The Third World project of national and social liberation burst into the world scene in the 1950s, led by the giants of the anti-colonial revolutions of Asia and Africa.  From the period 1955 to 1982, it proposed an alternative to the modern world-system, which had been constructed on a foundation of European colonial domination of vast regions of the Americas, Asia and Africa.  The Third World proposal for a New International Economic Order was adopted by the General Assembly in 1974 (see “The Third World Project, 1948-79” 7/20/2016 in the category Third World). 

     The Third World proposal was cast aside by the global powers, which proceeded to impose neoliberal policies on the world from 1980 to 2001.  But the Third World project was renewed, on a foundation of mass movements in opposition to neoliberalism, provoked by its overwhelmingly negative consequences for the peoples of the world. The global movement in opposition to neoliberal globalization has been particularly advanced in Latin America, where progressive and socialist movements have taken control of a number of governments (see various posts from July 22 to September 26, 2016 in the category Third World).  

     The renewal of the Third World project can be seen in the evolution in recent years of the leadership of the Group of 77.  Formed in 1964 by seventy-seven Third World nations, G-77 is a bloc within the United Nations, established for the purpose of promoting mutually beneficial trade among the member nations and with the goal of ameliorating the effects of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.  In now consists of 133 nations, including China, which joined in 1991.  It is now called the Group of 77 plus China (see “The nations of the Global South speak” 6/20/2014; 2014 Declaration of G-77).  

     Ecuador and Rafael Correa assumed the presidency of the Group of 77 plus China on January 13, 2017.  Correa was brought to the presidency of Ecuador by a popular social movement in opposition to the neoliberal project that emerged in the late 1990s.  Correa won the presidential elections of 2006, with the support of labor, peasant and indigenous organizations, soundly defeating a pro-neoliberal candidate supported by the national bourgeoisie and the United States.  Upon assuming the presidency on January 15, 2007, Correa immediately convoked elections for delegates to a constitutional assembly, in accordance with a campaign promise.  Nation Alliance, an alternative political party formed by Correa, won 80 of the 130 seats in the constitutional assembly, which developed a new constitution that was approved in popular referendum.  Correa was elected president under the new constitution in 2009 and was reelected in 2013.  As President, Correa has renegotiated the Ecuadorian national debt, making payments only on debts that were legitimately contracted.  This strategy has enabled the government to develop a budget in which social expenditures exceed debt payments.  The government of Correa also has nationalized underutilized properties and has attracted foreign investment in industries strategic for Ecuadoran economic development.  It did not renew a previous agreement with the United States for the use of an Ecuadorian Air Force Base by the U.S. military. Correa has declared that Ecuador is constructing “socialism for the twenty-first century” (see “Correa and the revolution in Ecuador” 9/19/2016).

     The emergence of Correa is part of a general social phenomenon in Latin America since 1994, in which leaders with exceptional capacities have been lifted up by the people and have led the people in changing the political reality of Latin America, stimulating the renewal of the Third World project of national and social liberation in Asia and Africa.  Other charismatic leaders include Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Luis Inácio Lula and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner of Argentina.  The emergence of charismatic leaders is a general characteristic of revolutionary processes (see Charismatic Leaders).

     Upon receiving the mandate of the presidency of G-77, Correa addressed the representatives of the 133 member nations in New York.  He began by noting that Ecuador will continue the work of its predecessors in the presidency of G-77.  “Ecuador defends the principles that have guided the Group of 77 since 1964: unity, complementarity, cooperation and solidarity of the Global South.”  The Group of 77, he observed, seeks social and economic equality in the world, which requires the eradication of poverty and exclusion and the attainment of the right of the peoples to live with sovereignty and dignity and in peace.  

     Correa maintained that poverty in the world is “a consequence of unjust and excluding systems.” And he proclaimed that “the overcoming of poverty of the greatest moral imperative of the planet.”

     Correa maintained that the global South seeks not only economic development but also a new notion of integral development, which involves the development of the whole person and of all persons.  In Ecuador, the concept of integral development is based on the heritage of the ancestral peoples and on the idea expressed in the quichua language as sumak kawsay, which means “living well.”

     He rejected the neoliberal project of the global powers.  “Neoliberal globalization does not seek to create planetary societies, but only planetary markets; it does not seek to create citizens of the world, but only global consumers.”  “The idea that free commerce always benefits everyone is simply fallacious, an extreme ingenuousness closer to religion than to science, and it cannot withstand a profound historical, empirical or theoretical analysis.”

     Correa observed that the savage capitalism of the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution caused workers to die from excessive working hours.  This historic exploitation, he maintains, was overcome by means of collection action through nation-states, which placed limits to these abuses.  But today, such collective action does not exist for the confrontation of the present process of globalization.  

      The remedy to this situation is unified political action by the peoples of the world, as a foundation for the taking of political power by the people in a number of nations.  “What is required is the capture of political power, in order to transform the relations of power in service of the great majority and to change our apparent states, representing only the interests of the few, into truly popular states, representing the interests of the great majority.”

     Correa called for “the transformation of the system of the United Nations, such that the General Assembly makes the great political decisions of humanity, and not the veto power of the small group of countries in the Security Council.”  He demanded an end to the privatization of knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge so that it is available for all of humanity.  And he advocated the creation of an International Court of Environmental Justice, with the authority to sanction attacks against the rights of nature and to establish obligations with respect to an ecological debt and to the consumption of natural resources.

     He called for a new international financial infrastructure.  From the point of view of the countries of the South, he maintained, it does not make sense to attempt to reform the Bretton Woods financial institutions, established by the global powers in 1944.  “We ought to construct our own international financial architectures, in order that our savings remain in the region and do not go to finance the richest countries, such as when our central banks, frequently autonomous and without democratic control, send hundreds of billions of our reserves to other countries, not only financing, but also transferring wealth to the most developed countries, while we continue depending on foreign loans and foreign investment” that do not change existing economic structures.

      He maintained that the dominant Western model of democracy has been imposed; it is a model that does not serve the needs of the people.  Real democracy requires equality of opportunity, but these imposed Western democracies grant sovereignty to capital and not to the people.  It would be best to call them “market-media” democracies, because they measure democracy by the size of the market, and because the media of communication are a more important component of the political process than the political parties and political authorities.  “We must ask ourselves if a society can be truly free when the societal communication, particularly information, comes from private profit-seeking businesses that are the property of the great corporations or a half dozen families, many of them without the most elementary ethics.”

      He criticized a confused understanding of human rights.  Many believe that only the state attacks human rights.  But “in fact, any power can attack human rights.”  For example, profit-seeking pharmaceutical transnationals condemn to death the poor that are not able to buy medicine that could save their lives; and the media of communication attack the reputation, the intimacy and the prestige of persons.

      Correa described fiscal paradises as “the extreme expression of a capitalism without face, without responsibility, without transparency, and without country.”  He maintained that “fiscal paradises are the worst enemies of our states,” because they exist for the purpose of evading taxes or hiding the origin of illicit wealth.  The poor nations and the economies in development are the most victimized by fiscal paradises.  In Latin America alone, 32 million persons could be lifted from poverty, if the resources hidden in fiscal paradises were taxed in accordance with the appropriate laws.  “The world needs more knowledge paradises and less fiscal paradises.”  

     We are here, Correa declared, “to demand democracy and to stress an alternative possible world, the urgent world that we require, the world of peace and justice, that is constructed through respect for the sovereignty of the nations and the prosperity of the peoples.”

     Correa concludes with a reference to the advanced stage of the popular movements in Latin America, more advanced today that in the period 1948 to 1979.  “Who governs in a society?  The elites or the great majority?  Capital or human beings?  The market or the society? In many countries of Latin America, with socialism of the twenty-first century and of living well, our peoples already govern.  And although their remains much to do, never before has so much been done.”

     Rafael Correa speaks on behalf of a Third World in renewed social movement, which envisions a sustainable future for humanity on the basis of fundamental universal principles: the rights of the nations of the world to sovereignty and integral development; the eradication of poverty; the rejection of the neoliberal prioritizing of markets over people as scientifically unsound and morally unjustifiable; the right of the peoples to collectively act in order to take power from the corporate elite; the democratization of the United Nations; the creation of a more just international financial architecture; and the need for the development of a form of democracy that responds to the needs of the people.  Many Third World governments, with the cooperation of China and Russia, are seeking to develop, in theory and practice, an alternative world-system based on these concepts and principles. They are doing so precisely at the historic moment in which the global powers are demonstrating their moral and intellectual incapacity to rescue the world-system from its sustained structural crisis, thereby revealing the unsustainability of the neocolonial world-system.  

     As these dynamics unfold, cynicism abounds in the North, and even popular social movements of the North are characterized by limited understandings and confusions.  But in the South, hope is alive, and the peoples, led by leaders with exceptional gifts, are developing that unity of thought and action required for the establishment of a possible and necessary more just, democratic and sustainable world-system. The activists and intellectuals of the North would do well to listen to the voices of the Third World, and to permit themselves to be inspired and to learn.

     The ascent to power of Donald Trump and his cabinet of the extreme Right is the culmination of a turn to the Right that began in the late 1970s.  It never should have happened.  From 1965 to 1972, popular sectors formed a revolutionary movement that sought to expand and deepen the meaning of democracy, declared as the foundation of the American Republic in 1776.  That popular revolution, which reached its zenith in 1968, should have provided the intellectual and moral foundation for a progressive turn by the U.S. republic.  But instead, the popular revolution collapsed, victimized by its limitations and errors.  Since 1980, the political culture has been dominated by political parties and think tanks intimately tied to international corporations, imposing a free-market mythology and wars of aggression on the world, thus leaving the political process susceptible to the exploitation of the fears and limited understanding of the people through a discourse that proclaims “America First” and scapegoats the most vulnerable.

     The revolution of 1968 had two principal components, the African-American movement and the student anti-war movement.  These two spawned a revitalization of the women’s movement and the emergence of the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, and the ecology movement.

      The African-American movement emerged in response to the denial of fundamental rights to U.S. citizens of African descent, including legally sanctioned and mandated discrimination and segregation the U.S. South.  The movement had originated in the urban North during World War I, and it expanded to the urban South in the 1950s, on the basis of the expansion and increasing strength of black churches, colleges and protest institutions in the urban South in the post-World War II era.  From the outset, the movement was committed to the protection of the citizenship rights of all, regardless of race, and including social and economic as well as political and civil rights; and it called for foreign policies that respected the sovereign equality of all nations, including the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.  In the period 1955 to 1965, the movement gave strategic emphasis to civil and political rights in the South.  Beginning in 1966, the movement turned to demands for black control of black institutions, in response to the failure of white allies of the period 1955-65 to support further reforms following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and it renewed its call for an anti-imperialist foreign policy, in reaction to the Vietnam War (see “The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/23/2015).    

     The student/anti-war movement emerged as a student movement in the early 1960s, and it evolved to become an anti-war movement in the late 1960s, as the U.S. war against Vietnam escalated.  The movement emerged as a consequence of the contradiction between, on the one hand, U.S. pretensions to democracy, and on the other hand, and the denial of rights of black citizens and the unleashing of the colonialist war in Indochina.  This contradiction was increasingly evident to white middle class students, who had internalized the democratic narrative of the nation, as a result the upward mobility experienced by their families, many of which were part of the great European migrations to the United States of the period 1865 to 1925 (see “The New Left and its errors” 5/13/2016). 

     The popular movement of the period 1966 to 1972 had all the elements necessary for a successful popular and democratic revolution.  The key ideas were formulated: the need for the people to take power from the elite; the obligation of a democratic society to protect the political, civil, social and economic rights of all citizens; and the obligation of the nation to respect the sovereignty and equality of all nations.  But such key ideas were expressed as part of a confused mix, which included critical strategic errors that limited the possibilities for the movement to gain greater support among the people.  The charismatic leader who might have been capable of putting together the key pieces and unifying the movement toward the necessary road, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968.  The black power movement was silenced by systematic oppression in the period 1970 to 1972, and the student/anti-war movement dissipated as the war wound down and the compulsory military draft for young men was eliminated.

       Following the national and global turn to the right in 1980, Rev. Jesse Jackson attempted to resurrect Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign with a Rainbow Coalition, an alliance of the various popular sectors.  Jackson understood that it was a question of the people taking power and directing the state to the protection of social and economic rights of all and to a foreign policy of cooperation with Third World nations seeking true independence.  But a charismatic leader understands all that needs to be done, and Jackson did not grasp that the Rainbow Coalition must be developed as a mass organization and as an alternative political party.

     Looking back on the fall of the Revolution of 1968, it is evident that white society did not learn from the insights of the African-American movement.  White society did not discern the colonial foundation to U.S. economic development or the limited scope of the U.S. understanding of democracy, so fundamental to the black nationalist critique.  Accordingly, white society has not embraced an anti-imperialist foreign policy or the concept of the protection of the social and economic rights of all.

     As a result of the impact of the popular revolution of 1968, white society abandoned legally sanctioned racial discrimination, and white discourse rejected blatant forms of racism.  But white society continued to be characterized by racism in a subtler form.  The failure of white society to encounter the African-American movement and learn from its insights was itself a manifestation of a subtle form of racism.  There were other signs as well, such as the tendency to attribute the lower educational and occupational attainment of blacks to a distinctive lower class black culture, thus nullifying a societal obligation to act decisively to protect social and economic rights (see “On racism and affirmative action” 6/26/2015).  

      But it was an error for the post-1965 African-American movement to focus on the new and subtler forms of racism, even though true. The focus should have been on the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement: the forming of a popular coalition for the protection of the social and economic rights of all and for an anti-imperialist foreign policy.  If it were not for historic errors, the black and student movements would be vibrant today, supporting an alternative political party that is committed to the political education of the people and to policies of North-South cooperation and the protection of social and economic rights, offering an alternative to the “America First” mentality that looks for scapegoats.

      Today, the Left frames issues in ways that are not intelligently formulated to create a broad-based popular coalition.  It calls for the protection of the rights of immigrants without analyzing the causes of uncontrolled international migration and without offering proposals for its control.  It condemns police violence against blacks, without acknowledging that police have killed more unarmed whites than blacks, and with apparent unawareness that the issue here is the militarization of the police in local communities in general (see Kuzmarov 2012).  It has failed to formulate these issues in ways that are sensitive to the perception of them in the various popular sectors, with proposals for: cooperation with other nations in the development of policies designed to ensure legal, controlled and safe international migration; the promotion of economic and social development in peripheral nations, so that the problem of international migration (and also factory relocation) is addressed at its source; and programs of local community control of police and greater integration of police and criminal justice institutions in the community.  The Left has framed these issues in a narrow way that promotes divisions among the people, which is the worst thing that a progressive movement can do, because divisions among the people invariably serves the interests of the elite.

      In response to the national turn to the Right in 1980s, the Left has failed to formulate an historical, global and comprehensive analysis of the neocolonial world-system, explaining the sources of its contradictions from the vantage point of the popular sectors in both core and peripheral zones of the world-economy.  The Left has moved to identity politics, rather than a concept of a popular coalition in the tradition of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Rainbow Coalition.  Its critique is superficial; it condemns racism, the denial immigrants’ rights, and neoliberal policies, without explaining to the people that these phenomena are symptoms of a neocolonial world-system in prolonged, structural crisis.  The Left offers no real remedies to the people (“The need for a popular coalition” 6/27/2015).

      The election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly right-wing policies that are likely to follow (dressed in populist rhetoric), will perhaps be a wake-up call to the Left, leading to a critical self-reflection on its perspective, concepts, methods and strategies.  What is needed today is an alternative political party of the Left that can offer an effective challenge to the Right, through a manifesto with such innovative explanatory power that it galvanizes the people to social movement and calls upon them to form a coalition that unites the various sectors of the people, a great popular coalition that seeks to take power in the name of the people, so that the rights of all persons and nations can be protected, and humanity can be saved.

Reference
 
Kuzmarov, Jeremy.  2012.  Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century.  University of Massachusetts Press.
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     Since 1980, in response to the structural crisis of the world-system, the two major political parties in the United States have abandoned the working and middle classes and have defended the interests of international corporations.  The Left, however, has failed to offer to the people a comprehensive political, intellectual and moral alternative. These dynamics have given rise to the ascent to political power of Donald Trump and his cabinet of the extreme Right, with a scapegoating rhetoric and a discourse that suggests an economic and militarist nationalism.  The failure of the Left to provide an alternative to the Trump phenomenon is deeply rooted in the history of the United States.

     The American Revolution was consolidated as a bourgeois revolution, in spite of ample popular participation and local control of the revolution by the popular sectors during the two years immediately prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  The reestablishment of bourgeois control of the American Revolution, symbolized by the Constitution of 1787, meant that political and economic structures of the nation would serve elite interests, and ideological justifications of the political-economic system would emerge (see “The US popular movement of 1775-77” 11/1/13; “American counterrevolution, 1777-87” 11/4/13; “Balance of power” 11/5/13).  

     As the new nation experienced a spectacular ascent in the world-economy for the next two centuries (see “Slavery, development, and US ascent” 8/30/2013; “Cotton” 9/9 2013; “The military-industrial complex” 8/29/2013), the dominant narrative portrayed it as a land of opportunity, obscuring the fact that its economic development was based on: a lucrative trading relation with slaveholders in the Caribbean and the U.S. South; a territorial expansion through conquest of indigenous nations and Mexico; and imperialist penetration of the Latin American republics.  The narrative effectively denied the role of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism in providing economic opportunities for European settlers and migrants and their descendants in North America.  Popular movements formed by workers, farmers, African Americans, women, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans challenged the dominant narrative, but they were successful only in forcing political and ideological adjustments, and not in constructing an alternative narrative that would comprehensively understand the global structural sources of the U.S. ascent and provide a more progressive and democratic alternative.

      During the last 150 years, cultural structures have emerged that have facilitated the continued obscurity of the bourgeois and colonial character of the U.S republic.  The bureaucratization of the university fragmented knowledge into the disciplines of philosophy, history, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, preventing the emergence of a universal philosophical historical social science capable of grasping the essential character of the nation.  At the same time, the development of a consumer society facilitated individualism, materialism, and ahistorical and a-theoretical popular consciousness.  

      The U.S. Left has been victimized by these dynamics, rendering it incapable of responding to the crisis of the world-system in a form that could lead the people in the development of a more democratic nation with a commitment to international solidarity.  Seven errors of the Left have contributed to its incapacity to offer to the people a scientifically-informed and politically-effective alternative.

     (1) Subtle Eurocentrism.  For the most party the U.S. Left has not studied revolutions of the Third World and the speeches and writings of Third World charismatic leaders and intellectuals.  It thus does not understand the historic development of the fundamental structures of domination of the neocolonial world-system, so clearly understood from the vantage point of the colonized and neocolonized.  This blindness leaves the Left confused about the world, unable to discern meaning in human history (as Marx did); or to grasp the necessary strategies for political action (as did Lenin).  Its commentaries are ahistorical, a-theoretical and superficial, not having explanatory power. 

     (2)  Protesting and protesting.  The Left is oriented to protesting, to speaking truth to power, rather than seeking to take power, so that control of the state could be used to transform society in accordance with the needs and interests of the people.  It shouts slogans, persuading no one; and it disdains explaining to the people the necessity and the possibility of taking power.

     The ahistorical, a-theoretical, and vocal Left likely will be visible in abundance in the United States with the taking of power by Trump and his team.  The Trump team will behave badly, and the Left will shout disapproval.  But the Left is not able to offer an historically informed and practical alternative that makes sense to the people.

     (3)  Tendencies to post-modernism and post-structuralism.  The Left discerns that knowledge is rooted in social position.  But it incorrectly moves from this insight to a rejection of grand narratives and of any hope for universal knowledge.  It disdains any effort to find meaning in human history and in the history of each nation.

     As a result, the Left does not discern the possibility of formulating a universal understanding on the foundation of personal encounter with persons of different horizons.  Seeing all understanding as partial and interested, the Left is not aware that there are persons driven by a desire to understand and not by defense of particular interests, and that from such commitment to understanding, universal knowledge emerges.  It does not see that, in other lands, the formulation of universal knowledge and universal values has been the foundation of movements and revolutions dedicated to the emancipation of the people.  

      Similarly, the Left views nations and states as social fictions, not recognizing that the nation, although a social construction, fosters real emotions among the people; nor seeing that the state is a principal actor in the world-system.  Disdaining all efforts to define the nation-state as a major actor in a world-historical narrative, the Left forfeits any possibility of leading the people toward the taking of political power in order that it can act in defense of the people, transforming states that promote and defend bourgeois and corporate interests.
  
     (4) Romanticizing the people.  The Left does not know the strengths and limitations of the people.  Although the people possess a dignity that enables them to persist in daily personal struggles to attain their human needs, the people cannot figure out for themselves what needs to be done to protect their rights and to provide for their needs. They must be led to an understanding of the necessary road by a vanguard, which comes from the people and which possesses the personal, intellectual and moral qualities that enable it to discern what must be done.  The people are capable of recognizing the correct road when it is formulated by their leaders, and they are capable heroic sacrifice in defense of the necessary road.

     (5) Subtle anti-intellectualism.  The vanguard is formed by charismatic leaders with exceptional capacities to understand, whose consciousness was formed by reading the writings of intellectuals that were driven by a desire to understand and to defend social justice.  But the Left does not appreciate the necessary role of intellectual work in the formation of the leaders of the people.

     (6) Localism.  Having lost faith in the capacity of national projects to attain the emancipation of the people, the Left celebrates local projects, such as cooperatives and alternative communities.  These are good things to do, but by themselves, they will not be enough.

     (7)  Cynicism.  The Left tends to believe that revolutionary leaders betray the revolution and the people when the people have brought them to power.   The Left comes to this conclusion quickly, without analyzing the complex situations that triumphant revolutions confront, including the opposition of national and international elites as well as global structural patterns that reinforce the dependency of the nation and the poverty of the people.

    In periods prior to the popular revolutions of the last 200 years, similar kinds of confusions abounded.  But charismatic leaders emerged, drawing upon the insights of intellectuals, to lead the people toward that unity of thought and action necessary for social transformation.  In the present situation of generalized confusion among the people, intellectuals of the United States ought to engage in sustained encounter with the revolutions of the Third World, seeking to establish the intellectual conditions that would make possible the emergence of charismatic leaders in the nation.

     On the basis of such encounter, the Left would be able arrive to understand that it must form an alternative political party, capable of explaining to the people the necessary steps.  The alternative political party would develop in the context of representative democracy, but it would be unlike other parties, because it would be oriented to the education and organization of the people, generating pamphlets and organizing people’s schools.  The leaders of the new party would model an alternative and more genuine form of political leadership.  The alternative political party would be preparing itself for the taking of power, a process that likely would be pushed forward by the inability of the power elite to respond to the contradictions of the neocolonial world-system.

      For more reflection on an alternative political party, see “Popular democratic socialist revolution” 1/15/2016 and “A socialist revolution in the USA” 2/1/2016 in the category Revolution as well as the concluding paragraph of “The infantile disorder of the Left” 12/19/2016.