What is the First World?

[Fawkes]

Lately, with all the talks about the first world and third world, I've been wondering what makes one nation a first world nation and another a third world. How do you define the two terms?

[Knight of Cydonia]

i think it's all about their influence to the world.i.e the US, it has so much influence to the world wide cause UN bases is there in US, and the US is had so much influence to the world wide, so that's make the US categorized in the first world.and as for the third world, is a nations that had lesser influence to the world.

that as far as i know, any criticize?

[Pirate Utopian]

i would say west & central europe, Japan and north-america.
i have a related question, if that's the 1st world and africa, asia, etc... is the 3rd world, what is the 2nd world?

[Fawkes]

I think the second world was the Communist bloc.

[Coggeh]

Developing countries , e.g china ..... cuba ... countries with a certain sustainable economy but not particularly first world.

[RebelDog]

The first world is a group nations who have industrialised previous to the 2nd and third world and thus control the latter two to a certain degree.

[More Fire for the People]

The first world is the colonial and neo-colonial countries — Euro-America and Japan.

[Guerrilla22]

The terms first world and second world were coined by the US government during the cold war. The first world was of course, the west and the second world was used to describe countries in the eastern bloc. later India coined the term "third world" to describe countries in the non-aligned movement, however the term has been twisted over the years and now most people incorrectly use the term to describe lesser developed countries. The terms are all outdated and people should stop using them. The correct terms are peripheral, semi-peripheral and lesser developed countries.

[Vargha Poralli]

All this first world second world and third world are really malicious categorizations by the cold war politicians to divide the people and impose their own hegemony.

All the Countries which claimed to uphold "FREEDOM" and "DEMOCRACY" weere categorised as the first.

The ones which claimed to uphold "COMMUNISM" comes in to second.

The ones which wanted to receive numerous investment(Financial and Other) at the same time wanted to appease their workers created a third way out and formed the NAM, categorised themselves as the third world.

Regardless of these division workers of the all the three worlds were never better.


Currently these terms really hold no meaning. The second world had collapsed with the demise of Stalinism and fall of USSR.

So this is the first thing we should leave behind.Marx called for workers of the world to unite to defeat capitalism not first or third worlds.

For us revleft members we should stop stupid threads discussing where communism will be first achieved and go on to debate whether in First world or Third world.