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[...] Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina held no brief for nation building. The oligarchs, the haute portenos, ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which meant that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina' s economic strength) . This detachment of the elite fueled the growth o f a socialist movement, led by Juan B. Justo and the trade unions, and it angered patriotic sections of the elite [...]
kinda obvious but still incredible to think about
[...] the basis of trade had to be altered . It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development. And further, since modernization theory promotes the view that national income and investment capital must be raised from the export of raw materials, it will only entrap the new nations more deeply. As Prebisch and the development economists saw it, the import of manufactured goods and the export of cheap raw materials will continue to drain capital and fail to enable the conduct of technological improvements toward socioeconomic development. The cycle of dependency would intensify rather than break.
To counter this, Prebisch argued that raw material exporting states should create some mechanism to develop a domestic industry, and absent outright grants, the best approach would be legal-political. The new nations should use tariffs to make imports prohibitive (what be came known as "import-substitution industrialization" or, in another guise, the "infant industry" thesis) . Prices in the core remained high partly because of the political role of trade unions and industrial monopolies. The periphery needed its own political strategy, and this would have to be in the realm of interstate trade.
[...] Within the United Nations there was often talk of land reform, and there was some discussion of the distorted or even corrupt use of the surplus, but hardly any concern given to it or the conflict among the different classes for use of the surplus (and for the surplus value drawn from the workers) . The main problem was to raise capital for the Third World's development, and the Prebisch position also ignored or downplayed the fundamental role of financial capital over the world's economy. The structural problems of landlordism, domestic class struggles, and the better use of the economic surplus already produced within a national economy as well as the problem of the surplus value stolen from the workers in the normal course of capitalism, rarely came up for discussion at the United Nations. It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
[...] That year, the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, nationalized the country' s oil industry (owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, where "Anglo" represented the English interests and "Iranian" simply referred to the place from which they drew the oil). [...]
incredible
[...] The multinational perspective questioned the racist claim that the darker nations could only be primordial, that blood and custom reduced the imagination of certain people. They could only be tied to kin and co-believer, not to a republican nationalism whose locus was both anticolonial and populist.
In this realm at least, Third World nationalist movements absorbed the idea of nationalism and digested it in accord with the rhythms and demands of their various histories. Fanon, who had learned about cultural regeneration in Algeria, developed the second strand of Césaire' s cultural program in terms of the idea of nationalism. Like Césaire, Fanon argued that the period of nationalist struggle enabled a people to rethink the feudal forms legitimized by colonialism. These liberation struggles, as opposed to those for conquest, did not feel the need to justify themselves based on crude biological concepts. The colonial power tries to mobilize every racist idea to break down the morale of nationalism, but with each such attempt the imputed superiority of the colonizer wanes. The people, once held down, now determined the pace of change." Those who were once immobile, the congenital cowards, those lazy beings who have always been made inferior, brace themselves and emerge bristling." The colonial ruler does not understand what has transpired." The end of racism begins with this sudden failure to understand." Finally, the end of colonialism means that the "rigid, spasmic culture of the occupier is liberated," and it opens itself up to the culture of the colonized. "The two cultures can confront one another, enrich one another." Rather than turn inward, away from Europe or any others, Fanon contends, nationalist culture will explore other cultures as resources. In the struggle lies liberation, or at least the process of national struggle gives energy to the national culture, which is now able to come alive and grow. Fanon overplays the lack of racism or the mobilization of biological notions in national liberation movements. National pride or patriotism often slid into the ugly language of racism or exclusion. But if what Fanon found is not a fundamental rule, it is at least a tendency.
As Nasser and Nehru prepared to leave Brijuni, they heard news that the U. S. government had decided to cut its $200 million pledge to finance Egypt's $ 1 .3 billion Aswan High Dam. The dam was crucial to Egyptian plans, as the Free Officers hoped that it would help the sluggish Egyptian agricultural sector, an area that needed immediate redress for the Republic to retain the support of the fellahin, the peasantry. To gain investment funds, Nasser had tried to play the Atlantic powers against the Soviets.12 Apart from these productive projects, Nasser also played off the two major blocs over arms sales. The United States had a less attractive offer: among its stringent restrictions, the U.S . government offered only certain kinds of arms, wanted them accompanied by a U.S. military assistance mission, and required that the U.S . arms aid be used to buy high-priced U.S. hardware (an elegant way to subsidize the U.S. weapons companies) . All this being impossible for Egypt, Nasser bought weapons from Czechoslovakia. In addition, Nasser had refused to join the Baghdad Pact and pushed the English to remove their military base from Suez. Little wonder that Dulles despised the Nasserite regime.
brilliant tbh
[...] The African, Asian, and Latin American states proffered draft resolutions to bring democracy to the United Nations in 1957, but it was not until 1959 and 1960 that the General Assembly heard debates on this theme. From Guinea to Pakistan, delegates reflected on the need for the United Nations to be awake to history, alter its structure as large numbers of new nations took their seats as sovereign powers, rethink its veto powers to the colonial and nuclear powers, and do so in the spirit of justice, not charity. [...]
yesss i love this. similar to what i've been thinking about tech workers
[...] In early December 1 964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this . . . . As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited, between oppressors and oppressed. [...]
The NAM states and NAM itself did not have the means to join the Vietnam War. NAM could not send its armies to Hanoi, even as the Second NAM Conference in Cairo (1964) had stated that wars of national liberation are defensible, that they are the principal means to fulfill the "natural aspirations" of people being colonized by powers that were loath to transfer sovereignty, and that " the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible." NAM had supported the Algerian struggle in 1961 , and it welcomed the victory of the Algerians in 1962. It also supported the main liberation movements in Portuguese Africa (Mozambique, Angola, and Cabo Verde). It was enough to support wars of national liberation when these were far away and much harder to take a principled position on the armed overthrow of a recognized government. Many of the NAM states had already begun to experience armed struggle within. The dominant classes of these states held the reins of state power, and wielded it against their internal critics. It was far easier to bemoan U.S. interventions and the ailing Portuguese colonies than to validate the tactic of armed struggle, especially if such struggles had broken out within an NAM state.
one main thread running through this book is the delicate nature of the Third World coalition ... held together by opposition to the superpowers, but that's not always enough to really bind them together. sometimes there are opposing interests along other lines.
[...] For Cabral, like Nkrumah, colonialism and neocolonialism are two forms of imperialism, both of which negate "the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces." "If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see that there is not, and cannot be, national liberation without the use of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism." [...]