[...] Fanon defended the right of national liberation movements to adopt armed struggle, as the movements would do at Ha­vana's 1966 Tricontinental. His defense, however, was not on tactical or even strategic grounds; he maintained that violence is necessary to wrench a colonized society into freedom and reshape the subservience of the colonized so that they might truly be freed by the act of taking their freedom. [...]

[...] the FLN failed the legions of anticolonial supporters who wanted a role in the creation of a new Algeria. The FLN's charter did not fully support the energy of the people; it was keener to demobi­lize this enthusiasm. The Third World "nation" did not fully live up to its promise of radical democracy, where every person would be consti­tuted by the state as a citizen, and where each citizen in turn would act through the state to construct a national society, economy, and culture. From India to Egypt, from Ghana to Indonesia-the great legions of the Third World drew their immense strength from popular mobiliza­tion, but none of these states enabled the people who created the plat­form for freedom to have an equal part in the project to build it. Of course, the construction of the new nation would require the labor of the people, but this work came with direction from above, and not with the co-equal participation of the people in the creation of the national plan or the division of the national surplus. The people had to act, not to lead but to take orders, and the state, the father figure, would protect its feminized subjects.

The president could rule by fiat, a structure that welcomed a coup d' etat because this alone could change the reins of gov­ernment in a society that had been substantially depoliticized.

In March 1 963, Ben Bella's government promulgated a set of laws known as the March Decrees. These had been created in consultation with a group of European and Arab Trotskyites (including the Egypt­ian Luftallah Solliman, the Moroccan Mohammed Tahiri, and the Algerian Mohammed Harbi) who favored worker self-management. The decrees declared any vacant property to be legitimate collective prop­erty, legalized worker self-management on farms and in factories, and forbade speculation. The workers had already seized the vacant facto­ries, and the peasantry had already grabbed three million hectares of prime land left by the French colon farmers. The new government insti­tutionalized the inventiveness of the workers and the farmers. So far so good, but then the state made some errors. Whereas it had written no role for the state in these new institutions, it also tried to cut out the main trade union federation, the two-hundred-thousand-strong Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens (UGTA) that had led the factory takeover. [...]

The architects of the self-management schemes had good ideas, but they were not the ones to execute and oversee the self-management (autoges­tion) project.

To break the polity into factions would obviate the idea that the freedom struggle had united the people with one interest, to create a nation against imperialism.

Boumedienne had a vision of a "solicitous" state that tended to the needs of a respectful and quiescent population.

The demobilization of the population led almost inexorably within the Third World to military coups and military rule. Where the military did not overthrow the civilian government, the inability of states to break from colonial borders and other such dilemmas led to a strengthened military brass. More money to guns meant less to butter, and therefore to an impoverished agenda for the increase of the social wage, the improvement of agricultural and other social relations, and better prices for exported commodities. The main social agency that demanded this agenda within the constraints of the Third World regime remained the Communists, and it was the strengthened hand of the military that often exorcised the Left (helped out by the CIA and given a blind eye by the USSR) . The broader story of these tragedies occupies us in this part, as we make our way from the military coup in La Paz, Bolivia, to the massacre of the Communists of the Indonesian archipelago, to the border war between India and China, and eventually to the reduction of the Third World's political and economic agenda into OPEC and the ujamaa villages of Tanzania. Neocolonial imperialism persisted, and the countries of the Third World remained in thrall to economic and political logics that disinherited most of them. The people wanted the formal trappings of freedom rather than flag independence (the Tanzanians called it uhuru wa hendera) . They had to settle for mild reforms and nostalgia. Or else be "disappeared."