The ‘Third World’ term gained legitimacy precisely because both communists and anti-communists deployed it

Evidence

The upshot was that while the politics of Maoism declined, its social and cultural impact among the middle-class intelligentsia remained, in many versions. The fact that the term ‘Third World’ was used as much by regimes of the national bourgeoisie as by the Soviet-style regimes and parties bestowed upon it overlapping layers of self-evident legitimacy, which could be used equally by the communist and the anti-communist, even though the individual theorist who used the term theoretically could not always tell what it meant. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 583

Related

• The term ‘Third World’ fuses three distinct meaning-sets. (similarity 0.85)
• The term Third World derives from the French Third Estate (similarity 0.84)
• The category ‘Third World’ has polemical but no theoretical status (similarity 0.83)
• The term Third World originally named military non-alignment, not geography or modes of production (similarity 0.82)
• Three Worlds Theory subordinated mass movements to national-bourgeois states (similarity 0.80)
• The Third World remains a career opportunity for those it supposedly liberates. (similarity 0.80)
• A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975 (similarity 0.78)
• The Third World has continually collapsed into competing national units (similarity 0.78)