Return to the Third World

...Conservative regimes were repeatedly "certified" to be democratic and respectful of human rights as against more democratic and less repressive radical regimes that the United States happened to oppose...

...Continued rule is maintained by aid from the CIA, with oppression tolerated by the United Nations and the rest of the world so long as it is garnished with nationalist rhetoric...

...This line of reasoning assumes a far more autarkic world than the one that exists...

...That in turn would be a major help to stagnant industries of the North...

...SUMMER • 1991 • 363 Return to the Third World What that proves is that innocence and ignorance can coexist...

...But many of the regimes abusing human rights had been set up with the active participation of U.S...

...agencies...

...Former Dutch and British Guiana and the Fiji Islands are examples, as is the tragedy of Asians in East Africa...

...On the other hand, according to most academic Third Worldists, the people in the Third World do not have a rosy outlook either, because their countries are doomed to underdevelopment by the immutable fact that the world market always imposes terms of trade that are unequal and exploitative...

...There are several reasons for this tolerance of national oppression...

...The vast sums in the international drug traffic encourage large-scale corruption in Third World countries and serve as another barrier to social advance and democratization...

...Support for national independence movements in the Third World assumed (1) that the nation in question did exist in the consciousness of sufficient majorities so that it could win a plebiscite and (2) that the new unified and freed nations would practice democracy and tolerance toward its minorities...

...A romantic Rousseauian faith in the essential goodness of human nature was extended to some of these nations...

...Devastating damage is done to the concept of socialism when it is handled like a medal issued for good intentions...

...Soviet weapons, incidentally, were not gifts...

...In any case, it was argued, Western societies had no right to criticize the newcomers to nation building, especially if one remembered the huge costs Europeans had imposed on their countries and the world during their own development...

...q 368 • DISSENT International Women's Day labor march and rally, New York City...

...Under President Carter the United States was helpful in fighting human rights abuses in many countries friendly to the United States...

...These universalist values are products of the long evolution of European democratic thought, which owes a major debt to non-European civilizations, philosophies, and religions...

...Democratic leftists must reject the racist and neo-Darwinian notion that democracy is something reserved for the developed societies...

...The huge emancipatory potential of mass organization from below has been repeatedly illustrated in the Third World...

...The "bourgeois democracy" of competing parties, organizations, independent unions, and press was presented as inferior...

...Decolonization, Nationalism, and the Abandonment of Subalterns The problems posed by Third World nationalism have been exacerbated by the abdication of minimal moral, financial, and political responsibility by the former colonial powers...

...For that matter, they often harshly exploit their own majority people, some even engaging in near genocidal attacks...

...Independence often became a convenient way of extricating the colonial power from any social or financial responsibility, or from the obligation to accept immigration to the metropolitan country...

...Indigenous colonial populations have been left to the not-so-tender mercies of whichever ethnic group emerged as dominant in the former colony and which often imposed discriminatory measures...

...I write imperial, not imperialist, rivalry...

...Third Worldist Ideologies Third Worldist doctrines were mostly developed by radical academics in the advanced countries who had little or no active connection with any socialist or labor movements in their own countries...

...The vitality of organizations developed during the struggle for national liberation against colonialism once made me optimistic about the prospects of the postrevolutionary regimes in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and Algeria...

...They were pessimistic about the prospects for significant egalitarian reforms in their own or any other advanced industrial country...

...More somberly, all Soviet support, military and economic, will be reduced in the years to come...

...The notion that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend was popular through much of the Third World, but this naive Machiavellianism proved to be inadequate for a complicated and nasty world in which two superpowers could threaten peace and the "enemy of my enemy" represented a new repressive system...

...Aid increased after the death of Stalin, under Khrushchev, and, above all, under Brezhnev, who expanded military and economic ties throughout the Third World...

...Kurds are repressed in Iraq with the use of modern poison gases...

...But it was difficult to extend support of plebiscitary nationalism to artificially created former colonies where mutually antagonistic peoples were unwillingly packaged together...

...The masses were expected to participate...

...Armenians, even the Algerians and Indians...

...Its most benign recent ancestor was the Italian independence movement of the nineteenth century, the Risorgimento of Giuseppe Mazzini, with its assumption that democratic nationalism was the foundation of a larger cosmopolitan democratic community...

...They should therefore be treated as responsible political actors and not patronized by high-minded northerners...

...This is in contrast with the countries that gained their independence without prolonged struggles based on mass mobilization over protracted periods of time...

...The traditional definition of imperialism as primarily an economic category is difficult to apply to the Soviet Union or, for that matter, even to the United States today...

...Therefore they also believe that life in their own countries is miserable for the vast majority not because of fate or the will of God but because of decisions made by human beings...

...364 • DISSENT Return to the Third World Both the United States and USSR had insistently subordinated the needs of the developing countries in their imperial rivalry for decades...

...Politocracies" would probably best describe Soviet-type societies before their disintegration— a shorthand term that emphasizes that these societies were not in any way worker-run states...

...Military strategic considerations (even mistaken ones), maintaining allies, even simply complicating life for the rival power often explain much more...

...In a way, this description made these states more attractive to the political elites of the Third World...

...These are goals in a universal struggle for democracy that are desirable in themselves...

...The workers of the advanced capitalist countries, whether organized or not, were seen as totally co-opted by their economic and social system, merely interested in material gains and hence not as radical as these revolutionaries of the chair...

...It isn't hard to understand why the United States is not taken all that seriously when it raises issues of human rights...

...It is grotesque that the left in general, and the Third World countries in particular, accept the boundaries inherited from the old colonial empires as the framework within which to build modern nations moving toward economic development...

...All the sins and errors of the various U.S...

...The immediate rights of peasants and workers must not be sacrificed to some abstract notion of national progress as defined by self-selected vanguards...

...Such alliances became more common after the Second World War when the language and symbols of radical anticolonialism took on a pseudo-Marxist cast, in the same way that they had been pseudoliberal in the nineteenth century...

...What is essential is a massive systematic effort over time, as distinct from ad hoc aid...

...That is what radical Catholicism has emphasized in building self-help networks among the poor in Latin America...

...In the post–Second World War period the Soviets aided a number of anticolonial revolutions...

...Decolonized former British and Dutch Guianas are miserable dictatorships where the descendants of Africans oppress descendants of immigrants from India—and both ignore the few remaining indigenous people...

...SUMMER • 1991 • 367 Return to the Third World The Need for Genuine Solidarity The issue of aid to the underdeveloped countries is complex, because many of the forms that such aid took have done more harm than good...

...I, for one, have no trouble accepting the charge that the values I defend are universalist in origin and character...

...In Defense of Universalism The heterogeneous nature of a number of the former colonies and the difficulty of applying modern nationalist ideas to the states that would emerge after independence was fairly clear even before decolonization...

...Two of the worst examples were Uganda under Amin and former Spanish Equatorial Africa, which was ruled by a mad despot who managed to kill or drive out more than a quarter of the population...

...But major responsibility clearly rests with the military rulers and the intelligentsia...

...Many of today's leftist intellectuals are petrified at so much as a whisper that the "socialism" being built in these microstates might not have any chance of success...

...At the same time, fear of proto-Stalinist repression creates allies for the United States in the Third World...

...These democratic states were, of course, also capitalist...

...Death squads and massacres by the military and landowner cliques in Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, or the Philippines did not generate indignation from the United States...

...There have been grotesque examples of what regimes were considered "progressive" by the Soviet policymakers...

...Democratic Holland and Belgium were brutal and racist in their colonies...

...Benazir Bhutto went to Oxford and was president of the Oxford Union...

...The mix will vary from country to country...

...policy on debts to domestic and international banks has effectively imposed a moratorium on any measures dealing with poverty, inequality, and injustice...

...Why was there such an unwillingness to face the fact that many of these states rapidly became dictatorial or military regimes oppressing subject national groups more ferociously than the colonial nations had...

...There is a role for Third World socialists, a difficult one, which is to engage in relentless struggle for the expansion of democracy, embracing the mobilization of the broadest layers of the population...

...The Soviet Union, about which Third World radicals knew little, seemed attractive to them, in good part because of their experiences with Western colonial powers, about which they knew a great deal...

...Sometimes a sheer act of defiance against a corrupt and incompetent system is necessary to remind oneself of one's humanity...

...Burning widows, caste discrimination, chattel slavery, female circumcision, death penalties for blasphemers, child marriage, torture of political opponents are thus all customs that belong to other cultures as "valid" as our own...

...These were not noble savages who had to learn for themselves by trial and error...

...I have always found it strange that educated radicals in the Third World, including women, who believe in individual liberties, including sexual emancipation, will often argue that equality for women is a "culture-specific" form of Western cultural imperialism...

...In the early eighties the Soviets helped the Angolans, Ethiopians, and Nicaraguans, as well as some other radical Third World regimes and movements...

...The democratic French republic waged brutal wars in Africa, Vietnam, and Algeria before and after the Second World War...

...The Spanish anarchists tried to teach the revolutionary movements in authoritarian societies to be suspicious of bureaucrats, above all "your own" national bureaucrats and the state...

...Solidarity with democrats and socialists in the Third World must begin with the assumption that concepts like democracy, freedom to organize, individual rights and liberties, and equality for women are not culture-specific "Western" ideas to be doled out in the Third World in small doses when elites decide it is appropriate...

...Statistics about such matters tell us a great deal about the way Gross National Income is distributed—a question of great importance in poor countries with huge income differences...

...Social democratic movements and parties of the North need a project to mobilize the idealism of the younger and better-educated publics if they are to survive...

...Most allies of the United States, however, are motivated by fear that their property and privileges would be destroyed, whatever else a radical change would achieve...

...Much of communist development was misdirected, creating industrial white elephants (obsolete steel plants, and so on...

...Much can be learned from the theology of liberation movements in Latin America and, for that matter, from the women's and other community organizations of the African liberation movements before they took power...

...It is natural to assume that what was constructed by human agency can also be altered by human activity...

...Above all, they were not to develop or maintain independent institutions and organizations...

...Leaders of many of the Third World countries are as well educated as their opposite numbers in the advanced North...

...Typically those who make up such organizations engage in efforts to spread literacy and establish educational and cultural institutions independent of the state...

...clients in the Latin American military, Thailand, the Afghan "freedom fighters," Turkey, and other governments and groups friendly to the United States...

...The support, critical or otherwise, for the Soviet and East European "socialist" countries within the Third World had been historically based on two claims made on their behalf: that they were progressive and anticapitalist, having abolished private property in the means of production and distribution, and that they were anti-imperialist because they challenged the world system dominated by the United States...

...And one reason these theories were so appealing was that they addressed a not-too-deeply-buried elitism of the Western-educated intellectuals...

...Those values include human rights, rights for women, political democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom...

...These concepts, in turn, are based on the assumption that certain norms are universal, which also is a "Eurocentric," culture-bound notion...

...The more difficult problem concerns former microcolonies that were created artificially and that never had a genuine national or economic basis...

...This does not preclude some planning and fiscal controls...

...While administration after administration declares verbal war against drug traffic, the United States has a major responsibility for the growth of this plague...

...But that is an idea whose origins lie in the past...

...The emancipation of women cannot be postponed to a vague future...

...That is why it was morally and politically good that French democrats and intellectuals opposed torture in Algeria, and defended the rights of the Algerians and Vietnamese to independence...

...These societies desperately need change, and many of the Third World activists and leaders are educated people who know that life can be better, that in some countries it is indeed better...

...Their character remains essentially national populist, with the oppressed nation—sometimes defined in religocultural terms—becoming the substitute for class in the socialist and Marxist movements...

...Military aid went to Islamic fundamentalist "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, rather than to the Southwest African Peoples Organization or the African National Congress...

...Genuine political and economic options in the Third World are not to be found in the pabulum of a civics classroom...

...Two dynamics were set up: the training of Third World revolutionary leaders in the European Communist parties or Moscow and the development of networks of support for colonial revolutionary struggle in Europe and North America...

...The Democratic Left in the Third World If anything is clear by now, it is that authoritarian and autarkic developmental short cuts do more harm than good...

...they were going to be educated and "politically developed" but they most certainly were not supposed to gain political power...

...The Soviet Revolution, isolated by a hostile world, found allies not in the revolutionary working class of advanced industrial countries, as its leaders expected, but in nationalist movements directed against imperialism...

...Many countries are also of a size that precludes an independent developmental strategy...

...allies in the Third World may sometimes be more democratic and law abiding, but they are never in favor of fundamental economic redistribution and social equality...

...In any case, Europe and the United 362 • DISSENT Return to the Third World States violate their own norms...

...Polite pressures for free elections in Paraguay and Chile contrasted markedly with the insistent demand for free elections in Nicaragua...

...This view assumed that with economic development these nations would all move toward political democracy and individual freedom of the "Western" type...

...So, unfortunately, has the capacity for revolutionary elites to take over these movements and societies...

...Thus, a central issue in the Third World is the role of free will, or the degree to which political alternatives can be affected by conscious human agency...

...The uncontrolled demand of the American domestic market for drugs fuels the entire malignant industry...

...The extent to which these states are victims of impersonal forces of the world economy, as distinct from the economic and political errors of their postindependence rulers, is an open question...

...Presented as models of development for the Third World, the communist regimes lagged behind comparable industrializing societies...

...growing hatred for the United States, seen as the prop of neocolonialism, made the Soviets appear a lesser evil...

...Islamic populism, Arab "Baath socialism," and, for that matter, some branches of left Zionism are examples...

...The Asians, for example, were economically and socially quite adaptable to the limited opportunities in heterogeneous colonial societies...

...But the Sandinistas, who, warts and all, were less repressive than any of their neighbors except Costa Rica, were repeatedly denounced for violations of human rights...

...This is the case with a number of small island colonies in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific, where the original inhabitants were wiped out or displaced with new settlers who were often semifree or slaves...

...That is why proposals for democratic social or economic transformation sponsored by the United States in Third World societies, proposals that reemerge under liberal DemoSUMMER • 1991 • 365 Return to the Third World cratic administrations, were and are illusory, even when well meant...

...Add to these illegal acts of war, such as the mining of harbors and arming contra insurgents against a government with which the United States was legally at peace...

...Democratic British governments colonized much of Africa and the Middle East...

...This has speeded up the tendency for the newly independent countries to spend increasing shares of their resources on arms and diverted precious resources...

...The U.S...

...In the three Guianas, a cursory comparison of political and social SUMMER • 1991 • 361 Return to the Third World conditions leads to startling conclusions...

...The Soviet Union did not have to be all that attractive...

...All this happened recently, in the past decade...

...Much of the trade and refining of drugs originates with U.S...

...Hence the appeal of the authoritarian Soviet-type regimes...

...Their police forces had been trained and financed by the United States...

...It does so by insisting on austerity in countries already miserably poor—a dogmatic insistence on fiscal austerity and a market-type economy advanced with the same rigidity that primitive Marxists had in favor of collectivization of land and central planning...

...In the twenties practical alliances were forged between the Soviet Union and the radical nationalist governments of Kemal Ataturk's Turkey and Sun Yat-sen's China...

...Burma, Zambia, Sudan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zaire, Bangladesh, Bolivia, and Peru are examples...

...But the same leftists who back black nationalism in the United States or South Africa, or Cuban nationalism, will often refuse to support Kurdish, Israeli, or Berber nationalism...

...Where arms were concerned, the Soviets were friends of most radical and revolutionary regimes and groups in the Third World...

...They are terrified lest they be attacked for arrogant Eurocentrism and a lack of sympathy for the victims of colonialism...

...A second view is more relativistic, based on the argument that oppression and democracy are culture-bound concepts...

...the United States, alone among nations, used nuclear bombs against civilians...

...the generals who toppled her government went to Sandhurst...

...They are also indispensable tools for developing decent societies capable of growth...

...Despite inexperience, adventurism, and mistakes, the Communist International managed to develop more cadres outside of Europe in twenty-odd years than the larger parties of the Socialist International during their entire existence...

...The major colonial powers were usually parliamentary democracies at home, even as they were repressing subject peoples...

...This makes democracy very problematic for those subjects of a national state who are not members of the dominant nation...

...Another reason given for failing to object to human rights violations in the Third World is based on the proposition that "they" are on the right side of a world conflict against imperialism...

...The "solution" would be a stern tutorship by an enlightened elite, somewhat like the Third World graduate students taught by these professors...

...The Communist International developed ties throughout Latin America, Asia, and, with less success, Africa...

...Participation in mass organizations under the control of the ruling party was highly encouraged under radical Third World regimes, and was pointed to as evidence of support for the regime...

...that is, they would have to go it alone...

...An example of the devastation caused by the United States within Third World societies is its role in the international drug trade...

...We were thus offered the roads to socialism of a Grenada, a Sao Tome and a Benin, or, for that matter, a Nicaragua...

...Some, like Burma and Zambia, had excellent prospects after decolonization...

...The most popular one was based on the proposition that these were "underdeveloped" nations that had gotten that way primarily because of Western colonialism...

...So the argument I mentioned in the previous 360 • DISSENT Return to the Third World paragraph has a certain appeal, but it can be applied quite as much to mildly reformist regimes such as those in Costa Rica and Sri Lanka as to full-blown one-party dictatorships...

...It has also strengthened the military in fragile societies with only rudimentary civic institutions...

...In both of the independent colonies living and educational standards have gone down for decades...

...Because going it alone would impose great privation on most of these societies, it is unlikely that this could occur with any vestiges of democracy...

...Because it was the enemy of the old colonial powers, the Soviet Union was seen as "not all that bad" by many Third World radicals...

...This is a profound challenge, which will be repeatedly taken on by new generations...

...It is that element of existential despair, the choice of personal risk and commitment, that links revolutionaries from a more or less Marxist background to Catholic activists who embrace a theology of liberation...

...The absence of competitive democratic political traditions, as well as caricatures of West European parliamentarianism, all too often revealed another truth: parties representing the old elites alternated in power—with unprivileged and poor rural groups unrepresented— and this gave parliamentary democracy a bad name...

...It owes a special debt to Islamic civilization, which preserved, and often enriched, Greek, Persian, Judaic, and Hellenistic ideas during the six centuries when Europe was a backwater...

...This status quo, as even the Pope has repeatedly stated, is fundamentally unjust...

...The leaders of national independence movements in the newly independent Third World countries had access to the same knowledge of alternatives as their opposite numbers in the metropolitan countries...

...treatment of Guatemala, which has waged a murderous war against its Indian majority, comes to mind...

...That nationalism was based on popular will and a repressed national identity...

...they were sold, on generous long-range terms perhaps, but sold...

...administrations, however, are less important than its central role in maintaining the present world economic system...

...Since these students were unlikely to be capable of carrying out these tasks, their real-life role was to become ideologues for the repressive modernizing elites 366 • DISSENT Return to the Third World in the Third World...

...The invented traditions they laid claim to were imposed with modern weapons and enforced with modern methods of torture and surveillance...

...Not only were communist societies subjected to decades of one-party tyranny, but even the cynical justification for that dictatorship—that it provided a short cut to rapid economic modernization—also proved to be quite wrong...

...Sometimes they were really fascist or corporate-statist in the years between the two World Wars...

...The fact that the United States has often lied about its role in the world did not mean that it was always wrong in describing its rival...

...So it is not strange that the enemy of the capitalist system would seem attractive to the victims of that system...

...It is the height of arrogance—so runs this argument—to demand that those societies abide by European norms...

...No project is more appropriate than a worldwide war on hunger, exploitation, and political oppression in order to create the first genuine human world community...

...That is bad news for the Third World, because it increases the tendency on the part of the United States and Europe to neglect the needs of the South...

...The pity of it is that personal commitment and anger are not a substitute for rational choices and good judgment...

...For despite all their egalitarian rhetoric, these regimes were themselves ruled by small coteries of political activists or young army officers...

...That is nothing more than a presumption of Western superiority—in contemporary jargon, of "Eurocentric" concepts of right and wrong...

...Vast areas of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have been turned into an ecological horror show...

...That means fighting to build democratic and participatory unions and popular organizations...

...For that matter, decentralized market-oriented agriculture, combined with individually owned and cooperative small trade and appropriate technologies, are more appropriate to deal with economic scarcity than state ownership and control...

...Hatred for the United States and its local allies builds support for local revolutionary movements and parties, and it is a justified hatred...

...Their solution is to break away from the world market and try a path of independent development, which can most charitably be described as autarkic...

...This made international communism a potential ally, even a mentor, for a generation of future revolutionaries in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East...

...The greatest source of instability in the Third World is caused not by communist or radical subversion but by the pressure of the world banking system on their economies...

...The Role of the United States For decades the United States had propped up reactionary regimes with only the tiniest fig leaf of democratic fabric...

...Decline in Soviet aid was capped in 1990 with an implicit partnership with the United States in creating a "New World Order," one in which elephants and fleas retain their respective roles...

...But in reality there never was a demographic, economic, or historical basis for creating separate Guyanese states from the leavings of colonial empires...

...Some choices did exist, even if limited ones...

...Why, then, was Third World nationalism so often regarded as "progressive" by the left in the industrialized countries...

...Meanwhile, there remains the question of relative costs of development and progress...

...The United States, preening itself as a paragon of democracy, smashed the Native Americans, practiced legal racism up to the 1960s, robbed Mexico of half its territory, and reduced much of Central America to a colony in all but name...

...Islamic fundamentalism now uses modern cassette tapes to spread its message, and when it can, it builds modern armies...

...Meanwhile, the symbiotic relationship of the two superpowers in much of the world repeatedly twisted various Third World struggles into extensions of the cold war...

...In those cases the old colonial power simply abandoned "minority" peoples to their fate...

...Socialists and democrats should propose an equivalent of the Marshall Plan...

...Unfortunately, there are too many cases where religious and nationalist conflicts, as well as mistakes in developmental policies, have sharply reduced the living standards and economic prospects of Third World countries...

...To object to violations of human rights in Third World countries is to impose alien values on different societies and cultures...

...Some were ruled by radical military regimes and engaged in "socialist" experiments at great cost to their peoples...

...The iconoclastic grass-roots activists, without a centralized vanguard party, spread a genuine sense of empowerment and selfconfidence and pushed the previously passive rural groups into the front lines of political struggle...

...Therefore, they could not be judged by standards that Europe and the United States adopted only in the very recent past, and often themselves violated, particularly where nonEuropeans were concerned...

...My optimism turned out to have been premature, if not mistaken...

...All conflate "ethnos" and "demos," the nation and the citizenry...

...The few nominal communist regimes that survive in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Cuba are sui generis, the exceptions that reveal the depth of the crisis of communism as a world system—the very system once seen as the "grave digger" of capitalism...

...In countries with weak civil societies one should support a weak state...

...It's also true that in some instances it was necessary to have a revolution or civil war to remove foreign occupiers in order to produce the kinds of modest results that can also be found in the mildly reformist regimes...

...Throughout the nineteenth century, high-minded European democrats supported the national liberation of the Irish, Poles, and Italians, and, much less often, the South Slays, Greeks...

...The communists were the first to break with the historic focus on Europe by the international workers' movement...

...The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not Necessarily a Good Friend Organized support for anti-imperialist nationalism emerged after the Russian revolution of 1917...

...Social Change, Free Will and Necessity The main argument that could reasonably be made in behalf of radical Third World regimes is that, in the best cases, they have made greater advances in literacy, child mortality, and life expectancy than other regimes in countries with comparable or even superior economic indicators...

...The problem with this view is that it ignores the fact that knowledge of political, economic, and institutional alternatives is not limited by the level of a society's economic development...

...This is not simply a question of the nature of the world economy and the exploitative relations between metropolitan countries and most colonies...

...One of the results of Gorbachev's glasnost is that past misjudgments about African despotic regimes are now acknowledged by Soviet experts...

...They had often gone to the same universities and military academies as the leaders of the metropolitan countries...

...Both Mussolini and Per& stressed the concept of the have-not exploited nation whose interests were more urgent than those of contending classes in ways very similar to contemporary Arab or African "socialism...

...And that was a point of convergence between the communist and Third World societies...

...These countries are inhabited by flesh-and-blood men and women who react to the demeaning backwardness and oppression of their countries...

...They also tell us much about the social priorities of a government...

...they were men, and more rarely women, with access to the most advanced thought about politics and economics...

...Much of the aid had been linked to the cold war, and the political price dragged the recipient countries into superpower confrontations...

...Michael Kaufman/imPAcr VISUALS 370 • DISSENT...

...Since the time of Marx and Engels there had always been supposed to exist more or less "progressive" nationalisms...

...To be effective that aid must produce egalitarian growth leading to selfsustained balanced and ecologically sound development...

...That system remains the major problem of the would-be reformers and democratizers, not the policies of one or another administration in Washington...

...The rural anarchist traditions—in Spain, Italy, and Latin American countries—are more in tune with the realities of underdeveloped societies than the centralized models imported from the English Fabians or the Soviets...

...The anarchists and rural socialists in the poorest regions of Spain before the 1934 Civil War, when Spain had many of the problems of a Third World country, provide interesting lessons...

...The horrors a Bokhassa and an Idi Amin imposed on their African populations were not products of a return to a "real" past...

...This included women, who are all too often ignored by the Third World liberation movements and represent a major resource for democratic change from below...

...French Guiana, which has formally become a part of France and thus the European Community, is light years ahead of the other two...

...There were also a great many differences, not the least of which were (1) the immense poverty of the Third World "socialist" countries and (2) their limited efficiency, even at repression...

...where civil societies are strong, a strong legal state can expand egalitarian social services to the entire population and can be kept under democratic control...

...Poor brilliant Leon Trotsky dared raise the question of whether socialism could be built in one country, even one as large and resourcerich as the Soviet Union...