ABSTRACT

Regardless of how Third World nations themselves viewed the matter (an issue treated only as a regrettable infelicity), the macro logic of the world economy, locked now in a life-and-death struggle between a resurgent (but restructured) Western capitalism (with the forced admission of defeated Japan into its ranks) and a militarily powerful Eastern-bloc socialism, dictated that the Third World would now be destined to be the pawn in a deadly East-West struggle for the hearts, minds, factories, and paddyfields of the ex-colonies.3 The future of both capitalism and socialism appeared to rest on the uncertain backs of the restless, anarchic, and effulgent masses in Asia and Africa, still staggering unsteadily after the long, deep, dark, and dismal slumber of colonial rule. Their "development"-in directions suitable to either capitalist or socialist agendaswas too important a matter to be left to the nations themselves or to the class struggles therein. While the USSR quietly went about building and bolstering anti-imperialist forces in these regions, Western governments and agencies-far richer than the Soviets and almost infinitely more sophisticated in their array of techniques-went about toppling governments and imposing procapitalist (or, more simply, pro-Western) dictatorships wherever possible, through means fair, foul, and unspeakable.4 But such clandestine and covert activities required more positive backstopping. Accordingly, Western economic policy-a potent adjunct of what might be termed North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign policywas now directed, with the assistance of a dozen newly created "international" agencies, to assure the conditions of capitalist reproduction in the Third World. The USSR had not merely provided the political and military provocation for decolonization; it had also, by dint of the example of its own internal transformation, provided the nucleus ofthe idea of a "planned" or "guided" development (in both theory and practice) that would be seized upon eagerly by developmentmongers who anxiously sought to plan (hastily) for capitalism in the periphery.5