Ambivalent successes, magnificent failures and historical afterlives: a postscript to Marx and Lenin in Africa and Asia

Julia C. Strauss

Third World Quarterly, 2021, vol. 42, issue 3, 630-640

Abstract: This article concludes a remarkable collection on the Left in Africa and Asia. Drawing on the contributions to this volume, it reasserts the importance of the Left’s sacred texts that, aligned to a takeover of the state, enabled the implementation of socialist programmes. It also cautions that in most places the Left was defeated, and posits that when it prevailed, it usually did so because of its ability, in joining unimpeachable leadership and organisation with an anti-colonial struggle to overcome pre-existing cleavages of religion and ethnicity, to create a new imaginary of modernity and development. It concludes by suggesting that the legacies of the socialism in Asia and Africa live on today with the rise of China and the ways in which the ruling socialist parties of Asia and Africa are now welcoming in a China that continues to confound neo-liberal expectations of development and modernity.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2021.1886583

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