5/2/2024

Third Worldism

Third-Worldism is a political concept and ideology that emerged in the late 1940s or early 1950s during the Cold War and tried to generate unity among the nations that did not want to take sides between the United States and the Soviet Union. The concept is closely related but not identical to the political theory of Maoism–Third Worldism.

The political thinkers and leaders of Third-Worldism argued that the North-South divisions and conflicts were of primary political importance compared to the East-West opposition of the Cold War period. In the three-world model, the countries of the First World were the ones allied to the United States. These nations had less political risk, better functioning democracy and economic stability, and continue to have a higher standard of living.

The Second World designation referred to the former industrial socialist states under the influence of the Soviet Union. The Third World hence defined countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO, or the Communist Bloc. The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, Oceania and Asia.

Kim Il Sung

“The peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America have a common interest and are in a position to support each other in their anti-imperialist and anti-U.S struggle. As long as Africa and Latin America are not free, Asia is not free.”.

Third-Worldism was connected to new political movements following the decolonization and new forms of regionalism that emerged in the erstwhile colonies of Asia, Africa, and the Middle-East as well as in the older nation-states of Latin America, including pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism, pan-Americanism and pan-Asianism. The first period of the Third-World movement, that of the "first Bandung Era", was led by the Egyptian, Indonesian and Indian heads of states such as Nasser, Sukarno and Nehru.

Several leaders have been associated with the Third-Worldism movement, including:

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Fourth President of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973, and later as the ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977.

Houari Boumédiène

Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria 1965-1976 and second President of Algeria until his death in 1978.

Amílcar Cabral

Pan-Africanist, political organizer, led PAIGC's guerrilla movement in Portuguese Guinea against Portuguese government.

Fidel Castro

Prime minister of Cuba 1959-1976, president 1976-2008. 1st secretary, Communist Party of Cuba 1961-2011.

Hugo Chávez

President of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Leader, Fifth Republic Movement political party 1997-2007.

Muammar Gaddafi

De facto leader of Libya 1969-2011. Committed to Arab nationalism / socialism with his own Third International Theory.

Ho Chi Minh

Founding member of the French Communist Party. Prime Minister of Vietnam 1945-1955, President of Vietnam 1945-1969

Mao Zedong

Founder of the People's Republic of China. Chairman, Chinese Communist Party establishing PRC 1949-1976.

Patrice Lumumba

African nationalist and pan-Africanist. First prime minister, Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960.

Michael Manley

Fourth Prime Minister of Jamaica 1972-1980 and 1989-1992. Populist championing democratic socialist program.

Evo Morales

Led the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party since 1998. 65th president (1st indigenous) of Bolivia from 2006-2019.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Second president of Egypt 1954-1970. Led 1952 Egyptian revolution, introducing far-reaching land reforms.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Anti-colonial nationalist, 1st Prime Minister of India serving 16 years. Fabian calling for complete independence from British Raj.

Kwame Nkrumah

First Prime Minister and President of Ghana. Founding member of the Organization of African Unity.

Julius Nyerere

Tanganyika prime minister 1961-1962, president 1962-1964. Nationalist / socialist, promoted "Ujamaa" political philosophy.

Koesno Sosrodihardjo

First president of Indonesia 1945-1967. Leader of Indonesian struggle for independence from Dutch colonialists.

Mohammad Hatta

First vice president / prime minister of Indonesia 1945-1956. Statesman and nationalist known as "The Proclamator".

Thomas Sankara

Marxist revolutionary / Pan-Africanist, served as President of Burkina Faso from his 1983 coup until his 1987 assassination.

Josip Broz Tito

WW2 leader of Yugoslav Partisans. President, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1953-1980.

Modibo Keïta

First President of Mali 1960-1968. He espoused a form of African socialism. Established US-RDA as the only official party.

They were followed in the 1960s and 1970s by a second generation of Third-Worldist governments that emphasized on a more radical and revolutionary socialist vision, personified by the figure of Che Guevara. At the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, Third Worldism began to enter into a period of decline.

Theorists include:

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought.

Bespectacled Jean-Paul Sartre smoking a pipe.
Jean-Paul Sartre - "To exist is to choose" - regarded as the father of existentialism, argued that man lacks essence and is condemned to be free.

The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. Sartre participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté ("Socialism and Liberty") with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students.

“The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there.”.

British historian Ian Ousby observed that the French Communists always had far more hatred for collaborators than they did for the Germans, noting it was French people like Déat that Sartre wanted to assassinate rather than the military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, and the popular slogan always was "Death to Laval!" rather than "Death to Hitler!". When Socialisme et liberté dissolved Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period—when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political involvement. Sartre was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from being executed. He embraced Marxism but did not join the Communist Party. For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as "provincial" and in a 1949 essay called for a "United States of Europe".

Sartre asserts that our anguish comes from the radical freedom with which we have been thrown into the world, from the need to choose between the multiple choices that present themselves at each and every moment. This exaltation of freedom is incompatible with the existence of God, which is a sublimation of reason. "Man is nothing but what he makes of himself," he says.

Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary" state working for the betterment of humanity and could be criticized only for failing to live up to its own ideals, but that critics had to take in mind that the Soviet state needed to defend itself against a hostile world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures of "bourgeois" states were due to their innate shortcomings. Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc, arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive" and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik".

Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges. Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth".

In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way". A number of people, starting from Frank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a "useful idiot" due to his uncritical position. As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121. He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.

Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution.

He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. His work after Stalin's death, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearing posthumously). In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious.

From the 50s on, Sartre became increasingly politically radicalized, aligning himself with Maoism, Cuban socialism and, later, the May 68 movement.

Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"; and the "era's most perfect man". Sartre would also compliment Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel". owards the end of his life, Sartre began to describe himself as a "special kind" of anarchist.

Frantz Omar Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon was a Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works became influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. Fanon was also a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

Frantz Omar Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time". For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have influenced national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.

Fanon has had an influence on anti-colonial and national liberation movements. In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in the United States and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba. Of these only Guevara was primarily concerned with Fanon's theories on violence; for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and "black consciousness" respectively.

The Black Power group that Fanon had the most influence on was the Black Panther Party (BPP). In 1970 Bobby Seale, the Chairman of the BPP, published a collection of recorded observations made while he was incarcerated entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. This book, while not an academic text, is a primary source chronicling the history of the BPP through the eyes of one of its founders. While describing one of his first meetings with Huey P. Newton, Seale describes bringing him a copy of Wretched of the Earth.

There are at least three other direct references to the book, all of them mentioning ways in which the book was influential and how it was included in the curriculum required of all new BPP members. Beyond just reading the text, Seale and the BPP included much of the work in their party platform. The Panther 10 Point Plan contained 6 points which either directly or indirectly referenced ideas in Fanon's work including their contention that there must be an end to the "robbery by the white man", and "education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society".

One of the most important elements adopted by the BPP was the need to build the "humanity" of the native. Fanon claimed that the realization by the native that s/he was human would mark the beginning of the push for freedom. The BPP embraced this idea through the work of their Community Schools and Free Breakfast Programs. anon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others. His work was a key influence on the Black Panther Party, particularly his ideas concerning nationalism, violence and the lumpenproletariat.

Samir Amin

Samir Amin was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst. He is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered a pioneer of Dependency Theory. Arriving in Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party (PCF), but he later distanced himself from Soviet Marxism and associated himself for some time with Maoist circles.

Samir Amin with Thomas Sankara
Samir Amin with Thomas Sankara.

With other students he published a magazine entitled Étudiants Anticolonialistes. His ideas and political position were also strongly influenced by the 1955 Asian–African Bandung Conference and the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The latter even encouraged him to postpone his PhD thesis that was ready in June 1956 to take part in the political unrest. Samir Amin acted as an adviser for several governments, such as China, Vietnam, Algeria, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

“The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that "there is no alternative" acceptable.”.

Amin was long an influence on and supporter of the leaders of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, becoming acquainted with the Khmer Rouge's future leaders in post-World War II Paris, where Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and other Cambodian students were studying. Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis, which he finished in 1959, noted collaborations with Amin and claimed to apply Amin's theories to Cambodia.

In the late 1970s, Amin praised the Khmer Rouge as superior to Communist movements in China, Vietnam, or the Soviet Union, and recommended the Khmer Rouge model for Africa. Amin continued to actively praise the Khmer Rouge into the 1980s. At a 1981 talk in Tokyo, Amin praised Pol Pot's work as "one of the major successes of the struggle for socialism in our era" and as necessary against "expansionism" from the Soviet Union or from Vietnam.

Maoist Third-Worldism

Maoist Third-Worldism (MTW) is a broad tendency which is mainly concerned with the infusion and synthesis of Marxism—particularly of the Marxist–Leninist–Maoist persuasion—with concepts of non-Marxist Third Worldism, namely dependency theory and world-systems theory. Theoretically Maoism–Third Worldism is defined by a variety of political principles which emphasize the enormous economic, social and political divisions which exist currently between the "overdeveloped" First World and the "underdeveloped" Third World.

“The whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who overwhelmingly make up the majority of the worlds population”.

This is expressed through the lens of Maoist theory and practice, but brought into a new international understanding of imperialism and class in the context of the world which has been divided into two distinct camps, namely the exploited countries (the Third World) and their exploiters (the First World). According to the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (RAIM), on the question of the principal theoretical observations of Maoism–Third Worldism they state:

“Confronted by a complacent working class, served by an opportunist left, and alienated from the proletariat through the reception of surplus value drained from the Third World, we must understand the ideological and strategic implications of struggle from within the parasitic core. It benefits neither the left in the oppressor or the oppressed nations to pretend that the condition of the working class around the world is the same... To be a Third Worldist, in our view, is to be a principled internationalist.”.

However, the foundations of Maoism–Third Worldism extend to encapsulate a great many strategic and theoretical developments in Marxist theory over the 20th century. Among them is the understanding of a global people's war being necessary as a military strategy for bringing an end to the historically unequal relationship built between the First and Third Worlds.

This strategy includes the systematic delinking of the exploited economies of Third World countries from the parasitic First World and the unification of international forces to deprive the imperialist countries of resources and wealth extracted from Third World countries. Though this strategy has been drawn from several historical sources such as Che Guevara's Message to the Tri-Continental, it has most famously drawn on a quote from Lin Biao's speech Long Live the Victory of People's War! in 1965:

“Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called 'the cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'. Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various reasons been temporarily held back in the North American and West European capitalist countries, while the people’s revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has been growing vigorously. In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas. In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The socialist countries should regard it as their internationalist duty to support the people’s revolutionary struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”.

Also fundamental to Maoism–Third Worldism is an understanding of the joint-dictatorship of the proletariat of oppressed nations (JDPON) and/or global new democratic revolution (GNDR) which is proposed as a form of alter-globalization aimed at breaking the political and economic foundations of the economic parasitism between the First and Third Worlds.

The Maoism–Third Worldism movement is currently mostly associated with organizations such as the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement and Maoist Internationalist Ministry of Prisons, a branch-off from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), a now defunct organisation). However, MIM Prisons considers its ideology to be MIM Thought and not Maoist–Third Worldist. ANTICONQUISTA, an anti-imperialist media collective, upholds Third Worldist views.

5/2/2024