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Esmer Milletler: Halkların Üçüncü Dünya Tarihi
Günümüzün en üretken Marksist tarihçilerinden Vijay Prashad, Esmer Milletler’de yirminci yüzyıla damgasını vuran Üçüncü Dünya’nın tarihini, “halkların tarihi” çerçevesinde ele alıyor.
Üçüncü Dünya’yı sadece coğrafi bir tanımlama ya da uluslararası bir ittifak modeli olmaktan ziyade, yüzyıllar süren esaretin ardından sömürgeciliğin zincirlerini kıran halkların siyasi, iktisadi ve kültürel mücadelelerinin bütünü olarak gören Prashad, Soğuk Savaş’a dair sıradan siyasi tarih anlatılarının ötesine geçen bir çalışmayla çıkıyor okurun karşısına.
Üçüncü Dünya’nın tarihini, bir fikir olarak doğduğu 1920’lerden, dünyanın gündemini belirlediği 1960’lara ve nefesini tüketerek kendi mirasına sırt çevirdiği 1980’lere kadar, bilimsel titizliği elden bırakmadan, son derece canlı ve etkileyici bir anlatımla aktarıyor.
Nehru, Nasır ve Tito gibi Üçüncü Dünya’nın “dev” siyasi figürlerinin olduğu kadar, Bolivyalı madencilerin, Jamaikalı kadın işçilerin,Tanzanyalı köylülerin, emperyalizmin kültürel boyunduruğuna karşı bayrak açan entelektüellerin de hikâyesi bu aynı zamanda.
Prashad geçmiş güzel günlere methiye düzmek ya da yiten umutların arkasından ağıt yakmak yerine, Esmer Milletler’de bu hikâyenin bugüne ve geleceğe bıraktığı mirasın izini sürüyor.
Üçüncü Dünya’yı sadece coğrafi bir tanımlama ya da uluslararası bir ittifak modeli olmaktan ziyade, yüzyıllar süren esaretin ardından sömürgeciliğin zincirlerini kıran halkların siyasi, iktisadi ve kültürel mücadelelerinin bütünü olarak gören Prashad, Soğuk Savaş’a dair sıradan siyasi tarih anlatılarının ötesine geçen bir çalışmayla çıkıyor okurun karşısına.
Üçüncü Dünya’nın tarihini, bir fikir olarak doğduğu 1920’lerden, dünyanın gündemini belirlediği 1960’lara ve nefesini tüketerek kendi mirasına sırt çevirdiği 1980’lere kadar, bilimsel titizliği elden bırakmadan, son derece canlı ve etkileyici bir anlatımla aktarıyor.
Nehru, Nasır ve Tito gibi Üçüncü Dünya’nın “dev” siyasi figürlerinin olduğu kadar, Bolivyalı madencilerin, Jamaikalı kadın işçilerin,Tanzanyalı köylülerin, emperyalizmin kültürel boyunduruğuna karşı bayrak açan entelektüellerin de hikâyesi bu aynı zamanda.
Prashad geçmiş güzel günlere methiye düzmek ya da yiten umutların arkasından ağıt yakmak yerine, Esmer Milletler’de bu hikâyenin bugüne ve geleceğe bıraktığı mirasın izini sürüyor.
448 pages, Paperback
First published February 19, 2007
About the author
Vijay Prashad
75 books725 followersVijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His most recent book is Red Star Over the Third World. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun.
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October 12, 2022
An absolute favorite dive into censored history to reemerge with the present conditions, so I have to give a worthy review...
Preamble on Vijay:
--As in his lectures (highly recommended, see below), Vijay Prashad has such mastery of articulating overarching social issues, drilling down to give detailed examples before resurfacing to tie the ideas together. So well-read, articulate, and with so much humanity... an inspiration.
--Prashad brings to life the side of history that is censored, the decolonization movements that shook 20th century power structures against all odds, their triumphs and their setbacks.
--Main concept = class analysis of anti-colonial independence movements, revealing their short-term compromises that escalated into long-term crises.
Fair Warning:
--This is an in-depth, radical analysis into the roots of global inequities.
1) For Western audiences trapped in their domestic liberal vs. conservative “debates” with little world history: I’m impressed you stumbled across this book, but a “gentler” introduction may be advisable to review the history/economics of imperialism (from the bloody military interventions to the opaque power politics of debt and “free trade”): The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
2) Vijay Prashad’s recent books have focused on accessibility, and his energy shines through in his lectures:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-global South playlist (feat. Prashad and others): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
-On ideological censorship of imperialism: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
-On capitalism as abstract social domination, turmoil from automation, and reactionary backlash: https://youtu.be/z11ohWnuwa0
-On labels of "capitalism", "socialism" (ex. China): https://youtu.be/3X7U2W6ryjE
-On US empire, wars, and capital accumulation: https://youtu.be/hTb2uVIWG5Q?t=44
-With more details on Global South examples: https://youtu.be/DiHtfeof15s
-Conversation on today’s capitalism: https://youtu.be/HXhogt3Zq9c
-What is the meaning of the Left?: https://youtu.be/M-frUMXKcEw?t=344
3) Once you’re ready to dive in, I recommend taking hierarchical notes, keeping in mind to highlight the general ideas and use the historical details as case studies; so much information to organize. Below is my attempt to distill the lessons...
Censored Successes
1) Universal Human Rights:
--Wait, from the Global South? Surprised? Didn’t read this in your history books?
--Power requires a level of consent, so it appropriates social innovations originating from the bottom. The framing then becomes Enlightened superiors handing down progress to their backward underlings. The logic is rather perverse; which side has the incentives/grievances to push for social change in the first place?
--Consider “Liberalism”, which is now associated with its political rhetoric of tolerance (multiculturalism, feminism, human rights). In reality, the world has experienced Liberalism (from the Atlantic Slave Trade to the Enclosures to the Age of Imperialism to today’s global division of labour) by the following definition (going back to Locke): those who developed the land deserve to own the land. Even if we set aside genocidal displacement and accept “development”, the ownership was highly inequitable with most labourers owning little.
--In the case of the Third World, sensitive Liberals may put a spotlight on Eleanor Roosevelt’s “human rights” agenda at the UN, ignoring the various Latin American representatives efforts to expand human rights (education, work, healthcare, social security).
--Meanwhile, Western Liberals saw the Global South as a treasure-trove of valuable resources and cheap/free labour during colonialism. After resistance mounted on these liberal business practices, the view on the Global South switched to “overpopulation” fear-mongering. Ah, Liberalism… first you commit genocide (ex. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World), and then you entertain quasi-genocide (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis).
2) Internationalist Nationalism united against Imperialism:
--The first 1/3 of this book highlights the solidarity of global anti-imperialism; with a shared history of enduring the teeth of colonialism and the overwhelming imbalance in arms, the Global South/"Third World” became the voice of reason on the global stage, using the United Nations (despite its limitations) as a platform. Disarmament has been a key demand, from the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung to the 60s Non-Aligned Movement focusing on nuclear disarmament (which is after all an existential threat to humanity).
--Thus, this nationalist (sovereignty) internationalism (united against imperialism) provided space to experiment with cultural development outside of Europe's conceptions of nationalism. Instead of nativism, there were experiments in multiplicity: a secular state to acknowledge multiple religions, anti-racism to mend colonialism's divide-and-conquer scars, and multilingualism.
--A key outcome from experiments in social development is economic justice and Global South contributions to Development Economics. For example, UNCTAD's New International Economic Order (NIEO) provided alternative visions to the imperialist GATT (and convenient Liberal smokescreens like “Modernization Theory” which focuses on blaming poverty on “traditional” culture, covering up imperialism forcing dependency through “free trade” and usurious debt).
--Economic justice focuses on redistribution of world’s resources + more dignified rate-of-return for labour (including more high-productivity sectors i.e. manufactured goods, instead of relying on exporting raw materials) + shared acknowledgement of the heritage of science/technology/culture.
--The 1966 Tricontinental Conference (Africa + Asia + Latin America) during Vietnam’s resistance to American bombardment epitomizes the hope of solidarity (and global diplomacy), which is why Prashad has started the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research.
--“[…] who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labour without want, now wanted to labour in their own image!”
Contradictions to Crises
1) Domestic Elites, Class Contradiction, and Cruel Cultural Nationalism:
--The central contradiction at the heart of the Third World project was uniting with hostile domestic classes (i.e. landlords, emerging industrial/financial capitalists) in order to prioritize the abolition of colonialism.
--While this may have been pragmatic at the start, domestic hierarchies were protected and the contradictions grew. Radical Left groups led anti-colonialism and programs for social development, but domestic elites used them to their benefit and purged them at their discretion.
--Using nationalism to fight colonialism thus became perverted, as solidarity increasingly gave way to crude nationalism.
--For example, the Sino-Indian border conflicts led to prioritizing militarization; this derailed the Global South’s demands for global disarmament and moved various members into the nets of Cold War spheres.
--More generally, independence required systemic transformations and great sacrifices to attend to the scares of colonialism and challenge the neocolonialism of global economics. This was not in the class interest of domestic elites, who pivoted to apolitical (safer) market-oriented liberal-globalization “development” (see below). The failures here (rampant inequity, losing economic sovereignty) combined with capitalism's abstraction (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future) opened the doors to cruel cultural nationalism, which diverted blame onto visible minorities instead of the abstractions of global division of labour/debt financing etc (reactionary politics 101, as seen in Nazism/Fascism/Global Trumpism):
2) Imperialism’s Dollars:
--Country-by-country comparisons of “advanced” vs. “developing” conveniently assume national economies, obscuring the dependencies/violence of global trade/finance/militarism (i.e. “imperialism”).
--Liberal economics is built on cheap raw materials and labour, which requires the divide. Forced (often by violent means) into dependency on the loser end of the global division of labour, liberal free trade laws forces open “free markets” in weaker countries (weaker states) while the stronger countries maintain non-market protection (stronger states). Open markets prevent domestic planning to build higher-productivity sectors, which requires nurturing before it is ready for global competition (“Infant Industry argument”); this is how the advanced West developed (along with violently smashing competition), in particular Britain and America.
-Crucial in-depth economic theory to supplement Prashad: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
--A key example is agriculture. The Global South, without protection to build other sectors and forced to swim in the open seas of the global market (free trade), competes in the global agriculture market with the US. The US creates enormous agricultural surpluses, with its immense technological scale and (perhaps more importantly) strong state protectionism. Thus, global market price shocks disproportionally ravage the Global South. Would like to read more on the Green Revolution in this context…
--Liberal finance (IMF, World Bank), like all private capitalist banking, profits from interest payments (usury). Post-colonial countries are of course in desperate need of capital for their social development projects, but Liberal finance targets the ill-planned projects of Global South elites. Falling into debt traps, productivity gains end up going to debt services (interest payments). A discussion on this "Super Imperialism": https://youtu.be/paUgY6SGlgY
--"The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soulless corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities."
--The 1970s-80s Nixon Shock, Oil Shocks, and Volcker Shock are popular turning point events in Western-centric narratives on the collapse of Keynesianism/Welfare State, but what is unmentioned is the overwhelming costs to the Global South’s social development/industrialization projects and subsequent Third World Debt Crisis:
-more accessible: The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-dive: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
--For structural solutions, see:
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-A People’s Green New Deal
3) Imperialism’s Bombs:
--Not only was the radical Left hunted down at home; imperialism (built on divide-and-rule) provided military/financial/political support for such purges. Strategies for social development became limited and easily perverted by the looming aggression of imperialism. The Eisenhower Doctrine supported monarchs (Saudi, Shah of Iran, Jordan, Iraq) against Nasser Arab socialism and those further Left. The Truman Doctrine ensured the "concept of socialism had to pay the penalty for Soviet limitations.” The Carter/Reagan Doctrine brought proxy terrorism to new heights. Plenty of resources here:
-Prashad's Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
In his words:
Quoting the beginning of "The Darker Nations":
Preamble on Vijay:
--As in his lectures (highly recommended, see below), Vijay Prashad has such mastery of articulating overarching social issues, drilling down to give detailed examples before resurfacing to tie the ideas together. So well-read, articulate, and with so much humanity... an inspiration.
--Prashad brings to life the side of history that is censored, the decolonization movements that shook 20th century power structures against all odds, their triumphs and their setbacks.
--Main concept = class analysis of anti-colonial independence movements, revealing their short-term compromises that escalated into long-term crises.
Fair Warning:
--This is an in-depth, radical analysis into the roots of global inequities.
1) For Western audiences trapped in their domestic liberal vs. conservative “debates” with little world history: I’m impressed you stumbled across this book, but a “gentler” introduction may be advisable to review the history/economics of imperialism (from the bloody military interventions to the opaque power politics of debt and “free trade”): The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
2) Vijay Prashad’s recent books have focused on accessibility, and his energy shines through in his lectures:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-global South playlist (feat. Prashad and others): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
-On ideological censorship of imperialism: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
-On capitalism as abstract social domination, turmoil from automation, and reactionary backlash: https://youtu.be/z11ohWnuwa0
-On labels of "capitalism", "socialism" (ex. China): https://youtu.be/3X7U2W6ryjE
-On US empire, wars, and capital accumulation: https://youtu.be/hTb2uVIWG5Q?t=44
-With more details on Global South examples: https://youtu.be/DiHtfeof15s
-Conversation on today’s capitalism: https://youtu.be/HXhogt3Zq9c
-What is the meaning of the Left?: https://youtu.be/M-frUMXKcEw?t=344
3) Once you’re ready to dive in, I recommend taking hierarchical notes, keeping in mind to highlight the general ideas and use the historical details as case studies; so much information to organize. Below is my attempt to distill the lessons...
Censored Successes
1) Universal Human Rights:
--Wait, from the Global South? Surprised? Didn’t read this in your history books?
--Power requires a level of consent, so it appropriates social innovations originating from the bottom. The framing then becomes Enlightened superiors handing down progress to their backward underlings. The logic is rather perverse; which side has the incentives/grievances to push for social change in the first place?
--Consider “Liberalism”, which is now associated with its political rhetoric of tolerance (multiculturalism, feminism, human rights). In reality, the world has experienced Liberalism (from the Atlantic Slave Trade to the Enclosures to the Age of Imperialism to today’s global division of labour) by the following definition (going back to Locke): those who developed the land deserve to own the land. Even if we set aside genocidal displacement and accept “development”, the ownership was highly inequitable with most labourers owning little.
--In the case of the Third World, sensitive Liberals may put a spotlight on Eleanor Roosevelt’s “human rights” agenda at the UN, ignoring the various Latin American representatives efforts to expand human rights (education, work, healthcare, social security).
--Meanwhile, Western Liberals saw the Global South as a treasure-trove of valuable resources and cheap/free labour during colonialism. After resistance mounted on these liberal business practices, the view on the Global South switched to “overpopulation” fear-mongering. Ah, Liberalism… first you commit genocide (ex. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World), and then you entertain quasi-genocide (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis).
2) Internationalist Nationalism united against Imperialism:
--The first 1/3 of this book highlights the solidarity of global anti-imperialism; with a shared history of enduring the teeth of colonialism and the overwhelming imbalance in arms, the Global South/"Third World” became the voice of reason on the global stage, using the United Nations (despite its limitations) as a platform. Disarmament has been a key demand, from the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung to the 60s Non-Aligned Movement focusing on nuclear disarmament (which is after all an existential threat to humanity).
--Thus, this nationalist (sovereignty) internationalism (united against imperialism) provided space to experiment with cultural development outside of Europe's conceptions of nationalism. Instead of nativism, there were experiments in multiplicity: a secular state to acknowledge multiple religions, anti-racism to mend colonialism's divide-and-conquer scars, and multilingualism.
--A key outcome from experiments in social development is economic justice and Global South contributions to Development Economics. For example, UNCTAD's New International Economic Order (NIEO) provided alternative visions to the imperialist GATT (and convenient Liberal smokescreens like “Modernization Theory” which focuses on blaming poverty on “traditional” culture, covering up imperialism forcing dependency through “free trade” and usurious debt).
--Economic justice focuses on redistribution of world’s resources + more dignified rate-of-return for labour (including more high-productivity sectors i.e. manufactured goods, instead of relying on exporting raw materials) + shared acknowledgement of the heritage of science/technology/culture.
--The 1966 Tricontinental Conference (Africa + Asia + Latin America) during Vietnam’s resistance to American bombardment epitomizes the hope of solidarity (and global diplomacy), which is why Prashad has started the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research.
--“[…] who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labour without want, now wanted to labour in their own image!”
Contradictions to Crises
1) Domestic Elites, Class Contradiction, and Cruel Cultural Nationalism:
--The central contradiction at the heart of the Third World project was uniting with hostile domestic classes (i.e. landlords, emerging industrial/financial capitalists) in order to prioritize the abolition of colonialism.
--While this may have been pragmatic at the start, domestic hierarchies were protected and the contradictions grew. Radical Left groups led anti-colonialism and programs for social development, but domestic elites used them to their benefit and purged them at their discretion.
--Using nationalism to fight colonialism thus became perverted, as solidarity increasingly gave way to crude nationalism.
--For example, the Sino-Indian border conflicts led to prioritizing militarization; this derailed the Global South’s demands for global disarmament and moved various members into the nets of Cold War spheres.
--More generally, independence required systemic transformations and great sacrifices to attend to the scares of colonialism and challenge the neocolonialism of global economics. This was not in the class interest of domestic elites, who pivoted to apolitical (safer) market-oriented liberal-globalization “development” (see below). The failures here (rampant inequity, losing economic sovereignty) combined with capitalism's abstraction (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future) opened the doors to cruel cultural nationalism, which diverted blame onto visible minorities instead of the abstractions of global division of labour/debt financing etc (reactionary politics 101, as seen in Nazism/Fascism/Global Trumpism):
2) Imperialism’s Dollars:
--Country-by-country comparisons of “advanced” vs. “developing” conveniently assume national economies, obscuring the dependencies/violence of global trade/finance/militarism (i.e. “imperialism”).
--Liberal economics is built on cheap raw materials and labour, which requires the divide. Forced (often by violent means) into dependency on the loser end of the global division of labour, liberal free trade laws forces open “free markets” in weaker countries (weaker states) while the stronger countries maintain non-market protection (stronger states). Open markets prevent domestic planning to build higher-productivity sectors, which requires nurturing before it is ready for global competition (“Infant Industry argument”); this is how the advanced West developed (along with violently smashing competition), in particular Britain and America.
-Crucial in-depth economic theory to supplement Prashad: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
--A key example is agriculture. The Global South, without protection to build other sectors and forced to swim in the open seas of the global market (free trade), competes in the global agriculture market with the US. The US creates enormous agricultural surpluses, with its immense technological scale and (perhaps more importantly) strong state protectionism. Thus, global market price shocks disproportionally ravage the Global South. Would like to read more on the Green Revolution in this context…
--Liberal finance (IMF, World Bank), like all private capitalist banking, profits from interest payments (usury). Post-colonial countries are of course in desperate need of capital for their social development projects, but Liberal finance targets the ill-planned projects of Global South elites. Falling into debt traps, productivity gains end up going to debt services (interest payments). A discussion on this "Super Imperialism": https://youtu.be/paUgY6SGlgY
--"The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soulless corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities."
--The 1970s-80s Nixon Shock, Oil Shocks, and Volcker Shock are popular turning point events in Western-centric narratives on the collapse of Keynesianism/Welfare State, but what is unmentioned is the overwhelming costs to the Global South’s social development/industrialization projects and subsequent Third World Debt Crisis:
-more accessible: The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-dive: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
--For structural solutions, see:
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-A People’s Green New Deal
3) Imperialism’s Bombs:
--Not only was the radical Left hunted down at home; imperialism (built on divide-and-rule) provided military/financial/political support for such purges. Strategies for social development became limited and easily perverted by the looming aggression of imperialism. The Eisenhower Doctrine supported monarchs (Saudi, Shah of Iran, Jordan, Iraq) against Nasser Arab socialism and those further Left. The Truman Doctrine ensured the "concept of socialism had to pay the penalty for Soviet limitations.” The Carter/Reagan Doctrine brought proxy terrorism to new heights. Plenty of resources here:
-Prashad's Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
In his words:
Quoting the beginning of "The Darker Nations":
Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals.
The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's "Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence.
The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as "overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.
May 14, 2021
Emerging from the throes of colonialism in a postwar world, the countries that constituted the so-called Third World came together—first as the League against Imperialism and later under the aegis of Bandung and beyond—to resist bipolar influence and maintain their independence from the cultural influence of the First and Second worlds. Much more than its stance of 'non-alignment,' the Third World was bound together with a commitment to anti-colonialism and egalitarianism.
In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad puts together a brilliant political history of the Third World as a cultural project rather than a place (hat tip to Frantz Fanon here). Prashad's cogent analysis is made in three parts: "Quests" for national liberation; the "Pitfalls" of the rule of the domestic elite and its dalliances with policy without analysis or mass mobilisation; and finally, the "Assassinations" of an egalitarian dream due to 'dollar imperialism' and the cultural chauvinism and fundamentalism set off by the IMF-led neoliberal regime.
While not quite a "People's History" as the subtitle of some editions call it (perhaps to draw methodological parallels with Howard Zinn's book on the United States), A Darker Nations presents an important challenge to narratives about the 'global south' written from without by taking a closer look at the intellectual history of the Third World nations and the manner in which decisionmaking therein shaped, and was shaped by, global events over the years.
Most striking is Prashad's reading of the abandonment of the social transformation agenda which had led to the formation of a 'Third' world in the first place. A post-independence vision of stability led to the demobilisation of the masses and rule in the interests of the domestic elites, which weakened the resolve of these nations for economic and cultural cooperation and prevented it from happening. The obsession with borders created by the colonial powers led to militarisation gaining over the nation-building project.
Even more importantly, however, the sham of 'development economics' hit the darker nations, who were asked to modernise instead of being provided with reparations, and the eventual 'structural adjustment' was accompanied, as we know, by a loss of political sovereignty while the (uneven) productivity gains made went into the repayment of debts and attempting to cover the gaps widened, and often created, by the free-market.
In many places Prashad's analysis reads rather dryly (and requires at least a basic understanding and/ or familiarity with the history of the darker nations). However, his explanation on the economics front; from the theoretical aspects of Prebisch and import-substitution to the history of projects like OPEC and of the rise and fall of East Asia; cannot be recommended enough for its accessibility and the way it has been substantiated. This book also presents a commendable explanation of the failures of the Second World vis-a-vis the Third, which is a rather rare find in scholarship across the ideological spectrum.
There is, of course, also the weight of the concluding observation:
In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad puts together a brilliant political history of the Third World as a cultural project rather than a place (hat tip to Frantz Fanon here). Prashad's cogent analysis is made in three parts: "Quests" for national liberation; the "Pitfalls" of the rule of the domestic elite and its dalliances with policy without analysis or mass mobilisation; and finally, the "Assassinations" of an egalitarian dream due to 'dollar imperialism' and the cultural chauvinism and fundamentalism set off by the IMF-led neoliberal regime.
While not quite a "People's History" as the subtitle of some editions call it (perhaps to draw methodological parallels with Howard Zinn's book on the United States), A Darker Nations presents an important challenge to narratives about the 'global south' written from without by taking a closer look at the intellectual history of the Third World nations and the manner in which decisionmaking therein shaped, and was shaped by, global events over the years.
Most striking is Prashad's reading of the abandonment of the social transformation agenda which had led to the formation of a 'Third' world in the first place. A post-independence vision of stability led to the demobilisation of the masses and rule in the interests of the domestic elites, which weakened the resolve of these nations for economic and cultural cooperation and prevented it from happening. The obsession with borders created by the colonial powers led to militarisation gaining over the nation-building project.
Even more importantly, however, the sham of 'development economics' hit the darker nations, who were asked to modernise instead of being provided with reparations, and the eventual 'structural adjustment' was accompanied, as we know, by a loss of political sovereignty while the (uneven) productivity gains made went into the repayment of debts and attempting to cover the gaps widened, and often created, by the free-market.
In many places Prashad's analysis reads rather dryly (and requires at least a basic understanding and/ or familiarity with the history of the darker nations). However, his explanation on the economics front; from the theoretical aspects of Prebisch and import-substitution to the history of projects like OPEC and of the rise and fall of East Asia; cannot be recommended enough for its accessibility and the way it has been substantiated. This book also presents a commendable explanation of the failures of the Second World vis-a-vis the Third, which is a rather rare find in scholarship across the ideological spectrum.
There is, of course, also the weight of the concluding observation:
"Indeed, cultural nationalism is the Trojan horse of IMF-driven globalization. The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soulless corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities."This is a heavy text that requires much context, but is entirely worth the effort. I would recommend a close reading.
October 21, 2014
A brilliant dialectical analysis of the political phenomenon of third world and the global political economy. This is an analysis and not a narrative and assumes some rudimentary knowledge of the world history of the 20th century on part of the reader.
The main thesis of Parishad is that the third world is a project among the formerly colonised states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for political, economic and cultural sovereignty and mainly for dignity. It thoroughly examines the major leaders of the third world, their ideologies and the institutions they formed and their struggles for economic and cultural sovereignty.
I liked the way the book is structured. The first part titled quest deals with the beginnings of the third world, from the League against imperialism conceived in the Brussels conference and the Bandung conference that happened after many of the third world nations have become politically independent. The second part titled pitfalls deals with the failures of the third world nations through authoritarianism, failures in land reforms, corrupt bureaucracy, failures in socialising production, local opposition from the dominant classes of the old and trying to implement policies without any proper analysis and mass mobilisation. The third part deals with the death of the third world through IMF-led liberalisation of economies and the rise of cultural nationalism in the form of chauvinism, religious intolerance and racism. In each chapter, he also provides a historical analysis of race, class and gender in the specific case.
One flaw however is that Vijay Parishad didn’t provide much attention to the people’s struggles apart from just a small mention, especially as this is titled “people’s history”. But I guess this can still be called a people’s history as it offers a view from the global south instead of being Eurocentric.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of international relations, neoliberalism and the global capital.
The main thesis of Parishad is that the third world is a project among the formerly colonised states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for political, economic and cultural sovereignty and mainly for dignity. It thoroughly examines the major leaders of the third world, their ideologies and the institutions they formed and their struggles for economic and cultural sovereignty.
I liked the way the book is structured. The first part titled quest deals with the beginnings of the third world, from the League against imperialism conceived in the Brussels conference and the Bandung conference that happened after many of the third world nations have become politically independent. The second part titled pitfalls deals with the failures of the third world nations through authoritarianism, failures in land reforms, corrupt bureaucracy, failures in socialising production, local opposition from the dominant classes of the old and trying to implement policies without any proper analysis and mass mobilisation. The third part deals with the death of the third world through IMF-led liberalisation of economies and the rise of cultural nationalism in the form of chauvinism, religious intolerance and racism. In each chapter, he also provides a historical analysis of race, class and gender in the specific case.
One flaw however is that Vijay Parishad didn’t provide much attention to the people’s struggles apart from just a small mention, especially as this is titled “people’s history”. But I guess this can still be called a people’s history as it offers a view from the global south instead of being Eurocentric.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of international relations, neoliberalism and the global capital.
May 3, 2015
A classic case of where even smart Marxist history can go off the tracks. Prashad's one of he best writers about Asian American experience and he can be a fiery speaker whose anger about the state of the world, especially white supremacy and economic injustice, is usually on target. I was hoping that The Darker Nations would be the kind of overview that could serve as a foundation for readers wanting to orient themselves to the dizzying range of experiences subsumed under the "Third World" terminology. Unfortunately, Prashad assumes that his readers are a. familiar with the frequently turgid vocabulary of Marxist class analysis; and b. in agreement with how he's worked through all the issues. All too often he winds up sounding like a delegate to a hallucinatory contemporary version of the Bandung Conference which he correctly identifies as a key moment in the development of "pan-Third-World" thinking. Problem is that a lot's happened in the interim (much of which Prashad touches on), so anyone who wants to make an impact on the way people outside the very small choirboy think about these issues had better come up with a new approach. In addition to passages that descend into not-particularly-engaging political theory, Prashad has a tendency to elide the differences between various Third World countries in the support of generalizations that simply don't hold up if you know the local histories in any detail at all. It's too bad because he sprinkles in enough real insight, especially into the decay and collapse of the promising post-colonial states into dictatorship and corruption. He makes particularly good use of Fanon.
Ultimately, though, the only people who I recommend this book to are those with a solid background in Third World histories and an interest in finding a rhetoric to communicate issues of injustice for whom Prashad will mostly be a cautionary tale of how not to craft a voice.
Ultimately, though, the only people who I recommend this book to are those with a solid background in Third World histories and an interest in finding a rhetoric to communicate issues of injustice for whom Prashad will mostly be a cautionary tale of how not to craft a voice.
February 9, 2021
Brilliant political history of the Third World project, but the prospective reader will need to brush up on their prior knowledge of events. This book won’t explain Suez, or Vietnam, but it will help the reader make sense of the political universe these events produced. The aspects on development economics are well explained and very enlightening.
June 11, 2023
If a lizard murmured an anti-imperialist thought under a rock in the desert, you will probably find it mentioned here. Sweeping in scope, crystal-clear in structure and argument, characteristically charming in presentation, Prashad wrote the bedrock survey on the rise and decline of the formerly colonized world, on its trek through the Non-Aligned Movement, navigating power blocs and grappling with a global economic structure stacked against it. Prashad possesses the rare combination of erudition, passion for struggle and moral clarity, and in this book these all come together. The reader really gets a feeling for the pioneering trajectory of the third world, the intoxicating high hopes of the first decades and the difficult decisions for which no ideological blueprint provided a framework. Libraries' worth of information, condensed in a story brilliantly hooked in a geographical narration, jumping from city to city as Prashad joins historical junctures to the places their protagonists acted in. A joy to read.
My gripe with it is theoretical. Within the anti-imperialist-developmentalist nexus, success and failure depend on the balance of power: globally between empire and third world, internally between reactionary landholders and the people at large. When progressive projects falter, the implication is often that they didn't break the back of feudal power, or made compromises with it, or betrayed the third world completely and acceded to the imperialist bloc, or enacted anti-democratic legislation curbing the power of poor farmers. If they'd been consistent in their revolution, they could have swept these obstacles away and done genuinely socialist development. The réal gauntlet has never been taken up, hiding behind an ever receding horizon.
The problem is: it has been. In places like Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia and Cambodia, there were no reactionary internal foes to vanquish anymore (symptomatically, these are little discussed, or not at all). Here the struggle wasn't horizontal, one power asserting itself against another, but lateral: a power attempting to harness the state machine vis a vis an economic algebra bigger than any of the agents participating in it. When these fail, the reflexive diagnosis is "betrayal", but that's an analytical dead end. It all comes down to hating the player, leaving the game out of view.
To Prashad's credit, he discusses the Asian Tigers who managed to climb the global economic ladder, but only to underline their exceptional nature, which could never be transplanted elsewhere. The following decades would show, however, that development, socialist or otherwise, requires an integration with global economic forces, dominated by the North as they may be — think China, Vietnam, but also Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Bangladesh. The narrative told by the non-aligned movement made grasping this Faustian bargain impossible to understand, unless in terms of betrayal. In The Poorer Nations, Prashad would mention China's neoliberalism of the early 2000s; he wouldn't use that word anymore today, or at least not with the connotation of capitulation.
My gripe with it is theoretical. Within the anti-imperialist-developmentalist nexus, success and failure depend on the balance of power: globally between empire and third world, internally between reactionary landholders and the people at large. When progressive projects falter, the implication is often that they didn't break the back of feudal power, or made compromises with it, or betrayed the third world completely and acceded to the imperialist bloc, or enacted anti-democratic legislation curbing the power of poor farmers. If they'd been consistent in their revolution, they could have swept these obstacles away and done genuinely socialist development. The réal gauntlet has never been taken up, hiding behind an ever receding horizon.
The problem is: it has been. In places like Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia and Cambodia, there were no reactionary internal foes to vanquish anymore (symptomatically, these are little discussed, or not at all). Here the struggle wasn't horizontal, one power asserting itself against another, but lateral: a power attempting to harness the state machine vis a vis an economic algebra bigger than any of the agents participating in it. When these fail, the reflexive diagnosis is "betrayal", but that's an analytical dead end. It all comes down to hating the player, leaving the game out of view.
To Prashad's credit, he discusses the Asian Tigers who managed to climb the global economic ladder, but only to underline their exceptional nature, which could never be transplanted elsewhere. The following decades would show, however, that development, socialist or otherwise, requires an integration with global economic forces, dominated by the North as they may be — think China, Vietnam, but also Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Bangladesh. The narrative told by the non-aligned movement made grasping this Faustian bargain impossible to understand, unless in terms of betrayal. In The Poorer Nations, Prashad would mention China's neoliberalism of the early 2000s; he wouldn't use that word anymore today, or at least not with the connotation of capitulation.
December 11, 2018
a radical history of the third world. similar in spirit to howard zinn’s people’s history of the us. very thorough and packed full of names, events, facts and figures.
July 26, 2017
The title unsettled me a bit – but this had received good reviews and the series it is in (The New Press's People's History series edited by Howard Zinn) is really quite good. I am so pleased I read this: it is a cogent, politically charged and engaged analysis of the 'Third World' as a political project. Prashad sees the Third World as a potentially a powerful challenge to but also product of the two worlds of the Cold War, and a movement and concept with enormous promise. He argues that the concept was weakened by the Third World's oppositionalism – it was defined by what it wasn't – and a fundamental problem of a focus on 'the people' as a largely undifferentiated anti-colonial mass at the expense of class. His concluding case, then, that the Third World as a political project was destroyed by resurgent class and imperialist power using three weapons – IMF related structural adjustment policies, an abandoned social transformation agenda leading to neo-liberal policies at home, and atavistic forms of cultural nationalism and religious anti-nationalism – is powerful and hard to refute. It adds together then to be a major contribution to contemporary history and to analyses of the current global political economy, as well as pointing to many of the weaknesses in the current wave of people's movements. The case that neo-liberal globalisation and cultural nationalism are bedfellows is essential to understanding the current shape of global politics, and one that needs more extensive analysis and exploration. Extremely good, highly recommended (one of my must-reads for the year), the kind of history we need more of.
November 7, 2009
Prashad’s book is important, though I wouldn’t call it a “people’s history” as it focuses largely on the actions of the leaders of the U.S., U.S.S.R., and “Third World.” He does a good job of accessibly covering the general themes that played out during decolonization, independence and neoliberalism, as well as conceptualizing the Third World as an intentional project. But no book can really get at the dynamics at play over the course of 80 years and three continents. And of course, as anyone in 2009 can tell (except Thomas Friedman), it’s not going to be an uplifting story. I’ll just throw in part of my response paper for class:
It got me thinking about the ideas of transition and power and how those played out in the Third World. Two consistent themes seemed to be the transition of ideas into action and the transition from armed resistance to national leadership. Prashad lays out example after example of how, sadly, these transitions almost always failed. In particular, I appreciated his analysis of how the FLN in Algeria worked to demobilize the population, failed to take advantage of its knowledge and desire to participate in the development of a new state, alienated them, then tried to appease them, and then Ben Bella was overthrown. Being of a certain political persuasion, I enjoyed his emphasis on the potential (and occasionally tangible) successes of participation and autogestion. It strikes me as both misguided and tragic that the party or forces that inherited the reigns after decolonization believed that a state could be built without popular participation and popular investment. One of my favorite quotes from Battle of Algiers sums this up: “Starting a revolution is hard, and it's even harder to continue it. Winning is hardest of all. But only afterward, when we have won, will the real hardships begin.” If you can’t win liberation without the people, how in the world can you run a state (in a nominally socially just form) without the people?
All tangled up in this is of course power - based in the state, the gun, the idea, the masses, the economy, the international scene. Can popular power ever be successfully transferred to state power (and remain popular, just, etc.)? Can the power of an idea ever be transferred into the power of actions that even come close to resembling that original idea? And even if the answer is yes to both - how do you do it after being colonized for one hundred plus years with two superpowers breathing down your neck?
It got me thinking about the ideas of transition and power and how those played out in the Third World. Two consistent themes seemed to be the transition of ideas into action and the transition from armed resistance to national leadership. Prashad lays out example after example of how, sadly, these transitions almost always failed. In particular, I appreciated his analysis of how the FLN in Algeria worked to demobilize the population, failed to take advantage of its knowledge and desire to participate in the development of a new state, alienated them, then tried to appease them, and then Ben Bella was overthrown. Being of a certain political persuasion, I enjoyed his emphasis on the potential (and occasionally tangible) successes of participation and autogestion. It strikes me as both misguided and tragic that the party or forces that inherited the reigns after decolonization believed that a state could be built without popular participation and popular investment. One of my favorite quotes from Battle of Algiers sums this up: “Starting a revolution is hard, and it's even harder to continue it. Winning is hardest of all. But only afterward, when we have won, will the real hardships begin.” If you can’t win liberation without the people, how in the world can you run a state (in a nominally socially just form) without the people?
All tangled up in this is of course power - based in the state, the gun, the idea, the masses, the economy, the international scene. Can popular power ever be successfully transferred to state power (and remain popular, just, etc.)? Can the power of an idea ever be transferred into the power of actions that even come close to resembling that original idea? And even if the answer is yes to both - how do you do it after being colonized for one hundred plus years with two superpowers breathing down your neck?
December 7, 2023
I'm very tempted to give this five stars just for how much information and resources Vijay Prashad managed to pack into this book. This truly is an entire modern-contemporary history of the world, if only through the specific lens of the "third world" and anticolonialism. If you are looking to learn more about the history decolonization and neocolonialism in the 20th century, this is a great resource.
It's really hard to write a book that covers such a broad topic as this one, but Prashad truly does a great job of synthesizing different events and political movements to show us these broader trends that created and changed the "global south" countries and their relationships to each other.
I just recently finished Noam Chomsky's Who Rules the World? which actually serves as a fantastic companion to this one. Where Chomsky was talking about the imperialist actions of the US over the years, Prashad presents the all history that was going on beneath and in spite of that. (Maybe that means my next read should be the book Chomsky and Prashad wrote together!)
Honestly, though, as much as I truly appreciate the effort this book represents, it can be a pretty dense read. I originally started reading this last year as part of my research for a paper on US paramilitary campaigns in Indonesia, and it was incredibly helpful for that specifically. To go back and read it cover to cover, though, was a lot harder, and I burned out on it pretty quickly, which is why it took me over a year to finally finish it.
Still, this is a fantastic resource, and if you can handle a hefty history book, you should give it a shot. This is absolutely an important history to know.
It's really hard to write a book that covers such a broad topic as this one, but Prashad truly does a great job of synthesizing different events and political movements to show us these broader trends that created and changed the "global south" countries and their relationships to each other.
I just recently finished Noam Chomsky's Who Rules the World? which actually serves as a fantastic companion to this one. Where Chomsky was talking about the imperialist actions of the US over the years, Prashad presents the all history that was going on beneath and in spite of that. (Maybe that means my next read should be the book Chomsky and Prashad wrote together!)
Honestly, though, as much as I truly appreciate the effort this book represents, it can be a pretty dense read. I originally started reading this last year as part of my research for a paper on US paramilitary campaigns in Indonesia, and it was incredibly helpful for that specifically. To go back and read it cover to cover, though, was a lot harder, and I burned out on it pretty quickly, which is why it took me over a year to finally finish it.
Still, this is a fantastic resource, and if you can handle a hefty history book, you should give it a shot. This is absolutely an important history to know.
May 29, 2018
Ok...so this is a really good book. It gives a great account of the Third World as a utopian concept. ("The Third World was not a place. It was a project." Prasad writes.) It gives the reader an excellent, encyclopedic knowledge of people, places, groups and and events that are important to the Third World's history. And it gives a decent analysis of the reasons the utopian project that was the Third World failed. I had several major complaints with this book, though. One, despite its title ("A People's History of the Third World"), the history it tells is very much a top-down history. It is told overwhelmingly though the eyes of the leaders of the Third World (Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Sukarno, Tito, Castro, Nyerere, Michael Manley, Indira Gandhi, Amilcar Cabral, Ho Chi Minh, Chou Enlai, et al.) And while all these leaders should be celebrated and remembered, the fact that it is told through them means it's not really a "people's history". Two, the author places two much of the blame for the failure of the Third World on its own shortcomings. He blames most of the failure of the Third World on its own leaders, even though at least a great deal of the blame should lie with the former colonizers. For instance, in his chapter focusing on Jamaica, he places almost all the blame for the collapse of Michael Manley's experiment in democratic socialism on Manley himself, and his failure to break with the IMF, even though Manley with the target of a CIA-led destabilization campaign that ultimately cost him his office. Three, and this is tied into the second complaint, he fails to give enough credit to the successes of the Third World. His chapter on Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, and ujaama paints it entirely as a stupendous failure even though there were major advances in health care and education under this system of "benign village socialism," to quote Howard Zinn. His dismissal of the achievements of Mexico under Lazaro Cardenas and Bolivia Paz Esstensoro fails to give them their due as well. Four, in the first chapter he flat out denies overpopulation is a problem, and dismisses birth control and family planning as Western neocolonial inventions, despite the fact that lower fertility rates almost always lead to a higher standard of living and are indicative of more women's rights-to say nothing of the environmental impact of too many humans. Five, the book is incomplete, though to Prasad's credit, he anticipates and admits my beef that "This story of the production of the Third World is not going to take us to antiquity or the devastation of the regions that become central to the concept." I happen to feel that a discussion of those things is essential to telling the history of the Third World as Vijay Prasad does. Lastly (and these two reasons are largely intertwined), Prasad dismisses the traditional classes of the Third World completely and insists that Communism/Marxism are the only way forward for the Third World. First of all, he fails to acknowledge the role religion and royalty/nobility, among other traditional groups, played in fighting Western imperialism, both violently and nonviolently. The examples of this that come to my mind (and this is only a microscopic fragment of 1%) include the Rani of Jhansi in India, Emperor Menelik II and Empress Tayta Beytul in Ethiopia, Cetewayo of the Zulus, Yaa Ansaantewa of the Ashanti, Agaja Trudo of Dahomey, Pope of the Pueblo Indians, Queen Lilioukalani of Hawaii and Queen Nzinga in Angola, just to name a few. Also, Prasad's insistence that orthodox Marxism and Marxist dogma are the only way for the Third World dream to be achieved are deeply problematic, to say the absolute least. What about such examples as the democratic Christian socialism of Costa Rica, where abolishing the military led to massive advances in health care, education, and the environment, that would put the first world to shame? What about Botswana? What about Bhutan, shrugging off globalization to embrace Buddhism and "Gross National Happiness"? What about Mongolia, embracing its rich nomadic culture and the history of its hordes, celebrating the legendary conquerer Genghis Khan while preserving the health and educational progress of the Communist era? What about the Jamahiyira system of Libya-while Gaddafi was brutal, who would not want to preserve the gains in material standards of living under him? I am not saying that Marxism is not viable-look at Cuba and Kerala-but Prasad is wrong to insist on it being the only way forward. This leads him to take deeply questionable positions. For one example, he praises the seizure of power in Ethiopia by the brutal Dergue and its psychotic leader Mengistu (he of the "wasted bullet tax") as a great good. For another, he describes Iran's brilliant, enlightened, progressive leader Mohammed Mossedegh as revealing "the shallowness of his class" by undermining the Communist Tudeh Party. It's not a bad book-it's a good book, but it suffers from flawed logic and an incomplete story. You're a very fine historian Vijay Prasad! Better luck next time!
June 13, 2020
I learned so much. Probably my favorite book I've read in years. Every leftist in the US should read this book.... I never learned basically anything about the stuff in here, the Third World project, the different people who led it, the debates within it, the meetings that shaped it, etc. Vijay Prashad's writing is absolutely incredible. And he really takes seriously the attempts to build socialist / Third World societies, and analyzes the pitfalls and mistakes made... he does a super good job of not at all ignoring US/Western imperialism but also not erasing the agency of the people of the darker nations to shape their own destiny.
November 23, 2020
Vijay Prashad İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası ortaya çıkmış "Üçüncü Dünya"nı kapsamlı bir çalışma olarak ele almış. Kitabın önsözünde yazar "Üçüncü Dünya bir yer değildi. Bir projeydi.." diyerek başlar yazmaya. İlk önce Parise, daha sonra Brüksele ve sırasıyla bir çok başka kente geçiş yapar ve sömürge sonrası toplumların tarihini daha sömürgeyken anlatmaya başlar. Nehru, Tito ve Nasır gibi titanların nasıl batı yönümlü tarih yazımı tarafından çarpıtıldığını gösterir, tarihi Üçüncü Dünya halklarının gözünden anlatır bizlere. Üçüncü Dünyanın doğuşunu, gelişimini, gerilemesini ve çöküşünü anlatan bu kitabı bana göre aykırı bir ruha sahip her birey mutlaka okumalı..
December 14, 2018
Well written, but surprisingly dry for a book by Vijay Prashad. I was a bit disappointed, honestly.
September 8, 2024
I have my concerns when starting this because of the framing multiculturalism/multinationalism, which I think fall short when applied to anything beyond the relation relationships of revolutionary governments, but Prashad not shy away from the unsavory truth of the cultu al chauvinism and ethnonationalism that is also pervasivein the global south. This is a comprehensive history and the full, international story of both socialist reform and revolution. Prashad does an excellent job of distilling the narrative of such a wide range of countries and events which is really impressive. What I would say is lacking is a more human touch. A lot of the brutality of these various regimes and governments gets lost to the gaze of analysis and historical distance, which I guess may be necessary to tell the truth of a bleak and depressing portion of history, and its conclusion
September 21, 2022
This book is one of a kind. A comprehensive historical survey of the Cold War era from the perspective of the wretched of the earth. And it does so within 300 pages. It is worth a read.
July 18, 2022
I really appreciated this book. It gave a really helpful overview of Third World history, and the etymological history of Albert Sauvy’s coinage of the term ‘Third World’ after the ‘Third Estate’ of the French Revolution was particularly useful for framing the general perspective of the book’s history of the Non-Aligned Movement unfolding under the terrifying shadow of nuclear extinction that Cold War decades threatened:
“In the ancien regime prior to 1789, the monarchy divided its counselors into the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (aristocracy), with a Third Estate being for the bourgeoisie. During the tumult of the French Revolution, the Third Estate fashioned itself as the National Assembly, and invited the totality of the population to be sovereign over it. In the same way, the Third World would speak its mind, find the ground for unity, and take possession of the dynamic of world affairs. This was the enlightened promise of the Third World.”
Considering the reputation Prashad has garnered for being in the most unserious of terms a so-called ‘tankie’, it may be surprising how critical in fact Prashad was of Third World socialist leaders, such as Ben Bella and the FLN (who Martin Luther King Jr. met with and spoke of positively) and of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Prashad on Ben Bella:
“Ben Bella centralized power. The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than the FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrates the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party." In November 1962, the regime cracked down on the Communist Party of Algeria, which was otherwise in line with the socialist agenda of the FLN, and it soon went after the Parti de la Revolution Socialiste, headed by the former FLN leader Mohammed Boudiaf; the leadership of both parties languished in jail.”
Prashad on Nyerere:
“When the government's "improvement" scheme faltered, it tried a more radical approach called "transformation." The regime encouraged peasants to move to experimental farms called "village settlements" where they worked cooperatively to increase, theoretically, the value of their efforts. On these farms, mechanical implements and fertilizers re placed manual labor (mainly the hand hoe). The people, in Nyerere's terms, had to learn to live in "proper villages." Of the millions who lived in rural Tanzania, only 3,500 families moved to set up these village settlements, which had cost the government upward of two million pounds. The famous French agronomist… Rene Dumont wrote a report in 1969 that came close to the government's own view of the creation of villages: the scheme had produced appalling results…”
I was surprised at how closely Prashad’s reading of this period of decolonization aligned with James Scott’s writing on Nyerere. Prashad writes in a more generalized conclusion:
“Tanzanian ujamaa is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations… Yet its modernist dream-to administer nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population-led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism.”
More recently reading some of Fanon’s writings as well as some of Ho Chi Minh’s, this perspective is actually quite consistent with the orientations of Third World revolutionary literature, which again is not wholly consistent with the way this discourse is painted in broad strokes by some segments of the Western left.
Prashad was also surprisingly very critical of the Soviet Union at some points, writing in the context of nuclearism: “…both Moscow and Washington made empty promises in return provides a measure of the limited value of moral pleas in a nuclear age.”
Prashad was particularly critical of Soviet accommodation to Nimeiri’s brutalities and intervention in Afghanistan:
“In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda… The Nimeiri regime arrested the party leadership, executed most of them (including Abdel al-Khaliq Mahjub, Joseph Garang, and Ahmed El Sheikh), and urged their followers to "destroy anyone who claims there is a Sudanese Communist Party. Destroy this alleged Party." When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leader ship, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the Scp's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China.”
“That the Marxists invited the Soviets into the country in 1979 showed their weakness and proved to their detractors that they were epigones of the USSR. As such, the CIA-WML-backed conservatives within Afghanistan and Pakistan had threatened the government, which was the reason they turned to the Soviet Union. All this was irrelevant as the Soviets entered an unwinnable situation, further alienated the people from their government, and gave legitimacy to the jihadists who now repackaged them selves as freedom fighters. It did not help the Marxist cause that the Soviet army engaged in a rash of brutal campaigns in the countryside that sent millions of people toward Iran and Pakistan as refugees.”
And I wasn’t actually aware how biting some of the commentary of Third World socialists were concerning the Soviet Union at the time, though this is consistent with Maoist interpretations of Soviet history today:
“Militants and national liberation organizations in this period flooded the meetings of the Third World and demanded armed action against imperialism. They challenged the Soviet delegates and brushed aside any consideration of the limitations of popular anti-imperialist sentiment in the countries to be liberated by the gun. Some of the militants adopted the critique of the two-camps theory to suggest that both the United States and the USSR were imperialists, and the only force able to stand up to them was armed national liberation.”
My favourite chapter however, was the one on Singapore, the postcolonial nation-state which became a beacon for the Third World bourgeoisie and capitalist development. Prashad’s was one of the best brief histories I’ve encountered of the island. Some excerpts:
“Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings (Hong Kong not only urbanized its landscape but also reclaimed land from the sea for its airport and residential areas). Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. These were almost purely entrepots.”
“World War II devastated the Pacific Rim. It left Singapore in shambles. The growth of the Communist movement in Malaysia and Singapore threatened the British hold on the region. A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957. In Singapore, the Communist movement developed mass support among the Chinese working class. Aware of the growing strength of the Left, an England-educated group led by Lee Kuan Yew created the People's Action Party (PAP). PAP made an alliance with the Communist trade unions to throw out the British. For the first elections of 1959, PAP developed a manifesto that reflected its eclectic ideology a mix of socialism, pragmatism, multiculturalism, and nationalism. In 1961 , as PA P gained confidence, it ejected its left wing (which re-formed as the Barisan Sosialis, the Socialist Front). In 1963, the PAP state engineered Operation Cold Store to "obliterate the BS's [Barisan Sosialis's] top level leadership." 17 PAP's lead economist and first finance minister of Singapore, Goh Keng Swee, warned the cabinet not to be swayed by either the lures of the free market or socialism. What Singapore needed, he argued, was the guided development of its free enterprise.
Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of PAP, came from an established, moneyed Chinese Singaporean family. He attended the best of the English medium schools (Raffles Institution and Raffles College) and took his degree at Fitzwilliam College (Cambridge).”
Singapore is also mentioned in many other chapters, and it was fascinating to hear that it was the main antagonist against Castro within Non-Aligned Movement gatherings:
“Castro's main antagonist in New Delhi was the Singaporean deputy prime minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam. A founder of the People's Action Party with Singapore's strongman Lee Kuan Yew, Rajaratnam brought the island nation into NAM in 1970 and helped create the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1977.
In Delhi, Rajarat nam circulated a speech that offered a resolutely anti-Soviet, pro-U.S. position. "We are witnesses to our own slow-motion hi-jacking," wrote this former columnist of the Straits Times, "and if we do not wake up to this fact and do something to abort it then the ship of non-alignment and all those who sail in it may wake up one day to find that they have docked in a Soviet port.””
Anyway, a very excellent book. I learned a lot.
“In the ancien regime prior to 1789, the monarchy divided its counselors into the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (aristocracy), with a Third Estate being for the bourgeoisie. During the tumult of the French Revolution, the Third Estate fashioned itself as the National Assembly, and invited the totality of the population to be sovereign over it. In the same way, the Third World would speak its mind, find the ground for unity, and take possession of the dynamic of world affairs. This was the enlightened promise of the Third World.”
Considering the reputation Prashad has garnered for being in the most unserious of terms a so-called ‘tankie’, it may be surprising how critical in fact Prashad was of Third World socialist leaders, such as Ben Bella and the FLN (who Martin Luther King Jr. met with and spoke of positively) and of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Prashad on Ben Bella:
“Ben Bella centralized power. The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than the FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrates the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party." In November 1962, the regime cracked down on the Communist Party of Algeria, which was otherwise in line with the socialist agenda of the FLN, and it soon went after the Parti de la Revolution Socialiste, headed by the former FLN leader Mohammed Boudiaf; the leadership of both parties languished in jail.”
Prashad on Nyerere:
“When the government's "improvement" scheme faltered, it tried a more radical approach called "transformation." The regime encouraged peasants to move to experimental farms called "village settlements" where they worked cooperatively to increase, theoretically, the value of their efforts. On these farms, mechanical implements and fertilizers re placed manual labor (mainly the hand hoe). The people, in Nyerere's terms, had to learn to live in "proper villages." Of the millions who lived in rural Tanzania, only 3,500 families moved to set up these village settlements, which had cost the government upward of two million pounds. The famous French agronomist… Rene Dumont wrote a report in 1969 that came close to the government's own view of the creation of villages: the scheme had produced appalling results…”
I was surprised at how closely Prashad’s reading of this period of decolonization aligned with James Scott’s writing on Nyerere. Prashad writes in a more generalized conclusion:
“Tanzanian ujamaa is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations… Yet its modernist dream-to administer nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population-led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism.”
More recently reading some of Fanon’s writings as well as some of Ho Chi Minh’s, this perspective is actually quite consistent with the orientations of Third World revolutionary literature, which again is not wholly consistent with the way this discourse is painted in broad strokes by some segments of the Western left.
Prashad was also surprisingly very critical of the Soviet Union at some points, writing in the context of nuclearism: “…both Moscow and Washington made empty promises in return provides a measure of the limited value of moral pleas in a nuclear age.”
Prashad was particularly critical of Soviet accommodation to Nimeiri’s brutalities and intervention in Afghanistan:
“In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda… The Nimeiri regime arrested the party leadership, executed most of them (including Abdel al-Khaliq Mahjub, Joseph Garang, and Ahmed El Sheikh), and urged their followers to "destroy anyone who claims there is a Sudanese Communist Party. Destroy this alleged Party." When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leader ship, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the Scp's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China.”
“That the Marxists invited the Soviets into the country in 1979 showed their weakness and proved to their detractors that they were epigones of the USSR. As such, the CIA-WML-backed conservatives within Afghanistan and Pakistan had threatened the government, which was the reason they turned to the Soviet Union. All this was irrelevant as the Soviets entered an unwinnable situation, further alienated the people from their government, and gave legitimacy to the jihadists who now repackaged them selves as freedom fighters. It did not help the Marxist cause that the Soviet army engaged in a rash of brutal campaigns in the countryside that sent millions of people toward Iran and Pakistan as refugees.”
And I wasn’t actually aware how biting some of the commentary of Third World socialists were concerning the Soviet Union at the time, though this is consistent with Maoist interpretations of Soviet history today:
“Militants and national liberation organizations in this period flooded the meetings of the Third World and demanded armed action against imperialism. They challenged the Soviet delegates and brushed aside any consideration of the limitations of popular anti-imperialist sentiment in the countries to be liberated by the gun. Some of the militants adopted the critique of the two-camps theory to suggest that both the United States and the USSR were imperialists, and the only force able to stand up to them was armed national liberation.”
My favourite chapter however, was the one on Singapore, the postcolonial nation-state which became a beacon for the Third World bourgeoisie and capitalist development. Prashad’s was one of the best brief histories I’ve encountered of the island. Some excerpts:
“Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings (Hong Kong not only urbanized its landscape but also reclaimed land from the sea for its airport and residential areas). Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. These were almost purely entrepots.”
“World War II devastated the Pacific Rim. It left Singapore in shambles. The growth of the Communist movement in Malaysia and Singapore threatened the British hold on the region. A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957. In Singapore, the Communist movement developed mass support among the Chinese working class. Aware of the growing strength of the Left, an England-educated group led by Lee Kuan Yew created the People's Action Party (PAP). PAP made an alliance with the Communist trade unions to throw out the British. For the first elections of 1959, PAP developed a manifesto that reflected its eclectic ideology a mix of socialism, pragmatism, multiculturalism, and nationalism. In 1961 , as PA P gained confidence, it ejected its left wing (which re-formed as the Barisan Sosialis, the Socialist Front). In 1963, the PAP state engineered Operation Cold Store to "obliterate the BS's [Barisan Sosialis's] top level leadership." 17 PAP's lead economist and first finance minister of Singapore, Goh Keng Swee, warned the cabinet not to be swayed by either the lures of the free market or socialism. What Singapore needed, he argued, was the guided development of its free enterprise.
Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of PAP, came from an established, moneyed Chinese Singaporean family. He attended the best of the English medium schools (Raffles Institution and Raffles College) and took his degree at Fitzwilliam College (Cambridge).”
Singapore is also mentioned in many other chapters, and it was fascinating to hear that it was the main antagonist against Castro within Non-Aligned Movement gatherings:
“Castro's main antagonist in New Delhi was the Singaporean deputy prime minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam. A founder of the People's Action Party with Singapore's strongman Lee Kuan Yew, Rajaratnam brought the island nation into NAM in 1970 and helped create the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1977.
In Delhi, Rajarat nam circulated a speech that offered a resolutely anti-Soviet, pro-U.S. position. "We are witnesses to our own slow-motion hi-jacking," wrote this former columnist of the Straits Times, "and if we do not wake up to this fact and do something to abort it then the ship of non-alignment and all those who sail in it may wake up one day to find that they have docked in a Soviet port.””
Anyway, a very excellent book. I learned a lot.
June 23, 2024
The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad, 2007, 364 pages, ISBN 9781565847859, Dewey 909.09724, Library-of-Congress D883 P74 2008 College Library Rm. 1191
A readable history of the emergence and demise of Third World hopes of liberty and social justice. p. 77. The Third World continues to suffer under debt to northern banks, and repression by local elites. This book recounts the many conferences among Third World nations during the decades when they could entertain hope.
One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. The Shah returned until re-overthrown by a different kind of coup in 1979. p. 75.
In 1500, Europe's per-person income averaged 3 times that of Africa and Asia. In 1960, it was 10 times. Colonial rule plundered the darker nations. p. 66.
"We have seen the Argentines reduced to the status of a British colony by means of economic penetration," enabled by the Argentine oligarchy, the "sellers of their country." --Juan Bautista Justo, 1896. p. 28. Europe controlled 85% of Earth in 1914. p. 41. The U.S. would control after WWII.
GATT allowed the First World to have an advantage in trade, the IMF enabled First World banks to survive fiscal slumps in the debtor nations, and the World Bank engineered development that benefited monopoly corporations. p. 71.
Before and after new nations won independence from colonial rule, the same people were the elites in political and economic power. By the 1970s, the darker nations were suffering under austerity imposed by the IMF and World Bank. The Third World project is over. The rich won. pp. xvii-xviii, 14. Aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. p. 73.
The U.S. fought to destroy the political left everywhere. It succeeded. pp. 38-39. "Pax Americana is the internationalism of Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan, and the Pentagon." --journalist I.F. Stone. p. 39. U.S. "dumping" government-subsidized agricultural commodities, destroyed agriculture throughout the Third World. p. 39. Every pact with the U.S. brought insecurity to the Third World countries. --Jawaharlal Nehru, 1955. p. 40.
The world must be taken through struggle. --Umm Kulthum, 1956. p. 52.
"Conflict comes not from variety of skins, nor from variety of religion, but from variety of desires. --Indonesian president Sukarno, 1955." pp. 33-34.
Recommends:
The Seven Sisters, Anthony Sampson, on OPEC. p. xi.
Global Rift, L.S. Stavrianos, on the Third World, 1492 to 1980s. p. xi.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961. p. xv.
Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, 1955, pp. 3-6, 81.
Documenting Belgian King Leopold's barbarity in the Congo, p. 18:
Affairs of West Africa, E.D. Morel, 1902
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902,
King Leopold's Soliloquy, Mark Twain, 1904.
Renascent Africa, Ndami Azikiwe, 1937. p. 23.
The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, Raúl Prebisch, 1949. pp. 62-74. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Measures for the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries, UN 1951. p. 64. https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
The Political Economy of Growth, Paul Baran, 1957. p. 73.
A readable history of the emergence and demise of Third World hopes of liberty and social justice. p. 77. The Third World continues to suffer under debt to northern banks, and repression by local elites. This book recounts the many conferences among Third World nations during the decades when they could entertain hope.
One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. The Shah returned until re-overthrown by a different kind of coup in 1979. p. 75.
In 1500, Europe's per-person income averaged 3 times that of Africa and Asia. In 1960, it was 10 times. Colonial rule plundered the darker nations. p. 66.
"We have seen the Argentines reduced to the status of a British colony by means of economic penetration," enabled by the Argentine oligarchy, the "sellers of their country." --Juan Bautista Justo, 1896. p. 28. Europe controlled 85% of Earth in 1914. p. 41. The U.S. would control after WWII.
GATT allowed the First World to have an advantage in trade, the IMF enabled First World banks to survive fiscal slumps in the debtor nations, and the World Bank engineered development that benefited monopoly corporations. p. 71.
Before and after new nations won independence from colonial rule, the same people were the elites in political and economic power. By the 1970s, the darker nations were suffering under austerity imposed by the IMF and World Bank. The Third World project is over. The rich won. pp. xvii-xviii, 14. Aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. p. 73.
The U.S. fought to destroy the political left everywhere. It succeeded. pp. 38-39. "Pax Americana is the internationalism of Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan, and the Pentagon." --journalist I.F. Stone. p. 39. U.S. "dumping" government-subsidized agricultural commodities, destroyed agriculture throughout the Third World. p. 39. Every pact with the U.S. brought insecurity to the Third World countries. --Jawaharlal Nehru, 1955. p. 40.
We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for profit alone. We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy. --Fifth Pan-African Conference, 1945. p. 24.
The world must be taken through struggle. --Umm Kulthum, 1956. p. 52.
"Conflict comes not from variety of skins, nor from variety of religion, but from variety of desires. --Indonesian president Sukarno, 1955." pp. 33-34.
Recommends:
The Seven Sisters, Anthony Sampson, on OPEC. p. xi.
Global Rift, L.S. Stavrianos, on the Third World, 1492 to 1980s. p. xi.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961. p. xv.
Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, 1955, pp. 3-6, 81.
Documenting Belgian King Leopold's barbarity in the Congo, p. 18:
Affairs of West Africa, E.D. Morel, 1902
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902,
King Leopold's Soliloquy, Mark Twain, 1904.
Renascent Africa, Ndami Azikiwe, 1937. p. 23.
The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, Raúl Prebisch, 1949. pp. 62-74. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Measures for the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries, UN 1951. p. 64. https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
The Political Economy of Growth, Paul Baran, 1957. p. 73.
June 23, 2024
Great book which follows the third world movement as it developed from the anti colonial struggles and through the cold war. Paints a really vivid picture of the hope and promise which was never realised and gives a good summary of the main reasons for this as well as how the west did all it could to stop it coming to fruition.
November 5, 2024
This book is an interesting history of countries of the Global South (with Soekarno’s Indonesia, Nasser’s Egypt, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Neru’s India , Castro’s Cuba, Ben Bella’s Algeria,... to name a few) and how they contributed to the (yes!) democratization of the world by organizing their own conferences (and directly influencing institutions such as the United Nations). NAM (Non-alignment Movement) and UNCTAD are the most important conferences. They advocated the end of Western imperialism, the anchoring of national liberation movements against (neo-)colonialism, non-alignment with Western capitalism and Communism, the disarmament of nuclear programs, the pursuit of fairer world trade and economic integrity, the installation of gender equality with more political and social rights for women (guess what? Egypt played a major role in this), respecting cultural diversity within and between states (Iran especially denounced the cultural imperialism of the West penetrating communities through its machinery, Iran advocated educational systems where both modern and traditional forms of knowledge production should have a place).
In the second part “Pitfalls,” starting in the 1960s, after official decolonization and with the onset of the Cold War, we see that the national liberation movements in those countries installed a kind of state socialism: a socialism organized from above and not from below and which favored the national bourgeoisie (an elitist decoction of the earlier national liberation movements) while systematically disregarding the needs and necessities of the working class and peasants (this while mobilizing these groups en masse to settle the decolonization struggle). Although we must take into account every national context separately, we will see the following dynamics recurring in many countries: the organizing of national planning, the ever-growing demobilization and depoliticization of the working class and peasants, and the militarization of the state will eventually lead to many coups and the installation of dictatorial states (Bolivia, 1964), a difficult cooperation of a fanatical nationalism and communist parties (Indonesia, 1964), the advent of a mystical nationalism and the growth of militarism (China-India War 1961), and the damaging effects of oil production in the oil countries (Venezuela, 1963). Communist parties were 'pushed aside' because they disrupted national unity, was the credo of the nationalists supported by the military apparatus and big capital of industrial oligarchs. The anti-colonial left and liberal bloc was weakened in the countries of the global south and replaced by a “cruel cultural nationalism” where a romanticized and superior nationalism will be fabricated as the true and only ideology that has stopped Western imperialism, numerous voices from minority groups will be systematically crushed in the process. The militarization of the state was also accompanied by a pervasive focus on a so-called national security and borders that had to be guarded more and more (behold, the colonial structures that have returned). The militarization of the state will also be increasingly supported by the US (and to a lesser extent the USSR), both materially and immaterially with the idea that the military state is the catalyst for development and progress of a country (in fact, the funding of the military apparatus went with the elimination of dissident voices and social programs).
So we come to the last part of the book (assasinations): an interesting class analysis and in which quietly an old elite alliance came back to the fore: authoritarian leaders, militaries and (global) capitalist groups (read: industrial, agricultural and financial elites) gained full control over the access and supply of raw materials (and especially oil to supply the machinery in the West). Neoliberalism gained a foothold in the countries of the Global South. Meanwhile, we see an increasingly weakened USSR (and communism) due to an aggressive military (and economic) apparatus of the U.S. which will start to support more and more proxy wars of authoritarian leaders from the Global South in the fight against Communists and Socialists. During this period, the U.S. will break the previous financial architecture that allowed currencies to compete among themselves with gold, with the dollar as the measure of economic things. Thus the international trade economy will regain an imperial dimension. The NAM tried to tackle this form of inequality by proposing new, more egalitarian rules around economic sovereignty but these were thwarted partly because of the U.S.'s numerous bilateral relations with various countries of the Global South. Jamaica is taken as an example but applied to other countries as well. A lack of diversification of export commodities, failed reforms and unbalanced budgets driven by excessive militaristic spending and corruption was unable (anymore) to stimulate substantive growth and we see that foreign investment capital in the form of loans from Western institutions (IMF and World Bank) had to be increasingly resorted to. In return, we see complete control of national economic programs in which spending had to be cut. Cuts in public services (education, healthcare, public transportation,…), devaluations of currencies, discourage import-substitution, increases in taxes paid by the poorest, and measures to undermine labor rights and protections. Dependency is now complete. Too bad that this dependency theory is not explored further. Economic growth will become more and more central, not for the population, but for the political, financial and industrial elites. In the example of Saudi Arabia, Mecca will become a veritable mecca of wealth and religious fanaticism that will spread worldwide thanks in part to the US. A critical note is that he sees religion as an oppressive factor but that analysis is too brief because religion also has (or can have) a socializing role. Some countries like Egypt, Iran and Lebanon made a dialectical synthesis of Islamic texts at the time precisely to bring in class analysis. That they ultimately failed at that is a fact.
The book is highly recommended if you want to gain insights in the internatioanal political history of the countries of the Global South and how they have contributed (or not) to the world order. What is also highly appreciated is that the author has done his best by also bringing in prominent journalists, poets, writers and freedom fighters in his analysis. However, it is good to know that each country has had its own historical processes, the author has taken that into account but to get more depth on each country you will probably have to read more on that level.
In the second part “Pitfalls,” starting in the 1960s, after official decolonization and with the onset of the Cold War, we see that the national liberation movements in those countries installed a kind of state socialism: a socialism organized from above and not from below and which favored the national bourgeoisie (an elitist decoction of the earlier national liberation movements) while systematically disregarding the needs and necessities of the working class and peasants (this while mobilizing these groups en masse to settle the decolonization struggle). Although we must take into account every national context separately, we will see the following dynamics recurring in many countries: the organizing of national planning, the ever-growing demobilization and depoliticization of the working class and peasants, and the militarization of the state will eventually lead to many coups and the installation of dictatorial states (Bolivia, 1964), a difficult cooperation of a fanatical nationalism and communist parties (Indonesia, 1964), the advent of a mystical nationalism and the growth of militarism (China-India War 1961), and the damaging effects of oil production in the oil countries (Venezuela, 1963). Communist parties were 'pushed aside' because they disrupted national unity, was the credo of the nationalists supported by the military apparatus and big capital of industrial oligarchs. The anti-colonial left and liberal bloc was weakened in the countries of the global south and replaced by a “cruel cultural nationalism” where a romanticized and superior nationalism will be fabricated as the true and only ideology that has stopped Western imperialism, numerous voices from minority groups will be systematically crushed in the process. The militarization of the state was also accompanied by a pervasive focus on a so-called national security and borders that had to be guarded more and more (behold, the colonial structures that have returned). The militarization of the state will also be increasingly supported by the US (and to a lesser extent the USSR), both materially and immaterially with the idea that the military state is the catalyst for development and progress of a country (in fact, the funding of the military apparatus went with the elimination of dissident voices and social programs).
So we come to the last part of the book (assasinations): an interesting class analysis and in which quietly an old elite alliance came back to the fore: authoritarian leaders, militaries and (global) capitalist groups (read: industrial, agricultural and financial elites) gained full control over the access and supply of raw materials (and especially oil to supply the machinery in the West). Neoliberalism gained a foothold in the countries of the Global South. Meanwhile, we see an increasingly weakened USSR (and communism) due to an aggressive military (and economic) apparatus of the U.S. which will start to support more and more proxy wars of authoritarian leaders from the Global South in the fight against Communists and Socialists. During this period, the U.S. will break the previous financial architecture that allowed currencies to compete among themselves with gold, with the dollar as the measure of economic things. Thus the international trade economy will regain an imperial dimension. The NAM tried to tackle this form of inequality by proposing new, more egalitarian rules around economic sovereignty but these were thwarted partly because of the U.S.'s numerous bilateral relations with various countries of the Global South. Jamaica is taken as an example but applied to other countries as well. A lack of diversification of export commodities, failed reforms and unbalanced budgets driven by excessive militaristic spending and corruption was unable (anymore) to stimulate substantive growth and we see that foreign investment capital in the form of loans from Western institutions (IMF and World Bank) had to be increasingly resorted to. In return, we see complete control of national economic programs in which spending had to be cut. Cuts in public services (education, healthcare, public transportation,…), devaluations of currencies, discourage import-substitution, increases in taxes paid by the poorest, and measures to undermine labor rights and protections. Dependency is now complete. Too bad that this dependency theory is not explored further. Economic growth will become more and more central, not for the population, but for the political, financial and industrial elites. In the example of Saudi Arabia, Mecca will become a veritable mecca of wealth and religious fanaticism that will spread worldwide thanks in part to the US. A critical note is that he sees religion as an oppressive factor but that analysis is too brief because religion also has (or can have) a socializing role. Some countries like Egypt, Iran and Lebanon made a dialectical synthesis of Islamic texts at the time precisely to bring in class analysis. That they ultimately failed at that is a fact.
The book is highly recommended if you want to gain insights in the internatioanal political history of the countries of the Global South and how they have contributed (or not) to the world order. What is also highly appreciated is that the author has done his best by also bringing in prominent journalists, poets, writers and freedom fighters in his analysis. However, it is good to know that each country has had its own historical processes, the author has taken that into account but to get more depth on each country you will probably have to read more on that level.
December 30, 2021
This was way better than i expected. The book is pretty balanced in its recounting of the history of the world throw the perspective of the global south. Its gains, success and failures. No ideology here is presented as better than any one else. For example the failures and contradictions of the communist system and countries is presented as the same way as capitalistics.
The amount of detail and theoretization of different strains of anti-imperialism and counter strategies are well researched and written in a clear way. I enjoined reading this book
The only flaw that i perceived in this book was at the end describing the 1980-Afghan war as a fight between "progressive" communist dictatorship and US-backed Islamists. This description is not exactly wrong, but it lacks nuance
The amount of detail and theoretization of different strains of anti-imperialism and counter strategies are well researched and written in a clear way. I enjoined reading this book
The only flaw that i perceived in this book was at the end describing the 1980-Afghan war as a fight between "progressive" communist dictatorship and US-backed Islamists. This description is not exactly wrong, but it lacks nuance
December 11, 2014
I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it failed to live up to the subtitle. This is not to say that there weren't good parts in this book, only that Prashad failed to really give a People's History of the Third World. This is most probably because, as I later learned, Prashad isn't really on the side of the people when it comes to places like India where he does not support, unlike Arundhati Roy, the Naxal uprisings (which have a long history––yes a people's history) and instead endorses a very anti-people discourse about them. Sigh.
October 3, 2015
An excellent overview of the Third World as a conscious project, one that started giddily in the newly liberated states but deflated in the face of neoliberalism. Although the book has a broad outlook, it avoids cliche and jargon. The use of chapters that focus on subthemes of how the Third World created itself (e.g. cultural projects, development strategies) allows the book to move quickly while packing in detail and comparative analysis of national and regional situations. A great introduction to the history of decolonization and a dramatic narrative to boot.
March 12, 2009
This is an amazing book that tracks the history of the Third World Movement and its foundation of the Nonaligned Movement and how the efforts existed and the story of how it failed.
It's such a great read and it would be a great text book for International Relations degrees to get a much more Global South perspective than what you get in the mainstream academia.
Anyone in the field should read this book at some point!
It's such a great read and it would be a great text book for International Relations degrees to get a much more Global South perspective than what you get in the mainstream academia.
Anyone in the field should read this book at some point!
May 2, 2010
A history of the idea of the Third World, and how it played out in the 20th century, from a socialist perspective. Snapshots, examples and anecdotes, used to illustrate the trajectory of a dream - not a comprehensive history.
October 31, 2024
Prashad walks us through a history of the 20th century through a chronological study of liberatory movements across the global south. The book explores different pivotal moments by taking the reader on a tour of different cities in the Third World that played an important role in shaping struggles against colonialism. It is a fairly dense read and requires some baseline knowledge of politics, history, and prominent thinkers.
I would have given it 5 starts, but Prashad makes the pitiful decision to almost entirely exclude Palestine from his account, an extrication so exact that it could hardly have happened by accident. His longest mention (p. 167) reads: “…the Israeli state and its Arab neighbors went to war as the former came into existence.” This not only completely erases the Palestinian identity and characterizes in the most passive of terms the violence of the Nakba, but it contradicts the explicitly anticolonial thesis of the book.
Today, supporting Palestine carries a different kind of political capital than it did when this book was published in 2007, right after the Second Intifada. So today, when no self-respecting (leftist) intellectual could do otherwise, Prashad is— finally, overtly, unapologetically— pro-Palestine. That this shift in his public political commitments happens to coincide with the almost universal recognition of Palestine as a principled struggle for justice makes him at best an armchair revolutionary and at worst a coward.
I would have given it 5 starts, but Prashad makes the pitiful decision to almost entirely exclude Palestine from his account, an extrication so exact that it could hardly have happened by accident. His longest mention (p. 167) reads: “…the Israeli state and its Arab neighbors went to war as the former came into existence.” This not only completely erases the Palestinian identity and characterizes in the most passive of terms the violence of the Nakba, but it contradicts the explicitly anticolonial thesis of the book.
Today, supporting Palestine carries a different kind of political capital than it did when this book was published in 2007, right after the Second Intifada. So today, when no self-respecting (leftist) intellectual could do otherwise, Prashad is— finally, overtly, unapologetically— pro-Palestine. That this shift in his public political commitments happens to coincide with the almost universal recognition of Palestine as a principled struggle for justice makes him at best an armchair revolutionary and at worst a coward.
December 20, 2021
As happens with other People's Histories, this one tells of a promising moment and its end. The third world colonies became countries with united vision for a time, a vision of independence and ability to serve their own people. Their nationalism was an anticolonialism and that goal united folks with varied other goals. Nationalism deteriorated to issues of similar race and culture, pushing to a tradition that may or may not have ever existed, and this one one factor of weakening the venture.
Economic control was another factor. Though there was an attempt to gain internal control, factors of politics and trade kept the balance in favor of the first world. Neoliberal economics had rules stacked against the emerging nations. And as they lost their unity, they lost hope of having voice in global organizations.
There were nuances, differences in how various countries reacted to challenge and difficulty, and some deterioration was due to internal class factors as well, where profit as a goal outsrtipped community good.
The titles appear to be organized by place, in the first section the conference that happened at that place and the second the conference where there was a loss. However, each chapter also covers a topic, presumably the issue that dominated a conference. So each chapter is a survey of a history of an issue. Sometimes I wished I'd made a list of conference and date to refer back to, and might do so if I reread it.
Economic control was another factor. Though there was an attempt to gain internal control, factors of politics and trade kept the balance in favor of the first world. Neoliberal economics had rules stacked against the emerging nations. And as they lost their unity, they lost hope of having voice in global organizations.
There were nuances, differences in how various countries reacted to challenge and difficulty, and some deterioration was due to internal class factors as well, where profit as a goal outsrtipped community good.
The titles appear to be organized by place, in the first section the conference that happened at that place and the second the conference where there was a loss. However, each chapter also covers a topic, presumably the issue that dominated a conference. So each chapter is a survey of a history of an issue. Sometimes I wished I'd made a list of conference and date to refer back to, and might do so if I reread it.
February 22, 2023
This is a concise but comprehensive look at the development of the political concept of the “third world” from its inception as a non-aligned force between the U.S. and Soviet powers throughout the bulk of the 20th century to its ideological dissolution by the end of it. It traces a movement initially formed to work together to protect and help flourish those recovering from the socio-economic darkness of colonization as it struggled to weather various political problems both within (competing local powers) and without (U.S. and IMF interventions). We are left with a story that starts with the promotion of a “third world nationalism” tied to the collective economic upliftment of its nations in opposition to their historical colonizers, and ends with its devolution into forms of heightened cultural nationalism that lay blame instead on internal social factors such as race and religion as cover for the lavish enrichment of local economic and political elites who benefit from the neoliberal status quo upheld by the promotion of “globalization”.
April 17, 2023
A thought-provoking examination of the Third World's anti-colonial struggles in the C20th, from co-operating to try and make their agenda herd in the UN to organizing as a Non-Aligned Movement to distance thmselvs from both First and Second world interference. There are case studies of liberation movements which are often, to quote Franz Fanon, "better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance", sometimes usurped by military coups (frequently sposored by the US) or by elites who speak "freedom" but are closely aligned with the First world capitalists who of course will only give financial assistance (at extortionate interest rates) in return for corporate concessions that don't benefit the local people. In the end it's an instructive but depressing book. Highly recommended.
September 13, 2024
Dit is een goed boek dat enorm veel interessante en belangrijke informatie over de maar al te vaak genegeerde derde wereld. Prashad probeert een omvattend overzicht te geven van de tendenzen die je in de verschillende landen zich ziet afschilderen in de dekolonisatie- (en rekolonisatie-)periode. De schrijver beschrijft duidelijk de nederlaag van de (soms half)socialistische, seculiere, progressieve en internationale projecten onder Nasser, Nehru en Sukarno, en vervolgens de reactionaire opkomst van de globalisatie, besparingen en nationalisme en religiefundamentalisme. Prashad wijkt er niet voor terug om ook de grote problemen van deze progressieve projecten aan te tonen, zoals dat ze bv ondanks hun linkse oriëntatie toch nog steeds een zware repressie tegen communisten voerden en zeer vaak concessies aan de traditionele elites toelieten, maar door die in context van de enorme moeilijkheden te plaatsen (de kolonisatie, het wereldkapitalisme, oude elites gesteund door de oorlogsmachine van de NAVO en door de CIA, en gewoonweg ook een lage economische ontwikkeling) en ook vervolgens te vergelijken met wat er ná hen kwam. Een goed voorbeeld hiervan is Sukarno in Indonesië: ja, er waren problemen, ja, ondanks dat hij samenwerkte met de communisten voerde hij ook zware repressie tegen hen, ja, hij deed wel wat concessies aan de oude elites, maar er was tenminste een enorme vooruitgang in sociale rechten, rijkdom en gelijkheid in het land. Na de staatsgreep door Suharto werd dit zo goed als allemaal teruggedraaid en kwam er een ware genocide/politicide op de indonesische communisten, waarbij tot wel 2 miljoen slachtoffers vielen. Zowat het enige derde wereldland dat dit lot niet beschoren was, is Cuba, waar de vooruitgang, democratisering en strijd voor sociale rechtvaardigheid nog altijd blijft doorgaan.
Prashad bouwt zijn boek op in thematische hoofdstukken, zoals internationalisme, democratie, en in de laatste hoofdstukken reactionaire tradities en besparingen en restructureringen onder invloed van de IMF. Deze thema's worden onder de naam van een stad geplaatst, waarbij Prashad dan een gebeurtenis in die stad beschrijft om vervolgens te generaliseren naar de rest (of een groot deel) van de derde wereld. Dit zorgt ervoor dat het soms wat moeilijk te volgen is als je nog geen goede achtergrond hebt in de geschiedenis van die verschillende landen, omdat er geen gedetailleerde uitleg van de context per land is. Dit zou waarschijnlijk sowieso niet mogelijk zijn en het was zeker een goede keuze om het boek thematisch op te bouwen.
Prashad bouwt zijn boek op in thematische hoofdstukken, zoals internationalisme, democratie, en in de laatste hoofdstukken reactionaire tradities en besparingen en restructureringen onder invloed van de IMF. Deze thema's worden onder de naam van een stad geplaatst, waarbij Prashad dan een gebeurtenis in die stad beschrijft om vervolgens te generaliseren naar de rest (of een groot deel) van de derde wereld. Dit zorgt ervoor dat het soms wat moeilijk te volgen is als je nog geen goede achtergrond hebt in de geschiedenis van die verschillende landen, omdat er geen gedetailleerde uitleg van de context per land is. Dit zou waarschijnlijk sowieso niet mogelijk zijn en het was zeker een goede keuze om het boek thematisch op te bouwen.
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