Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021
Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354

https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2021.5.3.138

Received 7 June 2021 © 2021 Konstantin D. Bugrov 
Accepted 8 September 2021 k.d.bugrov@gmail.com  
Published online 11 October 2021 

ARTICLE 

Colonial Revolution and Liberatory War:  
from Communist to Post-Colonial Theory 
(Georgy Safarov, Mao Zedong and Frantz Fanon) 

Konstantin D. Bugrov
Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences,  
Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

ABSTRACT 
The article investigates the intellectual roots of the concept of colonial 
revolution, which goes back to the 2nd congress of the Communist 
International, examines its importance in shaping the Communist 
political thought and outlines its subsequent transformation in the wake 
of post-colonial theory. The author starts with analyzing the political 
ideas of Georgy Safarov—Comintern [the Communist International] 
theorist. He was among the most original thinkers who elaborated 
the concept of colonial revolution. Safarov, drawing from his own 
experience in Central Asia, insisted that global capitalism is “retreating 
to the positions of feudalism” while operating in colonies, treating them 
as collective “serfs” and lacking any proper social basis save for its 
own enormous military force. Such analogy led Safarov to envisage 
the colonial revolution as a “plebeian” revolt and liberatory war against 
the inhumane and stagnant colonial order, opening the way for a non-
capitalist development with certain assistance from the Soviet Union. 
Similar ideas were independently formulated by Mao Zedong in the 
1930s. He saw colonial revolution in China as a “protracted war” 
of liberation and listed the conditions under which victory was possible. 
However, the subsequent development of a former colony was seen 
by Mao as a transitory period of “democratic dictatorship”. Similar 
ideas of colonial revolution as a liberatory peasant war and “plebeian” 
movement were developed by Franz Fanon in the context of his own 
war experience in Algeria. Developing the idea of “plebeian”, peasant 
revolt and justifying the violence as the sole means of ending the rule 
of colonial power, Fanon at the same time differed from the tradition 

https://changing-sp.com/


326 Konstantin D. Bugrov

Introduction

The relationship between Marxism and post-colonial intellectual paradigms was 
scrutinized many times (Moore-Gilbert, 2001; Wolfe, 1997). Of course, Marxism 
historically had many faces, and one of them was especially preoccupied with the 
colonial problematics based on the intellectual legacy of the Communist International 
and, speaking more broadly, the Communist thought. After the beginning of the First 
World War, the radical wing of Russian Socialist Democracy party (Bolsheviks) was 
consolidated around Vladimir Lenin in the anti-war, defeatist stance; Nikolay Bukharin 
was among the first who postulated that the military domination of developed Western 
countries in the colonies is unable to move the colonies forward in a violent but 
progressive way. At the same time, Lenin criticized Rosa Luxemburg, who thought 
that, besides revolutions, the era of imperialism cannot produce liberatory wars. 
To develop his arguments, Lenin together with Grigory Zinoviev published Socialism 
and War (1915/1931), where two types of just wars were defined: revolutionary wars 
(in respective periods of history, bourgeois states against feudal states, and proletarian 
states against bourgeois states) and national-liberatory wars; thus, even the war 
of colonial semi-feudal states against developed imperialist states could be justified: 

If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia 
or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just”, “defensive” wars, 
irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with 
the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, 
slave-owning, predatory “great” powers. (Zinoviev & Lenin, 1915/1931, p. 5) 

It was Lenin who developed “classical Marxist heritage on the national and 
colonial question” (White, 1976, p. 173). The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 
political success of the Leninist strategy which called for an unconventional support 

of the 2nd Comintern Congress (represented by Safarov, Mao and the 
others) while describing the independent existence of former colonies. 
For Fanon, the worst consequence of colonial rule is not permanent 
backwardness but psychological trauma, an inevitable result of a 
brutal conquest which requires therapy. The author concludes that 
such conceptual transformation was stimulated not merely by the 
disappointment in Soviet and Chinese economic strategies, but also 
in the geographical and cultural factor which made the reintegration 
with the former colonial powers preferable to the direct “escape” into 
the socialist camp. 

KEYWORDS 
colonial revolution; post-colonial studies; liberatory war; Georgy 
Safarov; Mao Zedong; Frantz Fanon 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 327

of national-liberatory movements eventually solidified the positions of such ideology 
and provided the basis for a political experiment, which historian Terry Martin called 
an “affirmative action empire” (Martin, 2001, p. 1). 

The foundation of the Communist International (Comintern) finally formed the 
Communist perspective on the colonial question: the key formula of the 2nd Congress 
of the Comintern (1920) was the possibility of direct transition to socialism in colonies. 
As Grigory Zinoviev, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, stated in 1920, from 
the moment of the revolution in Russia, “we can say that China, India, Turkey, Persia, 
Armenia can and ought also to begin the struggle directly for a socialist order” (White, 
1976, pp. 180–181). There were considerable disagreements regarding the political 
and social strategy of the colonial revolution. Lenin insisted that the Communist 
movement in colonies might rely upon the alliance with “bourgeois-democratic 
liberation movements”, while Indian communist Manabendra Roy argued that support 
has to be reserved only for “revolutionary movements of liberation” (Haithcox, 1971, 
p. 11). Indeed, 

anticolonialism was a diasporic production, a revolutionary mixture of the 
indigenous and the cosmopolitan, of situated local knowledges combined with 
universal political principles, constructed through international networks of party 
organizations, political contacts between different revolutionary organizations, 
and personal contacts between activists, generating common practical 
information with political and intellectual influences. (Young, 2003, p. 7) 

Through the 1920s, the Comintern was engulfed in disputes on different aspects 
of the colonial revolution, spurred by the revolutionary events of the second half of the 
1920s in China.

Post-colonial theory is often seen as a product of disappointment in the whole 
socialist and revolutionary project, strengthened by the demise of planned economy 
both in the USSR and China. When “uncertainty reigned as to what would follow in 
the wake of socialism” (Mueller, 2019, pp. 533–534), the attractivity of Communism 
per se fell. Communist ideas remained among the intellectual sources of post-colonial 
theory. The key post-colonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak not just readily used Marxist 
concepts and ideas, but also referred to Lenin, thus provoking harsh critique from 
figures like Neil Lazarus and Aijaz Ahmad, who were attacking post-colonial agenda 
as a sort of post-modernist attack over “universalism, rationalism and secularism” 
(Ahmad, 2011, p. 37), which was highly valued by classical Marxism. Another source 
of discontent is post-colonial theory’s emphasis on culture rather than economy. 
For instance, Benita Parry, inspired by Leo Trotsky’s ideas on “combined and uneven 
development”, criticized Gayatri Spivak and other prominent figures from the field 
of subaltern studies: 

It is now impossible to overlook a strong impulse in the contemporary 
postcolonial discussion to find a middle ground between the terms “domination” 
and “oppression”, to define colonial relationships as generically ambivalent, and 

https://changing-sp.com/


328 Konstantin D. Bugrov

to represent colonial locations as always and necessarily the site of dialogue. 
A tendency to privilege the cultural assimilation sought and achieved by colonial 
elites over popular resistance to colonial violence is both ahistorical and 
morally vacant in its detachment from the outrages visited on the dispossessed. 
(Parry, 2002, p. 144) 

Or, as some contemporary Marxist critics of post-colonial agenda put 
it, “exploitation cannot be transformed by producing alternative representations 
or interpretations” (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale et al., 2018, p. 153). 

This article focuses on the history of an important concept that emerged within 
the vast intellectual heritage of the Comintern—the concept of colonial revolution. 
Such historical inquiry allows us not only to learn better the origins and genesis 
of the intellectual framework within which the colonial system was dismantled, 
but also to uncover some of the historical roots of the post-colonial thought, and 
to provide an explanation of its break with the revolutionary and Communist thought 
as it was developed by Lenin and the 2nd Comintern Congress. To proceed with the 
analysis, we must make one more important distinction between different traditions 
in the Communist thought. We may roughly outline three key lines in which loosely 
understood Communism influenced the theories and ideas about the colonial 
revolution and subsequent independent development of former colonies. 

The first tradition could be referred to as hegemonist and is based upon the 
intellectual legacy of Antonio Gramsci. Even though Gramsci himself did not pay 
special attention to the problem of colonial revolution (he actually saw Italy in terms 
of colonial subjugation, as industrially developed North commanding the peasant 
South), his reflection on the reciprocal and complex character of political power, 
described within the concept of hegemony, proved to be quite valuable to describe 
the experience of colonial rule as well. The Gramscian notion of hegemony heavily 
influenced post-colonial studies in Asia and Latin America, and, although the 
source of Marxist influence in Indian subaltern studies were Edward Thompson and 
Victor Kiernan, it was Gramsci who emerged by the late 1980s as one of the key 
names of the new intellectual current (Brennan, 2001, pp. 150–152). Gramsci was 
also interpreted in non-Marxist contexts, for example, in the writings of Norberto 
Bobbio. Still, Gramsci belongs to the Communist tradition; Gramscianism could be 
considered an intellectual apology for the inability to wrestle the power by means 
of revolt; rather, it gave preference to a “long march” in order to culturally overweight 
capitalism. By the end of the 20th century, and with the influential additions by authors 
like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, these broadly understood Gramscian ideas 
became a dominant force in the European left.

The second is the Orthodox Leninist thought represented by different types 
of the USSR-inspired communist movements across the world, especially in the 
intellectual production of the different wings of the ruling Communist party in the 
USSR. Being definitely sympathetic to the “wretched of the Earth”, this version 
of Communism was always ready to turn to them by its other side, namely, the cold 
and cynical Machiavellian calculation of (economic) power. A follower of Leo Trotsky, 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 329

American communist Ted Grant stated in 1964: “The idea of leaning on the peasant 
masses, of the ‘revolutionary elements with nothing to lose’ and of the lumpen 
proletariat as a revolutionary force, superior to the ‘respectable industrial proletariat’ 
which has a higher standard of living, as the decisive force in the revolution, is the 
idea of Bakunin and not of Marx or Trotsky” (Grant, 1964).

While Trotskyism generally dismissed the peasant movements in colonies, its 
stance was paradoxically close to the intellectual positions of the official Moscow, the 
self-proclaimed death enemy of Trotskyism: an arrogant idea of superiority based 
on its economic strength. The psychological problems in dealing with Moscow are 
summarized in Enver Hodzha’s diatribes against “khruschevites”: he was blaming 
the Soviet leaders for their arrogant behavior and disdain for Albania’s needs. The 
economic advice from Moscow were seen by Hodzha as an attempt to humiliate the 
underdeveloped countries: 

You are not exact in your planning. The hydro-power station is costing you an 
enormous amount and you won’t know what to do with the current. Likewise, 
you have planned to build unnecessary factories, like those for steel, timber-
processing, paper, glass, linseed, bread, etc. Does Albania need all these 
factories? Why are you building the refinery? The question of agriculture is 
critical, therefore reduce your investments in industry and strengthen agriculture! 
(Hoxha, 1980, pp. 70–71) 

Indeed, the political program of Bolshevism in the 1920s shifted to the 
ambitious task of economic rivalry with the capitalism, which the Soviet state 
pursued with certain, if limited, success. There Communism as a science 
of political-economic domination risked being dissolved in the general stream  
of modernization theories. Immanuel Wallerstein remarked: “We could say that the 
Stalinist version of the theory of stages simply changed what state represented the 
model: the Soviet Union became the model state instead of Great Britain. But the 
idea that there was a model, and that each state must follow more or less parallel 
routes, was epistemologically the same, notwithstanding the political difference” 
(Stame & Meldolesi, 2019). 

And even though former colonies were seen by Red Moscow with sympathy in 
their anti-imperialist struggle, they were treated as inferior in terms of technological and 
industrial development, way behind the unparalleled Soviet power; the understanding 
of colonial revolutions was deployed to mark the difference between developed (that 
is, both capitalist and socialist) and undeveloped countries. 

The third tradition emerged from the more radical understanding of the resolutions 
of the 2nd Comintern Congress by the authors especially interested in discovering the 
condition under which the success of revolution in a colony would depend primarily 
upon the actual political and military qualifications of the revolutionary movement 
itself. As Laclau and Mouffe emphasized, the key moment in the transformation 
of the Leninist paradigm of Marxism came when it encountered the endless variety 
of peripheral popular movements: 

https://changing-sp.com/


330 Konstantin D. Bugrov

While implicitly retaining the notion of hegemony as a merely external alliance 
of classes, the new strategy conceived democracy as a common ground which 
was not open to exclusive absorption by any one social sector. A number 
of formulas—ranging from Mao’s “new democracy” to Togliatti’s “progressive 
democracy” and “national tasks of the working class”—attempted to locate 
themselves on a terrain that was difficult to define theoretically within Marxist 
parameters, since the “popular” and the “democratic” were tangible realities at 
the level of the mass struggle but could not be ascribed to a strict class belonging 
[…] From China to Vietnam or Cuba, the popular mass identity was other and 
broader than class identity. (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 62) 

The encounter happened exactly on the premises of the Comintern, but there 
was a serious difference between Mao and Togliatti. In Italy, the Communist Party 
operated as a legal force aimed at political struggle, in terms of either the Leninist 
struggle for power or Gramscian “long march” for hegemony, while in China the Party 
was engaged in the war against the foreign occupation. This national-liberatory 
momentum was downplayed or even missing in both Leninist and Gramscian visions 
of Marxist political philosophy, but for the colonies it was the most important part. The 
complex interaction of “class” and “mass” in the context of liberatory struggle was 
the intellectual focal point where the Marxism went colonial and, subsequently, post-
colonial. It was associated with the violent movements within the New Communism, 
and typically, this intellectual current is characterized as distinctly critical towards 
both European Socialist Democracy and the Soviet model of Leninism. There were 
debates in Latin America between the foquistas or guevaristas and their fewer radical 
opponents like Vania Bambirra in relation to how exactly organize a rebellion (Briceno 
Ramirez, 2016). The ideas of “urban guerilla” and other radical concepts of partisan 
war might be seen as by-products of this tradition. It was the tradition which frightened 
Сarl Schmitt to such an extent that he devoted a full-scope study, Theory of the 
Partisan (2007), to the attack on this tradition, which he saw as the biggest threat to 
the international order. Indeed, it was the partisan, rather than the critically-thinking 
intellectual or engineering economic planner, that played key role there.

The three key traditions of the Communist thought developed in the 20th century 
were considering the revolution of disputed hegemony, economic build-up, and 
liberatory war. Each of them had a certain impact upon the development of the 
colonial (and post-colonial) agenda. However, originally it was the third tradition 
that was dealing specifically with the problems of socialist revolution in a colony. 
This allows to specify the scope of the present article: it deals with the intellectual 
impact of the third tradition, a certain part of the larger Communist (Leninist) body of 
thought which, in its own turn, was a part of the global Marxist thought. The theories 
of the Third International were incorporated into the body of anti-colonial liberatory 
thought already in the 1920s when the attention of the Comintern was attracted to 
Asia and, particularly, to China. The development of this tradition was driven forward 
by the experience of the actual military (rather than political) struggle in the colonies, 
inevitably merging the concepts of liberatory revolution and liberatory war. Thus, the 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 331

issue of colonial revolution—that is, the revolution in an undeveloped country under 
the military influence of capitalist powers, which is capable of overcoming not merely 
its own backwardness but also the military superiority of the metropoly—emerged 
as a problem of liberatory warfare. At that time, the key questions were formulated: 
first, how could the revolution in a colony succeed both socially (since there is no 
proletariat) and militarily (since capitalism is powerful)? Second, how could a newly 
emerged state be independent and avoid succumbing to the economic power of 
imperialists and, so to say, deal with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called 

“the poisoned gift of national liberation”? 
The body of theoretical works, political proclamations and methodological 

approaches developed within the Comintern during the Interbellum was enormous, 
and this is even more true in relation to anti-colonial and New Communism writings 
of the middle of the 20th century. It is beyond the scope of the present article to cover 
it all. I would concentrate on three figures of greatest prominence: I start with Georgy 
Safarov, a prominent but almost forgotten figure in the Bolshevik Party of the 1920s 
who in 1921–1931 elaborated perhaps the most interesting theory of colonial revolution. 
Then I will discuss the political concepts of protracted war developed by Mao Zedong. 
The final part of the article deals with Frantz Fanon and his theory of revolution in Afriсa. 
Why these figures? Many Soviet theorists tried to find in the Comintern’s resolutions 
some ideas about the colonial revolution, but Safarov was the first Soviet author who 
took the colonial theory seriously, as well as the most original thinker among Soviet 
intellectuals who discussed the subject; it was Safarov who provided the detailed 
argumentation in support of Lenin’s insights about the national-colonial question. 
In the 1930s, the Comintern, following Moscow’s political aspirations, oriented itself 
towards Europe rather than Asia and Africa; and the whole colonial agenda receded 
into the background. Still, the colonial agenda was elaborated by the Chinese 
Communists; this subsequent development of the Comintern’s ideas regarding the 
revolution in a colony is researched through the intellectual heritage of Mao Zedong. 
After the Second World War, a full-scale anti-colonial movement emerged, supported 
both by the USSR and the revolutionary China. This period provides plenty of figures 
to choose from. Robert Young once stressed that theoretical and political identification 
of post-colonial theory “goes back to the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara” 
(Young, 2003, p. 7). Unfortunately, Fanon’s relations with the preceding Comintern 
and anti-colonial tradition is often overlooked; for instance, in the recent and 
otherwise illuminating book on Fanon’s thought, Frantz Fanon, Postcolonialism 
and the Ethics of Difference by Azzedine Haddour, the Comintern legacy or at least 
Lenin’s ideas are not mentioned as if there was no decades of anti-colonial thought 
and action in the period of the 1920s–1950s based upon the Comintern resolutions 
and subsequent experience of liberatory wars; instead, Fanon is directly compared 
with the “Marxist orthodoxy” (Haddour, 2019, pp. 160–161; Salem, 2018, p. 429).  
The present article aims, above all, at filling this gap. Thus, the three selected figures 
shed light on the changes which the concept of colonial revolution endured at 
different times and in different places. We should, however, keep in mind the general 
problem—the trajectory of the concept’s travel from the Communist to post-colonial 

https://changing-sp.com/


332 Konstantin D. Bugrov

paradigm of thinking or, in other words, how the concept that originally developed 
within the third tradition of Communist thought became associated with the first, 
Gramscian tradition.

Of course, there were certain mutual influences between these thinkers: they 
all were borrowing from the intellectual legacy of Lenin and the Comintern, in which 
Safarov himself played an important role and which influenced both Mao and Fanon. 
However, this article is aimed not at uncovering “intellectual genealogy” (Safarov’s 
influence on Mao, Safarov and Mao on Fanon, etc.), but rather at investigating the 
similarities and differences in the deployment of concepts, originally elaborated in the 
period of the First World War, Russian Revolution of 1917 and the foundation of the 
Comintern in 1919. Such deployment occurred in different locations and under different 
circumstances: that is, Safarov’s experience of supporting indigenous peoples in their 
struggle against Russian colonists in Central Asia amidst the Civil War; Mao’s action 
in North-western China as an actual military leader fighting Japanese invasion; and 
Fanon’s experience in Algeria as a leading theorist of the liberatory war against France. 
No doubt, Safarov’s situation was peculiar, since in Central Asia there was in fact 
a revolution “from above” rather than a liberatory war; yet in a broader sense, all these 
cases could be seen as revolutions in colonies, which were theorized with the help 
of conceptual tools derived from the resolutions of the 2nd Congress of the Comintern.

Thus, the article aims to demonstrate how the very idea of revolution in a colony 
was developed in several important contexts, traveled through several locations, 
eventually becoming a foundation for the theory of liberatory war and the basis 
for the counter-hegemonic project of post-colonial theory. In addition, the article 
aims at considering the problem of relations between post-colonial theory and the 
Communist concept of colonial revolution. Therefore, the article makes a special 
emphasis on Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961/1963) in order to show how the 
development of the problems of colonial revolution, which mainly took place within 
the third tradition of the Communist thought, was combined with the innovative 
psychoanalytical approach, thus putting the intellectual tools of the first (Gramscian) 
tradition centre stage in the post-colonial agenda. 

Safarov’s Plebeian Revolution

Georgy Safarov, a prominent Bolshevik since 1908 and an affiliate of Vladimir Lenin and 
Grigory Zinoviev, held important political positions in Central Asia in 1919–1921 during 
the years of political and military struggle in the region—he was a member of several 
governing bodies whose task was to put Central Asia under the Bolsheviks’ control. 
In 1921, he summarized his practical experience on the theoretical level by publishing 
a paper entitled Kolonial’naia revoliutsiia (Opyt Turkestana) [Colonial Revolution 
(Experience of Turkestan)]. The following year, he published a book under the same 
title where he expanded his vision of the subject. Safarov’s work was successful, and 
he tried to solidify his reputation as an expert in colonial and national matters. In 1923, 
he published Natsionalnyi vopros i proletariat [National Question and Proletariat]. 
In the subsequent years Safarov was somewhat distracted by his participation in the 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 333

struggle for power within the Bolshevik party: in 1923–1924 as a staunch supporter 
of Grigory Zinoviev, he was among the leading Bolshevik theorists attacking Leo 
Trotsky. When in 1925 Zinoviev became a target for the attacks from Joseph Stalin 
and Nikolay Bukharin, Safarov again was at the forefront of the conflict. He played 
an important role as a member of the so-called “united opposition”, when Zinoviev, 
Trotsky and their supporters joined forces. After the defeat of the “united opposition”, 
he was arrested and exiled to Achinsk, but in 1928 he returned to Moscow and was 
permitted to work in the Comintern. In 1930, Safarov published his paper Problema 
natsii i antiimperialisticheskie revolutsii [Problem of Nation and the Anti-Imperialist 
Revolutions]; just as ten years before, the paper was soon followed by a larger 
volume expanding the key points, entitled Problemy natsionalno-kolonialnoi revolutsii 
[Problems of National-Colonial Revolution]. In 1934, after the murder of Sergey Kirov, 
Safarov was arrested again and was imprisoned—thus effectively putting an end to 
his career of a political theorist—until his execution in 1942. 

What new ideas did Safarov bring to the general understanding of colonial 
revolution elaborated at the 2nd Congress of the Comintern? He remained fiercely loyal 
to Kautsky’s economic approach to understanding the nation and relied on Kautsky’s 
theory for describing the present-day Western nation-states as outcome of the 
political and economic ascent of the bourgeoisie. In the course of the bourgeoisie’s 
rise, it consolidated the emerging common market by means of cultural and political 
control, and, in doing so, disposed of the political domination of feudal elites. However, 
globalization undermines the basis of nation-states effectively dissolving them within 
the larger trans-national economic complexes; the contradiction between the global 
economy and the political superstructures of the nation-states leads to permanent 
waves of military conflicts among the leading capitalist powers (here Safarov follows 
the analytical works of Lenin and Bukharin on imperialism). The bourgeoisie’s fight 
for national independency against the feudal empires used to be progressive, as it 
was paving the way for new capitalist formation, but nowadays nationalism turns out 
to be reactionary for reasons explained above. Sooner or later, economic progress 
will destroy national borders, replace national languages with the sole “language of 
international trade”, and bring about an “American mill of nations” on a global scale. 
Such transition is possible only after the global socialist revolution. These arguments 
are fully in line with the classical Kautskian vision of the national question. 

However, speaking of colonial issues, Safarov takes on a different direction. He 
argued that colonial rule of capitalist powers over the backward feudal countries did 
not undermine the basis of feudalism in colonies, but rather strengthened it. Contrary 
to what the European Socialist Democracy believed colonialism did not have any 
developmental mission in the colonies. Safarov even wrote about the “blockage of 
economic development of colonies by imperialism” (Safarov, 1930, p. 77). Although 
this was, again, a commonplace of Leninist thought, Safarov masterfully expanded 
this point by dwelling on his own revolutionary experience in Central Asia: as he 
observed, in the colonies, even the social groups exploited by the metropolitan country 
became privileged oppressors. To be an industrial worker was a privilege in Central 
Asia. Thus, colonial Central Asia was suffering from three main types of exploitation: 

https://changing-sp.com/


334 Konstantin D. Bugrov

the native feudal elites, the foreign (namely, Russian) capital, and the Russian settlers 
who literally seized the land and water from the natives.

While at home the bourgeoisie had dismissed feudalism and established 
formal equality of citizens before the law, in the colonies the situation was 
absolutely different. Colonial rule is based almost solely upon the brutal force—the 
overwhelming technical-military strength of the imperialists. Here “national inequality 
is simultaneously an estate, political inequality: for one, being a member of the ruling 
nation, has specific rights and privileges, while the others are stripped of a part 
of their rights or of any rights—like serfs lacking any rights under the feudal regime” 
(Safarov, 1931, p. 16; my translation from Russian—K. B.). For Safarov, the settlers 
and colonizers cannot be the backbone of revolution in a colony, even though they 
represent more progressive economic orders than the natives, many of whom are 
still nomadic. The conclusion is clear: the colonial revolution could only be exercised 
by the natives, who must both eradicate their own comprador and semi-feudal elite 
and drive the settlers and colonizers off the land. 

But if there is no native working class, then what social force is capable of being 
revolutionary within the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution? Safarov was 
searching for an answer by reiterating the idea of “plebeian elements” referring both 
to Lenin and to Engels and striving to develop a more systematic theoretical approach. 
Safarov laid a special emphasis on this analogy—the imperialists are “attaching” the 
enslaved colonies to the production of raw materials just as feudal landlords were 

“attaching” serfs to the land (see: Safarov, 1931, p. 104), and putting them into ghettoes. 
In other words, capitalism, while entering the global market, “retreats to the position of 
feudalism” (Safarov, 1931, p. 93; my translation from Russian—K. B). This characteristic 
was apparently pejorative: the feudal system reproduced by imperialism on a global 
scale has nothing to do with the progress and must be demolished recklessly. The 
bourgeois revolution will not redeem the backward areas of the world, and the creation 
of “ordinary” nation-states with their respective capitalism is impossible for colonies: 

“What if complete hopelessness of the situation, tenfold the strength of the workers 
and peasants, opened us a possibility of a different transition to creation of the new 
prerequisites of civilization in regard to other European states?” (Safarov, 1930, p. 79; 
my translation from Russian—K. B.). 

Thus, the revolutionary thrust of the exploited native plebeians is the only 
solution, for “political superstructure and culture are forming in the process of 
storm and onslaught of the masses not in a strict compliance with the turtle pace of 
economic development” (Safarov, 1930, p. 78; my translation from Russian—K. B.). 
Safarov sums up: 

Anti-imperialist struggle gives birth to a long chain of social changes, political 
and cultural revolutions, which form the existence of backward peoples. Across 
all the historical leaps and “breaks of gradualness”, the clash between the 

“Lutheran-knightish” and “plebeian-Muntzerian” tendencies runs like a red 
thread. All these preliminary stages of revolutionary development are turning 
out to be in the final historical account the forms of their convergence with both 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 335

the global socialist revolution and its most important pillar—the first socialist 
Soviet Union. (Safarov, 1930, p. 95; my translation from Russian—K. B.) 

In other words, colonial revolutions, destructive and purging as they are, will 
open the way for the colonial nations to integrate directly into the Soviet system in 
their own distinctive manner. Of course, Safarov did not openly advocate the peasant 
war; rather, he emphasized the role of the rising proletariat of colonies. However, his 
favorite analogy, which presented colonies as collective serfs, his frequent references 
to the “plebeian-Muntzerian” movement (traceable, again, to Engels’s writings on the 
Peasant War in Germany), and his calls for an immediate revolutionary thrust in the 
colonies were indicators of his sympathy towards the idea of a peasant uprising. 

The very term plebeian was borrowed by Safarov from the works of Karl Marx 
and Friedrich Engels. Obviously, Marx referred to plebs in a rather ambiguous 
way (Bourdin, 2013). In his recent work, Martin Breaugh outlines the European 
tradition of plebeian politics (strangely enough, Breaugh excludes Marx from 
the line of plebeian thinkers, while simultaneously including Giambattista Vico 
and Montesquieu, and he barely mentions Lenin or Mao at all, let alone Safarov): 

“It arises when people excluded from the res publica transform themselves into 
political subjects able to act in concert […] The plebeian experience thus confirms 
the existence of communalist and agoraphile political traditions throughout 
Western political history” (Breaugh, 2007/2013, p. 241). Santiago Castro-Gomez 
adds that during his early years Marx was moving away from an abstract, Hegelian 
republicanism towards exactly this kind of plebeian republicanism (Castro-Gomez, 
2018, p. 25). The very manner of describing social structures by means of Roman 
historical analogies is in use even today (Ferguson, 2019, p. 15). In turn, Engels 
frequently spoke about “plebeian and proletarian ascetism” of Thomas Muntzer’s 
followers in The Peasant War in Germany: 

The plebeian opposition consisted of ruined burghers and the mass of townsmen 
without civic rights—journeymen, day labourers, and the numerous precursors 
of the lumpenproletariat, who existed even in the lowest stages of urban 
development. The lumpenproletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon that 
occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society. 
(Marx & Engels, 1978, p. 407) 

Engels’s treatise played a pivotal role in making the concept of “plebeian 
elements” important for the Marxist tradition, especially when one talked about the 
revolutions of the 17th–18th centuries, the period when the working class was absent 
from the historical scene. The mentions of “plebeian elements” or even “plebeian 
parties” entangled with the numerous references to the history of the French revolution 
are abundant in the works of Bolshevik political leaders including Lenin and Trotsky. 
Of course, this concept remained problematic as it was not clearly distinguished from 
the concept of “petty bourgeoisie”. One of Soviet social historians from the 1930s, 
Nikolay Lukin, explained the exact composition of these plebeian elements: the 

https://changing-sp.com/


336 Konstantin D. Bugrov

waged workers (including seasonal workers), handicraftsmen, street traders and the 
lumpen-proletariat, that is, “porters, organ-grinders, jugglers, dog-shearers, beggars, 
etc.” (Lukin, 1934, p. 113; my translation from Russian—K. B).

After achieving independence in the “plebeian-Muntzerian” way, how could 
former colonies evade being dependent upon Western capitalism in economic 
terms and secure themselves against what Trotsky later called the “intervention 
of cheap goods”? (Trotsky, 1936/1937, p. 17) Safarov responds by referring to Marxist 
classics: the proletariat will help its peasant brothers and sisters in creating a new, 
socialist economy. Surely, such help could be provided by the victorious European 
or American proletariat, but Safarov does not discuss such possibility; after all, that 
point would mean that the colonial revolution depends upon the European revolution, 
and that, without the European working class, any revolutionary thrust in the colonies 
would be futile. Thus, Safarov envisioned that the Soviet Union would assist the newly 
emerging peasant revolutionary countries, just as Soviet Russia assisted the native 
peoples of Central Asia, in the collectivization of the country and industrialization 
of the cities. Thus, Bolshevik experience of managing a socialist revolution and 
the subsequent socialist build-up in a colony became for Safarov a pattern for all 
colonial countries struggling for liberation. In a peculiar way, he brought together the 
sympathy towards the uncompromising struggle for liberation in colonies and the 
sheer admiration for the USSR’s growing industrial strength. The rhetoric of violent 
liberation was intertwined with the vision of industrial power. As Modest Kolerov has 
recently noticed, “awareness of the technological and social backwardness of the 
USSR gave a touch of national liberation to the pathos of the Bolsheviks” (Kolerov, 
2017, p. 129; my translation from Russian—K. B.).

It was Safarov who put together a set of rather unsystematic Bolshevik/Comintern 
ideas on colonial revolution to develop a theory of anti-colonial peasant war (though 
it was never presented as a single theoretical construction, partly due to Safarov’s 
passionate style of arguing). While the very concept of peasant uprising as a way 
to revolution in a colony was widespread among the Bolshevik theorists, Safarov 
diligently devised a suitable analogy presenting the whole revolutionary struggle in 
colonies as a “plebeian-Muntzerian” uprising thought in terms of a peasant war against 
the feudal regime. Safarov drew a totally different conclusion from the one made by 
Manabendra Roy, who insisted that the Indian revolution was possible only due to 
the fact that capitalism presumably had done much to develop India’s industry, or the 
ideas expressed by Karl Radek in regard to China. He also was the first Communist 
thinker to postulate the grave differences between the colonizers and colonized; the 
former, even being exploited workers, had a privileged status in a colony.

Another important aspect of Safarov’s vision of the national-colonial revolutions 
was his position of an external observer. Being in the middle of the revolutionary 
events of Central Asia, he nevertheless remained an emissary from Moscow, 
and, deliberating on the Chinese and Indian revolutionary movement, he was still 
pursuing the Soviet political line, that is, any revolutionary movement in the world 
was seen as inferior in comparison with the safety of the Soviet state. From this 
perspective, the permanent and fierce fight in the colonies could also be seen as 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 337

a tool of providing protection for the USSR on the grounds that the imperialists being 
busy in colonies would not dare to attack the Soviet Union. However, in the mid-1930s 
the whole colonial agenda faded into the background in Soviet Marxism and in the 
Comintern: The Chinese Revolution was in the stalemate, and the war in Europe 
was approaching, so for the Red Moscow the very colonial powers started to be 
seen as desirable potential allies against the aggressive Fascist bloc. In turn, it led 
to the disappointment in the Comintern’s liberatory rhetoric, for most of the colonial 
world was under the domination of those very “peaceful democracies” whom the 
Red Moscow tried to approach as allies. 

Mao’s Protracted War 

While Moscow started to pay less attention to the colonies, the struggle in colonies 
was going on, with China as the largest battlefield. The country nominally united by 
Kuomintang was still suffering from the civil war as neither the military leaders nor 
the Communist party submitted to Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. Soon, internal tensions 
attracted hostile attention from abroad. Since 1931, Japan started to invade China, and 
in 1937 the war was declared openly. The Communist forces led by Mao Zedong, who 
at the time strengthened his position as the leader of the Communist Party of China, 
retreated to the Western regions of China in 1935. From the city of Yanan, Mao ruled 
the whole Shaan–Gan–Ning border region (since 1936 Communists and Kuomintang 
became allies against the Japanese). The period of isolation in Yanan is considered 
to be as the most productive in Mao’s political career. Here, he developed his famous 
theory of protracted war, a great revive of the peasant war or, as Carl Schmitt called it, 
the Theory of the Partisan (Schmitt, 1962/2007). In 1938, a series of lectures of Mao 
Zedong were published under the title On Protracted War. 

Mao was familiar with the statements of the Comintern on colonial revolution and 
warfare, as well as with the overall Leninist approach to the problem of just and unjust 
wars. Mao’s ideas became an important step in the development of anti-colonial 
thought under the Leninist (or the Comintern) aegis, especially given the fact that by 
the end of the 1930s, the Moscow theorists were much less interested in the anti-
colonial struggle than ten years before. Unlike Safarov, Mao was not interested at all 
in the problem of the indigenous-settler relationships (most probably since China was 
not colonized by settlers either from the West or from Japan), and he did not use the 
very term “colonial” (let alone “national-colonial”) revolution. But even if Mao did not 
use this word, he surely elaborated the concept, producing a comprehensive analysis 
of colonial revolution interpreted as a liberatory war and reflecting the Chinese 
Communists’ unique experience of protracted partisan war against the Kuomintang 
and Japanese invaders. Mao’s elaboration contributed greatly to the formation of 
a new understanding of colonial revolution (already outlined in Safarov’s works) 
as a liberatory anti-colonial war. Of course, since 1927, the primary enemy of the 
Communists in China was Kuomintang, but soon that political enemy was re-imagined 
as an agent of imperialists. As Mao postulated already in his Why is it the Red Political 
Power Can Exist in China (1928), 

https://changing-sp.com/


338 Konstantin D. Bugrov

regime of the new warlords of the Kuomintang remains a regime of the 
comprador class in the cities and the landlord class in the countryside; it is 
a regime which has capitulated to imperialism in its foreign relations and which 
at home has replaced the old warlords with new ones, subjecting the working 
class and the peasantry to an even more ruthless economic exploitation and 
political oppression. (Mao, 1965a, p. 63) 

In Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (1936), he theorized over 
the laws of the revolutionary war, which could be either a “class war” or “national 
war”, in the specific conditions of “semi-colonial China” (Mao, 1965a, pp. 179–181). 
In Bankruptcy of the Idealist Concept of History (1949), Mao provided a concluding 
description of China’s revolution as a liberatory war against the “imperialists” and 
their “running dogs”: 

In its first battle, this scientific and revolutionary new culture acquired by the 
Chinese people defeated the Northern warlords, the running dogs of imperialism; 
in the second, it defeated the attempts by another running dog of imperialism, 
Chiang Kai-shek, to intercept the Chinese Red Army during its 25,000-li Long 
March; in the third, it defeated Japanese imperialism and its running dog, Wang 
Ching-wei, and in the fourth, it finally put an end to the domination of China by the 
United States and all other imperialist powers as well as to the rule of their running 
dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and all the other reactionaries. (Mao, 1961, pp. 456–457)

The fact that certain “running dogs” were at times seen as allies (as was the 
Kuomintang during the struggle against the Japanese invasion) did not affect the key 
ideas of Mao’s military-revolutionary strategy.

Indeed, in his works of the late 1930s, Mao examined the possibility of success 
in a colonial liberatory war. He followed (perhaps unintentionally) Safarov in saying 
that imperialism rules colonies by sheer force; therefore, colonial countries cannot 
just develop their respective economies under the colonial yoke to a degree when 
they will become powerful enough to compete with the imperialists. The Marxist 
understanding of power prevented them from considering that the spirit or enthusiasm 
of uprising to would outweigh the imperialists’ war machines with their technological 
sophistication. Mao’s answer was that, even though Japan was stronger in purely 
military terms, China was much larger and more capable to wage a war of attrition; 
that is why the liberation war was a “protracted war”. The key issue was to mobilize 
the mass of peasantry: 

Besides employing trained armies to carry on mobile warfare, we must organize 
great numbers of guerrilla units among the peasants […] The Chinese peasants 
have very great latent power; properly organized and directed, they can keep 
the Japanese army busy twenty-four hours a day and worry it to death. It must 
be remembered that the war will be fought in China, that is to say, the Japanese 
army will be entirely surrounded by the hostile Chinese people. (Mao, 1967, p. 10) 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 339

When the peasant mass entered the battlefield, the preponderance of China 
in terms of military force would be ensured.

However, Mao was aware that there were lots of examples when smaller 
countries conquered larger ones—like in the case of Britain against India, or Italy 
against Ethiopia. Mao made great efforts to explain how China could avoid the same 
fate as Ethiopia or India. When Italy attacked, Ethiopia proved unable to defend itself, 
while the expectations of the imperialists’ collective attempt to prevent Italy from 
devouring it also failed. According to Mao, the situation in China was different, for it 
was much more developed economically and socially than India during the British 
conquest or Ethiopia during the Italian invasion. In addition, British imperialism was 
dynamic and rising, while Japanese imperialism was declining and decaying. Japan 
was internally weak, Mao insisted, and the revolution in Japan was an important 
factor for planning and waging the war of liberation. In speaking so, he echoed the 
classical approaches of the Leninist theory of war. In addition, the international 
situation by the end of the 1930s had changed totally:

The popular movements in the world today are developing on a scale and 
with a depth that are unprecedented. The existence of the Soviet Union 
is a particularly vital factor in present-day international politics, and the 
Soviet Union will certainly support China with the greatest enthusiasm; 
there was nothing like this twenty years ago. All these factors have created 
and are creating important conditions indispensable to China’s final victory.  
(Mao, 1967, p. 20) 

Thus, the three main factors made Chinese victory inevitable: the strategic 
advantage in resources (or, simply, China was bigger); the internal weakness of 
Japanese capitalism; and the international situation—both the existence of the Soviet 
Union and the possibility of anti-Japanese coalition. Among these three factors, the 
mobilization and unity of China’s forces was the most important one; the two others 
(the revolution in Japan and international coalition against Japan) could reduce the 
time and costs required for the final victory (see: Mao, 1967, p. 107). Importantly, 
Mao often stressed that the war against Japan would be long and disastrous: even 
though the final victory would inevitably be achieved, no one could expect a fast 
and easy victory. The process of the war of liberation here was—just as in Safarov’s 
works—constitutive. 

However, in the way he envisioned the events to follow after the defeat of the 
imperialists, Mao differed from Safarov. By the end of the 1930s, Mao embraced 
the concept of new democracy. He referred neither to Lenin or Stalin, nor to the 
Comintern’s directives and resolutions (see: Smirnov, 2012, p. 383). However, 
the intellectual roots of this concept are quite clear. In 1928, striving to support 
the integration of the Communist party of China and Kuomintang, the Comintern 
proposed the slogan of “people’s democratic dictatorship”. It was heavily criticized 
by the leftist opposition within the Bolshevik Party, including Safarov. However, 
the terms of “democratic dictatorship” and “Sovietization” were rather vague. New 

https://changing-sp.com/


340 Konstantin D. Bugrov

democracy ought both to unite different social groups (that was what the Comintern 
pursued under the banners of “popular fronts”) and to facilitate the accelerated 
development of capitalism in China. The latter resembled the older Comintern politics 
towards Chinese revolution in 1927, when Moscow leaders insisted on integrating 
communists into the Kuomintang structure, but at that time with the Communist party 
at the helm, which was seen as the only way out of backwardness and poverty. Unlike 
Safarov’s ideas of the national-colonial revolution driving subjugated nations directly 
to socialism and skipping the phase of the bourgeois republic with the support 
from the already existing “workers’ state”, Mao’s new democracy meant to serve 
as a specific bourgeois phase of development under control of the Communist political 
force. Apparently, the leaders of the Chinese communists didn’t believe in any 
substantial assistance from the Soviet state; so, Mao prepared not for the skipping 
of the capitalist phase in Chinese history, but for a long period of co-existence and 
cooperation with their political opponents as well as with the Western powers. 

Thus, Maoist thought of the 1930s–1940s creatively combined two concepts: 
the idea of “democratic dictatorship”, which was already permanently present in the 
Comintern’s political assessments since the late 1920s; and the idea of peasant war, 
which coincided with what Safarov wrote about the “plebeian” movement. These key 
ideas were now reiterated in the light of Mao’s own experience of a long peasant war, 
semi-partisan fighting, and prolonged isolation in Yanan, giving birth to the specific 
concept of peasant war: “The Communists’ arrangements for the peasants, and their 
provisions to the uprooted rural people serving the 8th Route Army, permitted them 
to inspire the peasants to see the war as a quest to restore the values of family and 
village life and to support the great leap from local, self-defensive insurgency to national 
revolutionary war” (Thaxton, 2017, p. 55). Most probably, these political concepts also 
emerged from the influence of earlier Sun Yat-Sen’s thought on democracy (Bedeski, 
1977, pp. 340–341). This was a distinctly—yet recognizably Marxist and, more strictly, 
Communist—Maoist concept of colonial revolution and liberatory war. 

Even as the People’s Republic of China was affected heavily by the Soviet 
experience since the late 1940s, Mao was permanently aware of the undesirable 
effects of direct intellectual exports from Moscow. Historically, it turned out that 
a decisive role was played by the international factor rather than by China’s own 
mobilization of resources, as the Japanese Empire was destroyed by the international 
coalition, though the Japanese army was unable to conquer China by force, just as 
Mao predicted. But events went a different way:

In developing the strategy of the new democratic revolution, Mao Zedong 
expected the support from the USA to rebuild the economy of the new 
democratic state after the war. Instead of lending such support, the USA openly 
intervened into the Chinese civil war on the side of the Kuomintang, providing 
ostensible military and financial help to Chiang Kai-shek. Thus, real support 
to Mao Zedong was provided by the Soviet Union, which assisted in creating 
a military-revolutionary base in Manchuria. (Smirnov, 2009, p. 27; my translation 
from Russian—K. B.) 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 341

The resulting changes in political attitudes strongly resembled the ideas which 
Safarov put forward in his Problems of National-Colonial Revolution: The Soviet 
Union started to provide massive assistance to drive the Chinese economy forward1. 
For example, the concept of peasant war proved incompatible with the radical land 
politics of dekulakization, which some of the Stalinist factions of the Chinese Party 
were trying to pursue (Womack, 1982, pp. 135–137). In the 1945 speech entitled 
On Coalition Government, Mao proclaimed: 

Some people fail to understand why, so far from fearing capitalism, Communists 
should advocate its development in certain given conditions. Our answer 
is simple. The substitution of a certain degree of capitalist development for 
the oppression of foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism is not only an 
advance but an unavoidable process. It benefits the proletariat as well as the 
bourgeoisie, and the former perhaps more. It is not domestic capitalism but 
foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism which are superfluous in China 
today; indeed, we have too little of capitalism. (Mao, 1965b, p. 283) 

Thus, “new democracy” was rather meant to facilitate the capitalist development 
under the watch of the Communist party. Surely, Mao distrusted the bourgeoisie, 
that is why political control had to remain in the hands of the Communist party. 
Mao retained his concept of “new democracy”, albeit in a slightly different form. He 
emphasized in his 1949 work, On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship: “Who are 
the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, 
the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by 
the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their own state and elect 
their own government” (Mao, 1961, pp. 417–418)2. Despite the fact that certain party 
members thought “new democracy” to be a transitory period for a couple of decades, 
its conceptual apparatus still serves as a symbol of social consolidation and concord 
in present-day China (see: Rudolph, 2021, p. 299). 

The idea of protracted peasant war, which had liberating, emancipatory and 
democratic effects by itself, was a step in the same direction as Safarov’s plebeian 
uprising. While the final purpose, besides the national independence, was certainly 
economic and cultural development, the economic build-up itself was not considered 
to be a liberatory process; it was understood rather as a firmly controlled capitalist 

1 In the 1930s, the Soviet Union depended on the West for technological assistance, relying upon 
foreign cadres, technologies and equipment. During the First Five-Year Plan of China, the scale of the task 
was comparable, yet now all the foreign support came from the USSR, which alone played the same role 
as the United States and Germany together played for Soviet industrialization in the 1930s. 156 industrial 
objects were reconstructed or built from scratch with the Soviet assistance (see: Hanbing, 2010, p. 157). 
But while the industrial build-up was underway, the collectivization of the land was halted.

2 Mao classified all political regimes in the world as different kinds of dictatorship: that is, the 
republics under the bourgeois dictatorship, republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and republics 
under the “joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes”. Again, he closely followed the Leninist patterns 
in considering any republic as a dictatorship, but added to that his own specific treatment of the concept 
of the dictatorship of several revolutionary classes, a transitional political regime, which by the end of the 
1920s was promulgated in the Comintern by Joseph Stalin and Nikolay Bukharin.

https://changing-sp.com/


342 Konstantin D. Bugrov

growth under the aegis of the triumphant Communist party—a vision rather similar 
to Lenin’s new economic policy, though in the presence of the Soviet neighbor it was 
reshaped heavily. Indeed, Stalin himself considered the Chinese position as a sort of an 
imitation of Soviet Russia’s new economic policy, and so did the number of influential 
Chinese party officials; those who insisted on forced emulation of the Soviet model 
were criticized harshly. National independence achieved by means of war rather than 
economic victory over backwardness was the key idea in Maoism at that time. Those 
ideas brought the Maoist concept of protracted war close to what Safarov envisioned, 
but there were two conceptual lines that differed in relation to the national bourgeoisie: 
while Safarov believed that the colonial bourgeoisie was feudalized and had to be 
swept aside, Mao—while using the very term “feudalism” in the same pejorative way 
as Safarov did—drew the line between the “good” and “bad” bourgeoisie, allowing for 
a sort of social consolidation to support independency. Of course, these distinctions 
remained part of the tradition stemming from the resolutions of the 2nd Congress of 
the Comintern. Despite the differences, both approaches welcomed a broad social 
movement involving the peasantry and petty bourgeoise, both were demonstratively 
hostile towards “feudalism”, and both insisted upon the possibility of winning the 
liberatory war against the imperialists and staging a revolution even in the absence of 
the revolution in the West.

Fanon’s Counter-Hegemony

The intellectual and political context in which Franz Fanon’s writings appeared was 
quite different, but it bore certain similarities with the experience of Safarov in Central 
Asia and Mao Zedong in Yanan. Fanon’s political thought emerged in the context of 
the Algerian War, which, in its turn, was part of the broader frame of Africa’s liberation 
from colonial dependency. Fanon most probably was familiar with the resolution of the 
first four Congresses of the Communist International (Hudis, 2015, p. 79). 

In his arguably most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon described 
the process of colonization as brutal subjugation by sheer violence, pointing out that 
the settlers’ presence in colonies “was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets 
and cannons” (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 36). The conquest is inevitably followed by the 
psychological trauma, as the new masters turn the colony into a space of delusion. 
The subjugation strips the colonial peoples of their history: in colonies the settlers 
made history, and while they drove the social progress, they faced the “torpid 
creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic 
background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism” (Fanon, 1964/1967, 
p. 51). For Fanon, “the colonial world is a world cut in two” (Fanon, 1964/1967, p. 38), 
and to revolt is to discover the grim truth behind the web of words so carefully woven 
by the imperialists: 

After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish 
phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only 
forces which contend for his life—the forces of colonialism. And the youth of 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 343

a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well 
make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of 
his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the 
djinns who rush into your body while you yawn. The native discovers reality 
and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence 
and into his plan for freedom […] What they demand is not the settler’s position 
of status, but the settler’s place. The immense majority of natives want the 
settler’s farm. For them, there is no question of entering into competition with 
the settler. They want to take his place (Fanon, 1964/1967, p. 58)3. 

This famous justification of violence is quite similar to the formulas of the 
Comintern thinkers and, in particular, to Safarov’s vision of imperialism as a global 
reactionary force, which subjugates and governs colonies without any popular support, 
relying solely on its terrifying military strength, on dreadnoughts and airplanes. 
Inevitably, the colonial population, for whom this brutal conquest was aggravated by 
the psychological trauma, might only rely on violence, according to Fanon’s premises.

As Fanon recognized the violent liberatory war against colonialism as the only 
solution for colonies, he faced the same question as Safarov and Mao: how could 
a colony be victorious against such monstrous war machine? Many authors considered 
the spirit of liberation and enthusiasm to be sufficient for a victory. For instance, 
Kwame Nkrumah in his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1969), comparing the 
overall strength of the imperialists with that of the Independent States of Africa, was 
optimistic: “We possess the vital ingredient necessary to win—the full and enthusiastic 
support of the broad masses of the African people who are determined once and for 
all to end all forms of foreign exploitation […] Against such overwhelming strength 
organized on a Pan-African basis, no amount of enemy forces can hope to succeed” 
(Nkrumah, 1969, p. 23). But Fanon, whose connections to Marxism made him sensitive 
to the realistic arithmetic of power, provided much more elaborated argumentation. 

First, there are powerful rivals of the imperialists representing the socialist 
bloc, whose industrial and military strength somewhat undermines Western military 
superiority. Sebastian Kaempf stresses the Manichean aspects of Fanon’s approach 
to colonialism presumably borrowed from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre: “It was 
along the lines of Sartre that Fanon came to see a world made up of binaries as well 
as dialectics, and divided into two compartmental zones: the zone of the coloniser 

3 This apology of violence typically attracts students of Fanon’s political philosophy; there was 
a debate on whether Fanon unconvincingly supports violence or not. Sebastian Kaempf summarizes Fanon’s 
views of violence as following: “Precisely because colonialism represented a systematic and deliberate form 
of exploitation and dehumanization, it could only be overcome by force” (Kaempf, 2009, p. 140). There is 
a debate on whether Fanon was unconvincingly supporting the extreme violence of not, and some authors 
argued that “he was not, as is customarily thought, an advocate of the indiscriminate use of violence” (Jinadu, 
1973, p. 256). L. Adele Jinadu, for instance, is trying to find an inconsistency in Fanon’s analysis: “What 
Fanon probably overlooks, in effect, is the important fact that social injustice is not a defining characteristic 
of colonial rule. There is no logical contradiction in the notion of an ‘enlightened’ or ‘benevolent colonialism. 
Thus, Marx could, with respect to British rule in India, talk of the ‘unconscious’ benefits of colonial rule” (Jinadu, 
1973, p. 261). Unfortunately, Jinadu totally overlooks the whole tradition of Leninist and Maoist thought which 
develops Marxist theory in an opposite way, and which definitely influenced Fanon’s own writings.

https://changing-sp.com/


344 Konstantin D. Bugrov

or settler and the zone of the colonised or native” (Kaempf, 2009, p. 140). In fact, 
Fanon analyzes the anti-colonial struggle in the context of confrontation between the 
capitalist and socialist blocs, which both stimulates violence and creates possibilities 
for liberation, since “all the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed 
with cutlasses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes 
socialism and capitalism” (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 78). The military and diplomatic 
confrontation of the two blocs was seen by Fanon as an important factor in the 
liberatory fight of colonies: 

When Mr. Khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the United Nations, or thumps 
the table with it, there’s not a single ex-native, nor any representative of an 
underdeveloped country, who laughs. For what Mr. Khrushchev shows the 
colonized countries which are looking on is that he, the moujik, who moreover is 
the possessor of space rockets, treats these miserable capitalists in the way that 
they deserve”. (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 78) 

Second, within the very colonialist camp there are forces which cannot support 
older, militaristic ways of control, preferring milder methods of ensuring their hegemony 
over former colonies. Fanon’s vision of victory in a colonial revolt was different from what 
Mao postulated. While Mao expected three factors to play—that is, China’s impressive 
domestic resources, Japan’s internal weakness, and the changing international 
situation—Fanon believed that the victory was possible due to internal changes within 
the very structure of imperialism. Though it conquered the colonies with a “great array 
of bayonets”, it cannot rely upon sheer strength anymore. Surely, the confrontation of 
capitalism and communism creates new possibilities for colonial liberation, but the key 
factor is the change within the capitalist order itself. Fanon even draws a historical 
parallel: once German Nazism turned Europe into a “veritable colony”, and now 
Germany has to pay reparations. However, such payments did not prevent Germany 
from re-integrating into the European economic system; the West was in need of 
economically healthy and strong Germany. The same will happen to the Third World: 

The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer 
who is ready to buy goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually 
reinforced, if buying and selling slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and 
finished goods can no longer be exported, there is clear proof that the solution 
of military force must be set aside. A blind domination founded on slavery is not 
economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The 
monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose 
policy is solely that of the sword. What the factory owners and finance magnates 
of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate 
the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic 
conventions their own “legitimate interests”. Thus, there exists a sort of detached 
complicity between capitalism and the violent forces which blaze up in colonial 
territory. (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 65).



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 345

From here, a new strategy of imperialism emerges, replacing bayonets with 
compromises: “Their purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of 
liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let’s decolonize. 
Decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria” (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 70). 

The thrust was based upon the marginal social groups. As Clyde Barrow 
emphasizes, “Fanon was the first political theorist influenced by Marx to seriously 
revisit the problem of the lumpenproletariat after the Russian and Chinese revolutions” 
(Barrow, 2020, p. 87). The weak, greedy and corrupted bourgeois elite, which 
emerged within the system of colonial rule, will be unable to establish strong and 
healthy national states (Eyo & Essien, 2017, p. 69). Therefore, colonies will remain 
economically dependent producers of raw materials, or—to use Safarov’s analogy—
will be “attached” to particular types of raw materials just as serfs were attached to the 
land: “The national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role 
of manager for Western enterprise” (Fanon, 1964/1967, p. 154). Moreover, Fanon was 
aware that while colonial rule by force is collapsing, the rising “middle-class bourgeoisie” 
of former colonies might easily provoke a period of inter-African wars (see: Fanon, 
1964/1967, p. 186). The African countries, now emerging as formally independent 
nation-states, will compete with each other, triggering the wave of militant nationalism: 

“If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and 
craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans […] From nationalism we have 
passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism” (Fanon, 1961/1963, 
p. 156). Of course, imperialists will use tensions between African countries trying to 
increase their dependency upon former masters, especially in relation to the cultural 
and ethnic differences of the northern and southern parts of the continent. 

Taking all that into account, Fanon envisaged no place for the middle-class in 
the emerging African states: “The combined effort of the masses led by a party and 
of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles 
ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class” (Fanon, 1961/1963, 
p. 175). That’s why he was proposing “African Unity”, that is, “a principle on the basis 
of which it is proposed to achieve the United States of Africa without passing through 
the middle-class chauvinistic national phase with its procession of wars and death-
tolls” (Fanon, 1961/1967, p. 187). As Derek Wright puts it, “the continentalist turned 
white racialisation of black identity to serve the purposes of a spurious cross-cultural 
unity” (Wright, 1986, p. 680). The racial boundaries will become the basis for the 
creation of a state that will unite the whole continent—though Fanon was aware of 
the differences between the northern and sub-Saharan parts of Africa, he believed 
that the common traumatic legacy of colonial rule will contribute to bringing different 
parts together. In addition, the slogan of the United States of Africa surely echoed 
the slogan of the European Socialist Democracy of the early 20th century, namely, 
the United States of Europe. 

This new state will be strong enough to protect itself against the sweeping 
economic penetration of former colonial powers. Of course, that might result in 
a European blockade, aimed at throwing Africa back to the new Middle Ages and 
starvation without the access to European technologies, capitals and engineers. The 

https://changing-sp.com/


346 Konstantin D. Bugrov

socialist alternative, though Fanon was rather sympathetic towards Soviet socialism, 
seemed inappropriate to him as well. He was skeptical towards any sort of the “Great 
Leap Forward” to spur industrialization in a single country: “Let’s be frank: we do not 
believe that the colossal effort which the underdeveloped peoples are called upon 
to make by their leaders will give the desired results. If conditions of work are not 
modified, centuries will be needed to humanize this world which has been forced 
down to animal level by imperial powers” (Fanon, 1961/1963, p. 100). He emphasizes: 

There is no question of a return to Nature. It is simply a very concrete question 
of not dragging men toward mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms 
which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not 
be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, 
to break and kill him. No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. (Fanon, 
1961/1963, p. 314) 

Fanon saw colonial dependence not only as a system of subjugation, which 
permanently reproduces backwardness, but mostly as a psychological trauma, 
which means that colonial countries need no economic strategy of development 
but a psychological remedy. Here, the contrast with the Communist thought—be it 
Safarov’s national-colonial revolution, or Mao’s “new democracy”—is remarkably 
ostensible. 

Conclusion

In answering the question of how the colonial revolution is possible, different 
authors, following the resolution of the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, developed 
similar approaches. The vision of a peasant, “plebeian”, anti-feudal war along with 
the analysis of internal contradictions within the imperialist camp create for Safarov, 
Fanon and other authors the very possibility of victory. Fanon thought that the great 
jacquerie of colonial people against the powerful imperialist exploiters could be won 
due to the three main factors: the internal changes in the very social organization 
of capitalism; the specific spirit of freedom that inflames the subjugated (similar 
to the spirit of the Spanish guerillas who fought Napoleon); and the confrontation 
of socialism and capitalism that undermines the positions of the West. This triad 
is similar to the three factors of victory in Mao’s “protracted war” as well as to the 
broader intellectual framework once set by the Comintern thinkers in the Interbellum: 
the combination of factors internal for the oppressed (partisan warfare); for the 
oppressor (weakness of Japan in Mao’s writings and domestic changes in Western 
politics in Fanon’s texts); and the overall context of international relations, in which 
the Soviet Union plays a special role. Colonialism was stripped of any progressive 
connotations and thought to be an ultimate evil perpetuating the backwardness 
of colonies. Thus, colonial revolution was reduced to the liberatory war against 
colonialism, and as such it no longer depended upon the revolution in the West; 
it was not even an issue of the colony’s own economic development. 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 347

The social-economic development which was supposed to protect former 
colonies from an indirect “economic intervention” after the war remained a problem for 
the concept of colonial revolution all the way from Central Asia to Algeria. Everything 
that Soviet and Chinese thinkers could advise was forced economic development. 
Safarov thought that the solution was the direct economic support from the Soviet 
state, thus effectively replacing the expectations of the European revolution with the 
hope for Soviet assistance. Mao to some extent also relied on the help from abroad; 
nevertheless, the key issue of “New Democracy” was to use domestic capitalists to 
drive the economy forward under the strict control of the “democratic dictatorship”. 
Later Mao also adopted the strategy of the “Great Leap Forward”, and even after that 
remained faithful to the Stalinist-type planned economy. Fanon’s dream of a large, 
united African state standing against the imperialists and reducing the chauvinist 
tensions resembles the visions of powerful communist states of the Soviet Union 
and China. However, he defied the idea of rapid modernization under the aegis of 
socialism—whether in the form of the “Great Leap Forward” or as a reliance upon the 
direct Soviet aid. Fanon also had no trust in the native bourgeoisie. Emphasizing the 
need for psychological change rather than for “chasing someone” technologically and 
economically, Fanon envisioned a different path, the one which eventually led to the 
emergence of the post-colonial paradigm with its focus upon cultural therapy rather 
that liberatory action, and on subalternity rather than oppression. Such interpretation 
of Fanon’s ideas has been recently developed by Ranjana Khanna (Khanna, 2013, 
pp. 134–138). Arif Derlik summarizes it the following way: 

Escaping into the Second World of socialism, or “de-linking” from the system, 
were the only options available, and neither offered a satisfactory solution of the 
problems faced by colonial and neo-colonial societies. The first implied escaping 
one kind of colonialism to be entrapped in another, but without the structural 
integration that came with incorporation in capitalism, which at least brought 
some benefits with it. The other alternative meant opting out of the system only to 
be isolated, while leaving the system intact. (Dirlik, 2002, p. 435) 

The formula of “another kind of colonialism” seems to be inadequate to grasp 
the proper relations within the socialist camp, but those former colonies and semi-
colonies—for instance, Vietnam or Cuba—which entered the global socialist system 
in the 1950s surely were treated within the second tradition of orthodox Leninism, in 
which peripheral former colonies were seen as inferior and undeveloped—the same 
arrogant approach which enraged Enver Hodzha in his encounter with the Soviet 
leadership in Moscow. Regardless of the terms, the “escaping into the Second 
World” was not a simple option to choose or reject; such “escape” demanded certain 
historical, political and geographical conditions. Unlike the Soviet and Chinese cases, 
the wave of revolutions in Africa and Southern Asia mostly swept over the countries 
under direct control of colonial empires, while the Soviet Union was far away, both 
geographically and culturally. Even the victory in war left former colonies vis-à-vis 
powerful capitalist countries, which would be able to corrupt and indirectly control the 

https://changing-sp.com/


348 Konstantin D. Bugrov

greedy and stupid native bourgeoisie. Development of the theory of colonial revolution 
was mainly connected with the Bolshevik Party, where it was also used as a part of 
international politics securing the safety of the Soviet Union, and with the Chinese 
Communist Party, where it opened the way for a victorious liberatory war and national 
revolution. It is important that these two states had a common border and, so to say, 
were territorially close to each other.

Fanon’s rejection of accelerated economic modernization as incompatible 
with the essence of the colonial revolution—the great jacquerie—was not an 
isolated phenomenon. Sanjay Seth connects the emergence of post-colonial theory 
in India with the Maoist Naxalite movement in India rather than with the overall 
disappointment in socialism. Seth argues that by the mid-1960s, a new way of 
thinking about revolution had arisen, 

one more willing to use Marxism for a critique of Enlightenment, than to see 
Marxism as the culmination and fulfilment of Enlightenment rationalism; and 
one alert to the possibility that anti-colonial nationalism and the nation-states 
to which it gave birth may not have been the answer of the oppressed to their 
subordination, but yet another form of bondage to modern European knowledge 
and its forms of construing politics and community. (Seth, 2006, p. 603) 

The Naxalites developed the extreme form of jacquerie but the post-colonial 
Indian thinkers like Homi Bhabha substituted the Maoist organization with the “denial 
of organizational policy”, as “ambivalence is understood as the extent of politics” 
(Hutnyk, 2003, pp. 484–485). Not striving to “catch up with anyone”, unwilling (or 
unable) to “escape into the Second World”, post-colonial thinkers developed a specific 
strategy of complex relations with the former colonial powers, in which “the humiliated 
ones” would be able to pursue their own “counter-hegemonist” strategy. These 
relations were no longer determined by the sheer force of imperialists, and from that 
point Gramscian patterns became applicable to discuss and reinterpret transitional 
experience (Bentouhami, 2014, p. 118). As Arif Dirlik points out, “this new emphasis 
helps give voice to the victimized but, in the process of rescuing the colonized from 
voicelessness, also blurs the depth of the victimization colonialism visited upon its 
‘objects’” (Dirlik, 2002, p. 433). Indeed, nowadays, postcolonial theory is criticized from 
the position of decolonization for reproducing the colonialist structures of modernity 
with its strict division of object and subject (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009, pp. 130–132). 

The theory of colonial revolution, which goes back to the 2nd Congress of the 
Comintern, presented colonialism as an ultimate evil, incapable of bringing any 
progress to its victims. Colonial revolution was theorized by those Communist 
authors of the 1920s who were inclined to find conditions under which such action 
could lead to a victory (Safarov was the most consistent there) as a national-liberatory 
war against the colonial regime that not only galvanizes everything reactionary and 
feudal in colonies, but also operates on the basis of sheer power—dreadnoughts and 
airplanes, without a proper social base or consent within the colony. In addition, the 
possibility to move directly to socialism was provided by the existence of the Soviet 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 349

Union, capable to help former colonies in economic, political, and military spheres. To 
win the war meant to succeed in the revolution, though—most probably—the ideas 
of Safarov and other Soviet thinkers were also motivated by the desire to improve 
the international positions of the isolated Soviet state. But with the theoretical and 
practical triumph of Mao, the strategy of a “protracted” peasant war became globally 
recognized; the theory of colonial revolution as a liberatory war turned out to be the 
working one. Both the USSR and China pursued forced economic development, 
striving to outperform the capitalists. But as the limits of the Second World were 
unable to broaden endlessly, the theorists of the new revolutions in colonies strove to 
discover a possibility to re-enter the relations with the former colonial powers. As we 
saw in the case of Fanon’s deliberations on Europe’s possible “reparations” to undo 
the damage done by the colonial regime, the radical break with the ex-masters was 
followed by entering the relations of hegemony, based on persuasion and consent 
rather than violent governance by the “great array of bayonets”. These new relations 
were described in Gramscian terms of a long-term struggle over hegemony rather than 
in terms of forced economic build-up in the form of Stalinist industrialization or Maoist 

“Great Leap Forward”. To sum up, the comparison of Safarov and Mao with Fanon 
shows how the theory of colonial revolution as a national-liberatory war outgrows its 
initial sphere of use, leading the colonial peoples from the rule of sheer violence either 
to spaces of socialist planned autarky or to counter-hegemonic hybridity within the 
globally reaching capitalism. 

The historical-geographical peculiarities still influence the development of post-
colonial studies. Today, the post-colonial thought is associated mostly with Southern 
Asia and Africa, the former colonies of British and French empires, while Russia and 
China as the former “Second World” and the key locations in the early development 
of the theoretical approach to colonial revolution are underrepresented in this field. 
When post-colonial studies emerged in the 1970s, the Soviet Communists, who once 
stood at the roots of this intellectual adventure, definitely lost sensitivity towards 
colonial issues, as illustrated by Aleksander Gordon’s book on Fanon (Gordon, 
1977). The subject of this book is the “national-liberatory struggle” rather than 
“colonial revolution”; the legacy of the Comintern is not mentioned at all, while Fanon 
is characterized exclusively as a “humanist”; his apology of violence is downplayed, 
and he is compared favorably with Jean-Jacque Rousseau. The subsequent 
collapse of the USSR and severe damage to the reputation of Communism changed 
things dramatically; on the one hand, the former Soviet Union is studied now among 
other colonial empires, and on the other hand, the former center of the “Second 
World” became part of the “poor North”, borrowing Madina Tlostanova’s term. The 
things are different in China. Recently, Daniel Vukovich pointed at the fact that the 
very post-colonial agenda in Chinese academia is different from the similarly named 
approaches in South Asia or Africa: 

The mainland intellectual political culture (to use a phrase from Said) is itself 
in many ways postcolonial in two fundamental senses. It is deeply concerned 
with “becoming-the-same” as the modern, advanced West (if not outperforming 

https://changing-sp.com/


350 Konstantin D. Bugrov

it and “winning”) and with never forgetting—via education and propaganda 
institutions—the era of national humiliation, that is, the era of near-colonialism, 
the collapse of the dynastic system, disunity and chaos, and Japanese invasion 
[…] Importantly, much of the Chinese new left also breaks with a major political 
plank in Western and global political thinking: it is resolutely pro-state and seeks 
to retain and enhance, not cut back or avoid, state capacity. (Vukovich, 2017, 
pp. 149, 153) 

There is sound critique of post-colonial paradigm from the Chinese authors: 

It is not wrong that post-colonialism pays attention to “uncovering the secret” 
and “decoding” Western cultural hegemony. The problem is that it unilaterally 
emphasizes the importance of language on decolonization of thought and addicts 
itself to discourse, but cares little about the social, political, and economic system 
and other forms of social practice. (Yang & Zhang, 2006, p. 293) 

The growth of China’s technological and economic strength and its increasing 
“economic colonization” across Africa and Eastern Asia, which is yet to be considered 
through the lens of post-colonial theory, might become a decisive factor to re-evaluate 
the concepts of coloniality and dependence in the near future, so some new twists 
to the century-old tale of colonial revolution are to be expected.

References
Ahmad, A. (2011). On post modernism. The Marxist, 27(1), 4–38.

Barrow, C. W. (2020). The dangerous class: The concept of the lumpenproletariat. 
University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11595814 

Bedeski, R. E. (1977). The concept of the state: Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Tse-Tung. 
The China Quarterly, 70, 338–354. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000021974 

Bentouhami, H. (2014). De Gramsci a Fanon, un marxisme decentre [From 
Gramsci to Fanon, a decentralized Marxism]. Actuel Marx, 1(55), 99–118. https://doi.
org/10.3917/amx.055.0099 

Bourdin, J. (2013). Marx et le lumpenprolétariat [Marx and the lumpenproletariat]. 
Actuel Marx, 2(2), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.054.0039 

Breaugh, M. (2013). The plebeian experience: A discontinuous history of political 
freedom (L. Lederhendler, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Originally published 
in French 2007)

Brennan, T. (2001). Antonio Gramsci and postcolonial theory: “Southernism”. 
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 10(2), 143–187. https://doi.org/10.1353/
dsp.2011.0004 

Briceno Ramirez, L. (2016). Vania Bambirra y la alternativa insurreccional 
a inicios de los años 70 [Vania Bambirra and the insurrectionist alternative at 

https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11595814
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000021974
https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.055.0099
https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.055.0099
https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.054.0039
https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0004
https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0004


Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 351

the beginning of 1970s]. Izquierdas, 28, 93–113. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-
50492016000300004 

Castro-Gomez, S. (2018). Marx y El Republicanismo Plebeyo [Marx and plebeian 
republicanism]. Nómadas, 48, 13–32. https://doi.org/10.30578/nomadas.n48a1 

Dirlik, A. (2002). Rethinking colonialism: Globalization, postcolonialism, and the 
nation. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(3), 428–448. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801022000013833 

Eyo, E. B., & Essien, A. E. (2017). Frantz Fanon’s philosophy of violence and 
the participation of intellectuals in the advancement of social liberation in Africa. 
Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 10(3), 62–74. https://www.jpanafrican.
org/docs/vol10no3/10.3-6-Eyo-Edung.pdf 

Fanon, F. (1967). Toward the African revolution. Political essays (H. Chevalier, 
Trans.). Grove Press. (Originally published in French 1964)

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. 
(Originally published in French 1961)

Ferguson, J. (2019). Proletarian politics today: On the perils and possibilities 
of historical analogy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61(1), 4–22.  
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417518000476 

Gordon, A. V. (1977). Problemy natsionalno-osvoboditelnoi bor’by v tvorchestve 
Franza Fanona [Problems of national-liberatory struggle in the works of Frantz 
Fanon]. Nauka.

Grant, T. (1964). The colonial revolution and the Sino-Soviet dispute. (n.p.). 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1964/08/colrev.htm 

Haddour, A. (2019). Frantz Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference. 
Manchester University Press.

Haithcox, J. P. (1971). Communism and nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and 
Comintern policy, 1920–1939. Princeton University Press.

Hanbing, K. (2010). The transplantation and entrenchment of the Soviet 
economic model in China. In H.-Y. Li & T. P. Bernstein (Eds.), China learns from the 
Soviet Union, 1949–present (pp. 153–166). Lexington Books.

Hoxha, E. (1980). The Khruschevites. 8 Nentori.

Hudis, P. (2015). Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades. Pluto Press. 

Hutnyk, J. (2003). The chapatti story: how hybridity as theory displaced Maoism 
as politics in Subaltern Studies. Contemporary South Asia, 12(4), 481–491. https://doi.
org/10.1080/0958493042000194327 

Jinadu, L. A. (1973). Some aspects of the political philosophy of Frantz Fanon. 
African Studies Review, 16(2), 255–289. https://www.jstor.org/stable/523409 

https://changing-sp.com/
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-50492016000300004
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-50492016000300004
https://doi.org/10.30578/nomadas.n48a1
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801022000013833
https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no3/10.3-6-Eyo-Edung.pdf
https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no3/10.3-6-Eyo-Edung.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417518000476
https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1964/08/colrev.htm
https://doi.org/10.1080/0958493042000194327
https://doi.org/10.1080/0958493042000194327
https://www.jstor.org/stable/523409


352 Konstantin D. Bugrov

Kaempf, S. (2009). Violence and Victory: guerrilla warfare, “authentic self-
affirmation” and the overthrow of the colonial state. Third World Quarterly, 30(1),  
129–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590802622433 

Khanna, R. (2013). The lumpenproletariat, the subaltern, the mental asylum. 
South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(1), 129–143. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1891287 

Kolerov, M. (2017). Stalin: ot Fikhte k Beriia. Ocherki po istorii iazyka stalinskogo 
kommunizma [Stalin: from Fichte to Beria. Essays in history of language of Stalinist 
communism]. Modest Kolerov.

Laclau, E., & Mouffe, Ch. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards 
a radical democratic politics. Verso.

Lukin, N. (1934). Lenin i problema iakobinskoi diktatury [Lenin and the problem of 
jacobine dictatorship]. Istorik-marksist, 1(035), 99–146.

Mao, Z. (1961). Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 4. Foreign Languages Press.

Mao, Z. (1965a). Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 1. Foreign Languages Press.

Mao, Z. (1965b). Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 3. Foreign Languages Press.

Mao, Z. (1967). On protracted war. In Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 2 
(pp. 113–194). Foreign Language Press. 

Martin, T. (2001). The affirmative action empire: Nations and nationalism in the 
Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1978). Collected works. Vol. 10. Progress. 

Moore-Gilbert, B. (2001). Marxism and postcolonialism reconsidered. Hungarian 
Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), 7(2), 9–27. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/41274143 

Mueller, M. (2019). Goodbye, postsocialism! Europe-Asia Studies, 71(4), 533–550. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1578337 

Nkrumah, K. (1969). Handbook of revolutionary warfare. A guide to the armed 
phase of the African revolution. International Publishers.

Parry, B. (2002). Liberation theory: variations on themes of Marxism and 
modernity. In C. Bartolovich & N. Lazarus (Eds.), Marxism, modernity and 
postcolonial studies (pp. 125–149). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.
org/10.1017/CBO9780511483158.007 

Rudolph, H. (2021). The preparations for the first Chinese People’s Political 
Consultative Conference and the quest for legitimacy. In I. Sablin & E. M. Bandeira 
(Eds.), Planting parliaments in Eurasia, 1850–1950: Concepts, practices, and 
mythologies (pp. 282–310). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158608 

Safarov, G. I. (1923). Natsionalnyi vopros i proletariat [National question and 
proletariat]. Krasnaia nov’.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590802622433
https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1891287
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274143
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274143
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1578337
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483158.007
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483158.007
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158608


Changing Societies & Personalities, 2021, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–354 353

Safarov, G. I. (1930). Problema natsii i antiimperialisticheskie revolutsii [Problem 
of nation and anti-imperialist revolutions]. Revolutsiia i natsionalnosti, 2, 76–95. 

Safarov, G. I. (1931). Problemy natsionalno-kolonialnoi revolutsii [Problems 
of national-colonial revolution]. Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe 
izdatelstvo.

Salem, S. (2018). Reading Egypt’s postcolonial state through Frantz 
Fanon: hegemony, dependency and development. Interventions: International 
Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 20(3), 428–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/136980
1X.2017.1421041 

Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, V., McLaren, P., & Monzo, L. (2018). The complexity 
of Spivak’s project: a Marxist interpretation. Qualitative Research Journal, 18(2), 
144–156. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-D-17-00052 

Schmitt, C. (2007). Theory of the partisan: Intermediate commentary on the 
concept of the political (G. L. Ulmen, Trans.). Telos Press. (Originally published 
in German 1962)

Seth, S. (2006). Maoism to postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and beyond. Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies, 7(4), 589–605. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649370600982982 

Smirnov, D. A. (2009). Osobennosti transformatsii ideino-politicheskoi osnovy 
modernizatsii KNR v uslovijah perehoda k rynochnoi ekonomike [The peculiarities 
of transformation of ideological and political basis of PRC’s modernization under 
conditions of transition to market economy]. Problemy Dal'nego Vostoka, 5, 18–29.

Smirnov, D. A. (2012). K voprosu ob ideinykh istokakh teorii “novoi demokratii” 
Mao Tszeduna [The ideological origins of Mao Zedong’s theory of “new democracy” 
in China]. Obschestvo i gosudarstvo v Kitae, 1, 380–386.

Stame, N., & Meldolesi, L. (2019, September 11). Immanuel Wallerstein’s 
thousand Marxisms: An interview with Immanuel Wallerstein (D. Broder, Trans.). 
Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/immanuel-wallerstein-marxism-
world-systems-theory-capitalism 

Thaxton, R. (2017). On peasant revolution and national resistance: Toward 
a theory of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war with special reference 
to modern China. World Politics, 30(1), 24–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/2010074 

Tlostanova, M. V., & Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Global coloniality and the decolonial 
option. Kult, 6, 130–147.

Trotsky, L. (1937). The revolution betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where 
is it going? (M. Eastman, Trans.). Faber and Faber Limited. (Originally published 
in Russian 1936)

Vukovich, D. F. (2017). China and postcolonialism: Re-orienting all the Fields. 
InterDisciplines, 1, 145–164. https://doi.org/10.4119/indi-1040 

https://changing-sp.com/
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421041
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421041
https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-D-17-00052
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649370600982982
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/immanuel-wallerstein-marxism-world-systems-theory-capitalism
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/immanuel-wallerstein-marxism-world-systems-theory-capitalism
https://doi.org/10.2307/2010074
https://doi.org/10.4119/indi-1040


354 Konstantin D. Bugrov

White, S. (1976) Colonial revolution and the Communist International, 1919–1924. 
Science & Society, 40(2), 173–193. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40401942 

Wolfe, P. (1997). History and imperialism: A century of theory, from Marx 
to postcolonialism. The American Historical Review, 102(2), 388–420. https://doi.
org/10.2307/2170830 

Womack, B. (1982). The foundations of Mao Zedong’s political thought  
1917–1935. University Press of Hawaii. 

Wright, D. (1986). Fanon and Africa: A retrospect. The Journal of Modern African 
Studies, 24(4), 679–689. http://www.jstor.org/stable/161245 

Yang, G., & Zhang, Q. (2006). The essence, characteristics and limitation of 
post-colonialism: from Karl Marx’s point of view. Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 
1(2), 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11466-006-0009-4 

Young, R. (2003). Che and the Return to the Tricontinental. In Proceedings of the 
Conference “Karl Marx’s Legacy and Challenges for the 21st Century”, Havana, Cuba, 
May 5–8, 2003. https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/young_15abr03.pdf 

Zinoviev, G., & Lenin, V. I. (1931). Socialism and War (M. J. Olgin, Trans.). Martin 
Lawrence Ltd. (Originally published in Russian 1915)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40401942
https://doi.org/10.2307/2170830
https://doi.org/10.2307/2170830
http://www.jstor.org/stable/161245
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11466-006-0009-4
https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/young_15abr03.pdf