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Balderdash. More unthinking dogma from some left-wing kook who hasn't actually looked out his window to see what the Third World actually does.

The most obvious example of a third-world country trying to adopt a first-world consumer model is China. Parts of India are doing this too.

Western consumerism isn't hindering them; if anything Western consumerism is aiding their modernization in two ways: by making resources available and by providing markets by which goods can be sold that raise cash for modernization (i.e., providing trade opportunities so that third world countries can acquire goods they cannot yet manufacturer for themselves).

The usual tired complaint about resources is that the West is consuming so much oil that there is none left for anyone else. This is nonsense and directly contradicts the current world oil markets with respect to China. China is able to acquire oil with the same degree of effort and cost as the Western consumers, and the fact that the oil is available at all is due to consumer demand having been driving infrastructure development. China is able to buy from oilfields that would not be available in the short term were it not for Western consumer demand.

(in other words, it's not the case that but for Western consumerism the Third World would be able to buy North Sea oil at $5/barrel: without Western consumerism that oil would not be available at all, because no one would have developed the extraction infrastructure)

And where is China getting the cash to fund their modernization? Western consumers! Without Western consumers China would have far fewer opportunities for trade, and would have far less cash to buy technologies and finished goods needed to modernize. Being able to sell clothes to Western consumers is what raises the cash to buy machine tools, etc.

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All good points, can't argue with that.