Socialism as Praxis: 'Second World'-'Third World' Relations and the Evolution of the Socialist Model During the Cold War

During the Cold War, the developing countries of the Global South, then called the “Third World,” provided a laboratory for socialist experimentation. This came at a time when anticommunist politics in the First World and bureaucratic resistance in the Second World made socialist experimentation more difficult in the Global North. What took place in the Third World, however, was not merely a struggle for aid and resources, or an attempt to propagate existing models – it was a global process of conversation and iteration about how to adapt socialism to conditions that neither Marx nor Lenin had foreseen.  By the end of the Cold War, socialists the world over were mining the lessons learned in these Third World experiments as they sought to find a way forward.

Jeremy Friedman is an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School.  Previously he was the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.  He received his PhD in History from Princeton in 2011 and has published two books, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Split in the Third World" (UNC Press, 2015) and "Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World" (Harvard University Press, 2022).