This essay is based on the lecture delivered by Paris Yeros for the first Unit of the People’s Academy curriculum. You can receive the full program — including the recorded lecture — by signing up for The People’s Academy.

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Introduction

So much has been written on the Cold War. It was the major conflict after the Second World War, and it consumed thinkers of international relations across the world. There was an attempt to close the question when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the question remains open. The Cold War never really ceased; it went through ebbs and flows, and what we now call the second Cold War is in fact the same type of conflict that has persisted for decades.

When we speak of systemic conflict, we mean something more than a confrontation between superpowers armed with nuclear weapons trying to deter each other. There is something deeper. The Cold War is part and parcel of a transition from capitalism — a system that has lasted for five hundred years — to socialism. We are talking about very long transitions, and the transition from capitalism to socialism took this very real form of a cold war. This form continues to this day. One of the questions that remains open is where it is going and how long it will take, but the basic dynamic of this conflict is something more intrinsic than superpower politics.

Long Transitions

If we are to appreciate the systemic character of this conflict, we need to understand something about long transitions and, in particular, the nature of the transition to capitalism itself. The feudal system in Europe entered into crisis in the fourteenth century, and it took almost two hundred years to consolidate a direction towards capitalism. What saved the transition to capitalism was colonial expansion. We do not know what the course of capitalist relations would have been without it. The colonial system has always been necessary to capitalism; it is the natural political system of the capitalist mode of production. This is important to remember, because the Cold War was entangled in precisely this question.

One issue that arises in the historiography of this long transition is whether capitalism has gone through cycles or stages. Cycle theory, which came into its own in the 1970s when capitalism was again in crisis, proposed that the system passes through very long systemic cycles: a first cycle led by the Iberian Peninsula and financed by the Italian city-states, followed by the Dutch cycle, then the British, then the American. In this view, each cycle may have its own characteristics, but in its organic elements it is essentially the same story repeating itself.

Stage theory, by contrast — proposed by the Bolsheviks and Lenin himself — holds that capitalism has a cumulative development such that every stage has a new dynamic, even though it remains capitalist. In the twentieth century, capitalism entered the phase of monopoly capitalism: the highest stage, in the sense of the maturation of big monopolies, the concentration and centralisation of capital in gigantic companies.

Cycle theory enters into trouble when it looks forward, because in its theoretical basis it does not tell us where the system is going other than through a repetition of cycles. Stage theory raises its own debates. What Lenin meant by the “highest stage” was not necessarily the last stage. There is a difference between the highest stage — referring to the concentration of the means of production — and the last stage, which is when the system enters into decline. The Cold War, understood as systemic rivalry, presents an unprecedented challenge to capitalism and pushes it into its last long stage. If we take into account that capitalism at the centres of the system has been in permanent crisis for decades, we can begin to see that the system is on its last legs — even though this means the decline takes decades to play out.

Two Great Transformations

Two great transformations occurred in the twentieth century. The first was socialist revolution. For the first time, a challenge emerged to capitalism that looked forward beyond it, proposing a transition to a different social and economic system. All the revolutions before the Bolshevik Revolution were bourgeois revolutions — revolutions that sought to go beyond feudal remnants or to deepen capitalism and open up space for its development. The socialist revolution was different in kind.

It introduced critical elements in terms of how to make revolution. The Bolshevik political technology of organising a party was enormously important for the twentieth century as a whole; it went beyond the Bolshevik Party itself and inspired the formation of communist parties and nationalist parties across the Global South. The Bolshevik Revolution also established a new standard of sovereignty. Within a generation, it industrialised a very large country that had been overwhelmingly agrarian at the time of the revolution. The idea that through planning one could transform a society within a generation — within ten or twenty years — was new. The Soviet Union, with all its problems and deep contradictions, managed to install all the phases and dimensions of the second industrial revolution in a very short period of time. Before that, industrial revolutions were understood to take over a century. This reality had a profound impact: sovereignty now meant being able to modernise, industrialise, and transform a society within a generation. All national liberation movements that came afterwards had this as their standard.

The second great transformation was national liberation itself. Beginning in the early twentieth century, it gained strength through the first half of the century into the second, in strong synergy with the Bolshevik Revolution in terms of organisational politics and standards of national liberation. Together, these two forces presented an unprecedented challenge to capitalism.

The national liberation movements actually dismantled the colonial system. If the colonial system was the principal political system of capitalist expansion, it was unravelled by these movements — in a generalised sense, even though colonial situations persist to this day, Palestine being one of them. As a general phenomenon, the colonial system was dismantled in political structures and international law after the Second World War. Capitalism suddenly lost its political pillar. It was now vying with a social system that proposed going beyond capitalism itself. This is when the highest stage of capitalism — monopoly capitalism — enters into its last stage. The contradictions mature. The national liberation movements escalate the conflict on a global level between peasants and workers in the peripheries on one side and imperialism on the other. The system becomes locked into a permanent contradiction on a global scale.

Defining Characteristics of the Cold War

The defining characteristics of the Cold War can be summarised as follows. It is, primarily, a systemic rivalry — not simply a contest between ‘great powers’. The other characteristic is the military technology that marked the period: nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. The Cold War was cold between the nuclear powers, which would not engage each other with the highest level of technology at their disposal. What remained was a hot war using conventional weapons against the Third World. This is the nature of the Third World War: third in a series of great wars, and a war against the Third World.

Questions of theory abound. The Cold War was theorised very differently in different parts of the world. In the United States, the dominant framework was polarity theory: the system moves from a multipolar world into a bipolar world, and two superpowers compete on the nuclear terrain while avoiding direct conflict. Interestingly, this terminology has returned in the present, though its meaning has shifted. In the Soviet Union, theorisation also went through changes: from the approach of the Third International, which viewed international relations through the prism of imperialism, to the two-camps theory, then to peaceful coexistence, and finally to the theory of a correlation of forces. In China, the approach inherited from the Third International was combined with Mao’s insights into contradictions and later gave rise to the theory of the three worlds. In Africa, the theory of neocolonialism took root — Kwame Nkrumah’s famous book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism being the case in point. In Latin America, the terminology of the Third International was eventually challenged by dependency theory.

Whatever happened to many of these theories — they were suppressed or marginalised in the 1970s and 1980s — they are now re-emerging. But the important point to stress is that the Cold War cannot be understood as detached from the evolution of imperialism itself and the struggles it has spawned. Imperialism is the matrix of all the struggles that have emerged since the twentieth century.

Europe and the Turn to the Third World

We know from the literature how important the Cold War was for the development of Europe. The partisans who fought the Nazi invaders prevailed at the end in most places: in Italy, France, Greece, Poland, the armed struggles that led the resistance were organised by popular forces, and in many of them the communist parties were the leading hegemonic force. When the war ended, it was an open question where this was going. Would these popular forces, organised by communist parties, ally themselves to the Soviet Union? To what extent would they seek more autonomous paths? The cards were on the table.

The Marshall Plan transformed all this in the economic sense by injecting massive amounts of US dollars into the system to revive the cycle of accumulation and to marginalise the communist parties. From 1947 onwards, even the big communist parties of France and Italy, which had real possibilities of assuming control, saw themselves losing in elections and being marginalised, watching their parliamentary road to socialism evaporate. In Greece, there was armed struggle and the defeat of the communists. Europe was divided between East and West at the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam. The whole system came together under a new momentum whose objective was to resurrect and unite Europe and create a pole of accumulation that could withstand the communist system and what it had to show — for we must remember that the Soviet Union had defeated the Nazi armies and emerged from the war not only industrialised but with enormous prestige as the system that had defeated fascism.

Once Europe took its road, the conflict moved very quickly to the Third World. Revolutionary wars erupted in China, then Korea, then Vietnam. In the middle of all this, the Bandung Conference occurred in Indonesia, where the Third World came into itself as a political force with its own voice in world affairs.

Bandung and the Principal Contradiction

Bandung was a landmark event, an earthquake in international politics. For the first time, heads of state of countries that had previously been under colonial rule came together autonomously, without inviting the West or the North, and proceeded to make declarations on how the post-war world should evolve. These declarations were earth-shattering when compared to the previous four or five hundred years of colonial rule. The principle of peaceful coexistence, the resolution of conflicts on the basis of international law — this was completely different from the colonial system of resolving everything by brute force, violence, genocide, and slavery. There was now a civilisational view: the North itself had to be civilised, had to be transformed. The great civilisations that had been suppressed needed to come into their own and to develop.

Bandung was the moment where the anti-colonial movement marked its presence in world affairs in a united way — nationalists and communists together. This was always a very tricky, very conflictual relationship. In every single case — China, Indonesia, India, Egypt, the Middle East generally — the relation between communists and nationalists was fraught. The Soviet Union’s line called on communist parties to submit themselves to nationalist forces against colonial rule, but this was a very difficult relationship that did not work well in most cases. Nevertheless, they did come together. Bandung was the moment of unity against the common enemy, and it established the principal contradiction on a global scale.

The policy of non-alignment was also critically important. Positive non-alignment meant that these states did not aspire to isolation from international affairs but to economic relations with everyone — East and West — conditioned upon their national plans of development. The other important aspect was the non-participation in strategic blocs and the refusal to sign military agreements with either side. In reality, few countries managed to maintain this line, but important ones did.

The Neocolonial Transition

What kind of transition did this period of revolution and reform give way to? In the largest number of cases, decolonisation occurred in a controlled manner, such that very conservative or at least moderate forces took control of the new states, and the largest part of the system remained stuck in a relation of dependency with the European and American economies. Monopoly capitalism first retreated, because it was defeated in the colonies generally. Capitalism had never before had to confront a world of national sovereignties; the globalisation of the principle of national sovereignty was a major retreat. But it also reacted — and this is where the counterrevolution comes in. The militaries of the West — French, British, American — were mobilised constantly to fight nationalists and communists and to control the type of transition that occurred. The Cold War became a hot war in the Third World. It was the Third World War: a war that came after the Second World War, and a war against the Third World. The Third World was on fire.

We can distinguish between two phases of this neocolonial transition. The early phase was precisely the one where the Bandung spirit prevailed among a large number of important states. Even states closer to the West and the United States possessed an industrialisation momentum; they had some kind of planning, some kind of vision and legitimacy for their national development projects. This early period was hotly contested by revolutionary movements, Bandung-type nationalisms, and lesser radicalisms.

This period gave way to the crisis of the 1970s. The crisis took a severe toll on the Third World, which was already dependent on Western finance. When the system entered into crisis, debts exploded, and one country after another rushed to the IMF and the World Bank to resolve its debt situation on an individual basis. This was the moment when Bandung unravelled. The Cold War entered a new phase. The type of monopoly capitalism that existed underwent generalisation and financialisation. The Soviet Union lost many of its allies in the South as they turned to the West in a subordinate manner. The crisis also hit the centres of the system: since the late 1960s, when decolonisation took hold — since 1966, to be precise — the centre entered into crisis in terms of its profit margins. The whole system was moving in a deeply contradictory way.

Who Won the Cold War?

If we look more closely at the character of the supposed end of the Cold War, the picture is not so simple. There was a euphoria in the 1990s, and indeed the United States and its allies prevailed at that time over the Soviet Union and over the Third World. But the West also entered into a period of moral decline and financial implosion. The crisis in productive-sector profits began in 1966, and profits never truly recuperated in those sectors; what occurred was a recuperation of financial profits, which put the entire economy and society of the West on a different track — the track of decay and decline. In that sense, the Cold War was a Pyrrhic victory for the West.

Did the Third World really lose everything? There is much to be said about how the Third World evolved under structural adjustment and neoliberalism. Sovereignties were debilitated. There were invasions and neocolonial situations that moved towards semi-colonial conditions — in the Middle East, the Sahel, Haiti — where sovereignty was lost to foreign occupation forces. But the overall sovereignty regime conquered after the Second World War was not overturned. The regime of national sovereignty on a global level remained in place. This is the major victory of the Third World in this period.

Was the communist movement permanently defeated? There was talk of the end of history, and the Soviet Union collapsed. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that China moved straight ahead through leaps and bounds. The Communist Party of China, in charge of the Chinese state and economy, is now disputing power on a global level. The communist movement was not defeated in that sense.

The Evolution of Monopoly Capitalism

The evolution of capitalism in this period must always be analysed as part of the transition. There was a generalisation of monopolies, a financialisation of monopolies, technological leaps, and the absorption of peripheral bourgeoisies into value chains. There was a new round of primitive accumulation, and the system entered into permanent crisis. At least from the perspective of the West, no economic revival has been on the cards for decades. There is a very low rate of growth punctuated by crisis, even deep crisis, and a recuperation through financial instruments. This is the endgame of monopoly capitalism at this stage. There is no future for monopoly capitalism, no chance of it relaunching a cycle of accumulation.

The West has also been losing control over certain monopolies. If we consider the five monopolies that Samir Amin identified — over technology, access to natural resources, finance, communications and media, and weapons of mass destruction — we can see that each is under challenge. In technology, China is now taking the lead in a series of high-tech sectors. In access to natural resources, Russia under sanctions is channelling its oil exports and organising new economic and political relationships, such that control is no longer exclusively and monopolistically in the hands of the West. In finance, the massive Wall Street–dollar complex persists, but surplus countries — especially China — are now also financing the world. In communications and media, the Western media remain strong, but their ability to control public opinion in the Third World — on the war in Ukraine, on Palestine — is failing. And in weapons of mass destruction, the nuclear situation has never gone away; it is escalating, especially over Ukraine, and becoming extremely dangerous.

The Cold War Today

We are in a resumption of the Cold War, not a new phenomenon. It never really ended. There is a national liberation motive force under neocolonial conditions that persists — the unfinished business of decolonisation — and there is the question of transition to socialism, which acts in synergy today as it did in the past. The contradictions are there, as they have always been, but this is the real face of the long transition to socialism. This is what it looks like.

The principal contradiction between imperialism and the working people of the Third World remains in force. There is much talk today about multipolarity, terminology borrowed from Western political science. But the concept does not easily accommodate the real practice of states like China, which speak of ecological civilisation and a shared future — formulations that have nothing to do with polarity theory in its classic formulations. Whatever the relation of forces, and whichever way it goes, there is something structural that must remain on the map: the principal contradiction involves imperialism on the one hand, which has evolved in the ways described above, and the working people of the South on the other, who have also evolved.

The social formations in the peripheries have undergone transformation. They are not the same societies as they were at the end of the Second World War or at Bandung. There has been massive rural exodus and a new type of society has emerged. If we examine world employment data from the ILO over the last thirty years — a full period of neoliberalism, sufficient to assess where it has led — we see that employment in agriculture has declined, employment in industry has increased slightly, the service sector has exploded, and people thrown outside the workforce have multiplied. Women have experienced this more severely: on a global level, over fifty-five per cent of women of working age have been thrown outside the workforce. This is the result of five hundred years of capitalism. It has no future. It is not going to provide any answers to these questions.

If we disaggregate by region, the picture is stark. In Africa, only sixteen per cent of working people depend entirely on a wage; twenty-eight per cent are own-account labour, and thirty-eight per cent are outside the labour force entirely. In Western and Central Asia, roughly one third of the population is fully proletarianised, and forty-six per cent is outside the workforce. South and Southeast Asia present a similar structure, with eighteen per cent fully proletarianised and nearly half outside the workforce. Latin America and the Caribbean resemble Western and Central Asia: one third proletarianised, around forty per cent outside the workforce. China is the only case where the lines move in a different direction: proletarianisation rose from twenty-three to thirty-six per cent, a very substantial shift, even though China also retains a large labour reserve that has not yet been fully incorporated.

Conclusion

There is a radicalization of nationalism and even armed struggle in the axis of resistance in the Middle East. There is a re-radicalization of nationalism since the turn of the century in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and elsewhere — a revival of the Bandung spirit. There has been an outbreak of war in Europe, and the Cold War is back on European soil. The BRICS represent a new form of non-alignment, though many of these states are also in a mode of multi-alignment; Saudi Arabia, for example, aligns itself with everyone, including the military apparatus of the West. The genocide in Palestine has placed genocide squarely on the agenda of the twenty-first century.

The world’s most vulnerable population is in the Third World. If we add to this the dramatic situation of climate change, already impacting the most vulnerable, we see a convergence of crises in the first half of the twenty-first century that constitute the essence of the contradictions we are discussing. The Cold War today is about this: how to resolve this contradiction. We need a type of development that absorbs the world’s population into dignified labour and provides social goods in a very rapid way — within a generation. It cannot wait for the second half of the century; unless this leap happens soon, the consequences will be catastrophic. The systemic transition of the twenty-first century and the cold war that accompanies it will remain with us. There is something structural that will endure for the duration of this transition, and the urgency of the present demands that we take it seriously.