Geopolitics

Theory and history. Iranian and Russian elites divided. Patrushev vs Surkov. 2003.

A specter is haunting both the right and the left. The specter of third worldism.

On x.com, you have Nick Land and White House bluetick accounts furiously attacking ‘third worldist groypers’ for not supporting the war on Iran. One need only search ‘third worldist’ in the Twitter profiles of the likes of ‘Captive Dreamer’ to see how much this problem concerns them.

And, as always, you have socialists and left-liberals worrying that ‘campists are abandoning class struggle for brutal third world regimes’. Staying true to the ideals of Michael Harrington, the founder of the DSA who also enthusiastically supported Israel and the war on Vietnam.

What is third worldism? I think it can be defined quite simply. It posits that the principal global contradiction is between poor and rich countries. The relative prosperity of the rich countries — all their population, no matter the class — depends on the poverty of the rest of the world. I went into the economics of this in more detail here.

Third worldism is real. Not necessarily as an ideology or political movement, though that is also emerging under the force of events. But in the sense that this division determines global events. It is resistance to this exploitation that animates world history. It is to maintain or challenge this inequality that all wars of import are launched, from Iran to Palestine to Ukraine.

Ideologies divided

The ideologies of the 20th century were narrowly national. Not in the sense of nationalism, but in the idea that all societies were fundamentally the same.

In other words, they ignored the division between rich and poor countries, or at least did not prioritize it. But under the pressure of reality, the specter of third worldism emerged in all the century’s great ideological vectors. A phenomenon truer today than ever before.

For the communists, all countries were riven by internal class contradictions. For the liberals, all countries could achieve the living standards of the developed west, as long as they implemented enlightened market reforms. For the fascists, all countries were torn apart by a struggle between tradition and empty modernity.

But throughout the 20th century, this national framework became gradually supplanted by international contradictions. This was a particularly painful realization for the Marxists. Lenin hoped for help from the revolutionary workers of Germany, but none came. Instead of global working class revolution, revolutionary communist struggles erupted in colonially oppressed nations. Asia and Africa became the key battlegrounds between the capitalist and communist worlds.

The 1920 Baku Congress of the People’s of the East showed the Soviet leadership realized where the wind was blowing

Shortly before his untimely 1971 death in a plane crash while fleeing to the Soviet Union, the Chinese communist Lin Biao delivered the most direct manifesto of communist third worldism. Ironically, however, it was the ‘revisionist’ Soviet Union derided by Maoist China that aided armed third world movements in practice. The ‘radical’ Chinese, meanwhile, in their essentially nationalistic struggle against Moscow, ended up supporting proxies for US, and even South African imperialist power.

Regardless, as time went on, it became clear that the real dividing line was less between capitalism and communism, but between the west and the rest. The Soviet Union collapsed less because it abandoned communist ideology — Gorbachev presented perestroika as the true embodiment of Leninist ideals — but because it hoped to be given an equal place at the table in the ‘civilized west’. The Chinese government, lacking such illusions, did not collapse.

Both liberalism and fascism were also divided between third worldist and first worldist tendencies over the course of the 20th century.

Though it might seem unlikely at the present, there were in fact quite powerful liberal tendencies that could be called third worldist. John Maynard Keynes was one, whose hope to stabilize capitalism through domestic economic redistribution also played out on the world level. This was true already in the early 1920s, with his criticism of the economic inequality of the Versailles settlement. In the 1940s, Keynes played a signal role in the negotiations creating the Bretton Woods institutions.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, today excoriated by any self-respecting third worldists as prime examples of liberal imperialism, were originally meant to prevent trade surplus countries from permanently immiserating and deindustrializing the rest of the world. At least, Keynes had such a redistributive vision with his ‘International Clearing House’.

But it was the Americans that had the final say in how these institutions would look. They certainly didn’t like Keynes’ idea of limiting trade surpluses. After all, the ailing British economy was suffering from a trade deficit, while Washington had the opposite problem — it desperately needed markets to absorb its trade surplus, otherwise a return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s loomed.

And so the Bretton Woods system cared little for poor trade deficit countries. And they certainly didn’t prevent the rich countries from enjoying trade surpluses.

The IMF and the WB were stillborn, as far as the idealists who conceived them were concerned. Liberalism, whose guiding principle is that the free market is ultimately beneficial for all involved, can never truly be a framework for third worldism. Because it is through free trade that the third world is impoverished.

Attempts to ameliorate the losses incurred by free trade necessitate a serious break with the principles of capitalism. When the Keynesian ideal of a just world market was once again attempted in the 1970s by the G77 in its New International Economic Order (NIEO), this led to a reaction even more powerful than that of the early 1950s.

The 1974 UN declaration of the NIEO Western-led violently destroyed, through military intervention, debt, and sanctions, all those trying to regulate the world market. The Bretton Woods institutions now began actively disciplining poor countries, requiring them to keep their markets open to the exports of the rich.

We’ve covered liberal and communist third worldism. Now for the most interesting case.

The right has explored third worldism a number of times. Indeed, probably because of the right-wing emphasis on the nation, it is quite possible to say that the right pioneered the idea of international economic imperialism as a force more important than domestic inequality.

This was already true with the mercantilists of the 16th century, who would be viciously ridiculed by liberal economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to Eli Heckscher. The liberals were virulently opposed to the mercantilist idea that trade always led to the benefit of one at the expense of the other. Instead, they argued, trade resulted in mutual benefits for all, simply of comparatively different levels.

Marx and Engels also opposed such protectionist politics. After all, they believed that free trade would naturally lead to the dissolution of international inequalities, with globalized capitalism ushering the way for a global communist revolution.

Right-wing proto-third worldism became much more prominent in post-WW1 Europe. Karl Haushofer called for Germany to ally with the non-west, including the Soviet Union, against the diabolical anglo-saxons. Mussolini spoke of proletarian and bourgeois nations. Long after 1945, De Benoit and his New Right movement proclaimed the need for an anti-american alliance between Europe and the post-colonial world.

As conceptually and historically interesting these phenomena may have been, I think there is a fundamental contradiction between right-wing ideology and the idea of third worldism. Carl Schmitt, surely the most profound fascist philosopher, illustrates this quite well.

Schmitt was Germany’s great critic of liberalism in the 20s, the jurist of the Third Reich in the 30s. Fresh from the experience of the first world war and the British blockade-caused famine in Germany, Schmitt argued in works like the Concept of the Political that liberal pacifism actually led to wars of unprecedented scale, total ‘wars against war’.

There are certain parallels between this and the way that the ‘liberal internationalist’ western countries waged total war on Iraq from 1990 onwards. 500,000 children had to die of hunger from sanctions, Madeleine Albright memorably said, because Iraq rejected the rules-based international order.

Schmitt, in classic German (and Russian) fashion, insisted on the geopolitical division of the world — land powers and sea powers. Where ‘sea dogs’ like Britain and America were fundamentally animated by the spirit of piracy and plunder, land powers like Germany fought to create another type of civilization.

But what sort of civilization exactly? Even before the third Reich, German geopoliticians enjoyed criticizing Anglo-Saxon colonial savagery. But the second reich wasn’t much different to the British in their treatment of colonial subjects in Namibia, either. And Hitler’s proud warmongering wasn’t exactly kinder than liberal wars against war.

Regardless, the third Reich spent the 1930s courting (quite successfully) anti-British allies in the colonized Arab world. In eastern Europe, economists and politicians like Romania’s Mihail Manoilescu excoriated the ‘unequal exchange’ that free trade with western Europe involved.

Manoilescu became a prominent fascist, advising Franco and Salazar extensively in the 30s, funding the ultra-fascist Iron Guard paramilitary in Romania, and becoming Romania’s Hitler-aligned foreign minister in 1940.

But how did the Third Reich treat enthusiastic allies like Romania? In perfectly consistent fascist style — the power of the strong over the weak. Out of quite clear reasons of realpolitik, Hitler gave much of Romania to Hungary, causing Manoilescu to faint at the 1940 negotiations settling the issue.

Romania was heartily exploited for its natural resources. Now, it was no longer so problematic for poor countries to export raw materials to rich countries in return for industrial goods. As long as the rich country had the right red-black flag, of course.

One could say that this was merely because of wartime exigencies. But why would fascism, an ideology fetishizing ‘natural hierarchies’ and the right of the strong over the weak, make an exception for international trade?

But what does Romania matter. The Third Reich, supposedly the antipode to America’s ‘plutocratic sea empire’, explicitly took the model of settler-colonial California in its crusade against the Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa

Whatever the questionable benefits for tiny ‘allies’ like Romania, the Third Reich gave itself the goal of forming a colonial empire of privileged German colonists over masses of enslaved (former) Soviet men and women. Hitler quite explicitly wanted a German version of the United States of America.

(Those who read Russian (or can translate) should read Egor Yakovlev’s recent book A War of Extermination. The Third Reich and the Genocide of the Soviet People.)

This contradiction, incidentally, is quite visible in Schmitt’s own work. In his articles in 1940, he advocated for an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union. If one takes his theory of geopolitics seriously, this would have been quite consistent. After all, two land powers, a united Eurasia unstoppable against the depradations of the anglo sea dogs.

But Hitler certainly didn’t think that way. Operation Barbarossa threw a rather large spanner into Schmitt’s conceptual apparatus. Schmitt’s friends later recalled his disappointment:

Sombart, in his memoirs, recounts the following conversation with Schmitt after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union: “Ever and again he [Carl Schmitt] posed the question to himself (and me): What is this for a war in which we are engaged? This war which is to me so curiously distant and indifferent! Did it have any sense at all after the defeat of Poland and France? The revision of the Versailles Diktat, that was Hitler’s historical mission. Those were conventional land wars. But now? What should one think of this? In the East we are conducting an ideological war of annihilation, in the West a worldwide sea war. We simply aren’t up to this.’

In fact, even after the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 22 1941, Schmitt continued to assert the validity of the German-Soviet agreements of 1939. He republished a 1939 book praising the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in July 28, 1941, retaining the passage on the correctness of ‘the German-Russian friendship and border treaty of September 28, 1939’.

By maintaining that these agreements were still valid law, Schmitt was calling Barbarossa a violation of the ‘law of nations’. Indeed, Schmitt scholars argue that Schmitt saw the invasion of the Soviet Union as both an international crime a grand geopolitical mistake, unlike the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and France.

Ultimately, however, Hitler seems somewhat more consistent than Schmitt. The former glorified power of the strong over the weak, the idea of making Germany enslave all those around it. One can reasonably argue that launching a war against both the USSR and the anglo-saxons doomed Germany to failure. But besides such practical questions, Hitler had a fairly straightforward ideology — Germany Above All.

The same can’t be said for Schmitt. As entertaining as it may be to construct transhistorical theories on the nefarious nature of the anglo-saxons, there was no need to pretend that Germany, in its second or third Reich, was building some sort of radically different empire to that of its island-dwelling Atlantic cousins.

Glorifying imperialism for its own sake is one thing, and one can come up with various reasons to do so. But it is illogical to simultaneously condemn liberal-marxist egalitarianism, and argue that the German land-empire was somehow superior to the alternatives.

If one argues that egalitarianism is irrelevant or self-destructive, then why claim that one’s own empire is somehow more just, more egalitarian? Of course, any empire has to make such claims for reasons of internal stability, but that doesn’t make it any more true.

The fundamental issue that third-worldism faces is one of an unequal world. There is an insurmountable contradiction between fascist ideology, which glorifies the strong, aristocratic, proudly unjust minority, and third-worldism, which supports the weak but just majority.

That’s why in truth, Nick Land and his like are probably right to deride pro-Iran, anti-Israel groypers as crypto-communist third worldists. Objectively speaking, it is only communist egalitarianism that corresponds to third Worldism.

That’s not to say that the right-wing forces have only ever appealed to third Worldism out of opportunistic reasons. For one, the right-wing spirit of revanchism fits quite well with the third worldist desire to overturn the hegemony of the west. After all, this fact only emerged a few centuries ago, which in historical time is quite recent.

The dream of liberating the homeland from foreign occupiers, a new era of national revitalization to rival that of past greatness. The spirit of revenge, the lust for a revolutionary war. The hatred of liberal hypocrisy, excoriation of the false equality of free trade.

These are all themes just as popular in the German beer halls of the 20s, as, say, in the Iraqi or Egyptian cafes of the 50s or 60s, and even the Cuban Sierra Maestra of the 50s.

But while necessary in carefully curated doses, these nationalist ideas can also be exceptionally self-destructive. For individual countries, for entire regions, and ultimately, for the entire project of the third world.

In the 1980s, Iran and Iraq, the two poles of anti-western resistance in west Asia, decided to destroy each other in a nearly decade-long war. The Israelis and Americans said they wished both sides success, and indeed armed both sides. [Here the author of this piece is in my opinion falsely equivocating; the West armed Iraq to a much greater degree and saw the Islamic Revolution in Iran as the much bigger threat.]

And though there are quite reasonable nationalist arguments for both Baghdad and Tehran, ultimately, it would have been much more reasonable to lay aside the sectarian chauvinism and cooperate against the real Great Satan. [Again, i am not sure that the author is correct here in blaming the conflict on "sectarian chauvinism", when Iran was defending itself from Iraqi invasion.] Coincidentally, this actually started happening to some extent in the 1990s, another good reason for Washington to lay down the rules-based Law against Saddam Hussein.

That’s most certainly not to say that communism did very well at implementing third worldism. In fact, the Marxist-(Leninist)((-Maoist)) conviction that the construction of socialism would lead to the withering away of nations actually lead to the opposite. The return of the repressed, so to speak. The refusal to admit that national contradictions between socialist countries could exist led to their inflammation.

The socialist world, which in the late 1950s covered much of the non-western world, was torn apart by the sino-soviet split, a conflict with about as many rational grounds as the Iran-Iraq war.

For a nationalist, of course, one can come up with a range of quite real reasons that China should have feared the USSR or vice versa. But the whole point is that any transnational alliance requires some subordination of national interests. [Here i wholeheartedly agree with the author.] This needs to be done done consciously, with the long-term benefits clearly justified. The communist problem came from the a priori denial of national interests.

The unity of the west, in contrast to that of the non-west, speaks for itself. The vast north American continent was centralized under Washington. Following the self-destructive nationalist wars of the first half of the 20th century, Europe forcibly subordinated national interests to the imperative of European integration.

Certainly, it involves some losses for its members. But the modern European Union is a far more effective colossus of economic imperialism against the non-european world than the third Reich could even dream of being.

Currently, the EU is deindustrializing under the weight of non-western competition. Instead of embracing the benefits of economic cooperation with China, the EU is betting on sanctions (self-isolation) and military industrialization. This doesn’t seem likely to work (although it could), but that misses the point.

The prosperity and global power that Germany or France reached over the past fifty years as part of a united Europe is more than it could have ever reached on its own. Perhaps the costs of the EU will now drag down its members. But for those interested not simply in prosperity, but in superior wealth over the rest of the world, European integration would still be the better choice. [A questionable statement given that just prior the admission was made that the EU is now dragging its members down; members may join believing that the EU promises superiority over the rest of the world, but the real trajectory is now the opposite.]

Uncertain future

When I speak of the reality of third worldism, that doesn’t mean that the entire non-west has irrevocably aligned against the ‘golden billion’ of the privileged west.

A third worldist stance, so to speak, does not necessarily mean believing that the third world is doomed to win (to use the memorable phrase of Chairman Abimael Guzman). In the cold war, the third world movement was riven by contradictions. Under the very same umbrella of the G77, one had American-aligned fascists like Suharto or Pinochet, Soviet-aligned communists like Castro, countries trying to articulate a third way such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and Algeria, and then a wide spread of essentially opportunistic (petit)bourgeois regimes, from Pakistan to India to whatever else.

The Algerian Houari Boumedienne, chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, is pictured here calling for a New International Economic Order at the 1974 UN General Assembly. Those interested should read Byrne’s book Mecca of Revolution - Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Revolution, as well as Mahfoud Bennoune’s the Making of Contemporary Algeria.

And in the 70s, the third worldist movement, despite being at its height politically, spectacularly failed to take advantage of the historic economic and political weaknesses experienced by the USA and Europe. China fell in with the US in exchange for support against Moscow and, more importantly, economic investments.

By the end of the decade, Gulf Arab states hiked oil prices in an anti-soviet operation orchestrated by Washington. Dubai became Dubai, and the rest of the Arab world withered. Both the Chinese and the Gulf cooperated with the US to support anti-communist forces in Afghanistan. And by the 80s the USSR, lacking reliable or strong allies (the position that China could have occupied), became controlled by forces hoping to feed off the crumbs of the western masters’ table.

Now, too, the first world can still win. Though much undoubtedly happens covertly, it is hard to say that Iran is being particularly strongly supported by say, China and Russia against the US and Israel. [Here i think the author is severely underestimating the level of Russian and Chinese military but more importantly economic support to Iran.] One need only compare the level of support given by NATO to Ukraine. [This comparison in my opinion does not make much sense, since Ukraine is a wholly dependent Western proxy puppet regime whereas Iran is a sovereign, proudly independent state that is largely self-sufficient.]

What the west lacks in numbers, it makes up for in aggressiveness. With its back to the wall, the first world must strike down its enemies while it is still possible.

Much is at stake. In the post-war period, western societies benefitted from imperialism. Increasing cheap imports from the third world increased the real consumption levels of the first world population. Now, western consumption levels are no longer rising, and the aim is merely to preserve, by whatever means necessary, the comparative prosperity of western societies.

Truth be said, Marco Rubio’s recent rhetoric in Munich of resurrecting the imperial glory of the west is quite an appealing option for many in the west. And it is hard to say that non-western countries — or populations — are as united.

Non-western elites divided

At the present moment, there are no states that have made third worldist confrontation into their governing ideology. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Russian Federation come the closest (in order from most to least).

I know little about the DPRK, and what I do know seems to indicate that there is little one can know about divisions in its ruling elite (which isn’t to say that they don’t exist). I do know something about the IRI and the RF. The ruling elites of both states have most certainly exhibited strong conflicts between pro-western and anti-western fractions.

But under the pressure of western intransigence, both countries have been forced into an anti-western position.

There are many indications that much of the elite in both countries would much rather abandon confrontation with the west in favor of mutually respectful cooperation. This ‘mutually respective cooperation’ amounts, at best, to individual benefit while the rest of the world remains exploited. The premier examples of such ‘enlightened self-interest’ include modern China or Turkey.

Let me illustrate this struggle within the Russian and Iranian elites.

In Russia, it is quite visible in the difference between Vladislav Surkov and Nikolai Patrushev. Both were highly important aides to the Russian president, with the latter secretary of the Security Council until 2024.

But Surkov, who managed both domestic politics and relations with Ukraine from the late 2000s until 2020, was focused gaining a place at the table with the ‘western partners’. This postmodern playboy, though not a believer in ‘western-style democracy’, still viewed Russia’s future as inextricably linked with the ‘Global North’.

Patrushev, in contrast, sees the west as an existential enemy, a parasite on the global majority Russia is part of. And unlike Surkov, Patrushev advocates military means of dealing with the ‘empire of parasites’.

[Continued in paywalled article]