Nationalism in the Third World & the idea of a Fourth Political Theory

The anti-imperialist struggle, in political contemporaneity, possesses a radically third-worldly, patriotic, anti-systemic and multipolar characteristic.

The political blocks underlying the current conflicts do not consist of all those old ideological blocks which used to dispute hegemony during the Second World War and, subsequently, during the Cold War anymore. Said in a different way, politics in concrete, today, is not expressed anymore through a tri-partition between American liberalism, Soviet communism and Italo-German fascism, and much less between a dual division between a capitalist block and a socialist block.

With the American liberalism’s victory over its anti-liberal adversaries, global hegemony went from a virtual scale to a real scale: the expansionist Western ideology, led by the USA and materially backed by the strategic-military power of NATO, did not find any more obstacles for establishing their project of world domination: growing export of monopolies towards underdeveloped countries with the end goal of enjoying cheap labor and maximizing capitalist profits; strategic military interventions in nation-States; fomenting color revolutions1 in order to topple uncomfortable governments; instrumentalization of terrorist groups in the Middle East with the same goal; unilateral economic sanctions; control of the mediatic-cultural apparatus with the goal of promoting modern liberal democracy as the only model of political organization possible and plausible to be applied to all peoples around the world: surreptitious criminalization of those who oppose such model.

It was the proclamation of the imperative of the Economy (and liberal dogma) as Destiny. It was The End of History of which Francis Fukuyama and American neoconservatives did talk about.

But was History already over?

Just as the deceased Commander Hugo Chavez observed, in the very same year when Francis Fukuyama published his essay on The End of History, in 1989, there was a massive revolt led by Caracas popular sectors2, against a neoliberal structural adjustment package imposed by then president Carlos Andrés Pérez, who answered this protests with violence, causing death to hundreds of Venezuelans. It was the rebellion of the people after seeing their fate being toyed with in the sphere of bourgeois politics. Similar revolts happened throughout the world in subsequent years, with an emphasis on the Zapatista uprising in 1994.

In that same sense, new political forces emerged in order to face off the tyranny of the global West and, as fires, in order to set ablaze the various forms of domination from imperialism. While some of these forces trace back to historical periods from before Western hegemony and although they would have been influenced, in many layers, by the ideologies defeated by liberalism, such forces no longer fit the ideographic criteria of modern anti-liberal ideologies. They were syntheses, reconfigurations, transmutations, fusions, sui generis subversive ideologies which had something in common: third-world nationalism, the patriotic impetus for national liberation and sharing a common enemy.

We are talking about ideologies such as Chavism in Venezuela, undoubtedly a socialist patriotic ideology, guided by Hugo Chávez’ political creativity, which managed to forge a Fourth Way in relation to liberal capitalism, to communism and to chauvinistic nationalism, reconciling its Peronist* and Velasquist* influences with the perspective of a Communal State based in the productive autonomy of workers. Its goal? As it was outlined in his Plan de la Patria3, to establish a multipolar and pluricentric order and to effectively build a socialism founded upon the patriotic values of Venezuela.

Or Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya, political doctrine influenced by the ideologies of the Second and Third Position, but which also tried to forge a Fourth Way in relation to these: without stopping to recognize the contemporaneity of class the struggle and the preeminence of the nation, Gaddafi conferred the People, and only to this one, organized in Popular Committees, the role of historic agent and of political subject. Not the working class by itself neither the nation by itself, but the People. Its goal? To create a Social State based in organic democracy, in natural socialism and in Tradition (which he identifies, in his Green Book, as the natural law that guided societies before the rise of classes).

And regarding Hezbollah in Lebanon? Shia and, therefore, identitarian organization: anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, one of the major rocks in the West shoes’ regarding the Middle East. Its Manifesto4 calls to all the oppressed people of Lebanon and the world to rise in arms against the virus of Americanism. Its goal? To free Lebanese Muslims from puppet governments and to establish a State based upon Islamic values and anti-capitalist & anti-usury social justice.

We could mention the Ba’ath from Syria, the last representative of pan-Arabic nationalism, born from an ideological national-revolutionary synthesis, influenced by communism and the Third Position, as an authentic patriotic socialism directed by Arabs, rejecting both Marxism and petty-bourgeois chauvinism.

To sum up, even after the fall of communist and nationalist regimes, the struggle continued and came to be modulated by another logic. No longer the logic of modern ideologies, but the metric of realpolitik, in a way that, today, the only real struggle is the one waged by the peoples of the world, with their different overtones, against globalism, representing the long-term interests of the West. Meaning, between Dissent (periphery) and Conformity (center).

The resistance to status quo in contemporaneity is identitarian and over here, in our land, naturally third-worldly. Third-world nationalism is the instantiation of the idea of the Fourth Political Theory in practice in the countries of the so-called “Third World”.

There are only two options. There are only two sides from which we can take position. One has to be with one of these, automatically you are against the other and vice-versa. You must choose your option: we have already chosen ours.

The historical destiny of Brazil, regarding Fatherland, depends diametrically from which side will it pick: with Conformity or with Dissent. If it chooses Conformity, it will no longer exist as a project – it will be eternally doomed to be a bankers’ colony.

But if it chooses Dissent, for sovereignty, for the assumption of its own historical destiny, then it will have to follow the path of a Revolution that destroys and criminalizes the economic elite and that removes all right of political representation from the aspirations of the oligarchies. We need a new Vargas, of a personality that mocks, that gloats sincerely from the heart, with honest scorn, of the formal political process that exists in Brazil. This should be our path for Dissent.

Long live the anti-globalist international solidarity!

Long live the resistance of the Peoples!

Notes

“Colour revolution” in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
“Chavista Theory of Transition towards the Communal State” by Frederick B. Mills. https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11466
“Plan de la Patria” in Wikipedia. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_de_la_Patria
“The New Hezbollah Manifesto” by Hezbollah, found at the Instituto Brasil Israel. http://institutobrasilisrael.org/cms/assets/uploads/_BIBLIOTECA/_PDF/ter...
* Peronist means related to the legacy of Argentinian president Juan Domingo Perón
* Velasquist means related to the legacy of Peruvian president Juan Velasco Alvarado

Translated by Zero Schizo