Category: Capitalism

So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies

alemezzadriLeave a comment

In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by builds a strong case against calls to 鈥渦niversalize鈥� Development Studies shifting the focus from 鈥淚nternational鈥� to 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization 鈥� at least in the two influential 鈥減andemic papers鈥� the collective thoroughly revises, one is main-authored by and the other by 鈥� are misguided. As convincingly argued by the collective, these calls tone down the structural historical nature of the Global North-Global South divide; they erase development paradigms and understandings from the Global South and trivialize the nature of challenges emerging from long histories of colonialization and plunder, which still regenerate along global value chains and networks, as authors like have shown, as well as distinct regimes of social reproduction and contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as I explain here and .

Yet, universalizing and globalizing are not the same thing; they can be operated in distinct ways, and through entirely different intellectual projects. Moreover, the discipline of Development Studies, in its mainstream dominant avatar, badly needs 鈥済lobalizing,鈥� given its Eurocentrism 鈥� yet in ways that center the experiences in/of the majority world; think through plural frameworks and locations; and speak to the extraordinarily diverse material realities and practices of power, inequality, and subordination across our planet. Crucially, such experiences, realities, and practices are, at once, the result of trajectories mediated by the Global North-Global South Divide, as emphasized in critical International Development frameworks, yet also always been global in nature 鈥� calling for Global Development lenses 鈥� unlike what narrow development economic theorizing heavily relying on modernization theory has and still suggest/ed. Ultimately, one may wonder: in the debate between 鈥淚nternational鈥� and 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development, why and what exactly do we need to choose?

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Walt Rostow鈥檚 development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow鈥檚 advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.

Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.

To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.

Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.

No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916鈥�2003).

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Amartya Sen鈥檚 Work Shows Us the Human Cost of Capitalist Development

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen鈥檚 own analytical framework doesn鈥檛 go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.

Amartya Sen is one of the most influential thinkers about development in the contemporary world. Since the 1970s, he has published widely across the disciplines of economics and philosophy. He received the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1998. In 2010,聽Time聽magazine rated Sen as one of the world鈥檚 one hundred most influential people.

There is a predominant notion of development trumpeted by international institutions, many academics and journalists, and politicians of most stripes. It holds that economic growth provides the basis for human development. Given that under capitalism, economic growth is for the most part rooted in capital accumulation, 鈥済rowth-first鈥� notions of development are essentially capital-first notions.

This way of thinking places capitalist firms, managers, and the states that back them at the helm of the human development project. It conveniently excuses the ways in which such growth generates, and is often based upon, novel forms of poverty and oppression for workers. Sen鈥檚 writings pose a major challenge to the growth-first/capital-first idea of development.

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The labor of land

ramasalladieng1 Comment

Contemporary  and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a  . A central question is about , and its implications for structural transformation and .

Extraversion, exports and the labor question

In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital were historically linked to the quest for new labor and cash crops (cotton, then groundnut, followed by fresh fruits and vegetables) in frontier markets for Europe. Some of these transformations have been widely documented by Egyptian economist , Senegalese historian  and American historian . In 1819, the Ndiaw Treaty between France and the leaders of the Waalo Kingdom (in northern Senegal) was signed, allowing France to . This agricultural colonization project failed mostly because of the resistance of the inhabitants of the Waalo Kingdom (the Waalo-Waalo) and the inability of  French colonial leaders to secure land concessions they thought were automatically and permanently transferred to them through the treaty. The Waalo leaders, who managed the land on behalf of their community, understood otherwise. This conflicting interpretation on how land is governed became a recurrent source of conflict.

Another problem was the shortage of labor鈥攖he Waalo-Waalo refused forced labor and preferred to cultivate their subsistence crops rather than those for export. This refusal led to the return of clandestine slave trade and related abuses. The insecurity created by Waalo鈥檚 neighbors and the resistance of merchant capital added to the failure. These are key to understanding how various historical dynamics have sedimented to make the Senegal River Valley Region (historical Waalo) the site of the land rush that began in 2007-2008, especially for the production of export fresh fruits and vegetables.

Revisiting this rich history offers us a better understanding of relations of exploitation and contemporary resistance to  by a number of communities in this region. It is a reminder of the violence of primitive accumulation, a violence that is ongoing. Tanzanian historian  puts it well:

The early encounter of Africa with Europe was not commercial involving the exchange of commodities, but rather the unilateral looting of human resources. African slavery was neither a trade, nor a mode of production. It was simply a robbery of a people on a continental scale perpetrated over four centuries through force of arms.

Despite the subsequent attempt to develop new crops in 1826 in Saint-Louis, merchant capital eventually prevailed with the failure of agriculture. As a result, post-colonial leaders 鈥渋nherited a country organized by and for merchant capital鈥� after 1960 as  puts it. In the same vein,  note how merchant capital subsequently established colonial and post-colonial structures of extraction.

Beyond processes of land acquisition, it is important to pay attention to how land becomes capital and how agricultural workers are included, excluded, or rather  into these agri-food networks.For instance, in her 2011  on land grabbing in Southern Africa, Ruth Hall provides a useful typology of agricultural transformations from subsistence to capitalist imperatives. Besides models that are based on the displacement of primary producers and the establishment of large export-oriented agricultural estates, Hall emphasizes 鈥渃ommercialization in situ鈥� and 鈥渙utgrower鈥� schemes whereby petty commodity producers and other land users are incorporated into commercial value chains. This is a further invite to go beyond  in our analyses of the genealogy of  and of processes of exploitation.

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Ha-Joon Chang has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang is a brilliant, best-selling critic of neoliberal orthodoxy. But Chang stops far short of taking the necessary next step: questioning the capitalist system itself.

Ha-Joon Chang is a rarity in the contemporary world: an聽聽who is highly critical of the neoliberal free-market orthodoxy, advocates progressive social change, writes and speaks accessibly, and is very, very popular.

Chang鈥檚 books have sold millions of copies, and he is a regular contributor to mainstream media outlets. According to Chang himself, his aim is not simply to challenge free-market orthodoxy, but also to support, through his work, the kind of 鈥渁ctive economic citizenship鈥� that will demand 鈥渢he right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.鈥�

While socialists can learn a lot from Ha-Joon Chang鈥檚 work, we also need to read it critically and identify some of the gaps in his thinking. Chang鈥檚 self-professed aspiration is to promote an alternative form of capitalism, but our goal should be to develop an alternative聽迟辞听capitalism.

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Beating around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism

G眉ney I艧谋kara5 Comments

It is in vogue nowadays to describe the multifaceted and intertwined crises of capitalism without referring to capitalism itself. Obscure jargon of 鈥榦verlapping emergencies鈥� and 鈥榩olycrisis鈥� are brought up to describe the complexity of the situation, and they serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations. This short piece discusses the content, function, and limits of these evasive practices with concrete examples.

A Hodgepodge of Risks

鈥淎 polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises” writes Adam Tooze, it is rather a situation 鈥渨here the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts鈥� (Tooze 2022a). Even at first sight, he is able to count seven radical challenges on the radar, including Covid, inflation, recession, hunger crisis, climate crisis, nuclear escalation, and a 鈥楾rumpite鈥� Republican Party storming back to power.

Former long-time Harvard President, Larry Summers celebrates the term polycrisis for its capacity to capture the many aspects at stake, and adds: 鈥淚 can remember previous moments of equal or even greater gravity for the world economy, but I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross-currents as there are right now鈥� (Summers 2022). Make no mistake, the approval comes from a life-time mouthpiece of the establishment, foe of the working classes and the oppressed, frank enough to as the then Chief Economist of the World Bank that 鈥渢he economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable鈥�.   

In Tooze鈥檚 view, in the 1970s, too much or too little growth, or late capitalism could be shown as the ultimate source of the problems at hand depending on one鈥檚 political position. What makes the current moment distinctive is the fact that 鈥渋t no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause鈥� (Tooze 2022b). He is thus quite explicit that one should avoid the use of grand narratives, or, in line with that, the designation of the capitalist mode of production as the root cause of the radical challenges upon us.

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Marx and Colonialism

luguangmingLeave a comment

It is widely believed that Marx did not systematically consider the role of colonialism within the process of capital accumulation. According 迟辞听, Marx concentrated on a self-closed national economy in his main work. Although he did mention colonialism in Part 8 of聽Capital聽Volume 1 on the so-called primitive accumulation, this would only belong to a pre-history of capital, not to its everyday development. Based on a similar assumption, some postcolonial scholars criticise Marx for being Eurocentric, even a complicit supporter of Western imperialism, who ignored the agency of non-Western people.

If we read some  we could think that they are right. How can we explain otherwise Marx and Engels praising the role of the bourgeoisie drawing even the most barbarian nations into civilisation or the view that the liberation of colonised peoples depended on the victory of the revolution in Europe?

Before I start, let me make a short premise. In my first book I read Marx鈥檚 Capital in the light of his writings and articles on Ireland, China, India, Russia, and the American Civil War. At the time I believed that Marx only published a significant, but still limited amount of writings on the colonial question, those available in the Collected Works and in collections like Marx & Colonialism. But then in 2007 I worked at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, contributing to the complete edition of Marx鈥檚 and Engels鈥檚 writings. I thus 鈥渄iscovered鈥� some of Marx鈥檚 20,000 print page long notebooks (just to give you an idea, the printed notebooks alone would look like a new Collected Works). These writings show that Marx was interested in colonialism all his life, including when he wrote the Manifesto.

What came out of my reading? Let me start with the question of Marx鈥檚 field of analysis in聽Capital聽Volume 1. To analyse capital reproduction 鈥榠n its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances鈥�, Marx treats the world of commerce as one nation (1976: 727) and presupposes the full worldwide imposition of the capitalist mode of production. Does this mean that Marx analysed a 鈥渟elf-enclosed national economy鈥� as Harvey and others believe? In my view, this abstraction means exactly the opposite. Marx鈥檚 positing a coincidence between the national and global levels is a premise for conceptualising the world market, which includes both internal and foreign markets of all nations participating in it. This abstraction makes it possible to include expansionism into the analysis of capital accumulation. In this framework, a country鈥檚 economic system is not confined within its national borders but consists of all production branches where capital is freely transferable, including the colonies and dependent economies.

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Who鈥檚 in control? Wall Street Consensus, state capitalism, and spatialised industrial policy

Ilias ALAMI1 Comment

By Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami and Nick Jepson

Recent trends may well have puzzled critical observers of global development policy. On the one hand, we witness the rise of聽what Daniela Gabor has aptly termed聽the聽鈥�,鈥櫬燼n emerging聽paradigm聽promoting聽the mobilisation of private finance as a developmental priority.聽Southern states are encouraged 迟辞听re-engineer聽their聽domestic financial systems around securities and derivatives markets, create聽鈥榠nvestable鈥� opportunities in聽sectors such as聽infrastructure, water, climate adaptation, health and education, as well as聽deploy聽policies that聽specifically 鈥榙e-risk鈥櫬爄nvestment聽for global investors. In this formulation Southern states are subordinated to global financial capital and their policy space is significantly constrained.

On the other hand, however, we observe a tendency towards , wherein states are increasingly active within markets, as entrepreneurs and owners of capital as well as regulatory agents in the world economy. Across the income spectrum states have embraced the role of agents of transformation and development. In the , one way these trends manifest is in the proliferation of new modalities of spatialised industrial policy underpinned by . Examples include the China鈥揚akistan Economic Corridor, Indonesia Vision 2045, the Plan S茅n茅gal 脡mergent, Morocco鈥檚 New Development Model, and the developmental aspects of Mexico鈥檚 Fourth Transformation such as the Tehuantepec Isthmus Interoceanic Corridor. Some of these plans have benefitted from the rise of China and its multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which traditional development actors now increasingly seek to counter by providing .

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