As David T wrote in https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-in-a-world-without-a-communist-china.460500/ , could a mayor muslim country during the Cold War become sort of a Maoist China or Cuba analogy by promoting a muslim world centered marxist current?
I was thinking as candidates: Algeria, Somalia, Indonesia (maybe the US interferes in the war against the dutch in favour of the later, like in Vietnam, which leaves a smaller Indonesia maybe getting near the USSR), an alt-Gaddafi in Lybia? Also a fun bonus, Sultan-Galiyev thought gets adopted in turkey SOMEHOW(TM), with mayor enfasis in pan-turkism, somewhat hostility with the USSR (like China After the split or yugoslavia before), anti-colonialist/anti-greatpowers rethoric and muslim centered thirdworldism, and islamic religious populism (think of some sort of pan-islamic nationalism more cultural/common civilization rethoric; similar to pan-eslavism; meets latinoamerican theology of liberation)? Some of the list of traits of the "bonus setting" (particulary the last two) is how I imagine how the ideological rethoric would work, compared to the most "traditionalistic" vertions of pan-islamism speech.
P.S.: Wonder if a different dude runs Albania after WWII or in the arab nations of the levant and irak could this theoric marxist current get somewhere?
David T :
Actually, what is popularly associated with "Maoism" (though Mao himself always paid at least lip service to the hegemony of the proletariat, and it was in fact the Comintern that initiated the CCP's turn to the countryside) seems to have been anticipated by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsaid_Sultan-Galiev a Tatar Communist and for a while a protégé of Stalin's. Richard Pipes summarizes his career as follows:
"The treatment of Asians by pro-Bolshevik Russians led the most prominent Soviet Muslim Communist to revise the orthodox Marxist theory of class struggle. The Tatar Mirza Sultan-Galiev was in his youth a teacher in the reformed schools. In late 1917 he went over to the Communists and made a rapid career as Stalin's protégé in the Commissariat of Nationalities. In articles published toward the end of 1919 in the official organ of his Commissariat, Sultan-Galiev argued that it was a fundamental mistake to rely on the West to bring about a global revolution because the weakest link in the chain of imperialism lay in Asia. This view was tolerable to the Kremlin since it did not contradict Lenin's theory of imperialism. But Sultan-Galiev did not stop there, and broadened his ideas into a full-fledged heresy in which some historians see an anticipation of Maoism. He developed doubts whether even if the revolution in the industrialized countries were to succeed, it would improve the condition of colonial peoples. The Western working class was interested not in abolishing colonialism but in turning it to its own advantage. 'We assert,' he is quoted as saying,
'that the formula that offers the replacement of the worldwide dictatorship of one class of European society (the bourgeoisie) with another (the proletariat), that is, with another European class, will not bring about a major change in the social life of the oppressed element of mankind. At any rate, such a change, even if it were to occur, would be not for the better but for the worse.... In contradistinction to this we advance another thesis: that the material premises for the social transformation of mankind can be created only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the colonies and semi-colonies over the metropolitan areas.'
"To implement his ideas, Sultan-Galiev called for the creation of a 'Colonial International' to counterbalance the Communist International, dominated by Europeans; he also urged the establishment of a Muslim Communist Party. For these ideas, in April 1923 he was expelled from the Party and imprisoned on charges of forming an illegal nationalistic organization. L. Kamenev called him the earliest victim of a Stalinist purge. Released after he had 'repented,' he was rearrested in 1928 and perished either in the 1930s or during World War II..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=pfNEY931UzYC&pg=PA157
https://books.google.com/books?id=pfNEY931UzYC&pg=PA158
Leszek Kolakowski writes in Main Currents of Marxism that "The episode is worth remembering on account of the striking resemblance between Sultan-Galiyev's ideas and subsequent Maoist doctrine, or some ideologies of the 'Muslim socialist' type." https://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA804
This certainly suggests the Islamic world as a likely site for the emergence of an "anti-European" "Third World"-oriented Communist movement. Maybe even more plausibly than China, since in the Muslim world the resentment of Europe also had a religious dimension, which had its effects even on atheistic communists.
I was thinking as candidates: Algeria, Somalia, Indonesia (maybe the US interferes in the war against the dutch in favour of the later, like in Vietnam, which leaves a smaller Indonesia maybe getting near the USSR), an alt-Gaddafi in Lybia? Also a fun bonus, Sultan-Galiyev thought gets adopted in turkey SOMEHOW(TM), with mayor enfasis in pan-turkism, somewhat hostility with the USSR (like China After the split or yugoslavia before), anti-colonialist/anti-greatpowers rethoric and muslim centered thirdworldism, and islamic religious populism (think of some sort of pan-islamic nationalism more cultural/common civilization rethoric; similar to pan-eslavism; meets latinoamerican theology of liberation)? Some of the list of traits of the "bonus setting" (particulary the last two) is how I imagine how the ideological rethoric would work, compared to the most "traditionalistic" vertions of pan-islamism speech.
P.S.: Wonder if a different dude runs Albania after WWII or in the arab nations of the levant and irak could this theoric marxist current get somewhere?