Vietnam-era radicalism conflated wars of liberation with bourgeois state consolidation

Evidence

In the Anglo-American academy, the radicalizing impact came in the second phase of decolonization – ushered in, schematically speaking, by the Cuban Revolution (1958-9), Algerian independence (1962) and the onset of the Third Indochina War with the introduction of American troops during the Kennedy Administration. The Vietnam War was, of course, the central fact of the whole of this second phase, but the phase had two distinct and principal aspects: revolutionary wars of national liberation, mainly in countries of Indochina and Southern Africa, on the one hand; and, on the other, the consolidation of the national-bourgeois state in the majority of the Asian and African states that had been newly constituted as sovereign nations, where the expanding dynamic of global capitalism was bringing unprecedented growth and wealth to the newly dominant classes. This fundamental distinction between the revolutionary project in the countries under siege and of national-bourgeois consolidation in the rest was often erased from the dissenting ideologies that arose in the Anglo-American academy – except, of course, in those relatively small groups that had Marxist leanings or communist affiliation. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 68

Related

• Postcolonial Anglo-American academy discourse erased a structural split between revolutionary and national-bourgeois decolonization. (similarity 0.84)
• Radical theory shifted from socialist revolution to Third-Worldist nationalism as national bourgeoisies consolidated (similarity 0.81)
• Vietnam convinced elites that mass armies fueled domestic radicalization. (similarity 0.80)
• Post-1968 Western radicalism abandoned belief in domestic socialist revolution (similarity 0.80)
• French colonial wars, not Asian revolutions, first radicalized the metropolitan intelligentsia (similarity 0.79)
• French colonial defeats and occupation, not Asian decolonization, radicalized Western literary theory (similarity 0.79)
• Socialist revolutions required sidelining the national bourgeoisie during anti-colonial struggle (similarity 0.79)
• Western literary theory’s political turn originated in crises from anti-colonial wars (similarity 0.79)
• Settler-decimated or sidelined bourgeoisies let colonial struggles converge with socialist revolution (similarity 0.78)