The "Global South" is among the invisible organizations that is seamlessly aligned with the OIC, providing UN dominance. It is the Marxist component of the Marxist/IM alliance that most national security experts have never heard of even as they work tirelessly to undermine the… https://t.co/lw9ifjKWrP

— Stephen Coughlin (@S_Coughlin_DC) September 2, 2026

Stephen Kotkin is the speaker.His books and Interviews.

3rd world countries are no longer referred to as 3rd world, but referred to as the Global South.  The man who gave us the term was Ogelsby.  He was president of the Students for a Democratic Society and he was anti-Vietnam War.  So he said "the Global North is dominating the Global South," and something must be done.  He was expelled from the Students for a Democratic Society.  He was a working class kid and he was expelled for being trapped in our early bourgeoisie stage and failing to advance to a Marxist Leninist.  So there's your coinage; it died, it went nowhere.  It was resurrected by, of all people, Willy Brandt., the first Democratic-Socialist Chancellor since 1930.  And Willy Brandt was asked by Robert McNamara to chair a commission.  Robert McNamara was the architect of the Vietnam War when Carl Ogelsby coined the "global south."  And the Willy Brandt Commission came up with a line, called "The Brandt Line."  It was not the South, North on the equator; it was where Willy Brandt decided the line should be.  It's forgotten that line, but that's when the term "Global South" came into circulation.  And the idea was that the global order would be a social democracy, and everybody north of the line would send their tax receipts south of the line.  It would be a massive transfer of wealth.  That was the 

Willy Brandt Commission.  You can Google it now and read it.  When he came up with this Commission, the world turned away from Social Democracy right at that moment, including Sweden in many ways.  Turning back toward market principles, and one could go on.  So the Willy Brandt thing went kaput; didn't work.  None of this recommendations were implemented.  

Okay, so that's the framework we're working in.  Go right ahead.  You like that framework?  I don't like that framework.  I could give you many more details, silly as heyr are.  Now we have this amazing erudition on the pre-world systems.  Tremendous scholarship that you heard on the stage yesterday and today.  William Dalrymple, Golden Road as opposed to the Silk Road wasn't actually made out of silk; there was no silk on the Silk Road.  It wasn't Chinese, it was Central Asian.  Anyway, India was more central to trade than China.  Amazing book,  Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, 1991 [and other books].  And then, of course, Janet Abu Lughod on pre-Wallerstein.  There is this Rebellion Marxism of Wallerstein modes of production and other things.  I still don't know what they are.  Yes, I still don't know and I've read more about modes of production than anybody in this room.  And so she comes up with a world system that predates the European one.  So if people trade, it's a world system.  If there are circuits of trade, it's a world system.  I don't think so.  I don't think that's a world system whether you like it or not.

And then we had Aisha who transformed the literature by bringing us to political order of the Mongols.