The Bandung Era: 1955-1975
If I define Bandung as the dominant characteristic of the second phase of the postwar period, it is not from any ‘‘third worldist’’ predilection, but because the world system was organized around the emergence of the third world.
Modernization and industrialization brought radical change to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in varying degrees that will be discussed in detail in this book.
The world of today and tomorrow can no longer be what it was in the five previous centuries of capitalist deployment. Accumulation of capital on a world scale has taken on a new dimension.The Bandung era, with the triumph of the ideology of development, was based on a range of seeming truths, specific to each region of the world but all deeply rooted in prevailing beliefs: Keynesianism; the myth of catching up through Soviet-style ‘socialism’; and the myth of catching up through third world interdependence. These prevailing myths have been subject to critical examination, but to a limited and little-understood degree.
Throughout the period the third world was the stage for constant confrontation between various ‘developmentalist’ lines of differing degrees of social, ideological, and cultural radicalism. Maoism between 1965 and 1975 represents the apogee. During this period the Soviet Union escaped from its isolation by allying with the rising tide of third world national liberation. This gave the world system the appearance of a bipolarity determined by conflict between two superpowers. It was only a matter of appearances. The Soviet Union gradually wore itself down in the arms race imposed by Washington. The strategic goal of the Soviet Union’s efforts to smash NATO was not to conquer Europe or to export ‘socialism,’ but merely to end U.S. world hegemony and replace it with peaceful coexistence in a multicentric world. The strategy has finally failed.
Throughout the period, Western capital has remained glued to the United States, not through fear of Soviet expansionism—the Western ruling class knew this was an unreal danger despite manipulation of public opinion—but for the profound reason that capitalist accumulation was penetrating on a world scale. Europe and Japan made advances but did not perceive their conflict with the United States as analogous to imperialist conflicts in previous stages of history.
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