Compradors, Neo-colonialism, and Transnational Class Struggle: PRC relations with Algeria and India, 1953–1965

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
ANTON HARDER
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Chinese Perceptions ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World ◽  
World Concept

Abstract This study of China's relations with Algeria and India shows that the Mao-era emphasis on the transnational function of class made it fundamentally sceptical of the privileged status of the nation-state and transformed Beijing's posture towards the Third World in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beijing's sense of a growing matrix of transnational class forces damaged relations with India, a key Third World moderate, and spurred closer ties with non-state, revolutionary movements like the Algerian Front Libération Nationale (FLN). Thus Beijing retreated from the post-Korean War phase of moderate diplomacy during which it had eschewed support for revolution abroad under the rhetoric of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’. This article relates Beijing's class analysis of the growing challenges in its relations with India to the arc of interactions between the communist Chinese, the FLN revolutionaries, and the newly post-colonial Algeria. It demonstrates that because of Beijing's understanding of how the domestic class category ‘comprador’ facilitated ‘neo-colonialism’ (an emerging Third World concept), China's anti-imperialism must be understood through its perception of the transnational function of class forces. This understanding of the post-colonial dilemma—how far to maintain or sever ties with the West, which grew partly from Chinese perceptions of Indian politics—explains the curious difficulty that Beijing faced in maintaining cooperative relations with many newly independent nations like Algeria. The emphasis on transnational class struggle also provides an interpretation of Beijing's foreign policy which is intimately linked to domestic politics and affirms the contribution of ideology to the Sino-Soviet split.

From global to local and back: the ‘Third World’ concept and the new radical left in France

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kalter
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Third World ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
World Concept ◽  
Radical Left

AbstractIn the second half of the twentieth century, the transnational ‘Third World’ concept defined how people all over the globe perceived the world. This article explains the concept’s extraordinary traction by looking at the interplay of local uses and global contexts through which it emerged. Focusing on the particularly relevant setting of France, it examines the term’s invention in the context of the Cold War, development thinking, and decolonization. It then analyses the reviewPartisans(founded in 1961), which galvanized a new radical left in France and provided a platform for a communication about, but also with, the Third World. Finally, it shows how the association Cedetim (founded in 1967) addressed migrant workers in France as ‘the Third World at home’. In tracing the Third World’s local–global dynamics, this article suggests a praxis-oriented approach that goes beyond famous thinkers and texts and incorporates ‘lesser’ intellectuals and non-textual aspects into a global conceptual history in action.

Revolutions Betrayed

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Daniel Chirot
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third World ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World

This chapter discusses Third Worldism and its failures. It presents the case of Algeria—a country central to Third Worldism. Its long, successful struggle against French colonialism and its aspiration to create a more just, economically developed socialist society were at the heart of what the Third World movement stood for. The country later fell to widespread corruption and later, violence, which is a case mirrored by other Third World nations discussed in this chapter. In one way or another, the Algerian story has been repeated for most of the Third World socialist or semisocialist revolutionary regimes, though these characteristics are not only limited to such regimes. The chapter shows that what began as truly reformist, idealistic revolutionary movements ultimately degenerated badly, and what is most disturbing about this is that they once held out real promise of something cleaner. To conclude, the chapter presents a final case as a warning: the story of Russia after the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union.

Memories of a U.S. Political Prisoner

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
World History ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Che Guevara ◽  
The U.S

"We will fight from one generation to the next." In the 1960s and 1970s we anti-imperialists in the U.S. were inspired not only by that slogan from Vietnam but even more by how they lived it with their 2000-year history of defeating a series of mighty invaders. At the same time we felt that we just might be on the cusp of world revolution in our lifetimes. Vietnam's ability to stand up to and eventually defeat the most lethal military machine in world history was the spearhead. Dozens of revolutionary national liberation struggles were sweeping what was then called the "Third World," today referred to as the "global South." There was a strategy to win, as articulated by Che Guevara: to overextend and defeat the powerful imperial beast by creating "two, three, many Vietnams." A range of radical and even revolutionary movements erupted within the U.S. and also in Europe and Japan.… Tragically, the revolutionary potential that felt so palpable then has not been realized.… Today, fighting from one generation to the next takes on new relevance and intense urgency.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Class Struggle, the Proletariat, and the Developing Nations

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Taborsky
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Third World ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third World

The concepts of class struggle and the leadership of the proletariat figure high among the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology and strategy that Soviet theoreticians deem applicable to the developing areas of the world. “A new contingent of the world proletariat — young working class movement of the newly free, independent and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America — has entered the world arena,” asserted the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is this newly emerging proletariat that hopefully is expected to convert the nationaldemocratic revolutions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into genuine socialist revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Hence, the advancement of the working class and the promotion of class struggle have become major concerns of Soviet strategy and tactics in the Third World.

scholarly journals (Dis) Investing Homi Bhabha’s Emancipative Discourse (from) in Post-colonial Project Management: Re-thinking the Amodernism of Imperial/African Political Economy

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Alfred Ndi
Keyword(s):  
Project Management ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Third World ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Third ◽  
Perception Of Threat ◽  
Knowledge Industry ◽  
The Third World ◽  
World Economic Order

Drawing from Bruno Latour’s amodernist organization theory, which illuminates the canonization of epistemological boundaries in the field of project management studies, this paper argues that Homi Bhabha’s emancipative project in postcolonial research, has failed to assert itself in this globalizing age of projectification of societies. In its historiographical context incarnated in writings by management scholars, the field of project management orientalized Africa as underdeveloped and in need of occidentalist modernization. This Latourian insight driven by the quest for the ‘purified canon’ portraying the metropole as ‘centre’ of civilization and the colonies/Africa, as the Other, was tragically misjudged by nationalist ideologues fighting for independence, post-independence leaderships in Africa, who met in the Bandung Conference, advocates of a New World Economic Order, pan-Africanists, because their interventions were grounded chiefly in hybridization. But hybdization means the demise of the amodern and since the occident will not stand by to witness this decanonization with an applause, the Third World was already ‘mal parti’ (to cite Denan) because its post-independence leadership needlessly staged the post-colonial project on the path of a hybridization logic of inevitable confrontation rather than in a light of participation and solidarity. Hybridization in post-colonial management studies connotes with the inevitability of ‘confrontation’ at a time when the Third World does not have the means to deal efficiently with it. Hybridization can also mean ‘participation’ and ‘solidarity’ (in the sense of understanding the Other’s viewpoint and embedding it) without radiating the perception of threat and taking no responsibility or showing any competence to deal with the  consequences of that perception. It concludes that, instead of ‘playing’ the ideological game at the level of the ‘super-structures’, more emphasis should be placed on building greater competency in the Latourian amodernism of development, entrepreneurship, etc. The Third World needs to build more projects by investing in the knowledge industry of amodernism while incorporating its cultural values. The West and the emerging world should not see this as a ‘threat’ to amodernism but as a ‘richness’; but for this to happen, they should actively invest in sustainability of this process by supporting the intelligentsia of knowledge producers and interpreters in the Third World.

The Queer Third World

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-235
Author(s):  
Ilan Kapoor
Keyword(s):  
International Development ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Third World ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
World Nation ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Two Sides

This chapter assesses the relationship between the concepts of “queer” and “Third World,” and attempts to group them in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagement and their shared allegiance precisely to nonalignment and a radical politics (of development). In assembling both terms one is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of international development, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer: under Western eyes, it has often been constructed as perverse, abnormal, and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as deviantly strange — backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic development is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never living up to the mark. For their part, post-colonial Third World nation-states have tended to disown and purge such queering — by denying their queerness and, in fact, often characterizing it as a “Western import” — yet at the same time imitating the West, modernizing or Westernizing sociocultural institutions, and pursuing neoliberal capitalist growth. The chapter claims that the Western and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on Lacanian queer theory, also suggests that a “queer Third World” would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structural negativity and destabilizing politics.

A Commentary on the Third World Concept

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-83
Author(s):  
Jimm DeShields ◽  
Shirley M. DeShields
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third World ◽  
World Concept

Uganda, 1979–85: Leadership in Transition

1988 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy K. Tindigarukayo
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Third ◽  
Civilian Regimes ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Degree Of Participation ◽  
The Military

After a period of preoccupation with the study of the military in post-colonial states, some scholars have begun to turn their attention to the analysis of politics in post-military states in the Third World.1 This shift, however, has had a considerable impact on perceptions of the traditional rigid dichotomy between military and civilian régimes. In particular, there is increasing scepticism about the ability of the latter to restore political order, to establish the supremacy of civil institutions over the armed forces, and to acquire popular legitimacy. There seems little doubt that the pre-eminence of the soldiers, and their ability to dictate the degree of participation in politics, has continued to persist in a number of African countries, thereby producing systems of government that are a mixture rather than a clear manifestation of either a military or a civilian régime.

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