Recently saw a discussion in regards to "Third Worldism" as in MLM + unequal exchange (a non-Wallerstinian branch of world systems theory) having grown in influence in the anglophone/western, largely online, "communist" spaces.
Here is my dialectical engagement, as they were on to something important, not usually recognized, but also partially incorrect. I attempt to correct it ITT.
Unequal exchange, Mao/Chinese aesthetics and purely performative MLM rhetoric
has grown in recent years… But with time comes change.
The original 90s ThirdWorldism "movement", centered in north-america diverged from MLM on a variety of theoretical issues, most crucially the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. They supplemented their divergence with integrating post-Marxist turns happening in word-systems theory (which was ongoing in western academia between the 80s and 90s). As ""Maoism" ThirdWorldism" largely accomplished nothing, other than maybe increasing confusion in the communist movement during the era of blackest reaction, we mostly remember them by their cartoony writing and online media available through archives from that era.
So if 90s Third Worldism was a north-american revisionist offshoot from MLM which integrated non-Wallerstinian unequal exchange theory and rejecting revolution in the imperial core for rhetorical "support" of [far off, peripheral countries]… What are the particularities of the contemporary expression?
2020s Third Worldism can be observed as being a north-american right-wing revisionist movement which retains both the non-Wallerstinian unequal exchange theory and the purely symbolic appeals to Mao, but now replacing the "MLM" pretender framing for the simpler, safer state ideology of social-imperialist China; that also just so happens to feign adherence to 'Mao Zedong Thought', even after it was systematically replaced with the Bukharinist-Dengist capitulationist counterrevolution. which is continued today, the true basis for Xi Jinping Thought, as the bureaucrat-monopoly capitalist heading the political line of the party has only deepened the cementation of a new pole in the capitalist imperialist world system since Deng, when neither as many NEZ, stock markets, overall % of bourgeois in the party or billionaires existed in China. Mao Zedong Thought lives on in the rural and urban areas of any militant area of the
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