Class leadership determined whether decolonization produced socialist revolution

Evidence

Decolonization, however, was no uniform matter. All classes and all political ideologies, from landowners of various sorts to fully fledged national bourgeoisies, and from the most obscurantist to the most revolutionary, had contended for leadership over the anti-colonial movements, with diverse consequences in different parts of the world. Anti-colonial struggle was itself, in other words, a riven terrain. If in most places decolonization came under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie (considerably well developed in India, petty and mercantile in Kenya, with many variants in between), all the socialist revolutions that occurred in Asia and Africa between 1949 and 1978 were those where the national bourgeoisie had been sidelined and socialist hegemony established in the course of the anti-colonial struggle. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s research: material/class structure (who leads anti-colonial struggle) determines outcomes — the very structure Ahmad argues discourse-first theory obscures.