[...] Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristocratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But so­cialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.

The ujamaa program began with the assumption that the national liberation regime should create a democratic economy that worked in the interests of the vast mass of the people. Since most of the people in the formerly colonized world in general and in Tanzania in particular lived rural lives, Nyerere's 1961 slogan resonated with them: "While other countries aim to reach the moon we must aim for the time being, at any rate, to reach the village." Whatever Nyerere's intentions and those of the many Third World governments that had similar agricultural schemes (from Algeria to Burma, and on), the move to consolidate agriculture had the net effect of trying to control the peasantry, to agglomerate peasant production under the domination of the national liberation state. Once collected, peasant production in the Third World would now be made subservient to the dynamics of world trade (and imperialism) rather than the subsistence needs of the localities that could have governed their development. To render the relatively autonomous petty commodity sector subservient to the state, the regime abolished the marketing cooperative movement in 1975. Formed to gain better prices for agricultural produce (notably cotton), the movement brought some benefits to the peasantry. But the state decided to buy directly from the growers, often at prices set by the central government. Additionally, in 1972, the regime adopted the counsel of the U.S. consulting agency, McKinsey and Co., which advised it to replace the local government agencies with "development teams" that reported directly to central government ministries. These teams, wrote a scholar at the University of Dar es Salaam, "effectively replaced the local government system with an elaborate system of vertical information and planning flows centralized to the higher echelons of the government and party."

[...] Instead of doing much to turn the divide around, the state simply tried to siphon more welfare toward the poor. Short of socialism, the national liberation state in places like India wanted to produce higher growth rates. As output increased, regardless of the means to do so, the state would have a larger aggregate pool of capital and resources to distribute to the population. Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrialize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management class. Deliberation was kept to a minimum. Socialism made its appearance in the marketplace and on the threshing floor - to more equitably divide the spoils rather than to more equitably produce them in the first place.

By making alliances with the old social classes and adopting the colonial bureaucratic structure, the new nations essentially vitiated the Third World agenda.