Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World

Harvard Business School professor Friedman (Shadow Cold War) delivers an impressively detailed if somewhat inconclusive look at how “fledgling postcolonial governments” in the 1960s and ’70s sought to create a “viable model of socialism” for their countries. While newly independent states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America viewed capitalism as a “driving force” of imperialism, their agrarian economies, powerful religious institutions, and lack of “a coherent national identity” made it difficult to follow the Chinese or Soviet models of socialism. Friedman’s case studies of how these regimes experimented with socialism include Chile, where Marxist leader Salvador Allende’s coalition government collapsed as a result of foreign interference and internal divisions over “the peaceful path to power”; Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere’s program of “forced villagization” resulted in “famine and economic collapse”; and Iran, where Islamism emerged as “an alternative, and potentially superior, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist ideology.” Friedman makes a persuasive case that the “process of trial and error” he charts shifted the focus of “liberation movements-cum-ruling parties” from “economic egalitarianism and modernization” to “national, ethnic, and religious self-assertion” and maintaining “single-party dominance,” but the significance of this conclusion remains somewhat unclear. Readers will appreciate the nuanced analysis but wonder what to make of it. (Dec.)