The three worlds

Great changes have occurred in the world situation in the past decade and more. The Third World countries are intensifying their struggle for genuine economic and political independence from foreign imperialism. West European countries and Japan are increasingly challenging the United States in the world capitalist market. The United States has been decisively defeated in Indochina. Since the mid-sixties the Soviet Union has taken a course of global expansionism backed by growing military power. The United States is now in strategic decline, and Soviet social-imperialism is on the strategic offensive. The strategic focus of the intensifying contention between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, is in Europe. Soviet moves in the Middle East and Africa, particularly in Angola, Zaire and the Horn of Africa, are aimed at outflanking Europe.

The global rivalry of the two superpowers is driving the world forward to a new world war. There is no detente in the world. Of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union constitutes the greater danger to world peace: it is the younger rising imperialism whose nature is not yet comprehended clearly by the world's peoples and which is challenging the US in every corner of the world.

With the factors for both revolution and world war developing simultaneously, revolutionaries throughout the world are faced with a dual task; on the one hand, they must promote the great historical current of our times—countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people want revolution; on the other hand, they must make use of inter-imperialist contradictions in an attempt to slowdown the rate at which the strategic balance of power moves in favour of Soviet social-imperialism—the faster it moves towards the Soviet Union, the sooner will the world war come.

It was Mao Tsetung who solved the problem of this dual task. Analysing what actually exists, rather than what progressive people would like to exist, Mao Tsetung advanced his strategic concept of the three worlds.

The world is now divided as follows:

The First World. The two superpowers. A super power is an imperialist country which everywhere subjects other countries to its aggression, interference, control, subversion or plunder and strives for world domination.

The Second World. Developed capitalist countries and certain revisionist countries such as Britain, New Zealand, West Germany, East Germany, Australia, Japan and so on.

The Third World. Countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia which have a common heritage of problems arising out of past or present semi-colonial colonial or neo-colonial control. Amongst them are included socialist countries, newly independent countries and countries which are still nationally oppressed. The strategic concept of the three words provides the broadest possible international united front against the two superpowers. It brings out the decisive role of the Third World countries in combatting the two superpowers.

The Third World countries bear the main brunt of superpower policies of exploitation, oppression, agression and war. The Third World is the main force in combatting the two superpowers—its drive for economic and political independence is breaking up the world system of imperialism and social-imperialism.

The Second World countries often oppress and exploit other countries, particularly those in the Third World, but they themselves are subject to the interference and bullying of the two superpower. Increasingly they are finding common ground with the Third World countries in opposing superpower hegmonism.

Important examples are the Lome convention and the support fiven by some West European countries for the common fund for the stabilisation of commodity prices. Under the Lome convention certain countries in Africa, the Carribbean and the Pacific have been given free entry into the EEC for their industrial products and almost all their agricultural exports are eligible for duty-free or quota-free entry. The Third World countries in return agree that imports from EEC countries are accorded no less favourable treatment than imports from other countries.