Multipolarity Then and Now: Reflections on the Non-Aligned Movement

Over the past few months, the Non-Aligned Movement seems to be the expression on socialists’ lips. It is not hard to see why. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was founded in 1961 on the back of the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference, to defend the principle of national sovereignty for newly independent colonial countries in the midst of intensifying Cold War competition and war. The escalation of tensions around Ukraine, culminating in the Russian invasion earlier this year, has provoked widespread discussion, debate, and confusion over possible new international alignments in this next stage of the post-Cold War world. For many, equally concerned by Russia and by NATO, the golden age of the NAM suggests a time when leftists did not have to sully themselves with crude geopolitics.

For others, however, the widespread refusal of the global South to endorse US-UK led sanctions on Russia indicates already the re-emergence of an informal non-aligned movement, representing the weakening of US hegemony on the global scale. As Roger McKenzie and Vijay Prashad wrote for Globetrotter last month,

Already the contradictions of the present have raised the spectre of nonalignment in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America… Already, the war and sanctions have created serious political crises in Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka, with others to follow as food and fuel prices rise astronomically.

Similarly, David Adler of the Progressive International, writing in the Guardian in March, explains that most countries have been reluctant to involve themselves outside of the UN vote on Russia’s actions, and have even explicitly rejected sanctions, no-fly zones, and military support against Russia: ‘Should this war in Ukraine escalate, we say and we say it loud: do not bring it to our shores.’ Adler positions this neutrality as an understandable response to the emergence of a ‘New Cold War’ between the US and China, but he warns that we may also see the resurgence of similar Cold War style tactics such as intensified wars, sanctions, and economic embargoes against nations that seek to stand apart from great power politics. In these conditions, it is necessary, says Adler, to emphasise the active dimensions of neutrality which characterised the NAM at its height, so as to withstand the pressure of the militarised blocs. As India’s Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Tito wrote in 1954, ‘[Neutrality] represents the positive, active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security.’

Whilst it is clear that global trends are provoking a greater interest in non-alignment and the historical Non-Aligned Movement, it is nonetheless crucial that in attempting to reclaim radical histories of global non-alignment, we do not fall into a romanticised vision of the past, outside of the contradictions that make our present so hard to navigate. In fact, it is understanding the contradictions of the past that can clarify the present conjuncture for revolutionaries in Britain. This is, after all, not the first time socialists in Britain have been faced with dilemmas of international allegiance, or that we have been faced with a perceived choice between our own state’s policy and those of its international enemies. Though it would be easy to treat such questions as irrelevant to organising on the ground, the history suggests that British leftist movements’ apathy or abstentionism to confrontations between the great powers – of which the British state is one – has often left us bereft of tools and strategies for waging class war at home.

In some ways, Adler’s appeal in the Guardian echoes elements of Stuart Hall’s account of the international influences on the emergence of the New Left as a response to the conditions of post-war Britain.

The ‘first’ new Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture – not just a year – bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time – Western imperialism and Stalinism – and sent a shock wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics[...] ‘Hungary’ brought to an end a certain kind of socialist innocence. On the other hand, ‘Suez’ underlined the enormity of the error in believing that lowering the Union Jack in a few ex-colonies necessarily signalled the ‘end of imperialism’, or that the real gains of the welfare state and the widening of material affluence meant the end of inequality and exploitation. ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus liminal, boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age.[1]

The New Left, as Hall explains, premised itself on the claim that the existing paradigms of the Left, whether that of the old guard in the Marxist-Leninist CPGB or the unionist-reformism of the Labour Party (in and out of government), could not account for the realities of post-war British capitalism, or provide a meaningful path to socialism from those realities. The events of 1956, for Hall, signified the shifting landscape of anti-imperialism, where formal occupation and governance gave way to other means of pressure and control, and leftists could, or should, no longer rely on the traditional Leninist formula of national liberation in the colonies and socialism at home. Specifically, socialists in Britain should seek an independent path, outside of those determined by Western imperialism or ‘Stalinism’.

If Hall does not say the words ‘non-alignment’, this is the clear international background to the British currents he describes. At the same time, however, Hall’s ‘non-alignment’ (what he calls ‘the third way’ or ‘third position’) remains relatively abstract; ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ remain ideas, symbols, or even ‘metaphors’, rather than concrete places or events. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Hall’s essay is primarily a work of intellectual history, a document of his time as editor of the New Left Review. But the effect is an unfortunate, maybe accidental, isolation of that intellectual trajectory from the global movements that made non-alignment a real historical force.

In Egypt, for example, the policy of non-alignment was not the product of fastidious academic deliberation, but rather it seems to have happened almost by accident. Egyptian Communist scholar Anouar Abdel-Malek writes that in the early days of Nasser’s government, international neutrality was the only clearly defined ideological position held by the Free Officers group, a doctrine thrust upon them by the continued presence of British troops on Egyptian territory at that time. Simultaneously, however, the claim to neutrality was a response to claims in the West that the rapid advances of national liberation movements across the world, as well as in Egypt, were part of some sinister Communist plot. At this early stage, though, buoyed by the momentum of mass anti-imperialist mobilisations of the period, Nasser’s ‘neutrality’ took on a combative tone. His Minister of Culture and National Guidance, Salah Salem, stated:

You can call our new policy ‘neutrality’ or anything else that suits you. Some people will have a different idea of neutrality; what we mean is that we adopt a hostile attitude and refuse to co-operate in any way with anyone who takes a position against our dignity and our freedom, while we support and collaborate with whoever helps and supports us.[2]

This provided the backdrop for both Nasser’s refusal to engage in trade with the US while they insisted on military and political conditions to these relations, and for the increasing openness of Egypt to the Soviets and to other Third World currents at that time. Especially from the Tripartite Aggression onwards (what in the West is known as ‘the Suez Crisis’), feeling the support of the masses at home and a variety of other post-colonial nationalist states internationally, as well as the Soviet Union, Egypt felt increasing emboldened to stress the active components of neutrality, what was known as ‘positive neutralism’, emphasising anti-imperialism, international solidarity, and people’s struggle, against Western attempts to reimpose colonial relationships.

It is easy to narrate the history of non-alignment as if it were simply a matter of international policy or diplomacy, when in fact, as I have already mentioned, mass mobilisation played a key role in defining the character of Egypt’s ‘neutrality’ at this crucial stage. In particular, effective organising by the Communist movement in Egypt is what gave Nasser’s neutralism its positive content, in spite of his personal inclinations. Ironically, by placing rival Communist factions in prison camps together, the government unintentionally facilitated the unification of the Communist movement around a common programme of organising popular support for Nasser’s stands against the West, but at the same time using this organising as a basis for demanding the restoration of democratic freedoms and a new constitution ‘to provide substance to national unity’. Whilst it may seem strange that the Communists resolved to support Nasser from the camps he put them in, at that phase of struggle this was an effective strategic intervention, enabling them to capitalise on the surge of genuine popular support for Nasser whilst also forming autonomous organisations among the working class. The soundness of this policy was proven in the wake of the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, where Communist-led mass mobilisation was decisive in ensuring the domestic success of the nationalisation measures, directed against the colonial powers.

At the time of the bombardment of Cairo, the Communist organizations went into the streets, organizing firearm lessons and setting up resistance committees, while writers and journalists of the Left blanketed the country with intense patriotic propaganda that produced a few splendid poems.[3]

The early success of the Communist strategy in Egypt signals the dynamism of anti-imperialism in this period, a dynamism reflected more broadly in the Non-Aligned Movement. Nationalists in Egypt, and across the Third World, were suddenly faced with a whole new world of political possibilities, and a wide variety of potential forms and paths with which to respond to their local conditions. In Asia, the state-led capitalist development of India offered one possibility but the Chinese Revolution – with its successful mobilisation of mass movements and communes among both peasants and workers – at that time held centre stage in many people’s imaginations, an impact only amplified by the later, electrifying victory of the NLF in Vietnam. Similarly, movements in Africa towards both ‘scientific socialism’ and more ‘traditional’ alternatives held a certain allure in Egypt, and as the 60s progressed, Marxist, populist, and guerrilla currents in Latin America began to make their impact felt. Each of these approaches represented an attempt to navigate the pressures of imperialism, simultaneously weakened and revivified in different forms by the Second World War, responding with local forces to local conditions in an effort to forge a new path beyond western capital. All of these projects, until the complications introduced by the Sino-Soviet Split, were made possible by the presence of the Soviet Union, both as a military threat against Western intervention and, more crucially, as an alternative trade partner, whatever the ideological orientation of these projects to the socialist ‘superpower’.

In Britain, however, the Soviets played little role in new conceptions of ‘a third path’. Like many intellectuals of the New Left, Hall sought an analogous local path to socialism that included an analogous unlocking of popular power. This is part of why Hall invoked the events of 1956; to these New Left observers, the Soviet intervention in Hungary demonstrated the dangers of ‘Stalinism’s reliance on state power, whereas Britain’s role in Tripartite Aggression in Egypt, facilitated and supported by Labour Party politicians such as Nye Bevan and Clement Atlee, revealed the limits of the new welfare state in truly addressing exploitation and inequality in the post-war era. The ‘Third Space’ that these observers sought to forge, whether between Washington and Moscow or Labour and the CPGB, would be consistently defined through an attempt to find alternative forms of political organisation and strategy that did not rely on centralised authority. Whilst these concerns are obviously influenced by Trotskyism – especially, from the 1960s onwards, by the American Hal Draper’s understanding of ‘socialism from below’ – Hall highlights the pivotal role played by more distinctly British traditions of ‘co-operative’ or ‘Guild Socialism’. Originating in figures like Robert Owens and William Morris, and traced through the Fabians and G. D. H. Cole, who Hall and other New Left intellectuals encountered at Oxford, Guild Socialism was shaped by both an aim to reorganise ownership and productive relations via workers co-operatives, rather than state-led nationalisations, but also frequently a form of conservatism that saw industrial capitalism as an intrusion against traditional British ways of life, such as the history of craftsmen’s guilds going back to the middle ages, for which the theory was named. (Tellingly, whilst the Egyptian government discouraged the printing of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, books by Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and even Bevan were translated and republished by the state publishing house.)[4]

But if part of the New Left’s motivation for a ‘Third Space’ or an autonomous path, beyond Leninist orthodoxy, was the pressures of the Cold War, another was a distinctive impression among many observers that the nature of class was changing. In a 1958 essay titled ‘A sense of classlessness’, Hall named the gradual, uneven retreat of the social world oriented around industry, on which the Left in Britain had traditionally depended and its replacement by new, more ambivalent forms of social relation. Old industrial estates increasingly found themselves side by side with new middle class housing developments; the traditional industries of shipping and steel were receding to be replaced by new industries with new skills and styles of working; and a new commercial attitude, a new orientation to consumer goods like cars and washing machines, was increasingly taking hold among a working class that just a decade prior would have largely considered those same items unnecessary luxuries. It was not, as some commentators claimed (then and now), that the working class was ceasing to exist; the ways of living and social forms that had held the class together and forged its consciousness were decaying, fragmenting, and reassembling in new shapes. For Hall, and others, the Left needed to break from the practices of the Labour Party and the old Communist Party if they were to find the new theories, strategies, and tactics that could orient them on this newly unfamiliar terrain.[5]

Ironically, in their rush to articulate a ‘Third Space’ for British development, many on the New Left seem to have neglected that they weren’t alone in having to organise a class that was not composed in the forms known by Marx, Lenin, or Keir Hardie. If Marxism had an ambivalent role and reputation among the Non-Aligned Movement, this was at least partially due to a recognition that some of the key historical features of Marx’s work – especially the dominance of industrial capitalism and the concomitant presence of a large industrial proletariat – were not descriptive of colonial societies on the eve of independence after decades or even centuries of deliberate imperialist underdevelopment. Most had forms of industry, and emerging proletariats in the cities, but peasants and plantation workers predominated, and often even the wage-labourers moved seasonally between the factories and the countryside. If the Communists supported Nasser in Egypt it was partially out of recognition of a common enemy in the landowning class, and in Indonesia, Sukarno and the PKI found themselves aligned against the large British and American plantations. The appeal of the Chinese revolution, in this context, was not necessarily as a blanket model to be applied everywhere but as a demonstration that Communism could be a dynamic response to the instinctive feeling among the peasantry that decolonisation must mean ‘land to those who work it’, and not just ownership changing hands. What at first appears as the ambivalence of Marxism outside of the historic industrial core was in fact the source of vibrancy, dynamism, and power of the Communist movement throughout the Third World. By orienting themselves predominantly around American Trotskyism and traditions such as ‘Guild Socialism’, the New Left in Britain largely isolated themselves from these currents of internationalist creativity.

In fact, as Paul Gilroy argued in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, over the course of successive post-war crises, the left in Britain increasingly defined the class alliance of the ‘populism’ they sought in terms of a union between class consciousness and nationalism. In the wake of manufactured controversies over increased Black and Asian migration, writers such as Benedict Anderson, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm sought to deploy an analogous ideological frame to figureheads of the New Right like Enoch Powell and Peregrine Worsthorne to attain their political objectives, primarily through ‘uniting the Nation’, conceived of implicitly or explicitly as homogeneously white, and ‘restoring national pride’. The key concern in this approach, according to Gilroy, is an attempt to struggle against the Conservative Party’s political monopoly on widespread xeno-nationalist sentiment; in this rush to outmanoeuvre the right, rarely did they pause to interrogate why patriotism had become such a primary focus, what advantages it actually possessed for radical consciousness, or what concretely radicals would need to do to break its thus far overwhelmingly reactionary direction.

It is as if the only problem with nationalism is that the Tories have secured a near exclusive monopoly of it[...] When it comes to their patriotism, it would appear that England’s left intellectuals become so many radical rabbits transfixed and immobile in the path of an onrushing populist nationalism.[6]

Further, Gilroy persuasively argues that the implicitly white ethno-nationalist social framings of much of the New Left drastically limited any constructive or creative engagement with the alternative forms of material political culture, or ‘black oppositional practice’, that were emerging over the post-war years among immigrant communities in Britain. Whilst organisations such as the Asian Youth Movements, the British Black Panther Movement, and the Black Unity and Freedom Party remained small if influential forces of formal organisation among migrant communities in the 70s and 80s, they were engaged with wider networks of subaltern cultural and political activity – from clubs and carnivals to mutual aid societies, dating back to the earliest stages of modern migrant settlement – which informed more spontaneous forms of unrest, disruption, and insurrection that the wider left remained largely oblivious too at best, and often actively antagonistic towards.

From 1967 onwards, the new editorial board of the New Left Review increasingly flirted with Maoist or Third Worldist tendencies informed by local organising such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. However, for the most part, such campaigns remained outside the dominant tendencies of leftist organising in this period, and this fleeting engagement, whilst suggestive, was too little too late.[7] Nancy Fraser has suggested that elements of postwar dissent such as the New Left Review, which founded themselves on a critique of the Labourite welfare state, were left with no leg to stand on once Thatcher swept welfarism away by decree. But this is only a half truth. What left British socialists in the lurch was not their critique of welfarism, but their failure to articulate or engage with alternatives to Labour’s compromise between the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat, premised on their mutual reliance on national industry. Once the bourgeoisie were able to replace that industrial production with other economic forms, outside the power of the historic forms of trade unionism and industrial working-class community, many leftists were left without means of defence besides the New Right paradigm of a return to ‘national unity’ between capital and labour, against ‘alien invaders’ (whether migrants, international enemies, or both).

In Egypt, the rug was similarly pulled out from under Communist strategy. In 1958 Nasser led Egypt into a unified state with Syria. Access to Syrian markets, resources, and labour strengthened the Egyptian bourgeoisie against attempts at organising working class autonomy, and Communist dissent over the distinctiveness of national identity enabled Nasser to launch a crackdown against the left as traitors to ‘the Arab nation’. Accompanying this repression was a shift in international policy, away from ‘positive neutralism’ and towards ‘non-alignment’. Increasingly, Egypt’s neutrality was defined as against not ‘imperialism’ but ‘the great powers’ – with the USSR regularly singled out for criticism. In 1959, Egypt had public fallings-out with the USSR, China, and Bulgaria, and in 1961, Nasser’s key ideological mouthpiece Mohammed Husain Heykal explicitly argued that, ‘as the Egyptian leaders saw it, Bandung no longer existed’, primarily due to its concept of neutrality being ‘too far advanced and too vulnerable to exploitation by the Communists.’[8]

The NAM was a dynamic movement driven by a variety of local contradictions. As such, it would be too simplistic to see this early consolidation of anti-Communism in Egyptian non-alignment as the end of the story.[9] At the same time, however, it is hard not to look back on the post-’58 repressions as early, local signs of what was to come. By the end of 1970, Sukarno had been deposed and both he and Nasser were dead. Thousands upon thousands of people had been killed in anti-communist counterinsurgencies in Indonesia, Iraq, and beyond, and those Third World leaders who still resisted the encroachments of neocolonialism increasingly recognised the need for a more radical stance, as signalled by the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1967. The tensions that created the NAM were giving way to a new period of capitalist crisis and a new high point of anti-imperialist class struggle. At the same time, the first seeds of what we now know as neoliberalism were being sown in Sadat’s ‘corrective revolution’ of 1971. In the face of an increasingly unipolar global capitalist hegemony, neutrality was no longer an option.

After the defeat and destruction of the USSR in 1990 – and the concomitant neutralisation of progressive mass movements across the world – some insisted this was ‘the end of history’, the final accomplishment of a unipolar liberal capitalist order under US guardianship. Suffice to say, this was not the case. In reality, popular struggles for sovereignty and freedom had not failed but were only temporarily defeated. As early as 1994, the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, where a movement of predominantly indigenous peasants not only seized land and multiple cities from the control of the Mexican state but symbolically reawakened questions of decolonisation and sovereignty on the world stage – shattering what Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros call ‘intellectual structural readjustment’ to capitalist development. This was not just an isolated incident. The Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez in 1998, the mass protests at the WTO Conference in Seattle in 1999, and Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms and accompanying mass land-occupation movement in 2000, among other upheavals, further demonstrated that globally, popular classes, whether peasants, proletariats, lumpen, or even some petit-bourgeois forces, are not resigned to the dictates of American finance, but are still prepared to forge new alliances and make new experiments in pursuit of sovereignty and their material needs, with or without Marxism.[10] These popular upheavals were of course not the only challenges to US hegemony to emerge in this period. In the West, these challenges were usually mediated through scaremongering about the global resurgence of Islamic social, cultural, and political movements known as the ‘Islamic Revival’, and especially its more conservative manifestations, a convenient bogeyman for the failure of neoliberal universalism. But at the same time, other relations between bourgeois nationalisms and nation states emerged, seeking to break their dependence on US capital, most clearly represented by Putin’s role in the formation of the BRICS group and the CSTO. Surviving and newly emerging socialist projects such as those in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia are often criticised for the relations with more controversial forces such as those of Russia and Iran. As in the Non-Aligned Movement in its heyday, contemporary multipolarity is shaped by a form of ‘positive neutrality’, namely, the complicated relations between socialist and bourgeois projects, forged in the pressures of sanctions and the necessity of markets and political partners outside of circuits controlled by the US.

As with the history of the Non-Aligned Movement, it is easy to describe multipolarity as if it were simply a matter of international policy or diplomacy. But the newly emerging forces, social processes, upheavals, and mass mobilisations emerging against US hegemony in the past thirty years are not merely ‘geopolitics’. This is the real history of class struggle, popular democracy, and autonomous social organisation, the central demands of Communists within historic Non-Alignment, in the contemporary phase of global relations – from the communes of Venezuela, to Bolivia’s experiments in decolonial plurinationalism, to the whole range of measures undertaken in Cuba in recent decades to further social struggle on hunger, healthcare, racial justice, and the family. Even Iran, which makes no claims to socialism, has inspired and supported movements in Lebanon and Yemen, which have made significant victories over the economic and military stranglehold the US holds over the region. Where victories like this are possible, it is only because multipolarity has allowed for an intensified responsiveness to local conditions on the ground. Multipolarity – what the Zapatistas’ Subcommandante Marcos calls ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ – is the necessary condition for real class struggle in the present conjuncture. And Western capital knows it. Recent sanctions on Russia were explicitly designed to impact countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba that ‘operate outside of the international financial system’ as mediated by the dollar and US-dominated institutions. There is no terrain for popular movements outside of these entanglements; the only choice is to engage in class struggle in and through multipolar relations or to abandon it altogether. As Communists under Nasser learned, it is always the left and the working class that are the first victims of a purified neutrality.

For Moyo and Yeros this signals a need for a National Left – not only an abstract internationalism. Whilst their intervention is salutary, it may risk a parallel abstraction of its own. Abdel-Malek reminds us that there is a key distinction between what he calls ‘nationalitarian construction’, the needs of underdeveloped countries to pursue their national interests towards economic sovereignty, and ‘nationalism’, the politics and movements that begin from national interest over and against a rejection of exploitation and oppression, originating first in imperialist nations before being exported around the globe. Nationalitarian construction, in Abdel-Malek’s account, whilst necessary, is not the same or even sufficient for a socialist programme, and indeed, often embodies a tension between popular projects and the nationalism of the local ruling class. In Britain, a nation built on the underdevelopment of the whole world, this is not even a tension; the national project can only ever be the perpetuation of British capitalism’s white supremacist alignment.

There is a reason why Jeremy Corbyn was regularly smeared as an agent of Putin; the threat of even mild social democracy to the British ruling class could only be recognised in the form of multipolarity and its threat to Britain’s central place in global capitalist hegemony. But to realise this threat as a serious alternative will demand more than a mere defence of Corbynism, let alone Putin. If there is to be a real movement of the popular classes in Britain – proletariat and lumpen, dynamised by the social formations of migration from the imperial periphery – it must begin with a rejection of the nation, and a break from that nation’s ruling class alignments, whether with Europe or, increasingly after Brexit, with the US. Not only a rejection, but the movement will need positive content, new formations and alignments, both at home and internationally, to support its struggle against the increasingly hardening ruling class state on these islands. This ‘populism without a nation’[11] must begin, following the lessons of the historic Communist movement, the New Left, and contemporary socialist experiments, with a multipolarity from below, if it is not to be crushed by a unipolarity from above.

[1] ‘The Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review 61, Jan/Feb 2010. Link here.

[2] Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society; The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser, translated by Charles Lam Makmann (Random House: New York, 1968), p. 223.

[3] Ibid., p. 120.

[4] Ibid. p. 305. The sole exception to this anti-Marxist bent was one state edition of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

[5] ‘A sense of classlessness’, in Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, edited by Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin, and Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press: Durham, 2017), p. 28-46.

[6] Gilroy p. 56, 58

[7] A full account of what these various tendencies might suggest is a topic for another time.

[8] Abdel-Malek, p. 237.

[9] Abdel-Malek, p. 241.

[10] Cf. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts’, Historical Materialism 15 (2007), pp. 171-172.

[11] Inspired by G. A. Aloysios’ Nationalism without a Nation in India.