Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascism: The regrouping of the global South in the neoliberal era

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 231-254

  Patel, Rajeev ^a   McMichael, Philip ^b  

^a Institute for Food and Development Policy Food First   (United States)

^b Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; DEVELOPING WORLD; NEOLIBERALISM; SOVEREIGNTY;

EID: 21444443604     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143659042000185426     Document Type: Article

References (99)

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3. We should say at the outset that our critique is directed at a particular vision of state nationalism and national statism that, while clear and vehement in its rejection of US- and Soviet-sponsored visions of development, was grounded in a variety of programmes of national development co-ordinated and managed by elites. Clearly, we do not seek to indict anti-colonial struggle - rather, we suggest that it continues to be necessary.
4. We note that, while Third Worldism came to be elite managed, its origins were in historic, spontaneous mass movements. The historiography of this phenomenon demands abstraction and an observation of continuities across time. These continuities are not, however, intended to provide any sort of claim about the ultimate permanence or inevitability of any phenomenon, but rather an orthogonal and reorientating framework through which to recast our current understanding of, in this case, Third Worldism. We note, in passing, that the state, though a central feature of our analysis, is not the only locus of power in international political economy. The power of corporations, the media (both domestic and international/imperial), local 'traditional structures of power', the family, prisons, schools and the military is also important.
5. See, for example, S George, A Fate Worse than Debt, New York: Grove Press, 1988
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8. See WL Adamson, 'Gramsci's interpretation of fascism', Journal of the History of Ideas, 41 (4), 1980, pp 615-633
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14. 'Liberal definitions of fascism adopt the approach of ticking off items from an already printed menu and seeing if they match. But many social-democratic and most Marxist definitions grew out of the actual experience ... deriving from the overall dynamics of capitalist societies. Fascism was a weapon of last resort, used by a ruling class faced simultaneously with an economic crisis and the threat of a revolutionary labour movement.' T Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, London: Verso, 2002.
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19. In their recent article 'An emerging synthesis for a new way of war', published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Air Force Colonels James Callard and Peter Faber describe what they call 'combination warfare' - a concept derived from a 1999 Chinese text by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. In the 21st century a single conflict may include not only traditional military activity but also financial warfare, trade warfare, resource warfare, legal warfare, and so on. The authors explain that it may eventually involve even ecological warfare (the manipulation of the heretofore 'natural' world, altering the climate). Because combination warfare draws on all spheres of human activity, it is the ultimate in total war. It 'seeks to overwhelm others by assaulting them in as many domains ... as possible', Callard and Faber write. 'It creates sustained, and possibly shifting, pressure that is hard to anticipate ... Combination warfare has already begun, though it has yet to be codified in military doctrine. The most important front, in a way, may be the media. Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe, the media constitute a burgeoning class of bright and ambitious people whose social and economic stature can have the effect of undermining political authority.'
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21. This is a linguistic and biopolitical tactic that is alive and well, for example in the Indian government's Ministry of Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes.
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27. Indeed, a great deal of Comte's energy was directed towards reducing the influence of Catholicism in French society, in order that French society eventually arrive at the end of history. Gronemeyer reminds us that 'every epoch pervaded with a belief in progress has needed...the tendency [to] conceive [of the present] as the penultimate stage in history, to fancy itself as a kind of positive final time in which only the last breakthrough remains before the harvest of history can be gathered into humanity's granary.' M Gronemeyer, 'Helping', in W Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power, London: Zed Books, 1990, pp 53-69. This is no less true of post-revolutionary France as of millennial Europe and North America, as Francis Fukuyama's current popularity attests.
28. Cowan & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, p 40.
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42. Ibid
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57. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp 132, 133, 138, 146.
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59. For the effects of this in Africa, see G Arrighi, 'The African crisis: world-systemic and regional aspects', New Left Review, 15, 2002, pp 5-36.
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65. Kolko, Confronting the Third World, pp 134, 148, 184.
66. George, A Fate Worse than Debt, p 6.
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68. A Hoogvelt, The Third World in Global Development, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp 87-95.
69. Quoted in DM Roodman, Still Waiting for the Jubilee. Pragmatic Solutions for the Third World, Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper 155, 2001, p 30.
70. Quoted in K Danaher & M Yunus (eds), 50 Years is Enough. The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994, p 28.
71. Cf B Cohen, The Geography of Money, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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78. W Bello, Addicted to Capital: The Ten-year High and Present-day Withdrawal Trauma of Southeast Asia's Economies. Focus on the Global South, Bangkok: Chulalonkorn University, 1998.
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80. Hardt & Negri, Empire, p 74.
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83. World Social Forum, 2001. There are, even within movements, critics of Porto Alegre. See, for instance, Peter Waterman's Second Reflections on the Third World Social Forum, available at http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=342.
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89. R Patel, 'Rights to food: A critical perspective', Feminist Economics, forthcoming
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91. www.ns.rds.org.hn/via/. Via Campesina is a movement we find particularly interesting because of the centrality of autonomy and sovereignty in its history. The history of Latin American peasant movements had, until the advent of structural adjustment, been overwhelmingly tied to urban political parties. Corporatist structures of political patronage had been used by urban political elites to pacify and, at election time, mobilise peasant constituencies to vote for their political patrons. Peasantries were, however, at the tail of a political system wagged by urban dogs. Structural adjustment changed this dramatically. With a reduction in the surpluses controlled by the state came a concomitant reduction in the capital available to pacify rural communities. This staunching of patronage led to a radicalisation and separation of peasant constituencies from their erstwhile urban masters. Politically, this was given expression through 'autonomous peasant organisation', where the term 'autonomous' denoted autonomy from urban and stateembroiled political parties (and non-governmental organisations). Via Campesina emerged through a political process in Central America of precisely these autonomous peasant organisations. Personal communication with Peter Rosset, Food First.
92. www.mstbrazil.org/EconomicModel.html (accessed 23 July 2001).
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