Third Worldism and Global Fascism, Raj Patel

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Third Worldism and the Lineages of Global Fascism: The Regrouping of the Global South inthe Neoliberal EraAuthor(s): Rajeev Patel and Philip McMichaelSource: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, After the Third World? (2004), pp. 231-254Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993786

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Third World Quarterly, Vol 25, No 1, pp 231-254, 2004 Carfax PublishingTaylor Francis roup

T h i r d Woridism a n d t h e l i n e a g e s o fg l o b a l f a s c i s m : t h e regrouping o f t h eg l o b a l S o u t h in t h e neoliberal e r aRAJEEV PATEL & PHILIP McMICHAELABSTRACT We come to an analysis of Third Worldism through an historicalunderstandingof the developmentproject, one that locates Third Worldismas amomentin a broader series of resistances both to capital and colonialism, andto the techniques used by the state to maintain hegemony. Viewing ThirdWorldismin this wider context, we argue, enables us to not only explain thefailure of Third Worldism to deliver on its vision of emancipation fromcolonialism, but to also explain the shape of contemporary resistance to theworld capitalist order. We argue that the theory and practice of developmentdepends on a certain biopolitics, rooted in a regime of sovereign state control,and designed to mobilise citizens in ways favourable to capital. We hold thatThird Worldismembracedthisforn of sovereignty and its biopolitics. Further,by blendingcultural studies analysis with a Polanyian interpretationof the riseof fascism, we argue that Third Worldismcan be situated as a moment in thematurationof 'globalfascism'. Finally, we argue that contemporaryresistancesto neoliberalism have recognised the complicityof the state with capital. These'new internationalisms'arisefrom the ashes of ThirdWorldism,with an alteredunderstandingof 'sovereignty'that challenges the trajectoryof the Third Worldsovereign state.

The despised,the insulted,the hurt,the dispossessed-in short,the underdogsof thehumanrace were meeting [in Bandung].Here were class and racial and religiousconsciousness on a global scale. Who had thoughtof organizing such a meeting?And what had these nationsin common?Nothing, it seemed to me, but what theirpast relationshipto the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of therejectedwas in itself a kind of judgmentupon the Western world!'Even in the horrorsof the Nazi regime, then, it is possible to see some resemblancesto the trajectoriesof other countries.2

Historians can only see the past through the lens of the present. Our enterpriseexplicitly views the rise and demise of the Third Worldism launched at Bandungthrough contemporary offensives and resistances to capital.3 Today, at the WorldSocial Forums, at the protests against the World Bank, the IMF,the WTO,NATOand G8, we see phenomena strikingly similar to Richard Wright's observation inRajeev Patel is at Food First/the Institutefor Food and Development Policy, 398 60th Street, Oakland,CA 94618, USA. Email: [email protected] McMichael is at Cornell University,New York,USA.Email: [email protected] 0143-6597rinATLSSN 1360-2241 onlineI04I010231-24? 2004 Third WorldQuarterlyDOZI: 0.1080/0143659042000185426 231


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Bandung,quoted above:a varietyof differentcauses allied in theiroppositionto,now, variantsof a single kindof capitalism.Thereis, however,a key difference.While Bandungtrumpeted he possibility of national-statistpolitics as a vehicleof resistanceto the inequalitiesboth of the worldcapitalistorderandof the Sovietalternative, few parliamentarianshave taken seriously the demands of thecontemporary esistances o neoliberalcapitalism.Thedemise of ThirdWorldismcoincides with the captureof Third World elites by capital,andby its ideology.We contend that the seeds of the takeover were alreadyin place at the timeof Bandung,and germinating n the greenhouseof developmentalistpolitics. Inorderto demonstratehis, we trace the historyof developmentas colonialprojectand show that, at its inception, it instituted a particularpolitics of biopowernecessaryfor state-ledcapitalistaccumulation.Crises of capitalistaccumulationin the early 20th centuryreveal these tropesmost clearly, but they are present,anddynamic,throughout he colonialprocess.Importantly, hey areleft substan-tially untouchedeitherby national iberationpolitics orby changesin subsequentregimes.4 Indeed, the process of postcolonial nation-buildingdeployed disci-plinary colonial technologiesto create,throughcoercion andconsent, a nationalhegemony thatoperated hrough he state.This was an outcomepredicted,albeitin different language, by Fanon. At the very same time as the Non-AlignedMovement(NAM) matured,deployingthe UN Conferenceon TradeandDevelop-ment (UNCTAD) as a seat of Third Worldpower in inter-statepolitics, states andrulers were internalising he disciplines, self-definitions and elitism of develop-mentalism.The development illusion is a persistent but ever-changing one. There arecontinuities, however. It is striking, or instance,that the DeclarationadoptedbytheUN GeneralAssemblyatits 18thSession in 1963 calls fortradearrangementsandconcessions fundamentally imilarto those currently,andequallyunsuccess-fully, being demandedby developing countriesat the WorldTradeOrganization.More recently, the bubble of development rhetoric has been resoundinglypuncturedby a varietyof commentators.5While some groups(the SouthCentre,ThirdWorldNetwork)arekeen to participaten the modificationof developmentinstitutions,manyarevociferous aboutthe limits of the developmentalstate.Wehighlight the global justice movements (such as the Vla Campesina-theinternationalpeasantfarmers'movement) as organisationalattempts o transcenddevelopmentalism.We arguethat theirprojects, grounded n a firm scepticismof the state, andwedded to a robust nternationalismhatmaintainsanuneasy andincreasingly critical relation to the 'nation', come not as a continuationof theThird Worldist project, but have risen, phoenix-like, from its ashes. Theintentionallyprovocativecomponent o ourarguments to link contemporary ndhistoricalphenomena n worldhistory,ThirdWorldism ncluded,to fascism. Weexplain, in the following section, exactly why we choose to do this.

Two conversations about fascismIn the political-economyliterature fascism' has a fairly specific andhistoriciseddefinition.6It refers to that period of politics in Germany, Italy and, arguably,Japan incipient in the two decades before the beginning of World War II,232


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In the political-economyliterature ascism has a fairly specific and historiciseddefinition.6It refers to that period of politics in Germany,Italy and, arguably,Japan incipient in the two decades before the beginning of World War II,concluding with the defeat of Nazi Germanyin 1945. The fascism of theseregimes lies in the following characteristics:1. Fascism was a responseby capitalto a direct threat to its hegemony. At thetime, this threat was that of communism.2. It offered itself as a solution to the woes of the GreatDepression, throughapseudo-corporatismhat broughtthe needs of workers, capital and the statetogether.3. Fascism was, however,profoundlyanti-worker.Therewas, in otherwords, a

contradictionbetweenthe state'smobilisationagainstunions and autonomousworker organisation on the one hand, and its self-proclaimed interest inworkers' welfare on the other. To resolve this, elites within the (dominant)hegemonic bloc deployed state apparatus o banish working-class demandswith the surrogateof nationalism.Cultural echnologies thatelided state withnation,and demandedfealty to the unified nation-state,were deployed in theservice of quelling class discontent.These included,but were not limited to,notions of nationalpurity-extended, famously in the Nazi case, to environ-mental, bodily and geographicalpurity.4. Culture was strictly controlled and non-state-sanctioned hinking was sup-pressed. Weltanschauungskrieg world-view war) was systematically andscientificallypropounded,with rigorousjustificationby elites for particularsuppressionsand celebrations,accompaniedby a strict policing of culturalinteractions n orderto root out deviance.5. A hetero-normativesexual division of labour was strenuously enforced.Reproductive abourwas vigorouslypoliced, throughculturalcelebrationsoffemale domesticity, through strict monitoring of women's entry into theformal economy, and throughthe exterminationof homosexuals.6. Technologies of coercion and consent, particularlymilitaryauthoritarianism,were used by the state in order to secure hegemony over dissidents.

We modify the term 'fascism' with 'global'. This we do for a numberof reasons.We do not claim that the tendencieswe see at work from the early days of thedevelopment project to contemporarydevelopmentalismreplicate exactly thefeatures of mid-1930s and -1940s Germany, Italy and Japan. Although, asGourevitch notes, importantfeatures of Nazi Germany were present in thepolicies of other states at the time, we readily acknowledge the historicspecificity of this period.7What we attempt to do, however, is to broker aconversationbetween two differentkinds of heterodoxapproachesto develop-ment in which the idea of facism plays a key role. The first lies in the traditionof Marx and, specifically, KarlPolanyi. The latter's The Great Transformation(1944/1957) is usually read as an argumentabout the dislocation of socialrelations throughthe instantiationof 'fictitious commodities', and the marketsthattradein them. We note thatPolanyi's contribution o an essentially Marxistcorpus of ideas lies not in his re-presentationof Capital, but in his applicationof these ideas to the rise of fascism.8

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The literature o which we connect Polanyi stems from the British CulturalStudies tradition.We borrow the term 'global fascism' from Paul Gilroy, whouses it extensively in Against Race, in which he situates the continuities ofcontemporary apitalism,in North and South, in biopolitics (the deploymentofdisciplinarytechnologies at the level of the individual).Gilroy's definition offascism: 'anticonservative,antiliberal,populist, fraternalist,and revolutionary',assigns a central role to the state in orchestrating he productionand repro-duction of its citizens.9Caution andhistoryare importanthere. Following TariqAli, we do not want to suggest that the presence or absence of certain criteriaexclude or include a particular egimeor time withinthe ambit of fascism. Oursis not a 'checklist' approachto the study of fascism. We want, throughtheadditionof the adjective 'global', to renderthe term 'fascism' moreporous.Wedo this not to scandalise, but to recast the present. Fascism does not arise exnihilo but as a result of a particular onfiguration f social forces-it is the subtledynamics of these forces to which we want to direct our attention,and it is alesson we willingly learnfromthe culturalstudiestradition.As Gilroy suggests,the 'threat of fascism'

shouldnot be an open license to indulgein paranoia.Itloses none of its force whenwe appreciate hat the trainsarenot necessarilybeing loadedrightnow in our ownneighbourhoods.Fascism is not permanentlyon the brink of assuming terroristicgovernmentalpower ... If we wish to live a good life and enjoy just relations withour fellows, ourconductmustbe closely guidednotjust by this terriblehistory,butby the knowledgethat these awfulpossibilitiesarealways muchcloser than we liketo imagine.'0

Second, we emphasisethatglobal fascism, as a form of ruthless(for want of abetter qualifier) biopolitics, has always been a world-historicalphenomenon.This is not to say that fascism qua fascism is, and always has been, smearedacross the world. We do, however, suggest that its componentforces, in comingtogetherundercolonialism, have informedthe project of development,albeit inattenuated orm. We have only to think of the colonial project-beginning withthe cultural genocide in IberianAmerica, through slavery to forced/contractlabour n the late colonial period, andperhaps ncludingthe forcedexpropriationand starvationof Indians,Chinese andBrazilians,amongothers,documented nLate VictorianHolocausts:El NiaioFaminesand TheMakingof the ThirdWorldby Mike Davis.'"Indeed, we see our project as allied to Davis. He extends thenotion of 'holocausts', which had previously been applied to a Europeanphenomenon, into the colonial past.'2 We go one step further,pushing thehistoricalboundariesof global fascism back into colonial time and space, andthen drawingit forward, into the colonised present.We conjecture that fascist relations are immanent in global capitalism,intensify statebiopolitics at momentsof crisis, and may be sustainedpost-crisisfor hegemonicpurposes.Considerthe 1930s, when a roguestate(Germany)wasforced to structurallyadjustby the League of Nationspowers as a consequenceof the collapse of the gold-sterling regime. The resultwas whathas come to beknown as fascism: a manoeuvringof elites and a populist appealby the Nazipartyto regeneratean idealised nationalculturethroughselective mobilisation234


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based on ethnic and racialintolerance,and dedicatedto reconstructingmodernityvia statetechnologiesof control. Culture s, of course, always part of capitalism.Stuart Hall's work informs our use of culture as synonymouswith 'ideology'.The relationbetween cultureand capitalthat informs our use of 'global fascism'is one that invokes particularrelationsof control between the state, media, themilitary, and tropes such as 'family', 'homeland', 'nation', 'God' and themarket.13Our use of 'globalfascism' is also an attempt o represent oday's transformedinternationalconjuncture,where the crisis of market rule is premised on thedefeat of Third World utopianism, and on a definitive 'globalisation' of thecommodity form: the combined assault on organised labour (global labourmarket casualisation), on peasant cultures, and public goods. As early 20thcentury fascism was premisedon the defeat of anti-capitalist orces, so globalfascism now targets forces with collective claims that stand in the way ofcommodification.The increasingly unaccountable institutions of market rule(includingthe 'marketstate') providea mechanismfor one of the key forces of'global fascism' and, while this is a universal process, it is so contingently,because it continues the racistprojectbegun under colonialism. In this sense wesubmit that fascism has foundationalroots in European-centreddevelopment.The capitalist cultural technologies, with their ongins in Europe, have now,undera US aegis, been extended under multilateraldevelopmentalinstitutions.This is very much in keeping with the idea of development-an idea withdistinct cultural roots and heritage,but an idea that must, of necessity disavowthese roots if it is successfully to claim its goal of disinterestedand normaliseduniversality.

The projectof developmentColonialismand developmentDevelopment was integralto colonialism. While 19th century Europeansmayhave experienceddevelopmentas a specificallyEuropeanphenomenon,colonial-ism nevertheless representedit as a universal necessity. Development praxisinvolved managingthe social transformation ttending he rise of capitalismandindustrial technologies.'4 Development matched the apparent inevitability oftechnological change with social intervention-represented ideologically asimprovinghumansociety, but pursuedas a methodof controlof citizen subjectssubordinated o wrenchingsocial transformation.This social engineering impulse framed Europeancolonisation of the non-Europeanworld. The always-contestedrelationshipof plunderbetween Europeand its colonies necessitatednew forms of social controlof subject populationsin metropolitanas well as colonial regions. In the latter developmentserved alegitimacy function, since, comparedwith Europeans,native peoples were castas 'backward'.15 Subject populationswere exposed to a variety of new disci-plines, including forced labour schemes, schooling, and segregation in nativequarters.Forms of colonial subordinationdifferedacross time and space, but theoverriding object was either to adaptand/ormarginalisecolonial subjectsto theEuropeanpresence.

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Adaptation ncluded the use of the popularfactorymodel of schooling, whereknowledge was subdividedinto specialties, and pupils submittedto continuousmonitoring by supervisors.Punctuality,task specialisationand regularitywerethe hallmarksof this new discipline,breakingdown social customs andproduc-ing individual subjectswho confronted a new, rationalorder,which they bothresisted and reproduced.In 1843, for example, the Egyptian state (under thesuzeraintyof the declining Ottoman,and rising British, empire) introduced heEnglish 'Lancaster school' factory model to the city of Cairo, in order toconsolidate the authorityof its emergingcivil service.Egyptianstudents earnedthe new disciplines requiredof a developing society that was busy displacingpeasant culture with plantationsof cottonfor exportto Englishtextile mills, andmanagingan armyof migrant abourbuildingan infrastructure f roads,canals,railways, telegraphsand ports.'6Across the colonial divide industrialcapitaltransformedEnglish andEgyptiansociety in lock-step,producingnew forms ofsocial discipline amonglabouringpopulationsand middle-classcitizen-subjects.Given the world-historicalrelations of industrial capitalism, the new classinequalities within each society were premised on a racist international n-equality producedby colonialism. It was this inequality,and its 'local face' inthe colonies, that fuelled anti-colonialresistances.As Europeanswere 'civilising' their colonies, colonial subjectsexploredtheparadoxof Europeancolonialism-the juxtapositionof the Europeandiscourseof rights and sovereignty against their own subjugation.17 The decolonisationmovementpeaked as Europeancolonialism collapsed in the mid-20thcentury,when World War II sapped the power of the colonial empires to withstandanti-colonialstruggles.After millions of colonial subjects were deployed in theAllied war effort for self-determinationagainst fascist expansionism fromEuropeto SoutheastAsia, the returning olonial soldiersturned his rhetoricandsometimes violence on their colonial masters in a bid for independence.Sovereignty was linked to overcoming the deprivations of colonialism,throughan expression of state-centredautonomyfrom the colonial metropole.The idea of sovereigntydemands moretreatment han we can affordhere. In itsclassical sense it is a call for autonomy, delimited by geography, and ac-companied by a unitarysovereign, an agent with a monopoly on force withinprescribedboundaries.Equallytraditionally, his agent has been the state, anditsboundaries have been those of the state. Yet, in this context, it is also atechnology of disavowal, of amnesia-for it projectsThird World elites exclu-sively as victims, as a class absolutelysinned against and unsinning, demonis-ing-correctly-the imperial apparatuses of control without implicatingthemselves in its functioning.It also permits a platformnot only for culturalnationbuilding, but also culturalstate building. As we shall see, contemporaryunderstandings f sovereigntycome shorn of the state apparatus,withconflictingand complex geographies of claims to autonomy.18Fascism and developmentIt is important o recall that, from the outset, both sociology and developmentwere responses to Europeanclass tension. Auguste Comte, the founding father236


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of sociology, published his Plan des travaux scientifiques necessaires pourreorganiser la societe in 1822, when the social dislocations of industrialcapitalismwere beginningto be felt. Comtecould hardlyhave failed to be awareof the nascentworking class's conditionsin Paris, London andManchester.Thespreadingphenomenonof urbanunemployment againstthe backdropof empire)taxed the theoriesof humanprogressadvanced by the Scottish enlightenment.'9Under these material and historical circumstances,Comte, building on SaintSimon, completed the positivist project.Applying positivist methodsto the historicalrecord, Comte claimed to derivea three-stage model of human progress. This model came with none of thecaveats that accompanymany of today's more defensive applicationsof posi-tivist methods. Comte's work was as much a bold manifesto for a newscience-sociology-as a revisionisthistory. He arguedthat the laws he claimedto discoverwere not convenientsimplifyingassumptions,but actuallyexisted 'insociety'.Comte's observation,producedas it was in a periodof high colonialism, wasnot, however, an explicitly imperial one. It stemmedpurely from the logic ofdomesticconsiderations-in orderfor Comteto understandEuropeas he did, hecast other partsof the world in particularrelationshipto Europe, and cast theirpeoples as populationswhose manifestdestiny was to become as enlightenedasthe French. This is the violent consequenceof humanism; n imputinguniversalcharacteristics to all people, contingency, diversity and specificity arehomogenised in the name of a specious and often violent attempt to createhuman unity. This, in itself, lends legitimacy to cultural and biopoliticalcolonisation.For Comte this interpretation nvolved an explicit set of policy responsesvis-a'-vis the state. His three stages of increasing human order began withsavagery,progressedthrougha belief in God, to a final stage where humans,throughtheirmental faculties, transformedheir natural endencies for self-loveinto a pan-humanaltruism.Comte locatedhimself and his followers firmlyat thepoint of transition rom the stage of 'love of God' to 'love of humanity'. 0 Thisis an importantOccidental cultural technology. The violence of the FrenchRevolution, argued the positivists, had been necessary to sweep away thevestiges of old (second-stage)thinking.But the laissez-faire economic policiesthat followed in the wake of the revolutionhad, paradoxically,retardedprogress.In particular, he slavish pursuitof marketsin propertyand labour encouragedunderdevelopment;the most pressing manifestation of this lay in the newphenomenonof widespreadurbanunemployment.The forces of naturaldevelopmentcould, however, be shiftedto a fastertrackby removinga key blockage-private property. t is in retrospectstriking hatthepositivists should have focused on property as a problem of development.Perhaps even more striking was their solution, which involved not the dis-mantlingof privateproperty,but its trusteeship, n the hands of those most ableto manage it with requiredtechnical skill. For Comte and the positivists, theremedyfor unemployment,and the most effective means to expedite the socialtransition o altruism, ay in the handsof bankers.Banks would hold property ntrustfor the community,managingit wisely for the common good. Of course,

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these bankerswould need to be instructed about their 'social function', to be'moralised' in suitableways.21 Banks have remainedcentralto the developmentproject,eitheras trustees of communalproperty,sourcesof financefor nationalindustrialexpansion,or indeed as sources of micro-finance or village women.22Fromthis summaryhistoryof developmentwe make three observations.First,development was, among other central features, a capitalist project. From itsvery inception, Comte saw development (and sociology writ large) as theorderingof society for progress,throughthe regulationof privateproperty.Inorderto rendermorepublicthe corruptingnfluenceof privateproperty,Comte'ssolutionwas to have bankers(not legislators)administer he public good. Theseadministratorswould be guided by positivist rationality.Centralto this vision,then, is a conceptionof progress, managedthrougha system of class relations,not by capitalistsper se, but by an elite cadre of gurus of orderand science.Second, the state was a central locus of the orderingof society. The projectofcolonial developmentrequired he construction n essence, and in effigy, of theapparatusof the modem Europeanstate.This 'gift'23was an integral partof thedevelopment enterprise.The mechanisms of control and domination,the bio-politics of development,were createdspecificallyto pacify, monitor, police andconscript to labour,the ruralcommunities of the ThirdWorld, just as they didin Europe.These politics were predicatedon an exclusive state sovereignty,andmuch effort was spent securingthis sovereignty.Third,biopolitics and capital-ism are mutuallyconstitutivewithin the developmentproject.The limit case ofdevelopment, we argue,is fascism. We take Polanyi's analysis to be indicativeof incipient trends not only at the emergence of ThirdWorldism,but also incontemporaryglobal political economy.Biopolitics and developmentAt the heart of the developmentproject,then, are core ideas of managerialismand,less explicitly, of sovereignty.Managerialisms instituted hrougha processof 'civilising' people as a nation, a class, a race and a gender, specificallythrough control of individually coded bodies-where they work, how theyreproduce,even the language they dreamin. This is what we mean when werefer to biopolitics. Gilroy states that biopolitics 'specifies that the person isidentified only in terms of the body'. 4 The idea of biopolitical discipline isFoucault's: 'For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence wasreflectedin political existence'-the fact of living was no longer an inaccessiblesubstrate hatonly emergedfromtime to time, amidtherandomnessof deathandits fatality;part of it passedinto knowledge's field of control andpower's sphereof intervention.25 or the successful coupling of biological and political exist-ence, competingconceptionsof the biological, and the political,had to be tamed.This process required he extension,andexclusive and absolutemaintenance,ofstatesovereignty.We see the twin facets, of managementandsovereignty, n thevarious businesses of the development project: including the regulation ofeducation, sexuality, criminality and gender.26A biopolitical approach o understanding olonial developmentpraxisbroad-ens our conventional understandingof what the state does and does not do.238


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There are few areas of life that the state does not seek to regulate. Genderregulation practices exemplify how the state's engagement was at once bio-political,orientated hroughcapitalismandideas of progress.In southernAfrica,for example, the decreeing of pass laws in 1892 served to create, institute anddiscipline a labourmarket,and to monitortax payments.These passes served avariety of other unstatedpurposes. They aimed to identify, to surveille and topush into wage labourthe black men required o mine gold, and to work on thefarmsexpropriatedand alienatedby the settlers.The passes soon became waysof trackingand limiting the movementsof male black bodies in and aroundthecolonised terrain.They provideda markof recognitionof colonised subjectsbythe state, geographicallypolicing the division between colonial citizens andsubjects.Mamdani'shelpful categoriesof citizen and subjectand his investiga-tion of technologies of governance used to discipline colonies points to thespatial characterof juridicalcontrol.27Criticalto these operationsof power, however, was the creation of exclusivesovereignty by colonial regimes. Indeed, the exercise of biopower and sover-eignty were co-eval.28 This should come as no surprise-the existence ofcompetingsovereigntieswas anathema o the universal and exclusive characterof development; given that development was both inevitable and unilinear,competing sovereigntiescould be permittedneither in theory nor practice.

The case for global fascismHaving outlined our understanding f development,and its biopoliticalbasis, itis now time to make the case for 'global fascism'. One of the most strikingaccountsof the rise of fascism lies in Polanyi's Great Transformation.Polanyiviews fascism as a solution to the 'impassereachedby liberal capitalism'-theuntenabilityof the illusion of the self-regulatingmarket.The liberal marketcanonly ever be a fiction. Despite economic liberalism's rhetoricaland ideologicalseparationof the market and the state, and of the separationof economics andpolitics more widely, the market is an inescapably political construct. Theprocess of its institutionunderminesthe very conditions of its existence.Fascism, arguedPolanyi, explicitly recognises the social bases of productiveactivityand seeks to reorganisesociety to rectify the crisis of the self-regulatingmarket.Fascism follows market iberalisminevitably,because the very liberal-ism that called for global freedom of capital falls victim to the shocks tointernationalcapital markets.Throughthese shocks, paradoxically,the nationbecomes a more, not less, importantsite of political engagement.The logic offascism is a panickedresponse 'to protectsociety from the marketby sacrificinghuman freedom'.29 The logic is flawed, relying as it does on totalitarianism(nationalist,religious, patriarchal)and an emphasison state supportfor capital.But the problem is real. The implication that freedom and the market are

incompatible opposes Polanyi to Hayek and Schumpeterin his time, and tocontemporaryneoliberalideologues in ours.The importanceof deploying the term 'fascism' lies in its ability to help usinterpret he present.For Polanyi, the key puzzle was the abrupt ransition romdecades of relative peace to the Great War and then to fascism in Europe.239


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servitude,fishing, mail-orderbrides,marketstall labour,shop work, and the sextrade.3'These are the tropes associated with biopolitics. We contend that ThirdWorldism failed to uproot the biopolitics institutedby colonialism and, in thefollowing section, we attemptto demonstratewhy, despite the clear differencesbetween colonised and coloniser, Third World colonised elites (to differentdegrees) operatedwithin a similarset of assumptionsas theirerstwhile mastersabout power and the role of statism and nationalismfor the masses as loci ofdevelopment.

Rise of Third WorldismThird Worldism, situatedbetween the empires of capitalism and communism,embodied the contradictionsof the age: the universal institutionalisationofnational sovereignty as the representationof independence of decolonisedpeoples, political confrontationwith European racism, and a movement ofquasi-nationalist lites whose legitimacydependedon negotiatingtheireconomicand political dependence.Decolonisationwas rootedin a liberatoryupsurge,expressedin mass politicalmovements of resistance-some dedicated to driving out the colonists, andothers to forming an alternative colonial government to assume power asdecolonisation occurred. In this context development was used by retreatingcolonisers as a pragmaticeffort to preserve the colonies by improving theirmaterialconditions-and there was no doubt that colonial subjects understoodthis and turnedthe ideology of developmentback on the colonisers, viewingdevelopmentas an entitlement.32From 1945 to 1981, 105 new statesjoined the United Nations as the colonialempirescrumbled,ushering n the developmentera via the extension of politicalsovereignty to millions of non-Europeans.But political sovereignty was theformal attributeof a new world order substantively rooted in the politicaleconomy of imperialism.Fanon understoodwell the historical shortcomingsofAfrican postcolonial elites in these terms, characterisingthem as a lumpen-bourgeoisie.33Just as colonised subjects appropriatedthe democratic discourse of thecolonisers in fuelling theirindependencemovements,leaders of the new nation-states appropriatedhe legitimatingideals of the development era. Part of thedevelopment promise was the proclamationof equality as a domestic andinternational goal, informed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(1948). The UN Declarationincluded individual citizens' rights in the socialcontract: every body 'is entitled to realization, through national effort, andinternational o-operationandin accordancewith the organizationandresourcesof each State, of the economic, social and culturalrights indispensablefor hisdignity and the free development of his personality'.34We note that thisdeclarationnames statesas the exclusive guardiansof rights, specificallyvia thesocial contract, sanctioning a form of biopolitics and sovereignty originatingundercolonialism.35Development legitimised rulers' disciplining of their subject-citizens. In

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Africa forms of discipline included 'tribalisation'-a legacy of Europeancolo-nialism, combining forms of urbanpower directlyexcluding natives from civilfreedoms on racial grounds with forms of indirect rule of natives in thecountryside via a reconstructionof tribal authority.Independence abolishedracial discriminationand affirmed civil freedoms,neverthelessdividing powerwithin new nations accordingto the inherited artificial tribal constructsalongethnic, religious and regional lines.36Fanon's sociology of the postcolonial African state identifies the roots ofneocolonial biopolitics:

Powerless economically, unable to bring about the existence of coherent socialrelations ... the bourgeoisiechooses the solutionthatseems to it the easiest, thatofthe single party... It does not create a state that reassuresthe ordinarycitizen, butratherone thatrouses his anxiety ... It makesa display,it jostles people andbulliesthem, thus intimatingto the citizen thathe is in continualdanger.The single partyis the modem form of the dictatorshipof the bourgeoisie... In the same way thatthe nationalbourgeoisieconjuresaway its phase of construction n orderto throwitself into the enjoymentof its wealth, in parallelfashionin the institutionalsphereit jumpsthe parliamentary haseandchooses a dictatorshipof the national-socialisttype. We know that this fascism at high interest,which has triumphed or half acenturyin LatinAmerica,is the dialectic resultof states,which were semi-colonialduringthe period of independence.37

As a bloc the ThirdWorld was incorporatednto a hegemonicprojectof orderinginternationalpower relations, where states adopted a universal standard ofnationalaccounting GNP), andforeignaid disbursements ubsidised stateappara-tuses and elite rule. In postcolonialIndia, 'Insteadof the state being used as aninstrument of development,development became an instrument of the state'slegitimacy'38 Internallythe reificationof the state as the source of order andprogress perpetuateda capitalistbiopolitics of subjugation ntroducedvia thecolonial project.ExternallyThirdWorldismdepended on state mediation of apolitics of opposition to capitalist dependencies and an unequal world order.The harmonisation f internalandexternaldemandswas not, however, alwaysfavourablyachieved-US imperialimperatives often trumpedthe fragile dom-estic hegemonywon by ThirdWorldelites. We illustrate his throughan accountof the changing fortunes of Third World sovereignty.On balance the conscrip-tion of ThirdWorldismto neoliberalism,acrossfourdecades,was achieved witha great deal of continuity. Its culmination in the 'lost decade' of the 1980s,duringwhich capital's capture of the state was securedby the debt regime andthe elaboration of financial technologies of control, demonstrates this point.These technologies dovetailed with, and intensified, a domestic biopolitics nowreconstitutedas 'privatisation'-the explicit shifting of the intensifiedcontrol ofbodies and the economic organisations hat serve them to the sphere of capital,beyond the illusion of 'public', governmentalcontrol.

First World counter-attackThirdWorldismdemandsto be interpretedwithin a world-historical ontext. The1955 Bandungconference did not, after all, happen in a vacuum, but within a242


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fraughtandtense international ontext,at one of the nadirsof the Cold War. Theprocess of postwar reconstructionand decolonisationhad stretched the pre-warlines of colonial controlbetween the two poles of the USA and the USSR. Theliquidationof Europeaneconomieshad both provided an exogenous shockto thecolonies, but also permitteddegrees of economic and political freedomthat hadpreviously been unthinkable, or those in a position to exercise it.39Just as the Third World was born as an elite political entity, so it died,expressing the dialectic of economic nationalismin the development project.Proclaimed as the objective of the developmentalstate, economic nationalismneverthelesswas at odds with US hegemonicobjectives. Early indicatorsof thisdialectic were the 1953 CIA-sponsored oup against Iranian Prime MinisterMossadegh's nationalisationof British oil holdings, and the 1954 overthrow ofGuatemalan President Arbenz, whose land reforms threatened United Fruitinterests.40A decade later a geopolitically strategiccoup in Indonesiaopened a door forcorporate transnationalism, presaging a two-decade reversal of economicnationalism. By the time of IndianPrime MinisterJawaharlalNehru's death in1964, the non-alignmentstrategy of Third Worldism was weakening. A keyfigurein the NAM, IndonesianPresidentSukarno(as outlinedin the introductionto this special issue), nurtureda state- and military-sponsored orm of nationaldevelopment, supportedby a complex coalition of nationalist, Muslim andcommunist parties, forming what he called a 'Guided Democracy'. Sukarno'sregime had mobilised more than 15 million citizens to join parties and massorganisationsencouragedto challenge Westerninfluence in the region.4'In 1965 President Sukarnowas overthrown n a bloody ciA-supported oup,which includeda pogromclaimingbetween 500 000 anda million lives-mostlyof membersof Indonesia'shuge andpopularcommunistparty(PKI)-'one of themost barbaric acts of inhumanity', 'the "final solution" to the Communistproblem in Indonesia'. Recently declassified documents reveal that a BritishForeignOffice file called in 1964 for defence of Western interests in SoutheastAsia which was 'a major producer of essential commodities. The regionproducesnearly 85 percentof the world's naturalrubber,over 45 percentof thetin, 65 percentof the copra and 23 percentof the chromiumore.'42Following the regime change, Time Inc sponsoreda 1967 meeting in Genevabetween General Suharto,his economic advisors, and corporateleaders repre-senting 'the majoroil companiesandbanks,GeneralMotors, ImperialChemicalIndustries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express,Siemens, Goodyear,the InternationalPaper Corporation,and US Steel.' WithFord Foundationhelp, GeneralSuhartoreformulateda development partnershipwith foreign investment. Billed 'To Aid in the Rebuilding of a Nation', theconference nevertheless invited corporations to identify the terms of theirinvolvement in the Indonesianeconomy. James Linen, presidentof Time Inc,expressedthe birth of this new global order, observing: 'We are here to createa new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries worktogether... for the greaterprofitof the free world. This world of internationalenterpriseis more than governments .. It is the seamless web of enterprise,which has been shapingthe global environmentat revolutionaryspeed.'43

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RAJEEVPATEL& PHILIPMCMICHAELThe coup markeda turningpoint in the trajectoryof ThirdWorldnationalism,

introducingnew formsof statedevelopmentalism,partneringwith global corpo-rations in marketexpansion (anticipatingliberalisation1980s-style). The warwaged in Vietnamby a US-led coalition over the next one-and-a-halfdecadesconfirmedthis policy, and it was followed up with strategic interventionsinChile (1973) and, in the 1980s, in El Salvador,Nicaragua,GrenadaandIraq,aswell as with disbursementsof militaryand economic aid to secure the perimeterof the 'free world' and its resourceempire.Militarypower was critical to thesecuring and prising open of the ThirdWorldas partof an emerging projectofglobal developmentorchestratedby the USA as the dominantpower. Throughthe biopoliticalexpedient of 'officertrainingschemes' andstrategicsupport, heUSA incited 'militarymodernisation'and dictatorshipas the rule ratherthanthe exception, sanctioningpredatoryThird World states as the alternativeto'conservative civilian elites with strongnationalistbents'.44The Vietnam War(early 1960s to 1975) came to symbolise global inequality.Just as terrorismof the 21st centuryis often identifiedas a productof poverty,so communism and/ornational liberationstruggleswere identified with under-development. (It is instructive o note that,in both cases, structural ssues aboutcapitalismitself were never understood as causal factors.) Between 1974 and1980 national liberation orces came to powerin 14 differentThirdWorldstates,perhaps nspiredby the Vietnamese resistance. The possibility of a united Southpresented itself in two forms in this decade: first, throughthe formation of theOrganizationof PetroleumExportingCountries OPEC),representinghe possibil-ity of ThirdWorldcontrol over strategiccommoditieslike oil. Second, with the1974 proposal to the UN GeneralAssembly by the G-77 for a New InternationalEconomic Order (NIEO).45The NIEO proposal demanded reform of the worldeconomic system to improvethe position of Third World states in internationaltradeandtheiraccess to technological andfinancialresources.It operationalisedthe dependencyperspective,namely, thatFirst-ThirdWorld structural elationscompromised the ThirdWorld's path of development.Perceived as 'the revolt of the Third World', the NIEO was indeed theculminationof collectivist politics growing out of the Non-Aligned Movement.But it was arguably a movement for reform at best and, at worst, an in-tensification of the development project insofar as it called for Northernconcessions, geared to increasing external revenues available to Third Worldelites, strengthening he sovereignty of the rentierstate. Its initiates were thepresidents of Algeria, Iran, Mexico and Venezuela-all oil-producingnationsdistinguishedby their recently acquiredhuge oil rents.46Althoughmuch of thewealth was oil money, recycled throughbank lending to the Third World, itneverthelessmet the demandsof Third Worldelites for developmentfinancing,including conspicuous constructionand consumption(in addition to financingcostly fuel imports and military hardware,accounting for about one-fifth ofThirdWorldborrowing).Muchof this moneyconcentrated n the middle-incomestates, undercuttingThird World political unity, and subsidising military sub-jugation of citizens. In the short term Third World unity fragmentedas theprosperingOPEC states and the newly industrialisingcountries (NICS) pursuedupwardmobility in the internationalorder. In the long term the redistributive244


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goals of the NIEO (which were never implemented)were overtakenby the newdoctrine of monetarismthat ushered in the 1980s debt crisis through drasticrestrictionson credit and, therefore,on social spendingby governments.47Managing the debt crisis: co-ordinating the technologies of financialdisciplineThe managementof the debt crisis introducedwhat is euphemisticallycalled'global governance', which subjects individual debtor state policies to co-ordinated, rule-based procedures strengtheningthe grip of the internationalfinancial institutions (IMF and World Bank). Structuraladjustment policiesevolved, requiring a comprehensive restructuringof economic priorities andgovernment programmes n order to qualify for new lines of credit. Openingeconomies, imposing austerityand mandatingprivatisationbecame a commonformula applied (with some variation,and considerableresistance) across theindebted ThirdWorld. The debt managersdrew on the Chilean model of the1970s, where a militaryjuntaexperimentedwith monetaristpolicies (backed upby militaryforce), slashingsocial expenditures n order to reducedebt. Alludingto the particularbiopolitical consequences of the debt regime, in 1989 theExecutive Directorof UNICEF, James P Grant,observed:

Today, he heaviestburden f a decadeof frenziedborrowings fallingnoton themilitary r on thosewith oreignbankaccounts ronthosewho conceivedheyearsof waste, but on the poor who are havingto do without necessities,on theunemployedwho areseeingthe erosionof all thattheyhave worked or, on thewomenwhodonot haveenough ood to maintainheirhealth,on the infantswhoseminds and bodies are not growingproperlybecauseof untreatedllnesses andmalnutrition,ndonthechildrenwhoarebeingdenied heironlyopportunityo goto school .. it is hardlyoo brutal noversimplificationo saythat herichgottheloansand thepoor got the debts.48The debt regime divided and ruled the Third World throughan impoverishingreversalof developmentpolicy, while it also built a new discipline into states.States were brought under direct financial surveillance by the internationalfinancial nstitutions,andgiven little room to manoeuvre n formulatingpoliciesbasically gearedto ensuringdebt collection. Withinstates,reductionof currencyvalues, wages and development subsidies underminedliving standards,andprivatisationcompromisedstate capacity to honour the developmentalistsocialcontract. Third World Network director Martin Khor characterisedstructuraladjustmentas 'a mechanismto shift the burdenof economic mismanagementand financial mismanagementfrom the North to the South, and from theSouthernelites to the Southerncommunitiesandpeople. Structural djustmentsalso a policy to continuecolonial trade and economic patternsdeveloped duringthe colonial period, but which the Northernpowers want to continue in thepost-colonialperiod.'49Arguablyeconomic and financialmismanagement s thephenomenalform of periodic, market-induced inancial crises visited upon theglobal South (mostrecentlyEast Asia andArgentina),externalisingthe problemof overproductionof fictitiouscapitalvia financialmarketsthat victimise stateslow in the global currencyhierarchy.50

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What is today termed 'globalisation' is in fact a form of hegemonic crisismanagement.It stems from the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime of capitalcontrols andfixed currencyexchangesand includesthe subsequentruptureof thesocial contract. An unregulatedglobal money market(facilitatingarbitrageandraising the opportunitycost of fixed capital) accompaniedby currencyfloats,encouraged'financialisation':an investor preferencefor liquid rather han fixedcapital. Bank deregulationand a proliferationof financialinstruments,creatingnew money out of expected future income, encouraged securitisation andtradeabledebt. With the financial liberalisationrequiredby evolving conditionsof debt management,destabilisingmoney flows associated with currencyspecu-lation characterise he global financial andscape.Currencystabilityundertheseconditions depends on speculators' ongoing evaluation of national economicpolicies, effectively subordinatingall states' policies to marketrationality (in-cluding liberalisation)to stabilise national currencies.5'As crisis management,then, 'globalisation' involves a structural financial) imperativeto conform tomarketrelations,and to the political projectof market rule (via the IMF, WTO),which, through financial liberalisation, allows the USA to extract financialcapital from the rest of the world, and transmits/exportsinancialcrises to stateswith weaker currencies.52

The politics of debtAt the turnof the 21st century,the politics of debt has assumed a new form. AsIMF conditionalityhas evolved, strippingaway social protections,so have theforms of resistance.Duringthe 1980s 'IMFriots' swept across the ThirdWorld,focusing on the withdrawal of public subsidies, and blaming IMF-enforcedconditionalities.Urbanpopulations n LatinAmerica,EasternEuropeandAfricatargetedpolicies that eroded social supports,with food subsidies as the charac-teristic flashpoint.The politics of a diminishing social contractgoverned thisaction. As the 1990s proceededprivatisationcame to define the IMF'S 'second-generation structuraladjustment' linking credit to 'good governance'), as loanrepaymentconditionsdeepenedtheirhold on debtorstates. In Indonesia,whereliving standardsplummetedwith the loss of three-quarters f the value of therupiah., esulting from the Asian financialcrisis of 1997 (andexacerbatedby theIMF response), 80% of privatisation contracts went to President Suharto'scronies. The political response here was a mass movement for democracy,replacing Suharto's military regime with a parliamentaryregime, but notessentially disturbingthe course of privatisation.53Several thresholds have come to define periods of world ordering. TheIndonesiancoup in 1965 underlined,geopolitically,the principle of the freedomof corporateenterprisewithin the US cold warempire. This was followed by the1973 coup in Chile that implemented, with force, drastic social reversals viaeconomic liberalisationbefore it became a global strategy.Covertintervention nNicaraguathroughout the 1980s suppressedresistance to imperial policies inCentral and South America. Implementationof NAFTA was accompanied, in1994, by militarisationof Chiapasto neutraliseopposition to implementationofnew rules of a globalpropertyregime(anticipatinghe wToregime).And rolling246


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market-inducedinancialcrises, fromMexico to Asia, to Russia and on to Braziland Argentina, exerted financial discipline over various forms of 'fast-trackcapitalism' at the expense of the working poor and their activist representa-tives.4Sovereigntycrises, with growing public incapacity in the global South, leadinevitably to the forceful centralisationof power, and the tightening of bio-political controls, pushing the developmentproject to its limit. ArundhatiRoyobserves this process at work in India, and calls it by name:

Fascism is about the slow, steady infiltrationof all the instrumentsof state power.It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular,day-to-dayinjustices... Fascism has come to India after the dreamsthat fueled the freedomstrugglehave been fritteredaway like so much loose change ... Over the past fiftyyears ordinarycitizens' modest hopes for lives of dignity, securityand relief fromabject povertyhave been systematicallysnuffed out. Every 'democratic'institutionin this country has shown itself to be unaccountable, naccessible to the ordinarycitizen and eitherunwilling or incapableof acting in the interestsof genuine socialjustice. And now corporate globalization is being relentlessly and arbitrarilyimposedon India,rippingit apartculturallyand economically ... There is very realgrievancehere. The fascists didn't create it. But they have seized upon it, upturnedit and forged from it a hideous, bogus sense of pride.They have mobilizedhumanbeings using the lowest common denominator-religion. People who have lostcontrol over their lives, people who have been uprooted from their homes andcommunities, who lave lost their culture and theirlanguage,arebeing made to feelproud of something.55

We could never-have put it so well. But what we lack in concise eloquence, wecan make up for in plodding explanation.This fascist political resolution lieslow, prowling,as a real practice n the very idea of development, n the very ideaof capitalism,particularly hat kind of capitalismnurturedby the state, indeedpremisedon the state's sovereignty.Yet it is neitherinevitable, nor invincible.We turn now to examine trendsin the resistanceto this kind of developmentalstate, and to this kind of sovereignty.Resistance today: global justice movements

A defining feature of contemporaryglobal justice movements is the reformula-tion of 'sovereignty'.Movementsattempt o appropriateovereigntywhereit hasbeen debasedin the state-expressing the dialectic of modernity,which at oncecelebrated the progressive Enlightenment principle of self-organisation butcontained it through the device of state sovereignty.56Historically politicalsovereigntywas constructedas a relationshipof power, channellingcitizen andsubjectsovereigntiesthrough he state.The bankrupting f political sovereignty,throughdevelopment and its intensified complicity with capital via neoliberalmechanisms,amplifiesmovementsfor alternativesovereignties.Countering he centralising hrustof developmentand/or authoritarian olitics,global justice movements promote decentralisedconceptions of politics gov-erned by locality (place) and/or situated identity (where relations of class,gender, race, ethnicity, environmental stewardship are specified world-

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historically-in networks, diasporasand movements). Contraryto the univer-salist conception of sovereignty governing the modern states system, thesealternative orms of sovereignty express the particulars f locality/class/identity-based relations.They transcendcorporateglobalisation,which reveals, throughits capture of the state, the world market to be a political construction-an'empireof civil society'.57The unclothing of the 'empireof civil society' marks the transition rom thecitizen-stateto the market-state, s nationalsovereigntyyields to the sovereigntyof monetaryrelations,beginningwith the debt regime. The devastatingdevalu-ation of southerneconomies and societies, imposed by the multilateralagencieson behalf of financecapital,exposed not only the growing 'autonomy'of globaleconomic relations,but also the structural nd institutionalisednecessityof statesponsorshipof these relations,thereby exposing the complicityof the state withcapital.58The legitimacy problem is underlinedby, among other trends, a growingrebellionagainstneoliberalismacross Latin America(significantregimeshifts inBrazil,Venezuela, Ecuador, or example),as well as the emergence,in 2001, ofthe World Social Forum WSF), as a counter-summit,n PortoAlegre, strongholdof the Brazilian Workers' Party. While the WSF slogan is 'anotherworld ispossible', it celebrates difference, viewing itself as a process, not an organis-ation. Its Charterof Principlesdeclaresthatit is a body 'representingworldcivilsociety', and that it is not a 'locus of power' as such, rather it is a plural,diversified context that 'in a decentralized ashion, interrelatesorganizationsandmovements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the inter-national to build anotherworld ... [and]encourages ts participantorganizationsand movements to situate their actions as issues of planetarycitizenship.'59The global justice movement is so called because of its characteristic osmo-politan activism, located in its constituents' 'focus on virtuallyidentical oppo-nents: the agencies and representatives of neoliberal capitalism-global,regional, national and local'. The Zapatistaresistance to the Mexican state'scomplicity in NAFTA articulatedsuch world-historicalconditions of a regionalstruggle, notablyin the 1994 communique: Whenwe rose up against a nationalgovernment,we found that it did not exist. In realitywe were up against greatfinancialcapital, against speculationand investment,which makes all decisionsin Mexico, as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas-every-where.' Zapatista politics are not about civic inclusionof a mnarginalisedeopleper se, but about redefiningcitizenship, expressed in the call for 'A politicaldynamic not interestedin taking political power but in building a democracywhere those who govern, govern by obeying'.60Contemporary esistances to the international ood orderexemplify the newpolitics of justice-countering globalist conceptions of food security, which arepremised on managed dumping of Northernagriculturalsurpluses that under-mine peasantfarming,and wherefree marketsexclude and/orstarvepopulationsdispossessed by their implementation.61Via Campesina organises around analternativeconception of food sovereignty.This means not just protecting ocalfarming,butrevitalisingdemocratic-collective,culturalandecological processesat the sub-national evel. The several-million strongVia Campesina, formed in248


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1992, unites local and regional chaptersof landless peasants, family farmers,agriculturalworkers,ruralwomen and indigenous communities across Africa,Europe,Asia andNorth,Centraland SouthAmerica.It claims that: 'biodiversityhas as a fundamentalbase the recognition of human diversity, the acceptancethatwe are differentand thatevery people and each individualhas the freedomto think and to be. Seen in this way, biodiversityis not only flora, fauna,earth,water and ecosystems; it is also cultures, systems of production,human andeconomic relations, forms of government; n essence it is freedom.'Food sovereignty, in this vision, is 'the right of peoples, communities andcountriesto definetheir own agricultural,abour,fishing, food and land policieswhich areecologically, socially, economically andculturallyappropriateo theiruniquecircumstances'.2 Central o this conceptionof rightsis the understandingof a rightas somethingwhose contentis not necessarilypreordainedby the state.In fact, Via Campesina's conception of a right here is one that is explicitlywithout content-the right is a right to self-determination, or communitiestoredefinefor themselves the substanceof the food relationsappropriate o theirgeographies.This is a contradictoryunderstandingof rights-where the stateremainsa guarantor f the rights,but where it plays no role in the authorshipofthese rights. In fact, the Via Campesina call for policy formulation runsexplicitly counterto the state: since the state has been capturedby capital, therightsof small farmers,and the ability of small farmersto influence statepolicy(despite their numericalsuperiorityvis-a-vis large farmers)has been abrogated.This violation of rights has resulted simultaneouslyboth in a disillusionmentwith the state's ability to represent ts constituentsto internationalcapital, andin a recognition of the power of the state to impose dicta from internationalcapital.Also important s the 'queering'of the attributionof rights.Rights hereare not ascribed exclusively to humans, but to 'peoples, communities, andcountries'.This challenges deeply the notion that rights are only justiciable forindividualbodies and,therefore,challengesthe formsof biopoliticsbased on thisindividuatingassumption.Perhaps the most significant chapter of Via Campesina is the Brazilianlandless workers' movement, the Movimento dos TrabalhadoresRurais SemTerra MST). In the past 17 years, the MST has settled over 400 000 families on15 million acres of land seized from unproductiveuse. The stimulus has been aBrazilian developmentmodel of structural djustment,n a contextwhere 1%oflandowners own (but do not necessarilycultivate)50% of the land, leaving 4.8million families landless. Between 1985 and 1996 ruralunemploymentrose byfive-and-a-halfmillion, and between 1995 and 1999 a rural exodus of fourmillion Braziliansoccurred.63The landless workers' movement draws legitimacy for its land occupationsfrom the Brazilianconstitution'ssanctioningof the confiscationof uncultivatedprivate property:'It is incumbentupon the Republic to expropriatefor socialinterest,for purposesof agrarian eform,ruralproperty,which is not performingits social function'.' Land seizures, under the slogan of 'Occupy! Resist!Produce!' lead to the formationof co-operatives,which involve social mobilis-ation 'transformingthe economic struggle into a political and ideologicalstruggle'.65 Democratic decision making is practised to develop co-operative

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relations among workers, and alternativepatterns of land use, financed bysocialising a portionof settlementincome, used for participatorybudgetingtocover social andtechnical needs. The MST has pioneeredthe productionof staplefoodstuffs for the Brazilianpopulationat large (with a formal outlet throughthenational Zero Hungerprogramme), illing a significantgap left by agro-exportpriorities.Most recently,the MST has ranged tself againstcorporatesovereignty.In a declaration (19 May 2003) the MST declared that fields planted withtransgeniccrops by large farmerswould be burned.On a global scale perhapsthe distinguishingmark of this emergent globaljustice movement is its commitmentto building solidarityout of a respect fordiversity. The WSF is a springboardfor constructing enduring networks ofrelationshipsamongdiverse civic and cultural nitiatives,to forge an alternativeorganisationaland discursive space to thatoccupied by corporateglobalisation.Previous anti-systemic social movements worked to reform or institutionalisecountervailing power within institutionsor societies. While this has been anindispensable part of giving substance to modernity, it has privileged theuniversalist themes of modernity-which of course crystallised in the statistprojectof development,and which are now the targetof a new sensibility thatchallenges this singular,reductionistvision of development.This is not to saythat the globaljustice movementshould not workto reformor transform xistinginstitutions,but it has the historic opportunity o do this by drawingon, andsupporting,alternativemodels that are not paralysedby the logic of economicreductionism and proto-fascistrationality.66

Conclusion: Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascismAt the World Trade Organizationtalks in Cancun in 2003, a new politicalgroupingin the Global South, the G20 +, was made. As with its predecessors,the G20 is a groupdependenton the supportof largeThirdWorldgovernments(Brazil, India, China). It emerged in a political space createdby tense EU-USrelations over trade in agriculture.It is, as with its predecessors, a tentativeexpression of the dialectics of power in the state system. The targeting anderosion of the G20 by the USA in the weeks since its birth confirm thearguments n this paper.The state sovereigntyupon which ThirdWorldismwasfounded was always fragile and fractured by internationalcapital. We haveoffered an explanationof why this has been so, and why contemporary ocialmovements find alternative orms of sovereignty so attractive.The biopoliticalproto-fascismof development has always been immanent.Extremehegemoniccrises bring these tendencies in capitalism to the surface. We suggest that theywere just as 'fascist' in their 19th and 20th centuryinstantiations n the ThirdWorld as they were in their more recognisable early-to-mid 20th centuryEuropean forms. Moreover, we see similar trends arising today in theconfigurationof state forces, not only in the USA but also in the global South.Fascism deserves to be unmoored from its historical European home; itstechnologies of control, its ideology, its body count, and even its concentrationcamps precede its orthodoxrecognition in Europeanfascism. And, as Guan-tanamo Bay suggests to us today, the fascist threat is alive and well, for all250


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people, citizens of the USA no less than those in the global South, especiallyinsofar as empire is accomplishedthrough the mobilisationof ever-decreasingrights for domestic citizens.Globaljustice movementshave responded o the crises of developmentand anarrayof neoliberalprojects by detaching ideas of sovereigntyfrom the state andfrom its attempted(nationalist)monopoly on biopolitics. Through an explicitencouragementof alternative forms of anti-colonial sovereignty, these move-ments, we have argued, inherit the promise of Third Worldism, a genuinealternative, now, to a form of imperialism spearheadedby the USA andmimicked with alarming precision by nation-states across the globe. Fanoncalled for the Third Worldto 'not want to catch up with anyone.Whatwe wantto do is to go forwardall the time, night and day in the company of Man, in thecompany of all Men ... It is a questionof the Third Worldstartinga new historyof Man.'67Today, to paraphraseRichardWright, where citizens are despised,insulted, hurt, and dispossessed by Third World states, social movements arefosteringresistanceto capitalas a nexus of social relations on a global scale, notthrough specious ideas about the nation, but throughfar more complex, anduncertain,ideas of local sovereignty. These initiatives practice 'politics with-out guarantees'.68 In world-historical erms, there is no paradoxin such initia-tives, in that they are a genuine and hopeful alternativeto the contemporarytotalitarianism urroundingus again.

NotesThe authorsthank Mark Berger and Dia Mohan for invaluable suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

1 RichardWright,The Color Curtain:a Reporton the Banding Conference,New York: World PublishingCompany, 1956, p 12.2 PA Gourevitch,Politics in Hard Times:ComparativeResponses to InternationalEconomic Crises, Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, p 25.We should say at the outset that our critique is directed at a particularvision of state nationalismandnational statism that, while clear and vehement in its rejection of US- and Soviet-sponsoredvisions ofdevelopment,was grounded n a varietyof programmesof nationaldevelopmentco-ordinatedandmanaged

by elites. Clearly, we do not seek to indict anti-colonial struggle-rather, we suggest that it continuesto be necessary.4 We note that, while ThirdWorldismcame to be elite managed, its origins were in historic, spontaneousmass movements. The historiographyof this phenomenon demands abstractionand an observation ofcontinuitiesacross time. These continuitiesare not, however, intendedto provideany sort of claim aboutthe ultimate pennanenceor inevitabilityof any phenomenon,but rather an orthogonaland reorientatingframework hrough which to recast our currentunderstandingof, in this case, ThirdWorldism. We note,in passing, that the state, though a central feature of our analysis, is not the only locus of power ininternationalpolitical economy. The power of corporations, he media (both domestic and international/imperial), local 'traditionalstructuresof power', the family, prisons, schools and the military is alsoimportant.S See, for example, S George, A Fate Worse than Debt, New York: Grove Press, 1988; G Arrighi, 'Thedevelopmentalist llusion: a reconceptualization f the semiperiphery', n WG Martin(ed), SemiperipheralStates in the WorldEconomy, Westport,CT: Greenwood,1990, pp 11-42; and A Escobar,Encountering

Development: The Makingand Unmakingof the Third World,Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press,1995.6 See WL Adamson, 'Gramsci's interpretation f fascism', Journal of the History of Ideas, 41 (4), 1980,pp 615-633; RO Paxton, 'The five stages of fascism', Journal of Modern History, 70 (1), 1998, pp 1-23;and D Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, London: Pluto Press, 1999.7 Gourevitch,Politics in Hard Times, p25.

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RAJEEV PATEL & PHILIP MCMICHAEL8 K McRobbie & K Polanyi-Levitt (eds), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The ContemporarySignificanceof TheGreat Transformation,Montreal:Black Rose, 2000.9 P Gilroy, Against Race: ImaginingPolitical CultureBeyond the Color Line, Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000.10 'Liberaldefinitions of fascism adoptthe approachof ticking off items from an alreadyprintedmenu andseeing if they match. But many social-democraticand most Marxist definitions grew out of the actualexperience ... deriving from the overall dynamics of capitalistsocieties. Fascism was a weapon of lastresort,used by a ruling class faced simultaneouslywith an economic crisis and the threatof a revolutionarylabour movement.' T Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms.Crusades,Jihads and Modernity,London:Verso, 2002; and Gilroy, Against Race, p 86.

'1 Mike Davis, Late VictorianHolocausts: El Niio Famines and TheMaking of the ThirdWorld,London:Verso, 2001.12 Davis was not the first to unmoor ideas normally associated with the Shoah. See, for example, DEStannard,American Holocaust: The Conquestof the New World,New York: Oxford University Press,1992.13 Robert Kaplan,writing on technologiesof control in the AmericanEmpire,demonstrates hese relationswell through the following approvingquotation:'RULE NO 9 FIGHT ON EVERY FRONT'. R Kaplan,'Supremacy by stealth', Atlantic Monthly,July-August 2003, p 65. In their recent article 'An emergingsynthesis for a new way of war', published n the GeorgetownJournalof InternationalAffairs, Air ForceColonels James Callardand PeterFaber describewhat they call 'combinationwarfare'-a conceptderivedfrom a 1999 Chinese text by two colonels in the People's LiberationArmy, Qiao Liang and WangXiangsui. In the 21st centurya single conflict may include not only traditionalmilitary activity but alsofinancialwarfare, tradewarfare, resourcewarfare, legal warfare,and so on. The authorsexplain that itmay eventually involve even ecologicalwarfare themanipulation f the heretofore natural'world,alteringthe climate). Because combination warfare draws on all spheresof humanactivity, it is the ultimate intotal war. It 'seeks to overwhelmothersby assaultingthem in as many domains... as possible', Callardand Faber write. 'It creates sustained, and possibly shifting, pressure that is hard to anticipate..Combinationwarfare has alreadybegun, though it has yet to be codified in military doctrine.The mostimportant ront, in a way, may be the media. Like the priestsof ancient Egypt, the rhetoriciansof ancient

Greece and Rome, and the theologiansof medieval Europe,the media constitute a burgeoningclass ofbrightandambitiouspeople whose social andeconomic staturecanhave the effect of underminingpoliticalauthority.'14 MP Cowen & RW Shenton, Doctrines of Development,London: Routledge, 1996.15 This is a linguistic and biopolitical tactic that is alive and well, for example in the Indiangovernment'sMinistry of Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes.16 T Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988, pp 68-75, 96.17 See, for example, CLR James, The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L'Ouvertureand the San DomingoRevolution, New York: Vintage Books, 1963.18 P Chatterjee,TheNation and its Fragments:Colonial and PostcolonialHistories, Princeton,NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993. We aregratefulto Dia Mohan for pointingout the ambiguousrole of Third Worldelites.19 RL Heilbroner, Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the WorldlyPhilosophy, New York: Norton,1988; andMP Cowan & RW Shenton,The Inventionof Development.The Power of Development,London:Routledge, 1995, ch 1.20 Indeed, a great deal of Comte's energy was directed towardsreducingthe influence of Catholicism inFrenchsociety, in orderthat Frenchsociety eventually arrive at the end of history.Gronemeyerremindsus that 'every epoch pervaded with a belief in progresshas needed ... the tendency [to] conceive [of thepresent] as the penultimatestage in history, to fancy itself as a kind of positive final time in which onlythe last breakthrough emains before the harvestof history can be gathered nto humanity'sgranary.' MGronemeyer, Helping',in W Sachs (ed), TheDevelopmentDictionary:A Guide to Knowledgeand Power,London:Zed Books, 1990, pp 53-69. This is no less true of post-revolutionaryFrance as of millennialEurope and North America, as FrancisFukuyama'scurrent popularityattests.21 Cowan & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, p 40.22 F List, National Systemof Political Economy,Philadelphia,PA:JB Lippincott& Co, 1856; A Gershenkron,Economic Backwardnessin Historical Perspective, New York: Frederick Praeger, 1965; R Hilferding,Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development,London:Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1985; and CL Dokmo & L Reed, 'Developmentand poverty in a global age-building blocks-microfinanceand entrepreneurshipn the developing world', HarvardInternationalReview, 21 (1), 1998,pp66-68.23 N Karagiannis, Givingdevelopment.responsibilityandefficiency in the Europeandevelopmentdiscoursetowardsthe ACP countries(1970s-1990s)', unpublishedPhD thesis, PoliticalScience, EuropeanUniversity,Florence, 2002.252


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REGROUPING OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH24 P Gilroy, Against Race, p 196.25 M Foucault, The History of Sexuality, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p 142.26 EP Thompson, 'Time, work-discipline,and industrial capitalism', in Thompson, Customs in Common,London: Merlin, 1991, pp 352-403; AL Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's Historyof Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 1995; and PMcFadden, 'Women workers in South Africa', Journal of African Marxists, 4, 1983, pp 54-62.27 M Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: ContemporaryAfrica and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.28 G Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford,CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998.29 F Block, 'Introduction', n K Polanyi, The Great Transformation,Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, p 5.30 Ibid;AM Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality:Britain, 1968-1990, Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994; JC Torpey, TheInventionof the Passport: Surveillance,Citizenship,and the State,Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,2000; S Abramsky,Hard Time Blues, New York:Thomas DunneBooks, 2002; F Fanon & CL Markmann,Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1968; JMander & E Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy: And For a Turn Toward the Local,

San Francisco:Sierra Club Books, 1996; and SP Huntington,The Clash of Civilizations and the Remakingof World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.31 'Slavery in the 21st century', New Internationalist, July-August, 2001, p 18.32 See F Cooper& AL Stoler, Tensionsof Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 1997.3 LS Stavrianos,Global Rift. The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William Morrow, 1981, p 624;and F Fanon, The Wretchedof the Earth, London: Penguin, 1967, p 120.34 Quoted in T Clarke & M Barlow, MAI. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the Threat toCanadian Sovereignty,Toronto: Stoddart, 1977, p 9.3 M Hardt& A Negri, Empire, Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000; and R Patel, 'Rights tofood: a critical perspective', Feminist Economics, forthcoming 2004.36 M Mamdani, 'Making sense of political violence in post-colonialAfrica', in L Panitch & C Leys (eds),Socialist Register. FightingIdentities:Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism,London:Merlin Press,2003,pp 132-151.37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp 132, 133, 138, 146.38 S Bose, 'Instrumentsand idioms of colonial and national development:India's historical experience incomparativeperspective', in F Cooper & R Packard (eds), International Developmentand the SocialSciences, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, p 153.39 For the effects of this in Africa, see G Arrighi, 'The African crisis: world-systemic andregional aspects',New Left Review, 15, 2002, pp 5-36.40 G Kolko, Confronting he ThirdWorld. UnitedStatesForeign Policy 1945-80, New York:Pantheon,1988,41 pp 102-103.J Pilger, The New Rulers of the World,London: Verso, 2002, p 29.42 Kolko, Confrontingthe Third World, p 181; and Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, pp 25, 28.43 Pilger, The New Rulers of the World,p 28.44 Kolko, Confrontingthe Third World,pp 134, 148, 184.45 George, A Fate Worse than Debt, p 6.46 G Rist, History of Development: From WesternOrigins to Global Faith, London: Zed Books, 1997,pp 152-153.47 A Hoogvelt, The Third Worldin Global Development, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp 87-95.48 Quoted in DM Roodman, Still Waiting for the Jubilee. Pragmatic Solutions for the Third World,Washington,DC: WorldwatchPaper 155, 2001, p 30.49 Quoted in K Danaher & M Yunus (eds), 50 Years is Enough. The Case Against the World Bank andthe InternationalMonetary Fund, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994, p 28.50 Cf B Cohen, The Geography of Money, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.51 G Arrighi,The Long TwentiethCentury. Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London:Verso,1994; and A Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World. The New Political Economy ofDevelopment, London: Macmillan, 1997, p 82.52 G Arrighi, 'The social andpolitical economy of global turbulence',New Left Review, 20, 2003, pp 5-71;andE Helleiner,States and theReemergenceof GlobalFinance. From Bretton Woods to the 1990s, Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, p 112.53 J Walton & D Seddon,Free Markets & Food Riots: The Politics of GlobalAdjustment,Oxford:Blackwell,1994; and S Erlanger,'Suhartofosteredrapideconomic growth, and staggering graft', New YorkTimes,22 May 1998, p A9.54 W Bello, Addictedto Capital: TheTen-yearHigh and Present-dayWithdrawalTraumaof SoutheastAsia'sEconomies. Focus on the Global South, Bangkok: ChulalonkornUniversity, 1998.55 A Roy, 'Fascism's firm footprintin India', The Nation, 30 September2002, p 18.

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RAJEEV PATEL & PHILIP MCMICHAEL56 Hardt & Negri, Empire, p74.57 J Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of InternationalRelations,

London: Verso, 1994.58 P McMichael, 'Globalization',in T Janoski,R Alford, AM Hicks & MA Schwartz (eds), A Handbookof Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies and Globalization,New York:CambridgeUniversity Press,2004.59 World Social Forum,2001. There are, even within movements,critics of PortoAlegre. See, for instance,Peter Waterman's Second Reflections on the Third World Social Forum, available at http:/lwww.voiceoftheturtle.org/showarticle.php?aid 342.6 P Bond, 'Radical rhetoric and the working class duringZimbabweannationalism'sdying days', Jourmalof World-SystemsResearch, VII (1), 2001, p7. Zapatista quotes from A Starr, Naming the Enemy.Anti-CorporateMovementsconfront Globalization,London: Zed Books, 2000, p 14; and N Harvey, TheChiapas Rebellion. The Strugglefor Land and Democracy, Durham,SC: Duke University Press, 1999,p 210.61 R Patel & A Delwiche, 'The profits of famine: southern Africa's long decade of hunger', Food First,8 (4), 2002, pp 1-8; P McMichael, 'Food security and social reproduction:ssues and contradictions',in I Bakker & S Gill (eds), Power, Productionand Social Reproduction,Basingstoke:PalgraveMacmillan,2003, p 178; R Patel, 'Rights to food: a critical perspective',FeministEconomics, forthcoming;and WBello, 'The crisis of the globalist project & the new economics of George W Bush. Focus on the globalSouth', 10 July 2003, at http://www.tni.orglarchives/bello/globalistproject.htm.62 www.ns.rds.org.hn/via/.Via Campesinais a movement we find particularly nterestingbecause of thecentralityof autonomy and sovereignty in its history.The history of Latin American peasantmovementshad, until the advent of structuraladjustment,been overwhelmingly tied to urban political parties.Corporatist tructures f politicalpatronagehadbeen used by urbanpoliticalelites to pacify and,at electiontime, mobilise peasantconstituenciesto vote for theirpolitical patrons.Peasantrieswere, however, at thetail of a political system wagged by urban dogs. Structuraladjustmentchanged this dramatically.Witha reduction n the surpluses controlledby the state came a concomitantreduction n the capital availableto pacify ruralcommunities. This staunchingof patronage ed to a radicalisationandseparationof peasantconstituencies from their erstwhile urban masters. Politically, this was given expressionthrough'auton-

omous peasant organisation', where the term 'autonomous' denoted autonomy from urban and state-embroiled political parties (and non-governmentalorganisations). Via Campesina emerged through apolitical process in Central America of precisely these autonomous peasant organisations. Personalcommunicationwith Peter Rosset, Food First.63 www.mstbrazil.org/EconomicModel.htmlaccessed 23 July 2001).64 Article 184, quoted in FM Lapp6 & A Lappe, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, NewYork: Jeremy P Tarcher/Putnam, 002, p 70.65 L Flavio de Almeida & F Ruiz Sanchez, 'The landless workers' movement and social struggles againstneoliberalism', Latin American Perspectives, 22 (5), 2000, pp 11-32.66 See, for example, J Brecher, T Costello et al, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity,Cambridge,MA, South End Press, 2000; Starr,Naming the Enemy.Anti-CorporateMovementsconfrontGlobalization;and P Waterman,Globalization,Social Movementsand the New Internationalisms,London:Continuum, 2001.67 Fanon, The Wretchedof the Earth, pp 254-255.68 S Hall, 'The problemof ideology: Marxismwithout guarantees', n D Morley & K-H Chen (eds), StuartHall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 1996.

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Documents

Third Worldism and Global Fascism, Raj Patel