The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies (Routledge Critical Development Studies) [2 ed.] 0367478862, 9780367478865

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‘In this updated and expanded edition across over 40 chapters, this volume is the “go to” source for scholars and students of critical development studies. It provides the highest levels of scholarship and knowledge around the history, content and scope of the field with relevance for challenging and posing contemporary policy and activism.’ Ben Fine, Emeritus Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK ‘Given the aspirations for social, economic and climate justice, the need for critical, interdisciplinary knowledge that points us toward bold alternatives has never been greater.This Essential Guide offers an invaluable resource in this regard. Its chronicling of the trajectory of development studies will be particularly useful to contemporary scholars to see their ideas in a historical context.’ Ananya Mukherjee Reed, Professor, Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada; Co-​editor, Canadian Journal of Development Studies ‘The second edition of The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies offers a theoretically sophisticated, comprehensive and highly accessible guide to the growing field of international development studies from a critical perspective. It is critical in two senses: critical of mainstream development thought, while at the same time scrutinising popular ideas on alternatives. It will be an indispensable guide for academic researchers (students and senior scholars) as well as activists and development policy practitioners.’ Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Professor of Agrarian Studies, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Netherlands ‘We have not reached the end of history but the story of progress, its errors and criticisms, is the most important one in social science. Here critical development scholars have both charted and navigated an extensive archipelago of ideas to produce this guide. This updated and expanded edition covers many crucial debates and is indispensable.’ Barbara Harriss-​White, FAcSS, Emeritus Professor and Fellow,Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK

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The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies

The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies provides an up-​to-​date and authoritative introduction to the field, challenging mainstream development discourse and the assumptions that underlie it. Critical development studies lays bare the economic, political, social, and environmental crises that characterise the current global capitalist system, proposing instead systemic change and different pathways for moving beyond capitalism into a new world of genuine progress where economic and social justice and ecological integrity prevail. In this book, the authors challenge market-​driven, neoliberal development agendas, incorporating analyses of class, gender, race, and the dynamics of uneven capitalist development. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition includes: • • • •

18 new chapters, including on topics such as philanthrocapitalism, race, the energy transition, Indigenous resistance and resilience, and global health Expanded global coverage, including new chapters on South Africa, North Africa, and the Gulf Arab states A new section on resistance and alternatives Additional pedagogical features, including a glossary of key terms, discussion questions, and expanded guides for further reading.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of global development, political science, sociology, economics, gender studies, geography, history, anthropology, agrarian studies, international political economy, and area studies. It will also be an important resource for development researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Henry Veltmeyer is Senior Research Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, and Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies (IDS) at Saint Mary’s University, Canada. Paul Bowles is Professor of Global Studies and Economics at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.

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Routledge Critical Development Studies Series Editors Henry Veltmeyer is co-​chair of the Critical Development Studies (CDS) network, Senior Research Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, and Professor Emeritus at Saint Mary’s University, Canada Paul Bowles is Professor of Global Studies and Economics at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), Canada Elisa van Wayenberge is Lecturer in Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK The global crisis, coming at the end of three decades of uneven capitalist development and neoliberal globalisation that have devastated the economies and societies of people across the world, especially in the developing societies of the Global South, cries out for a more critical, proactive approach to the study of international development. The challenge of creating and disseminating such an approach, to provide the study of international development with a critical edge, is the project of a global network of activist development scholars concerned and engaged in using their research and writings to help effect transformative social change that might lead to a better world. This series will provide a forum and outlet for the publication of books in the broad interdisciplinary field of critical development studies—​to generate new knowledge that can be used to promote transformative change and alternative development. The editors of the series welcome the submission of original manuscripts that focus on issues of concern to the growing worldwide community of activist scholars in this field. To submit proposals, please contact the Development Studies Editor, Helena Hurd ([email protected]). 9. Deconstructing Human Development From the Washington Consensus to the 2030 Agenda Juan Telleria 10. Revolutions in Learning and Education from India Pathways towards the Pluriverse Christoph Neusiedl 11. Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America Edited by Ben M. McKay, Alberto Alonso-​Fradejas and Arturo Ezquerro-​Cañete 12. The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies (2nd Ed.) Edited by Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​ Critical-​Development-​Studies/​book-​series/​RCDS

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The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies Second Edition Edited by Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles

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Second edition published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2018 British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Veltmeyer, Henry, editor. | Bowles, Paul, editor. Title: The essential guide to critical development studies / edited by Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge critical development studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021014224 (print) | LCCN 2021014225 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Economic development. | Development economics. | Social change–Economic aspects. Classification: LCC HD82 .E757 2022 (print) | LCC HD82 (ebook) | DDC 338.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014224 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014225 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47886-​5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47885-​8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​03718-​7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003037187 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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The editors dedicate this book to Kari Polanyi Levitt, Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field of international development studies and her unwavering commitment to the need for a critical perspective. As a leading figure in critical development studies, she continues to be a source of inspiration for successive generations of students and scholars in many countries, especially in Canada and the Caribbean, the locus of so much of her most important work and writings.

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Contents

List of figures and tables  About the authors  Acknowledgements  Abbreviations and acronyms 

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Critical development studies: An introduction 

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1 Introduction to critical development studies: Four characteristics with illustrations from seven decades 

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PAU L B OW LE S AND HE NRY VE LTME Y E R

PART I

History as development 

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2 Unravelling the canvas of history 

13

K A RI P O L ANY I LE VI TT

PART II

Thinking critically about development 

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3 Critical development theory: Results and prospects 

23

RO N A LD O M UNCK

4 Race in/​and development 

31

RO B T E L N E AJAI PAI LE Y

5 Development theory: The Latin American pivot 

40

C RI STÓ BAL KAY

6 Postdevelopment and other critiques of development  E D UARD O G U DY NAS

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7 Feminist contributions to critical development studies 

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F E R N A N DA WAND E RLE Y

PART III

System dynamics: Capitalism, imperialism, development, and globalisation  8 Capitalism and crises 

65 67

R AD H I K A DE SAI

9 Development, capitalism, imperialism, globalisation: A tale of four concepts 

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H E N RY V E LTME Y E R

10 Globalisation versus development: Beyond dualism 

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S. A. H A M E D HO SSE I NI AND BARRY K . GI LLS

11 Philanthrocapitalism and development 

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A N D RE W MUSHI TA AND CARO L THO MPSO N

12 The migration–​development nexus in the neoliberal era 

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R AÚ L D E LGAD O WI SE

PART IV

Policy configurations for development 

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13 The post-​Washington consensus 

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E L I SA VA N WAE Y E NB E RGE

14 International cooperation for development 

121

P E TE R K RAGE LUND

15 The developmental state, globalisation, and structural transformations 

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PAU L B OW LE S

16 Local economic development, microcredit, and financial inclusion 

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M I L F O R D BATE MAN

PART V

Inside the BRICS 

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17 Brazil: Development strategies and peripheral conditions 

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A N A G A RCI A AND MI GUE L B O RBA D E SÁ

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Contents  xi

18 India: Critical issues of a ‘tortuous transition’ 

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JO H N H A RRI SS

19 Interrogating the China model of development 

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Y I N -​WA H C HU AND ALVI N Y. SO

20 South Africa: An economy of extremes 

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SAM A SH M AN

PART VI

Poverty, inequalities, and development dynamics 

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21 Development: Class matters 

181

H E N RY V E LT ME Y E R

22 The dynamics of poverty production: A political economy perspective for the SDGs era 

189

ALB E RTO D. CI MADAMO RE

23 Poverty analysis through a gender lens 

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N A I LA K AB E ER

24 Women, work, and gender inequalities: with illustrations from Cambodia and China 

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F I O N A M AC PHAI L

25 Health inequalities and development in a global context 

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TE D SC H RE CK E R

PART VII

Capital, labour and the state 

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26 Labour and development 

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B E N JA M I N SE LWY N

27 The triangle of underdevelopment: Technology, patents, and monopoly  233 E D G A R Z ÁYAGO LAU

28 The making of the new Chinese working class 

241

P U N N GAI

29 Labour and development in Latin America  SU SAN SP RO NK

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30 Class and state formation in the Gulf Arab states 

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A DA M H A NI E H

PART VIII

Dynamics of agrarian change and urban development 

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31 Contemporary dynamics of agrarian change 

267

C R I STÓ BAL K AY

32 Food regimes and agrarian questions 

275

A . H A RO O N AK RAM-​L O D HI

33 Urban development in the Global South 

284

C H A RM AI N LE VY AND ALI CE MO URA

34 Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism 

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L E AN D RO V E RGARA-​C AMUS

PART IX

Development, climate change, and the environment 

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35 Eco-​Marxist lenses for viewing human–​nature relations 

303

DARC Y T E TRE AULT

36 Climate change and development 

311

M A RC U S TAY LO R

37 The energy transition and the Global South 

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L E AN D RO V E RGARA-​C AMUS

38 The political ecology of extractivism in North Africa 

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H A M ZA H A MO UCHE NE

PART X

Resistances and alternatives 

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39 Understanding the rise of the Far Right, and what to do about it 

337

WA LD E N B E LLO

40 Rural dispossession and resistance in Asia and Africa  DIP KAPOOR

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41 Extractive capitalism and the resistance in Latin America 

350

RAÚ L Z I B E C HI

42 Colonialism’s miasmas: Indigenous resistance and resilience 

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M AK E R E S T E WART-​H ARAWI RA

43 Workers’ control and self-​management 

366

DA RI O AZZE LLI NI

44 Communitarian revolutions: Ecological economics from below 

374

DAV I D BARK I N

Conclusion 

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45 Moving towards another world: possibilities and pitfalls 

385

H E N RY V E LT ME Y E R

Glossary of terms Index

392 405

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Figures and tables

Figures 12.1 The counter-​hegemonic/​Southern perspective: key analytical dimensions 25.1 Gradient in under-​5 mortality rate (U5MR), by income quintile, selected low-​and middle-​income countries

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Tables 8.1 18.1 18.2 18.3 21.1

Crises by source and form Independent India’s decadal growth rates India: employment by sectors (% of total) Two analyses of phases of India’s economic growth Income distribution, percentage share, and Gini coefficient for selected Latin American countries, 1990–​2010 22.1 The international political economy of poverty production: a two-​level simplified model 32.1 Land Gini coefficients for selected countries for various years in the 21st century

72 156 157 158 184 191 279

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About the authors

A. Haroon Akram-​Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of Economics and International Development Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada; a former Fellow of Food First, the Institute for Food and Development Policy; and has adjunct appointments in Canadian, American, and Mexican universities. He is also the Editor-​in-​Chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies and an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. He does extensive advisory work for UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme. Email: [email protected]. Sam Ashman is Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg where she is director of the University of Johannesburg–​Institute for Economic Development and Planning (UJ-​IDEP) MPhil in industrial policy programme. Her research focuses on the financialisation of the world economy and its various impacts—​on firm behaviour, patterns of development, the shaping of economic and social policy, and the worsening of inequality. She also researches industrial policy and development issues, including the impact of global value chains, the evolving political economy of South Africa, and the history and philosophy of economics and political economy. Dario Azzellini is Professor in Development Studies at Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, and Visiting Fellow at the Latin American Studies Program of Cornell University. He received his PhD in political science from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and his PhD in sociology from Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has lectured in development sociology at Cornell University and was assistant professor at Johannes Kepler University, Linz,Austria. He has published more than 20 books, numerous other writings, and made 11 documentary films in the areas of critical labour studies and global social change with a special focus on Latin America and Europe, including Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (2017); They Can’t Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (2014); The Class Strikes Back: Self-​Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-​First Century (2018); and Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (2011). Much of his work is available at: www.azzellini.net. David Barkin is Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), Xochimilco Campus, Mexico City, and was a founding member of the Ecodevelopment Centre, created by the Mexican Science and Technology Council as an independent research organisation. He was a recipient of the National Prize in Political Economy in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. He was elected to the Mexican

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xvi  About the authors Academy of Sciences in 1992 and is an Emeritus Researcher at the National Research Council. He collaborates with groups of communities in many parts of Mexico in their efforts to consolidate postcapitalist societies. He was visiting professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, as a Georg Forster Fellow during the 2015–​2017 period. Milford Bateman is aVisiting Professor of Economics at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia, an Adjunct Professor of International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada and an Associate Researcher at FINDE, Fluminense Federal University, (UFF), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research and consulting interests are in local economic development and local financial systems, with particular reference to the developmental role of the local state. He is the author, inter alia, of Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (Zed Books, 2010) with an invited second completely revised and updated edition due out in early 2022 with Bloomsbury, a co-edited (with Kate Maclean) multidisciplinary study entitled Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2017 and in 2019 a co-edited book (with Stephanie Blankenburg and Richard Kozul-Wright) The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit: Development, Debt and Disillusion (Routledge in cooperation with UNCTAD). Email: milfordbateman@ yahoo.com. Walden Bello is currently Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and a retired Professor at the University of the Philippines (Diliman). A former member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, he is the author of 25 books, the latest of which are Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2019) and Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/​Zed, 2019). He is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (aka the Alternative Nobel Prize) and was named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association in 2008. Miguel Borba de Sá is Assistant Guest Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a Political Advisor at the Institute of Alternative Policies for the Southern Cone, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His recent works include publications on the fields of Critical Theory, Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, International Political Economy, and (De)Colonial Struggles, all with a special focus on Latin American realities and perspectives. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and a Master of Arts in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex, UK. Email: [email protected]. Paul Bowles is Professor of Global Studies and Economics at the University of Northern British Columbia, located on the unceded traditional territory of the Lheidli T’enneh. He has published on China’s political economy, globalisation, development, and the international monetary system. His work on these topics has appeared in Review of International Political Economy, Development and Change, Journal of Development Studies, New Political Economy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Third World Quarterly, Resources Policy, and New Left Review. He has also authored or edited 11 books. Email: paul. [email protected]. Yin-​Wah Chu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests focus on the political economy of development, as well as social and political movements in China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Her research papers

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About the authors   xvii have been published in Economy and Society, International Journal of Urban and Rural Research, and Urban Studies, among others. She is editor of Chinese Capitalisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), The Asian Developmental State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), co-​editor of East Asia’s New Democracies (Routledge, 2010), and co-​author of The Global Rise of China (Polity, 2016). Email: [email protected]. Alberto D. Cimadamore is a Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina (CONICET) and the School of Economic Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (2001–​present). He was previously the Director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) of the International Sciences Council, located at the University of Bergen, Norway (2011–​ 2018). He is also a lawyer and a political scientist and obtained his PhD in International Relations at the University of Southern California. His most recent publications are focused on global development, sustainability, science, social change, poverty, social justice, sustainable development goals, and international relations. Raúl Delgado Wise is professor and former director of the Doctoral Program in Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico, general coordinator of the UNESCO Chair on Migration, Development and Human Rights, and member of the advisory board of the UNESCO-​Management of Social Transformations (MOST) committee in Mexico. He is also president and founder of the International Network on Migration and Development, and co-​Director of the Critical Development Studies Network. He has authored and edited 30 books, and written more than 200 essays, including book chapters and refereed articles. Recent books include Mexico’s Economic Dilemma: The Developmental Failure of Neoliberalism (2011); Critical Development Studies. An Introduction (2018); and Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance (2019). Radhika Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. She is also President of the Society for Socialist Studies. Her research interests in the field of comparative politics and international political economy include globalisation and neoliberalism, Marxism, emerging economies, and the politics of development. Ana Garcia is adjunct professor at the Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio, Brazil, where she also coordinates the BRICS Policy Centre. She collaborates with the Institute for Alternatives in the Southern Cone (PACS) as an activist and researcher. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-​Rio) and a degree in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She was a visiting researcher at York University, Toronto, Canada. She works within the field of international political economy, mainly with critical theory, multinational corporations, and BRICS’ investments in Africa and Latin America. Barry K. Gills is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Department of Political and Economic Studies, and formerly Professor of Global Politics at Newcastle University, UK. He is the founding editor of the journal Globalizations and the book series ‘Rethinking Globalizations’ and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He is currently involved in the launch of the Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT) based at the University of Helsinki. His current research focusses on the role of global extractivism within the global climate emergency and radical transformation.

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xviii  About the authors Eduardo Gudynas is Director and Senior researcher at the Uruguay-​ based Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES). His expertise is in the area of social ecology, sustainable development, and alternatives. In these areas he has published numerous books and academic articles. He has also presented numerous keynote addresses in conferences all over the world. Recent books include: Aguas azules y mareas negras: Social ecologia ante el derrame petrolero del San Jorge (Blue Water and Black Tides: Social Ecology in the Face of the San Jorge Oil Spill); La praxis por la vida: Introducción a las metodogias de la ecología social (Praxis for Life: Introduction to the Methodologies of Social Ecology); and Ecología, mercado y desarrollo: Políticas ambientales, libre mercado y alternativas (Ecology, Markets and Development: Environmental Policies and Development). Email: [email protected]. Hamza Hamouchene is a London-​ based Algerian scholar-​ activist, commentator, researcher, and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA). He is currently the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI). He previously worked for War on Want, Global Justice Now, and Platform London on issues of extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty as well as climate, environmental, and trade justice. He is the author/​editor of two books, The Struggle for Energy Democracy in the Maghreb (2017) and The Coming Revolution to North Africa:The Struggle for Climate Justice (2015). He also contributed chapters to Voices of Liberation: Frantz Fanon (2014) and The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Imperialism and Anti-​Imperialism (2016). His other writings have appeared in the Guardian, Middle East Eye, Counterpunch, New Internationalist, Jadaliyya, openDemocracy, ROAR magazine, Pambazuka, Nawaat, El Watan, and the Huffington Post. Adam Hanieh is a Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. His current research focuses on global political economy, development in the Middle East, oil and capitalism. He is the author of three books, most recently Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 International Political Economy Group (IPEG) Book Prize of the British International Studies Association and the 2019 Middle East Political Economy Project Book Prize by the Arab Studies Institute. John Harriss is a Professor and sometime-​Director of the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University (SFU), British Columbia. Trained originally in social anthropology, he has worked for most of his academic life in contexts of cross-​ disciplinary development studies, at Cambridge, the University of East Anglia, the London School of Economics, the National University of Singapore, and now at SFU. He has lived and researched in India, and elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia, for long periods, and particularly in Tamil Nadu, where he has studied many different aspects of economy, politics, and society. Outside the academy, he worked for some time as the Head of the Regional Office for South and Central Asia of the Save the Children Fund (UK). S.A. Hamed Hosseini holds a PhD in Sociology and Global Studies from the Australian National University (2006), and is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. He is the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (2020), author of Conscientious Sociology (2013) and Alternative Globalizations (2010), director of UON

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About the authors   xix Alternative Futures Research Network, and founder of “Common Alternatives” (www. thecommonalts.com). He has conducted research and published articles on ‘Critical open-​ mindedness’, ‘Towards transversal cosmopolitanism’ (co-​ authored, 2016), ‘Theorizing alternatives to capital’ (co-​authored, 2016), ‘Transversality in diversity’ (2015), ‘Transversalist justice’ (2015), ‘Transversal cosmopolitanism in Occupy movements’ (2013), ‘Theorizing social ideations’ (2012), and ‘Sociology of dissident knowledge’ (2010). Naila Kabeer is joint Professor of Gender and International Development at the Gender Institute and the Department for International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main areas of research include gender, poverty, labour markets and livelihoods, and social protection. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Feminist Economics, is Advisory Editor of Development and Change and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Gender and Development and Third World Quarterly. Her recent books include Gender and Social Protection in the Informal Economy (Routledge, 2010) and Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak (Zed Books, 2013). Dip Kapoor is a Professor in International Development Education and Political Sociology of Education at the University of Alberta. He is a voluntary research associate for the Centre for Research and Development Solidarity, a popular indigenous and small peasant rural organisation in eastern India; and is the editor of several collections on colonial capitalist development /​globalisation, social movements, critical adult education, and participatory action research. Cristóbal Kay is Emeritus Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR); Professorial Research Associate, Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London; and a former Emeritus Professor, FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador. His research interests are in the fields of rural development and development studies, with particular reference to Latin America. He has been the editor of the European Journal of Development Research (EJDR) and a co-​editor of the European Review of Latin and Caribbean Studies (ERLACS) and of the Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC). He is currently an editor emeritus of JAC. Email: [email protected]. Peter Kragelund is Dean of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, Denmark. His main interests include changes in the global economy and how these changes affect developing countries. In particular, his research has examined how the tectonic shift brought about by ‘emerging’ economic actors’ renewed interest in Africa has affected the political economy of the host countries. He is the author of South–​South Development (Routledge, 2019) and Africa’s Shadow Rise: China and the Mirage of African economic development (Zed Books, 2020). His work has also been published, inter alia, in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Development and Change, Development Policy Review, European Journal of Development Research, Extractive Industries and Society, Journal of Modern African Studies, Resources Policy, Review of African Political Economy, and Third World Quarterly. Email: [email protected]. Kari Polanyi Levitt is Emerita Professor at McGill University, specialising in Political Economy and Economics of Development. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies; is honorary president of the Karl Polanyi Institute

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xx  About the authors of Political Economy at Concordia University; and is a recipient of the J.K. Galbraith Prize from the Progressive Economics Forum of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Among her publications are Life and Work of Karl Polanyi, co-​edited with McRobbie, Karl Polanyi in Vienna; Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community; Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development, co-​authored with Lloyd Best; and From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: On Karl Polanyi and Other Essays. Charmain Levy holds a PhD and DEA in Anthropology and Sociology of Politics (2000) from the University of Paris VIII. She has been a Professor at the l’Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) since 2005, teaching International Development. She is a specialist in Latin America, particularly Brazil. She has published scholarly articles and book chapters on social movements, religion and development; and urban and development studies. She holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight research grant. She presently occupies the position of Dean of Research at UQO. Fiona MacPhail is Professor of Economics at the University of Northern British Columbia. Her main research programme centres on gender, work, and public policy in Canada and Asia, with particular attention to migration, and different types of paid and unpaid work. Her research has been published in journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, World Development, and Feminist Economics and she has completed consultant reports for several international development agencies. She is a member of several advisory boards for academic journals, including the advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. Alice Moura holds an MA in anthropology from the Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil). She is a PhD candidate in Applied Social Sciences at l’Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO). Her MA dissertation studied the forced displacements caused by the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and she worked in the Brazilian federal social housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. In recent years, her research has focused on housing policies, the production of urban space, forced eviction, the nuances of everyday politics, and the relationship between the state and marginalised populations in Brazil. Ronaldo Munck is Head of Civic Engagement at Dublin City University and a visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, Liverpool University and Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. He is a labour and development specialist, having authored books such as Labour and Globalisation: The New Great Transformation (2002) and Critical Development Theory: Towards a New Paradigm (1999). He has published, inter alia, Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony and Social Transformation (2013), which established a new framework for considering the past and future of Latin America from a broadly Gramscian perspective. He is also a lead author and Ireland coordinator for the International Panel on Social Progress, chaired by Amartya Sen, which aggregates social science research to explore innovative solutions to the global challenges of the 21st century. Andrew Mushita, Executive Director of Community Technology Development Organisation, Zimbabwe, participates in national and international policy dialogues related to agricultural biodiversity, food and nutrition security, international trade,

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About the authors   xxi farmers’ rights, and the implications of intellectual property rights on smallholder farmers. Trained as an agronomist, he is currently Board Chairperson of the Regional Agricultural and Environmental Initiatives Network for Southern and Eastern Africa and a member of the Africa Union’s Africa Seeds Board. Pun Ngai is Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. She was honoured as the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award for her first book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), which has been translated into French and Chinese. Her co-​authored book, Dying for iPhone: Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers (2020), has also been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in China: Post Socialist Transformation (Polity Press, 2016) and the editor of seven book volumes in Chinese and English. She has published widely in leading international journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, Sociology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, and Work, Employment and Society. Robtel Neajai Pailey is Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A Liberian scholar-​ activist working at the intersection of critical development studies and critical African studies, she centres her research on how structural transformation is conceived and contested by local, national, and transnational actors from ‘crisis’-​affected regions of the so-​called Global South. Robtel is author of Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her core areas of expertise include the political economy of development; citizenship construction and practice; migration; ‘South–​South’ development cooperation; conflict and postwar recovery; race, racism, and racialisation processes. Ted Schrecker is Professor of Global Health Policy at the University of Newcastle, UK. He is a Canadian political scientist who moved to the UK’s Durham University in 2013 and to Newcastle in 2017 with members of Durham’s School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health. Ted’s main research interests focus on the political economy of health inequalities, especially as they are affected by neoliberal globalisation. His research has been published in journals including Critical Public Health, Global Public Health, Globalization and Health, Health & Place, Review of International Political Economy, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociology Compass. Ted is a member of the advisory group to the Independent Panel on Global Governance for Health and a member of the editorial board of the journal Critical Public Health. From 2014 to 2019 he was co-​editor of the Journal of Public Health. Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Development and International Relations in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. His most recent publication is “A Green New Deal for Agriculture: For,Within, or Against Capitalism?” in the Journal of Peasant Studies. His writes about and researches labour, food, and development. His books include The Struggle for Development (2017). Alvin Y. So was, until his retirement, Professorial Chair in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include development, class conflict, and East Asia. His recent publications include The Global Rise of China (co-​authored with Yin-​wah Chu, Polity Press, 2016) and Class and Class Conflict in Post-​Socialist China (World Scientific, 2013).

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xxii  About the authors Susan Spronk is Associate Professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the experience of development in Latin America, more specifically the impact of neoliberalism in the Andean region with a focus on the water sector and social policy. She coordinates the journal Studies in Political Economy. She is also a research associate with the Municipal Services Project, an international research project that focuses on alternatives to privatisation in basic service delivery in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her most recent book is Public Water and Covid-​19: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings (Municipal Services Project, Transnational Institute and Latin American Council of Social Sciences, 2020), co-​edited with David A. McDonald and Daniel Chavez. Makere Stewart-​Harawira is a Professor of Indigenous, Environmental, and Global Studies in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, Faculty of Education, the University of Alberta, Canada. She leads the University of Alberta I-STEAM Pathways program in environmental research for Indigenous youth, and is an expert member of a number of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commissions including, but not limited to, the joint specialist group on Indigenous Peoples, Customary and Environmental Laws, and Human Rights. Dr. Stewart-​Harawira is also a national board member of the Keepers of the Water organization Canada. Her research interests include climate change, freshwater governance and the integration of Indigenous knowledge and science in addressing critical issues of sustainability and global transformation. Dr. Stewart-​Harawira is a registered member of the Waitaha Iwi (tribe) in Aotearoa New Zealand, living and working in Treaty Six territory in Alberta, Canada. Marcus Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. He has worked on various topics in the political economy and political ecology of development, including climate change adaptation, labour and livelihoods, agrarian change, microcredit, and anti-​poverty policies. His most recent books include The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation (Routledge, 2015) and, with Sébastien Rioux, Global Labour Studies (Polity, 2017). Darcy Tetreault is a Professor Researcher at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico, in the Department of Development Studies. His doctoral thesis on environmental degradation and poverty in rural Mexico was awarded the national-​level (Mexico) Arturo Warman Prize in 2008. His research interests include socioenvironmental conflicts, peasant and indigenous movements, agrarian transformation, poverty and social policy, with a focus on Mexico and Latin America. Recent publications include Conflictos socioambientales y alternativas de la Sociedad civil (ITESO, 2012), Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development Pathways (Kumarian, 2013), and Social Environmental Conflicts in Mexico. Resistance to Dispossession and Alternatives from Below (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Carol Thompson, Professor emerita of Political Economy, Northern Arizona University, US, works on issues of food sovereignty with Community Technology Development Organisation’s policy advocacy unit (Zimbabwe). Learning from Southern African farmers’ networks, she returns home to work for change in American policies toward food production. She has consulted on issues of genetically modified organisms and biopiracy for diverse groups, from the Zapatista Governing Council (Mexico) and the Union of Medical Professionals (Costa Rica) to Peking University.

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About the authors   xxiii Elisa Van Waeyenberge is a lecturer in the Economics Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests include international financial institutions, changing development paradigms, alternative macroeconomic policies, infrastructure financing, and more recently, housing provision. Her writings have appeared in various journals and edited book collections that include The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research (Pluto, 2011), jointly edited with Kate Bayliss and Ben Fine. HenryVeltmeyer is Senior Research Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, and Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies (IDS) at Saint Mary’s University, Canada, with a specialist interest in Latin American development. In addition to holding a Senior Research Fellowship in advanced Latin American Studies at the University of Guadalajara he is co-​Chair of the Critical Development Studies (CDS) network, and co-​editor of Routledge’s Critical Development Studies book series. He has authored and edited over 50 books on Latin America and the political economy of international development, including Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development Pathways (2013), New Extractivism in Latin America (2015), Human Development: Lessons from the Cuban Revolution (2014),The Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil: The Landless Rural Workers Movement (2015), and Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization (2016). Recent publications include Latin America in the Vortex of Social Change (2018) and Critical Development Studies: An Introduction (2018). Leandro Vergara-​Camus is Associate Professor and heads the programme Economy and Social Innovation at the Université de l’Ontario français in Toronto, Canada. From 2012 to 2021, he was Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the SOAS University of London. He specialises in Latin America, the Left, globalisation of agriculture, alternatives to neoliberalism, social movements and the state, as well as the political economy of renewable energy. His current research is in agrofuels, nature, and the global energy transition. His work has been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, the Journal of Agrarian Change, Latin American Perspectives, Revista Mexicana de Sociology, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Recent publications include Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism (Zed Books, 2014). Fernanda Wanderley holds a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University, US, and is the Director of the Institute for social and economic research at the Bolivian Catholic University (IISEC-​UCB), La Paz, Bolivia. She has written widely on Bolivian and Latin American development and public policy, care work, labour market, feminist economy and social and solidarity economy, and women’s and children’s rights. She has written many books and articles on these subjects. Recent publications include Social Enterprise in Latin America Theory, Models and Practice (edited by Gaiger, Nyssens, and Wanderley; Routledge, 2019); Hacia el desarrollo sostenible en la región andina Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador y Colombia (2018); Los desafíos del desarrollo productivo en el siglo XXI (2018); and Between Extractivism and Living Well: Experiences and Challenges (2017). Edgar Záyago Lau is Professor and Researcher at the Academic Unit in Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas (UAZ), Mexico; and Co-​coordinator of the Latin American Network of Nanotechnology and Society (ReLANS). His research interests include the political economy of science, technology, and development; and development theory and public policy. Currently he is the director of the

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xxiv  About the authors PhD programme in Development Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. He has also been a visiting research scholar at the Transdisciplinary Doctorate for the Scientific and Technological Development of Society (DCTS) of the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV–​ IPN) (2016–​present) and at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil (2014). He is the author and co-​author of more than 60 articles in mainstream academic journals and has co-​edited nine books. He is a member of the National System of Researchers (Tier II) and a member of the Mexican Academy of Science. Raúl Zibechi is Professor of Critical Pedagogy, journalist and adviser with several urban social movements in Latin America. He has published 15 books, three of them translated into English. Recent publications include Decolonizing Critical Thinking (2014), The Limits of Progressivism (2016), Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (2012), and Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-​State Forces (2010). His weekly articles can be found in La Jornada (Mexico), Gara (Spain), and Rebelión.

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Acknowledgements

In preparing this second edition we have benefited from the efforts and support of many people. The most obvious are those of the contributing authors who have grappled with the challenges posed by COVID-​19 to provide us with their chapters. We also thank Dr Mark Rushton who proofread all of the chapters and suggested some valuable clarifications. At Routledge, we thank Helena Hurd, Elizabeth Cox, and Matt Shobbrook who ably shepherded the book through the contract and publication process. Pun Ngai’s chapter is a revised version of her 2020 article,“The New Chinese Working Class in Struggle.” Dialectical Anthropology, 44(3): 319–​ 329. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​ s10624-​019-​09559-​0.

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Abbreviations and acronyms

ABD AbM ACWF ADB AFAP AFL-​CIO AGRA ANC ART BJP BRI BRICS BWIs CDM CDS CEDAW

accumulation by dispossession Abahlali Basemjondolo All-​China Women’s Federation Asian Development Bank African Fertiliser and Agribusiness Partnership American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa African National Congress antiretroviral therapies Bharatiya Janata Party Belt-​Road Initiative Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa Bretton Woods Institutions Clean Development Mechanism critical development studies Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women CEPAL Comisión Económica para América Latina CGS critical globalisation studies CO2 carbon dioxide CoV coronavirus CSA climate smart agriculture CSP concentrated solar power CSR corporate social responsibility DAC Development Assistance Committee DCF Development Cooperation Forum DESA UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs DRC Democratic Republic of Congo ECLA Economic Commission for Latin America ECLAC Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean EAM East Asian Miracle EPAs Economic Partnership Agreements EPE EasyPay Everywhere EROI energy return on investment ERT empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores EU European Union

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Abbreviations and acronyms   xxvii EZLN FAO FDI FIEs FINCA FTAA FTAs FTU GATT GBD GCC GDP GFC GMOs GNI GNP GPEDC HDI ICCA ICT IDB IDS IFIs IGO ILO IMF INDCs INGO IP IPCC IPE IPO ISEB ISI LCD LFPR LLD LMICs MAI MDGs MEC MENA MIT MIVs MNC MOST MST MTST

Zapatista Army of National Liberation Food and Agriculture Organization foreign direct investment foreign-​invested enterprises Foundation for International Community Assistance Free Trade Area of the Americas free trade agreements Federation of Trade Unions General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade global burden of disease Gulf Cooperation Council gross domestic product global financial crisis genetically modified organisms gross national income gross national product Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation Human Development Index Indigenous and Community Conserved Area information and communication technology Inter-​American Development Bank international development studies international financial institutions international governmental organisation International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund intended nationally determined commitments international non-​governmental organisation intellectual property Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change international political economy initial public offering Superior Institute of Brazilian Studies import substitution industrialisation labour-​centred development labourforce participation rate labour-​led development low-​and middle-​income countries Multilateral Agreement on Investment Millennium Development Goals minerals–​energy complex Middle East and North Africa Massachusetts Institute of Technology microfinance investment vehicles multicnational corporations Management of Social Transformations Landless Workers’ Movement Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Homeless Workers Movement)

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xxviii  Abbreviations and acronyms NAFC North Atlantic Financial Crisis NAFTA North America Free Trade Agreement NANs national advocacy networks NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NCDs non-​communicable diseases NEET not in education, employment or training NGO non-​governmental organisation NICs newly industrialising countries NTDs neglected tropical diseases OAS Organization of American States OCMAL Observatory of Mining Conflicts of Latin America ODA overseas development assistance OECD Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development OPEC Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries PA precision agriculture PCB Brazilian Communist Party PMV Plan Maroc Vert (Green Morocco Plan) POLOP Marxist Revolutionary OrganizationWorker’s Politics PPPs public–​private partnerships PRC People’s Republic of China PRSPs Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers PT Workers Party PV photovoltaic R&D research and development R2P Responsibility to Protect RMB Renminbi ROI return on investment RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RST rentier state theory SAPs structural adjustment programmes SARS severe acute respiratory syndrome SDGs Sustainable Development Goals SLA sustainable livelihoods approach SME small and medium enterprises SNEHA Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action SSA sub-​Saharan Africa SSE social and solidarity economics SSEE social, solidarity, and ecological economy TANs transnational advocacy networks TEK traditional ecological knowledge TINA there is no alternative TNCs transnational corporations TRPF tendency of the rate of profit to fall TRIMs trade-​related intellectual measures TRIPS Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights U5MR under-​5 mortality rate UAE United Arab Emirates UN United Nations

newgenprepdf

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Abbreviations and acronyms   xxix UNCTAD UNDP UNDRIP UNESCO UN-​HLD UNICEF US WB WCAR WCIP WEF WEMA WGIP WHO WIPO WRCs/​WREs WTO

UN Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Programme United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations High-​Level Dialogue on Migration and Development United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund United States World Bank World Conference Against Racism World Council on Indigenous Peoples World Economic Forum water-​efficient maize for Africa Working Group on Indigenous Peoples World Health Organization World Intellectual Property Organization worker-​recuperated companies/​enterprises (Spanish: ERT) World Trade Organization

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1

Critical development studies An introduction



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3

1 Introduction to critical development studies Four characteristics with illustrations from seven decades Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer We live in a world disfigured by poverty, inequality, multiple injustices, and planetary threats. Critical development studies (CDS) seeks to explain why and how and where alternatives might be found. The emanicipatory claims of the mainstream development project, launched in the post-​1945 period and designed to set ‘developing countries’ on the path to capitalist modernity, have not been realised. Seven decades of mainstream development thinking and practice, for example, have still left a significant portion of the world’s population pursuing their daily lives unable to meet basic human needs in a world which has never been richer in material terms. Exactly how many people this applies to depends on how poverty is defined and measured (see Hickel, 2016, for a review), but even official data from the World Bank show that around 700 million people, or close to one in ten of the world’s population, live on less than $1.90 a day and nearly a quarter live on less than $3.20 per day. CDS is a broad, heterogeneous, multi/​interdisciplinary and continually evolving field with no clear boundaries.1 We therefore provide here not an all-​encompassing definition of the field of CDS but rather we identify four key understandings or characteristics that help shape the field and distinguish it from mainstream development studies. Not all CDS scholars and practitioners will necessarily share or support all four characteristics or support them with equal intensity; some who support them may not necessarily describe themselves as CDS scholars. Nevertheless, taken as a group, the four characteristics are a useful starting point for understanding the broad contours of CDS. The first characteristic is that it is essential to examine closely and theorise the development dynamics of the underlying operating system—​capitalism. In the mainstream of development studies, the taken-​for-​granted assumption that capitalism provides the best—​if not the only—​system for achieving development’s fundamental emancipatory aim has led to the virtual disappearance of any mention, let alone theorisation, of capitalism as a system. However, the production of poverty and inequality is associated with and a direct outcome of a multiplicity of forces such as class power, colonialism, imperialism, war, racism, patriarchy, and ecological destruction that cannot be fully understood or overcome without a clear understanding of the dynamics and fundamental contradictions of capitalism. While there have been previous instances of ‘crises in development’ or ‘a theoretical impasse in development’, the current conjuncture leads us to argue that, from a CDS perspective, the crisis of development cannot be separated from the crises of capitalism (analysed in Chapter 8). Secondly, ‘development’ viewed through a critical lens—​CDS—​provides a rich terrain and useful tools for examining how states, societies, and communities have sought to build better lives for their members while challenging prevailing orthodox models, and drawing DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-1

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4  Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer lessons from these experiences. In these experiences, we can better see the potential and pitfalls of different pathways of reforming or moving beyond capitalism. Thirdly, CDS takes as axiomatic that these experiences and the resistance to the advance of capital in the development process, and the search for alternatives to capitalism, are capable of being articulated, advanced, and implemented on the periphery of the world capitalist system. At the level of states, for much of the 20th century this was the case: state socialist revolutions, starting in Russia in 1917, spread through the periphery of the system from China, to Cuba, and Vietnam among others; there were experiments with various forms of ‘African socialism’ from the 1950s to the 1970s (see Lal, 2015, for the Tanzanian example); and in Latin America a Left government came to power with Allende in Chile in 1970. In fact, resistance to capital was prevalent in much of the periphery although its conjecture with anti-​colonial and anti-​imperialist struggles meant that it took different forms in different places. At any rate, the periphery is no stranger to searches for alternatives to capitalism; in fact, quite the opposite.This continues in the 21st century, as the examples of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador in Latin America demonstrate. Fourthly, the development of the productive forces and associated social conditions of people in countries and macro-​regions across the world system are very uneven, allowing us to conceive of underdevelopment or peripheral capitalist development in some instances and postcapitalism or postdevelopment in others. This concept of uneven capitalist development is central to Marxism. What CDS adds is a fundamental concern with conditions that are specific to capitalism on the periphery of what has emerged as a world system. For example, Marxists have long theorised that the capitalist development of industry is based on the capitalist development of agriculture and an associated process of proletarianisation—​the transformation of a peasantry of small-​scale agricultural producers into an industrial proletariat and the creation of an industrial reserve army of surplus labour, However, they have failed to understand what this has meant for capitalism in many parts of the periphery of the system; in Latin America, for example, this took the form of a semiproletariat of impoverished rural landless workers that in the 1990s would constitute the primary social base of the resistance to capitalism in the form of neoliberal globalisation (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2013). Analysts operating within a CDS framework, which combines political economy with social ecology, have further argued that the contradictions of extractive capital, combined with the contradictions and forces of change generated by the capital–​labour relation and the centre–​periphery relation—​arguably the major contradictions of capitalism—​underlie and help explain the emergence of the fundamental and most powerful forces of capitalist development and the organised resistance to capitalism today. Identifying the forces that have the potential for bringing about systemic change requires an approach which allows for the analysis of resistance to be grounded in the dynamics of capitalism as it is experienced in different parts of the periphery. For this, it is argued, we might well turn towards CDS (see Part X). CDS has evolved over time, partly in response to the evolution and shifts in mainstream development thinking—​ for example, from modernisation theory to the Washington and post-​Washington Consensuses (see Chapters 2 and 13 especially)—​and partly as the dynamics of capitalism at the global level have unfolded. Thus, the critiques of, and challenges to, mainstream development thinking from CDS have been formulated in the mirror of capitalism; CDS theorising and practice have been responses to ‘actually existing capitalism’ and its material outcomes. It is for this reason that CDS contains a wide range of approaches ranging from those which emphasise the shortcomings of the ‘actually existing’ capitalist development process to those which emphasise the failings of

5

Introduction  5 ‘capitalism’ both in its existing and in any of its possible forms. Thus, some CDS writing has been based on critique of the dominant model of capitalism advocated in orthodox approaches such as neoliberal capitalism or Anglo-​American-​style capitalism. Others have been more trenchant and radical, calling for forms of socialist and/​or feminist paths. Others still have confronted the notion of ‘development’ itself, replacing development in its capitalist or socialist forms by postdevelopment. Taken together, these critiques and proposed alternatives constitute the field of CDS, a field concerned with asking big questions, highlighting issues of power and challenging dominant approaches, and containing vibrant debate. We provide here a brief discussion of selected CDS contributions to illustrate how they have challenged the (changing) mainstream. We have chosen seven illustrations roughly to approximate to the seven ‘development decades’ that have passed since the initiation of the modern ‘development project’. (See also Parpart & Veltmeyer, 2004). Development decades have been commonly used by development organisations to describe their ambitions on the basis that a decade is a suitable timeframe within which development goals can be realised and results witnessed. The United Nations (UN) classifies its first development decade as being the 1960s,2 a decade which also framed US President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress between the US and Latin America. The timeframe for meeting lofty developmental aims was increased to 15 years for both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), perhaps on account of their ambition but also, perhaps, because of the failures to see progress over previous decades. In fact, it is just as common now to find reference to ‘lost decades’. The term ‘lost decade’ was widely used to describe Latin American and African countries in the 1980s as they struggled with the debt crisis, structural adjustment programmes, and political crises. More recently, increasing concerns have been raised about the fate of the UN’s Decade for Biodiversity from 2011 to 2020 (Brondizio et al., 2019) while Richard Kozul-​Wright, Director of UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Globalisation and Development Strategies, has warned of another lost decade in the 2020s if the international community does not adopt an appropriate policy response to COVID-​19 (UNCTAD, 2020). We adopt the heuristic device of decades here to provide illustrations of how CDS has challenged the prevailing mainstream, pointed to alternatives, and remains of enduring relevance.These illustrations are necessarily selective with detailed examples provided in the rest of this volume. Central to CDS challenges to modernisation and its variants in the 1950s and 1960s, which presupposed a virtuous circle of capitalist development if pre-​capitalist social institutions could be dismantled, was the issue of class configurations at local, national, and global levels. One of the earliest critiques which falls within the broad scope of CDS was advanced by Paul Baran (1957). For him the failure of capitalism in the periphery arose from the distribution of the economic surplus; it did not go into capital accumulation but into elite consumption levels, rents accrued to a parasitic landlord class and to foreign shareholders. The elite was not the entrepreneurial class capable of forging national development as in Rostow’s ‘non-​Communist manifesto’ but a comprador class more tied to foreign interests. It was this, termed ‘the political economy of growth’ by Baran, that accounted for Latin America’s position of relative poverty and its failure to advance economically. Class structures and their development implications continue to play a key role in CDS analyses, as shown especially in Chapters 21, 26, and 28–​30. Soon, underdevelopment in the periphery became linked with global structures of capitalist accumulation in the arguments of both dependency theory and world systems

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6  Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer theory which emerged in the 1960s and challenged the dominant view of ‘trade as the engine of growth’. The former argued that exploitation could occur in exchange (rather than just in production, as in the original analysis of capitalism provided by Marx) and analysed capitalism as a global system characterised by a chain of metropolis–​satellite relationships, with the economic surplus flowing upwards to the metropolitan core. This led, in Andre Gunder Frank’s memorable dictum, to the ‘development of underdevelopment’, a global process which produced and reproduced a global division as necessary dual and inseparable elements. The focus on exchange and on the system-​wide dynamics was common to world systems theory which similarly viewed global capitalism as a relatively stable, although not static, international division of labour into which countries were incorporated with relatively little scope for advancement within it for peripheral countries individually, and certainly not collectively. Multiple critiques of international trade by writers such as Raul Prebisch, Samir Amin, and Arghiri Emmanuel also sought to demonstrate the biases of the global system and the limited possibilities for capitalist development in the dependent or peripheral part of the global capitalist system. Not impossible but certainly limited. A dependent development might be possible, especially in some enclaves, but the prospects for broader capitalist development remained unattainable. These approaches have implications for a number of contemporary debates. This includes the return of extractivism in the South, especially in Latin America and Africa, in the first decade and a half of the 21st century in tandem with the long (now ended) commodities boom. Many governments interpreted this boom as an opportunity to develop new models of progressive development based on an extractivism led by foreign capital but with the economic surplus now channelled into domestic poverty reduction and social welfare; in effect, an inclusive form of social democratic capitalist development. For critics, this revived the dependency debate in important respects as countries again tied their development objectives to the mast of foreign investment and the logic of capital accumulation in the core. The ‘progressive extractivism’ of the ‘pink tide’, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador, sought to build an alternative to neoliberal capitalism by first integrating further with a fraction of capital, extractive capital, a strategy which led to contradictions that could not be solved without coming into conflict with and suppressing many of those whom the strategy was intended to liberate. Buen Vivir, or ‘living well’, embodying an Indigenous worldview, emerged within this context and remains as a powerful critique of mainstream capitalist development. Amin and Emmanuel’s ideas of ‘unequal exchange’ have re-​emerged and been applied to the ‘unequal ecological exhanges’ between North and South in the contemporary period (see Frey, Gellert, & Dahms, 2019). Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 37 especially in this volume explore these CDS themes. In the mid-​1970s, the UN launched the ‘Decade for Women’ (1975–​1985). This stimulated much important work, then and now, on fundamental questions about why ‘development’ was experienced differently by women and men. Boserup’s (1970) seminal work Women’s Role in Economic Development first highlighted the differences between women and men’s roles using statistics that had been readily available but hitherto unanalysed. Her argument, that women should be included in the development process, provided the basis for the ‘Women in Development’ approach which became important in international development circles, complementing the prevailing dominant theory of modernisation. Over time, however, this approach was challenged by more critical perspectives which emerged under the ‘Women and Development’ and ‘Gender and Development’ approaches (Rathgeber, 1990). Here systemic forces were identified for

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Introduction  7 critical analysis but the ‘system(s)’ under scrutiny here were patriarchy and/​or capitalism (Beneria & Sen, 1982). The ensuing debate highlighted issues concerning the possibilities for women’s solidarity across class and national boundaries, and an exploration of the heterogeneous ways in which gender relations conditioned and were affected by development. This resonates with contemporary critical feminist studies of intersectionality, of ‘Southern feminisms’ (Byrne & Imma, 2019), and calls not simply for inclusion but for agency, empowerment, and justice. And yet, while ‘gender’ became a concept used for critique of existing development theories and policies, it also became acceptable to development agencies and policies of ‘gender mainstreaming’ became widespread, if contentious, in their effectiveness (Parpart, 2014). Emerging in the 1970s and continuing since, feminist critiques of development orthodoxy, and gender blindness and biases, have been key contributions; ‘gender’ remains a central contested analytical concept. Chapters in this volume, especially Chapters 7, 23, and 24, demonstrate the insights to be gained from critical gender analyses. The 1980s witnessed the neoliberal turn in development thinking, the dominance of the Washington Consensus policy package, and the restructuring of the global political economy according to the dictates of neoliberal globalisation. This led to broad and widespread challenge within CDS with the market fundamentalism and pro-​neoliberal globalisation evident in the new orthodoxy coming under sustained interrogation from numerous critical angles. These included, inter alia, reclaiming the ‘developmental state’ as a key facilitator of economic development success of East Asia (White, 1988) and the examination of the deleterious impacts of structural adjustment programmes on vulnerable groups (see Cornia, Jolly, & Stewart, 1987), on Africa (see Campbell & Loxley, 1989), and on Latin America and the popular resistance that it fomented. Many of the chapters in this volume provide critiques of neoliberalism, document its failings, and identify alternative paths. As the failings of structural adjustment programmes became evident, even to their proponents, revisions within the mainstream were made in the 1990s, including the introduction of what came to be known as ‘social capital’, i.e., ‘a set of norms, institutions and organisations that promote trust and cooperation among persons in communities and in the wider society’ (Durston, 1999: 104). The theory was that social capital, understood as norms of reciprocity and social exchange based on relations of social solidarity, was a productive resource accessible to the poor, empowering them to act for themselves in a process of community-​based local development. With the understanding that the labour and migration pathway out of rural poverty had reached its limits, and that the incessant flows of rural migrants to the cities and urban centres were placing excessive pressures on both governments and the private sector, the World Bank shifted towards a strategy of so-​called empowerment of the poor in a process of community-​based local development.The concept of social capital was a critical factor in this approach and the theory behind it. The introduction of social capital into mainstream development thinking opened up the space for bringing back in politics and social structures; but the way in which this was done by many failed to take this approach through to its logical conclusion. From the perspective of CDS critics, the concept of social capital was formulated and advanced for the purpose not of poverty reduction, the stated goal of the World Bank’s Social Capital Initiative, but political demobilisation—​to turn the rural poor away from the confrontational politics of social movements (see, for example, Harriss, 2002). In contrast, CDS points to the importance of political mobilisation, of social movements, and of class and gender relations, to an understanding of how an alternative development can be possible.

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8  Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer That is, the question of mobilisation becomes central, in contrast to the ways in which orthodox accounts of ‘social capital’ seek to depoliticise. This, in turn, links into another ongoing CDS concern, namely, the peasantry, its class formation and struggles over land. These themes are taken up in several chapters, in their different ways, in this volume, especially Chapters 6, 13, 3–​32, 34, and 42. At the turn of the millennium, there were many issues vying for development attention such as the implications for the ‘rise of the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) on development policy and global governance and the emergence of the ‘new extractivism’, to name but two. Here we choose migration as an example of the differences between mainstream and CDS approaches.This complex issue can be analysed in multiple ways and at multiple levels; despite the fact that internal migration and intra-​ developing country migration significantly outweighs South–​North migration, it is often the latter which dominates media analysis. Much of the mainstream development literature looks at migration through the lens of individual decision making and analyses international impacts by examining the skill sets of migrants and what they may contribute to the host country and the value of the remittances which they send to their home countries; the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Unit bi-​annual Migration and Development Briefs provide examples. CDS scholars, in contrast, are more likely to focus on factors such as the dynamics of contemporary capitalist accumulation which produces the ‘surplus population’, often in rural areas, which makes migration a necessity (see Chapter 12), the geopolitical rivalries, wars, and insecurities which create refugees (see Ullah, 2014, for application to the Middle East and North Africa), the state strategies used to promote the movement of workers (see Pun, 2017, for Chinese state policy in the making of a migrant class and Chapter 30 for the use of migrant workers in the Gulf Arab states), the racial and gender hierarchies in migration processes (see Beneria, Deere, & Kabeer, 2012) and the forms of, and prospects for, resistance. Here, as elsewhere, the interdisciplinary concerns of CDS are evident as well as the CDS intersections with other fields such as citizenship studies, critical race studies, refugee studies, globalisation and transnational studies, and gender studies. In 2010, the World Bank’s annual flagship World Development Report focused on the need for the world to be ‘climate smart’ and we take climate change and the environment as our example of a development issue of the 2010s.The Report documented the scale of the climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on inhabitants of developing countries. The Report offers a plethora of suggestions for market-​based incentives, society-​wide safety nets, technological fixes, new global agreements, and financing mechanisms as well as calls for transformed land and water management in order to increase agricultural output ‘without the increase in environmental cost currently associated with intensive agriculture’ (World Bank, 2010: 16). Conspicuously absent, however, is analysis of how capitalism generates climate crisis, how alternative forms of social organisation at the local level are addressing environmental and climate challenges, how the global food regime is currently constituted, how extractivism and fossil fuel capitalism are impacting the Global South, and how resistance is being organised.These are the topics that CDS embraces and analyses can be found in Chapters 8, 32, and 36–​42. One consequence of global environmental destruction is the increased possibility of global pandemics. COVID-​19 has dramatically demonstrated this at the beginning of the 2020s. Global health—​surely one of, if not the central issue of the 2020s—​is examined in Chapter 25.

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Introduction  9

Notes 1 In discussing the field of critical political economy, Dunn (2020: 1) has argued that ‘nobody thinks of themselves as uncritical. So there is no neat definition of what constitutes critical political economy. This field is unbounded and fecund’. The same can be said of critical development studies. There are many other similarities too: both contain diverse schools of thought; both differ from the ‘mainstream’ in terms of method, questions asked, nature, and breadth of the research agenda; both view the mainstream as ‘profoundly conservative’ (ibid.: 1); both run the risk of oversimplification and with some scholars capable of being ‘claimed by the mainstream and the critics’ (ibid.: 2). See also Bowles and Veltmeyer (2020) for shared characteristics of critical development studies and critical globalisation studies. 2 See https://​research.un.org/​en/​docs/​dev/​1960-​1970.

References Baran, P. (1957). The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Benería, L., Deere, C., & Kabeer, N. (2012). “Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance,” Feminist Economics, 18(2): 1–​33, DOI: 10.1080/​13545701. 2012.688998. Beneria, L., & Sen, G. (1982). “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies, 8(1): 157–​ 176. DOI: 10.2307/​3177584. Boserup, E. (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bowles, P., & Veltmeyer, H. (2020). “Critical Development Studies and the Study of Globalization(s): Introduction.” Globalizations, 17(8): 1325–​ 1334. DOI: 10.1080/​ 14747731. 2020.1776481. Brondizio, E.S., Settele, J., Díaz, S., & Ngo, H.T. (eds.) (2019). Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-​Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat. Byrne, D., & Imma, Z. (2019). “Why ‘Southern’ Feminisms?” Agenda, 33(3): 2–​7. DOI: 10.1080/​ 10130950.2019.1697043. Campbell, B., & Loxley, J. (1989). Structural Adjustment in Africa. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cornia, G., Jolly, R., & Stewart, F. (1987). Adjustment with a Human Face,Vols. 1–​2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, B. (2020). “What Makes Critical Research in Political Economy?” in Dunn, B. (ed.), A Research Agenda for Critical Political Economy, pp.1–​18. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Durston, J.W. (1999). “Building Community Social Capital.” CEPAL Review, 69. Frey, R., Gellert, P., & Dahms, H. (2019). Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harriss, J. (2002). Depoliticizing Development:The World Bank and Social Capital. London:Anthem Press. Hickel, J. (2016). “The True Extent of Global Poverty and Hunger: Questioning the Good News Narrative of the Millennium Development Goals.” Third World Quarterly, 37(5): 749–​767. Lal, P. (2015). African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between Village and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parpart, J. (2014).“Exploring the Transformative Potential of Gender Mainstreaming in International Development Institutions.” Journal of International Development, 26: 382–​395. DOI: 10.1002/​ jid.2948. Parpart, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2004). “The Development Project in Theory and Practice: A Review of its Shifting Dynamics.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, XXV(1): 39–60. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2013). Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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10  Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer Pun, N. (2017). “The Making of the Migrant Working Class in China,” in Veltmeyer, H., & Bowles, P. (eds.), The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies, pp. 271–​278. London: Routledge. Rathgeber, E. (1990).“WID,WAD, GAD:Trends in Research and Practice,” The Journal of Developing Areas, 24(4): 489–​502. Ullah, A.A. (2014). “MENA: Geopolitics of Conflicts and Refugees,” in Refugee Politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Global Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​ 9781137356536_​2. UNCTAD. (2020). Trade and Development Report. Geneva: UNCTAD. White, G. (ed.) (1988). Developmental States in East Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. World Bank. (2010). World Development Report: Development and Climate Change. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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Part I

History as development

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2  Unravelling the canvas of history1 Kari Polanyi Levitt

Origins of the development agenda Development came on the agenda before the end of World War II in anticipation of the decolonisation of Asia and Africa. Leaders of struggles to free the colonial world from imperialist control and refugee economists from continental Europe gathered in London, Cambridge, and Oxford. The early literature on development economics was produced by independent-​minded scholars. A remarkable number originated from Scandinavia (Frisch, Myrdal, Nurkse), Western Europe (Hirschman, Mandelbaum, Perroux, Singer, Tinbergen), and Central and Eastern Europe (Bauer, Georgescu-​Roegen, Kaldor, Kalecki, Rosenstein-​Roden, Schumacher, Streeten). Others came from Britain (D. Seers), Russia (Gerschenkron, Kuznets, Leontieff), India (Chakravarty, Mahalanobis, V.K.R.V. Rao), Burma (Myint), Argentina (Prebisch), Egypt (S. Amin), Brazil (Furtado), the West Indies (W.A. Lewis) and the US (Chenery, Rostow). The early United Nations (UN) provided a supportive environment, and important conferences were held in New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, and Cairo. In 1945, the US and the Soviet Union emerged as the two most important world powers. Both enjoyed respect and influence in Europe and Asia, but neither was initially concerned with the development of underdeveloped regions.The primary concern of the US in the early postwar years was the threat of communism in Europe and Asia. A secondary objective was the dissolution of British and also French preferential economic spheres of influence and currency blocs. The Marshall Plan, a large volume of unconditional economic assistance, was successful in limiting Soviet influence to the satellite states of Eastern Europe, where communist governments were installed in 1948 after a brief period of democratic multiparty regimes. In Asia, following the defeat of Japan in 1945, US hegemony was challenged by the victory of Mao’s communist revolution in 1949. The remnants of Chiang Kai-​Shek’s forces retreated to Taiwan. For the next 30 years, the US recognised the Nationalists in Taiwan as the legitimate government of China with a veto in the Security Council in the UN. A major war in Korea pitted a US-​led UN force against China, resulting in the division of the country between North and South, with 30,000 troops on the border to this day. The US Seventh Fleet is permanently deployed in the waters of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. A rising tide of anti-​imperialist forces in Southeast Asia were engaged in struggles to free the region from Japanese occupation and attain political independence from British, French, and Dutch colonialism. British India gained independence in 1947, tragically by the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. India established friendly relations with the Soviet Union while Pakistan drifted into the US sphere of influence. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-2

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14  Kari Polanyi Levitt In 1956 Egyptian president Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, and the US refused to support British and French intervention. In 1955, President Sukarno of Indonesia, joined by Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, and Nkrumah of Ghana, convened a conference of Asian and African non-​aligned states in Bandung. China’s premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai headed the Chinese delegation. By this time China’s relations with Russia had chilled, and Tito’s role in the Non-​ Aligned Movement, formalised in Belgrade in 1961, was evidence that the Bandung initiative sought independence from Moscow as well as Washington. The US used every means at its disposal in efforts to replace secular national left-​wing governments, including assistance to religious fundamentalist extremists, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s. From the overthrow of Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah in Iran, to the massacre of a million supporters of the Sukarno regime in Indonesia by General Suharto in 1965, to the war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1975, and massive support for the Marcos regime in the Philippines, which hosted a principal US military base, Asia was the prize, and official development assistance was directed toward securing the gains.

The development project takes shape In the course of the 1950s, development studies was institutionalised, and the US State Department engaged the services of leading US universities to fashion programmes of economic development. India was assigned to Harvard, and Indonesia to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Chicago played the leading role in Latin American studies. MIT professor W.W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, subtitled A Non-​Communist Manifesto (1960), suggested that any country could engage in an aeronautical assent from ‘takeoff ’ to self-​sustaining growth and mass consumption, provided cultural and historical obstacles to modern business practice were overcome. The model was appealing, and the modernisation approach dominated development studies in political science and sociology. In the 1950s, Latin American states were firmly locked into friendly relationships with the US, which could at all times count on their votes in the UN. It is important to note, however, that the US did not pressure these governments to comply with free trade treaties. Brazil was particularly successful in implementing policies of industrialisation. The US responded to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 by launching the Alliance for Progress. The US also imposed a trade embargo and made a number of unsuccessful attempts at regime change in the island. In 1962, Cuba was suspended from the Organization of American States (OAS); only Mexico and Canada maintained diplomatic relations. With the end of easy import substitution, political tensions mounted. In 1964, a military government took control of Brazil and exiled thousands of intellectuals and other opponents of the regime. In 1973, the democratically elected government of Allende in Chile was overthrown by a US-​supported military coup. Murderous military dictatorships were also established in Argentina and Uruguay, in 1976. Strong economic growth in the 1970s was driven by favourable markets for primary products, and Latin America attracted large inflows of capital from US commercial banks seeking returns higher than could be obtained domestically. The foundations of the debt crisis of the 1980s were laid. As an increasing number of African and Caribbean countries acceded to political independence, the UN established the Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 under the direction of Raúl Prebisch to address the problems of export-​dependent peripheries. But it was the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in

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Unravelling the canvas of history  15 the Middle East, with the participation of Venezuela, that was effective in exercising commodity power. In the 1970s, the General Assembly of the UN adopted the Action Plan for a New International Economic Order. Many international conferences were held, but no meaningful concessions were made by the North. It marked the end of an era in which the UN could effectively give voice to the aspirations of the developing world. In his Nobel prize lecture of 1979, renowned development economist W. Arthur Lewis noted that there will be no new international economic order until the nations of the Global South develop their own resources, individually and collectively, to increase food production and employ their populations in productive industries and services. He noted that the ‘engines of growth’ of industrialised countries were slowing down and that continued dependence on exports to these countries would ensure that they remain poor. A more equitable international economic order would have to await the rising power of the Global South. With the accession of Prime Minister Thatcher (in 1979) and President Reagan (in 1980), an economic regime change was instituted in Britain and the US. The objective was to restore the discipline of capital over labour in the industrialised world and reduce the powers of government in the developing world. A doctrinal coup at the World Bank dismissed liberal-​minded economists, including Streeten and Ul Haq, who had introduced a basic needs approach to development, and installed a team of hard-​nosed neoliberals, including several trade economists. Policies of domestic industrialisation, which had achieved growth rates in the South equalling those of the industrialised countries from 1950 to 1980, were now deemed to be inefficient and contrary to principles of comparative advantage in international trade. Export-​oriented development became the new panacea.The early pioneers of development economics were demonised as ‘structuralist’, a heresy bordering on socialism. Recommended reading: Parpart and Veltmeyer (2004).

The right to development There was no longer a need for development economics because, in the new order, the laws of economics had universal validity without regard for structural or historical difference. Two prominent pioneers of development economics, Albert Hirschman and Dudley Seers, wrote eulogies with titles such as ‘The Rise and Decline…’ and ‘The Birth, Life and Death of Development Economics’. The declaration of the Right to Development by the UN in 1986 was a defensive action intended to confirm the right of developing countries to engage in national strategies of social and economic transformation. However, under the influence of the rising tide of neoliberalism, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which included social and economic rights, was reinterpreted as a doctrine of individual human rights, which effectively excluded the collective right to development. Twenty-​five years of structural adjustment policies imposed on African and Latin American debtor countries have systematically limited the exercise of sovereign states to achieve the goals of human development for their citizens. Development was replaced by macroeconomic and structural adjustment to demands of private and official creditors. The Washington Consensus of deregulation, liberalisation, and privatisation became the universal prescription. The authors of the UN Contribution to Development Thinking and Practice (Jolly, Emmerij, Ghai, & Lapeire, 2004), the official history of the UN, acknowledged that in the 1980s intellectual and policy initiative regarding development passed to the International Monetary

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16  Kari Polanyi Levitt Fund ( IMF) and the World Bank. The UN found itself ‘unable to come forward with a new agenda that offered the prospect of coping with the new problems while preserving the social and human development goals it had been advocating’ (Jolly, Emmerij, Ghai, & Lapeire, 2004: 150). The UN became increasingly impotent. An extreme rise in interest rates at the opening of the 1980s plunged Latin American countries into a decade-​long debt crisis. Over-​exposed commercial banks were rescued by the IMF and the US Treasury. Private debt was socialised and added to public debt. The blame for the debt crisis and the entire cost of adjustment was placed on the debtor countries and borne by their populations. Africa became a gigantic laboratory for experiments in economic liberalisation, as scores of countries came under the tutelage of the IMF and the World Bank. Subsidies to farmers were eliminated, and domestic food production declined as scarce resources, including water, were reserved for the production of exotic products, such as strawberries and flowers, for European markets. Where tropical agricultural commodities competed with US products, as in the case of cotton, African exports were effectively embargoed. Few economists in Africa believed in these policies, but desperation elicited compliance. By contrast, in the 1970s and 1980s Korea had embarked on industrial policies that combined import substitution with export promotion guided by large and effective planning agencies with the full support and direct participation of political authorities.The corporatist business organisation of Korea was modelled on Japan, with close association between large productive enterprise and domestic development banks. Foreign direct investment (FDI) was restricted. In Taiwan, medium-​sized enterprises were favoured. The success of the so-​called Tiger economies owed nothing to the World Bank or the IMF but benefited from the geopolitical interests of the US, which permitted them to engage in active industrial policies that violated neoliberal doctrine. With variations, such as the encouragement of FDI, policies combining domestic industrialisation with export of manufactures were followed by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and later also Vietnam. In all these cases, nationally owned enterprises were critical to successful economic development. In the late 1970s, China launched a programme of economic reform combining private with state enterprise in a unique model of a socialist market economy.This yielded unprecedented high rates of growth, based on very high rates of domestic and foreign investment, the latter principally from overseas Chinese capital from North and Southeast Asia. External markets for manufactured exports in North America and Europe were complemented by a dense network of China-​centred regional trade relations. In the early 1990s, China, and to a lesser degree India, emerged as new growth poles of the world economy. Recommended reading: Jolly, Emmerij, Ghai, and Lapeire (2004).

The nation-​state, capitalism, and development As in the earlier case of the late industrialisers of the 19th century—​Germany, the US, Russia, and others—​no country has ever achieved economic development without the construction of an effective modern nation-​state, and no country has established a viable industrial base without protecting its industries from the unrestricted import of goods and capital. In all cases of late industrialisation, economic development was a political project requiring a state with authority and legitimacy to negotiate conflicting interests of classes and regions.

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Unravelling the canvas of history  17 Following the victory of the West in the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union, social democratic governments in Europe embraced Anglo-​American doctrines and policies of privatisation. Socialism was in ideological retreat, and the social welfare state on the defensive. In Russia, a new oligarchy of former Soviet officials acquired state assets at fire sale prices. Huge fortunes were made in this chaotic condition of wild capitalism, while millions descended into poverty and average life expectancy plummeted. Similar policies transformed the countries of East Europe from Soviet satellites to economic and political clients of the Western powers. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military installations were shifted from West to East Europe, and control over the Balkans was secured by dismantling the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, the US launched the first Gulf War against Iraq, which it had previously supported in its war with Iran. In the rest of the world, the projection of Western economic power was aimed at securing access to markets and natural resources and, most importantly, protection of foreign investments from regulation and control by host national governments. The first attempt at a treaty designed to privilege investor rights over the sovereign rights of national governments was the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) drafted by the Organisation for Economic Co-​ operation and Development (OECD) . This was blocked by a campaign of international non-​governmental organisations (NGOs). The arrangements governing mutually negotiated trade agreements under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was converted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), with binding rules and mechanisms of enforcement of all member countries; now extended to include services, intellectual property, and so-​called trade-​related intellectual measures (TRIMs). Although disadvantaged in negotiations, developing countries were able to use their votes to block agreement on further extensions to include investment, government procurement, and competition aimed at entrenching the privileges of the transnational corporations and proposals granting foreign investors extended rights under enhanced free trade agreements (FTAs) such as the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Signed in 1994, the NAFTA served as a template for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and all subsequent FTAs. Commitments made by countries signing FTAs with the US or Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Community go far beyond what is required of member countries of the WTO. In the early 1990s, a word was lifted from the literature of communications and presented as describing an irreversible historical trend toward a borderless global economy: ‘globalisation.’ For developing countries, there appeared to be no alternative to deeper integration into circuits of trade and capital flows. As Latin America emerged from the debt crisis of the 1980s, governments advised by US-​trained economists installed in central banks and ministries of finance instituted neoliberal reforms—​most radically in Argentina. In Africa, debt relief failed to reverse the excess of the outflow of debt service over the inflow of official development assistance. This so-​called TINA (there is no alternative) effect was accompanied by extravagant claims for the beneficial results of ‘globalisation’. The World Development Report of 1995, entitled Workers in an Integrating World, suggested that globalisation promised a return to the ‘golden age’ of 1870–​1914, which could bring untold prosperity to developing countries provided they opened their economies to unrestricted imports and capital flows (World Bank, 1995). The title of the report suggests that workers could be the principal beneficiaries of globalisation. The authors of this flagship publication of the World Bank seem to have forgotten the fact that 1870–​1914 was the Age of Empire, when European imperialist expansion engulfed

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18  Kari Polanyi Levitt all of Africa and most of Asia. Throughout this period, colonial labour exploited in the mines and plantations of Africa and Asia contributed to the accumulation of capital in the industrialised countries, on impoverishing and deteriorating terms of trade. Colonial possessions became captive markets for British and other European textiles and their traditional agricultural economies were transformed to supply cotton, rubber, palm oil, jute, indigo, and other agricultural and mineral commodities to the metropoles. When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the living standard of an Indian peasant was no lower than that of an English agricultural labourer, and China was regarded as a model of a prosperous and stable civilisation. From the conquest of Bengal by the East India Company and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries British India regressed from a viable agricultural economy to an impoverished underdeveloped country. In the late 1870s and again in the late 1890s, the failure of monsoon rains produced the greatest famines in recorded history in India and also in Northern China. British authorities failed to provide famine relief and continued to ship large quantities of grains to London on railways whose costs were charged to the colonial government of India. Because colonial authorities neglected to maintain traditional management of water resources of canals, wells, and storage tanks to provide for drought, many millions perished unnecessarily from hunger and disease. In China, social disintegration due to the introduction of opium by the British East India Company earlier in the 19th century had weakened the capacity of the government to come to the aid of victims of the famine in Northern China, which claimed between 8 and 20 million lives. Both in India and in China the forced opening of the country to ‘world markets’ by British imperial policies turned devastating droughts into human disasters (Davis, 2002). It is difficult to understand how an agency mandated to serve ‘development’ could have advocated a return to the globalisation of the 19th century as a prescription for development for the 21st century. Moreover, the World Development Report of 1995, a veritable capitalist manifesto, cannot be dismissed as a lapse of memory, because the World Bank continues to urge countries to increase exports, encourage imports to compete with domestic firms to improve efficiency, open up to unrestricted flows of capital, and generally to deepen integration into the world economy. Recommended reading: Bello (2009); Bienefeld (2013); Veltmeyer (2005); World Bank (1995).

The financialisation of development and the global financial crisis The most serious crisis since the Great Depression heavily affected precisely those countries most deeply integrated into the financial networks of capitalism. The epicentre of the crisis was in the US, and the countries most vulnerable included the UK, Australia, Switzerland, the Eurozone, Eastern Europe, and the OECD country of Korea. Among the least vulnerable were the large developing countries, including China, Indonesia, and Nigeria. For the first time since the 1970s, the IMF extended rescue packages to European countries, including Iceland ($12 billion), Hungary ($20 billion), Latvia, and other Baltic countries indebted to Western banks. By contrast, in the developing world, only Pakistan and Turkey requested IMF assistance. The 1990s witnessed more frequent and more severe financial crises than those of the 1930s, not yet in the heartlands of capitalism, but in Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Russia and, most importantly, in East Asia. In some of these crises, incomes plunged by

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Unravelling the canvas of history  19 20 or even 30 per cent at a time. The IMF intervened to save major international banks from losses in East Asia in 1997–​1998 and facilitated the transfer of ownership of industrial enterprises from domestic to foreign capital. The panic soon passed, and in 1999 legislation enacted during the Great Depression, which had prohibited deposit-​taking commercial banks from engaging in the sale of stocks, bonds, and insurance and issue of mortgages, was repealed by the Clinton administration at the urging of Wall Street. The firewall separating commercial from investment banks was thereby removed. For the next ten years, an inverted pyramid of financial assets and claims was constructed on the base of the savings of millions of people in pension funds, mutual funds, insurance premiums, equities and investment in real estate, whose value appeared to be forever rising. During the Bush administration, all remaining restrictions on financial transactions were removed. Since the mid-​1980s, the returns on portfolio investments and the opportunities for capital gains have exceeded profits from investment in non-​ financial enterprise. Corporations moved assets from production to distribution and finance. They engaged in downsizing, subcontracting, and outsourcing to cheaper labour locations to boost shareholder value and compete on stock markets with financial service industries. Some 40 per cent of total corporate profit accrued to financial enterprise. The contribution of finance, insurance, and real estate amounts to 20 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the US and Britain whereas manufacturing declined to levels of 13 and 11 per cent respectively. There has been no increase in median wage and salary earnings in the past 25 years. Ten years after the Asian crisis, the inevitable crash finally hit the heartlands of this predatory Anglo-​American variety of capitalism. The epicentre was the US and Britain, but the damage extended to Europe and to financial institutions in many other countries. The permissive condition of the extraordinary accumulation of public and private debt was the inflow of capital from the rest of the world to cover a 6 per cent external current account deficit in the US. Since 1971, when the US abandoned gold convertibility, the US dollar has served as the principal reserve currency of the world, and banks have been able to create dollar liabilities unconstrained by official reserve ratios. Keynes’s greatest fear was that finance would destroy capitalism. By this he surely meant that the unrestricted power of financial capital could corrupt the capitalism that organised the production of useful goods and services and applied technology to improve living standards of the people.Western governments are pouring billions into the bottomless coffers of banks to save a rapacious form of capitalism that has demonstrably failed to deliver on its promises. The ideologues and institutions that preach their doctrines of ‘reform’ designed and serving to subordinate societies and nations to the global republic of capital have lost all legitimacy. Henceforth, crises must present an opportunity to regain political and economic control of governments by the majority population in the developing world. Globalisation, it has often been said, provides challenges and opportunities, winners and losers. But history has surprises. The advocates of globalisation did not imagine that the principal beneficiary of the liberalisation of trade would be communist China. Nor did they anticipate that the failures of liberalisation policies in Latin America would result in the election of a new generation of left-​leaning political leaders in the 2000s. They certainly did not expect that the deregulation of powerful financial institutions would unleash the most serious financial and economic crisis in 2008 since the Great Depression. Recommended reading: Polanyi Levitt (2013).

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20  Kari Polanyi Levitt

From global crisis to a reconfiguration of international power relations We do not know what the future holds, but it is clear that the world has become both more diverse and more interdependent. We live on one planet, which is seriously threatened by climate change and environmental degradation of the rivers, seas, and earth that sustain our lives.There is agreement that the predatory mode of capitalism, which has dominated international trade and finance, has failed. But there is no agreement, indeed there cannot be, on any one alternative mode of economic organisation. All modern economies are mixed economies, with some combination of state enterprise, at national, regional, or municipal levels, private sector, cooperative, community or social economy, non-​ profit associations, and work performed within the household. But all societies require an effective state with the authority and legitimacy to negotiate conflicting domestic interests. Just as there are many forms of organising an economy, there are many forms of democratic governance, and representational government by political parties is not necessarily the most appropriate for any particular society. The economic crisis invites innovation in the regions of political and social organisation in accordance with the specific historical and cultural heritage of the varied peoples of the world. This much more interesting approach to the study of international development challenges its students to explore the history and the culture of the diverse societies of the world. Recommended reading: Bello (2009); Lapavitsas (2013).

Note 1 Editors’ note:This chapter is a revised version of that included in the first edition of the Essential Guide. It has not been updated to include the latest economic crisis resulting from COVID-​19 but is retained here for its exemplary sweep of history, the ability to link events separated in time, and the prescience of the analysis of the path out of crisis which resonates today. The original chapter was based on material contained in the author’s From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: On Karl Polanyi and Other Essays (Fernwood, 2013).

References Bello, W. (2009). “The Global Collapse: A Non-​Orthodox View.” Z Net, February 22. Bienefeld, M. (2013). “The New World Order: Echoes of a New Imperialism,” in Veltmeyer, H. (ed.), Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization. London: Routledge. Davis, M. (2002). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London:Verso. Jolly, R., Emmerij, L., Ghai, D., & Lapeyre, F. (2004). UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lapavitsas, C. (2013). Profiting Without Producing. London:Verso. Parpart, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2004).“The Dynamics of Development Theory and Practice: A Review of its Shifting Dynamics.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, XXV(1): Special Issue. Polanyi Levitt, K. (2013). “Mercantilist Origins of Capitalism and its Legacies: Decline of the West and Rise of the Rest,” in Veltmeyer, H. (ed.), Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization. London: Routledge. Rostow, W. W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-​ communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veltmeyer, H. (2005). “Development and Globalization as Imperialism.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, XXVI(1): 89–​106. Veltmeyer, H. (ed.) (2013). Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization. London: Routledge. World Bank. (1995). Workers in an Integrating World. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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Part II

Thinking critically about development

A critical perspective on development in the current context takes diverse forms, but can be traced back to an idea, and an associated project, advanced by a number of development economists and foreign policy analysts at the end of the Second World War when ‘development’ was conceived of in the form of international cooperation by governments in what we might now describe as the ‘Global North’ with the ‘nation-​building’ efforts of governments in the ‘Global South’. A close look and critical examination of this ‘project’ reveal that it was designed as a means of ensuring that the relatively economically backward countries subjected to the yoke of European colonialism would follow a capitalist rather than socialist pathway. ‘Development’ in this context was viewed as ‘economic growth’ based on the expansion of a capitalist nucleus. On this see Hunt (1989).This project, and the associated idea of development advanced with diverse permutations over the following development decades, was subjected to serious questioning and critical thinking from the outset. The essays in this part are not intended to provide a systematic introduction or a comprehensive review of all of the different ways of thinking about development, or the range of development theories that have been elaborated over the course of the past seven decades, including those identified in the Introduction. Rather, the chapters provide a number of short analytical probes into a range of critical perspectives regarding development theory; not exhaustive but certainly crucial. Ronaldo Munck, in Chapter 3, describes ‘critical development theory’, which takes different forms, including the ‘knowledge as power’ perspective (the ‘coloniality of power’—​ the liberating belief in one’s own power to effect transformative change) embodied in the notion of postdevelopment, as discussed in Chapter 6 by Eduardo Gudynas, an approach characterised by a rejection of structuralism in all of its permutations, including Marxism, and the promotion of a poststructuralist form of discourse analysis and an analysis of cultural visions from across the developing world. On this see Kothari et al. (2019). Gudynas also makes reference to two critical perspectives, that of postcolonialism and buen vivir (living well), both conceived within a postdevelopment framework that combines an awareness of the contradictions of capitalism and the power of knowledge /​knowledge as power with social practice, i.e., actions based on that knowledge (Gudynas, 2016). On this also see Kothari et al. (2019). Another very different ‘critical’ perspective was embodied in what has been described as Latin American structuralism, a school of thought advanced by economists at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a UN agency; and a neo-​ Marxist theory of dependency and uneven capitalist development. The

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-3

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22  Thinking critically about development contributions of the former are succinctly outlined by Cristóbal Kay in Chapter 5, while the latter is discussed in Chapter 17 in the context of developments of Brazil. Part II also includes several essays that probe the theoretical dimension of various key issues of critical development studies, such as class, race, and gender. Robtel Neajai Pailey, for example, examines the role of race in/​and development and ‘racial capitalism’ in Chapter 4 (see also Chapter 20), while Fernanda Wanderley in Chapter 7 provides a feminist critique of mainstream development (on this also see Chapters 23 and 24).

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION Given the breadth and complexity of the panorama of development thinking, and the lack of signposts for navigating both the mainstream and critical sidestreams, it is useful for students of development to consider the following questions as they navigate these chapters: 1. What major theories can you identify from the chapters? What are their major propositions? What are the policy or normative prescriptions that were derived from them? 2. Mainstream development thinking in the immediate postwar context was focused primarily on the dynamics of economic growth and modernisation. What were the central concern and focus of the Latin American pivot? 3. What insights are gained by explicitly including race in the analysis of development? 4. From a feminist perspective, what are or should be the central concerns of ‘development’?

References Gudynas, E. (2016). “Beyond Varieties of Development: Disputes and Alternatives.” Third World Quarterly, 37(4): 721–​732. Hunt, D. (1989). Economic Theories of Development: An Analysis ot Competing Paradigms. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Kothari, A., et al. (eds.) (2019). Pluriverse: A Postdevelopment Dictionary. New Delhi:Tulika Books.

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3  Critical development theory Results and prospects Ronaldo Munck

This chapter reconstructs a genealogy of critical development theory in relation to Marxism which has played a dominant role in the field. It traces the complex views of Karl Marx himself, the sharp turn taken by Leninism, the practice of development in the socialist world to, finally, take up the challenge of postdevelopment. Our emphasis is on tensions and contradictions and we do not assume a linear development of a unified critical development theory.

Marx and development For Marx, development and capitalism were almost synonymous. Marx’s vision of development was also totally wrapped up with the era of modernity. Production was becoming increasingly internationalised and capital was being centralised. Capitalism advanced at an ever more frantic pace as development spread across the globe. This vision of what we might call ‘Manifesto Marxism’ is quite explicit: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’ (Marx, 1977: 71). For the Marx of the Communist Manifesto, ‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-​frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-​formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify’ (Marx, 1977: 70). This exhilarating roller-​coaster of modernisation is the essence of Marx’s conception of development. As the bourgeoisie mounted the world stage it would sweep away all old orders and transform all in its own image. The more developed country was a mirror in which the less developed could glimpse its own future. The bourgeois era, for ‘Manifesto Marxism’, is one of unprecedented development of the productive forces: ‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all previous generations together’ (Marx, 1977: 72). Nature is subjected to humankind, chemistry is applied to industry and agriculture, the railway and the telegraph revolutionised communications. The insatiable drive of bourgeois development tears up all obstacles in its path. Markets are constantly expanding, capitalist social relations corrode all others, productivity increases by leaps and bounds. Manifesto Marxism is a thoroughly modernist discourse but Marx did not stop at his paean of praise for the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary development role for human society. This capitalist development process was also creating its own ‘gravedigger’, the proletariat or working class. In proportion as the bourgeoisie—​that is to say capital—​develops, so does that class of labourers who sell their DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-4

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24  Ronaldo Munck labour, as a commodity, to this hungry new mode of production.The same process which revolutionises society creates the revolutionary class which will overthrow the new order. The development of modern capitalist society produces ‘dialectically’ as it were the basis for its own surpassment. The ambiguity of Marx’s views on development can be illustrated through his (admittedly journalistic) writings on India. In these passages Marx paid tribute to the progressive role of capitalist colonialism: ‘England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—​the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’ (Avineri, 1969: 132). Modern industry and the railway system would dissolve the old divisions of labour, break up the ‘inertia’ of the Indian villages, and drag the country into the slipstream of global capitalist development. Of course, The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether (Avineri, 1969: 137). While those passages can be read as a support for the civilising effect of Western capitalism over Eastern barbarism, in fact Marx’s writings on India, admittedly one-​sided, dated, and not too well informed, are consistent with the message of the Manifesto. Capitalism is a revolutionary force but it begets the cause of its own eventual downfall. Where Marx began to break with his previously mechanistic/​modernist views on development was in relation to Russia. In 1881, Marx spent some considerable time and effort drafting a reply to Vera Zasulich on the nature of the Russian peasant commune. Marx had been studying Russia since 1861, the year of the ‘emancipation of the serfs’.The question was whether the commune was a symptom of all that was archaic in Russian society or whether it was a harbinger of a progressive ‘communist’ future. Marx’s intervention in this debate was quite clear-​cut. He foresaw two alternatives. The first would involve state capitalism penetrating and destroying the commune. The second option, however, was that the commune would become ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’ (Shanin, 1983: 124). What Marx was arguing against, on the basis of the Russian case, was the tendency to make his analysis of mature capitalism in Capital into a schema of historical inevitability. This has major implications for any theory of development and, seemingly, contradicts his earlier dictum that the backward country saw its future in the mirror of the advanced one.What Marx actually argued later, in a letter to another Russian follower, was that ‘to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-​philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances it finds itself, ... is honouring and shaming me too much’ (cited in Shanin, 1983: 59). There is a refusal here of any deterministic, blanket application of ‘laws’ of historical development. Marx was engaging, in fact, with the combined and uneven nature of development in strikingly ‘modern’ terms. Marx was certainly aware of the role of colonial plunder in oiling the wheels of the industrial revolution but, in analysing the internal and external factors in the ‘primitive accumulation’ which gave rise to capitalism, Marx undoubtedly prioritised the first dimension. Subsequent Marxists, engaged in debates over imperialism and dependency, would reverse the order and prioritise the external dimension as the explanation of

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Critical development theory  25 why capitalism emerged in some regions of the world and not others. Anthony Brewer (1980: 44) correctly points out that: ‘A stress on external factors is consistent with a picture of capitalism in which a centre–​periphery division on a world scale is a defining feature, but such a definition of capitalism is not to be found in Marx’. While in his writings on Ireland, Marx can be seen to be aware of the stunting effects of colonialism on development, his emphasis is on the internal development of capitalism as a mode of production and its appetite to create a whole world in its own image.

Leninism and development It is ironic, given the subsequent history of Marxism-​Leninism, that when Lenin engaged with the issue of the Russian commune in the mid-​1890s he was implicitly opposing Marx’s views of the same phenomenon. Lenin’s perceptions of the Russian peasantry were extremely negative, stressing their individualistic nature. Belief in the peasants’ ‘communist instincts’ had naïvely infected many Russian socialists ‘based on a purely mythical idea of the peasant economy as a special communal system’ (cited in Bideleux, 1985: 71). Lenin developed the label of ‘populism’ to criticise those Russian socialists who sought in some way to bypass capitalism via the commune. For Lenin only the industrial proletariat (however minuscule it might be) could lead a revolution: ‘only the higher stage of capitalist development, large-​scale machine industry, creates the material conditions and social forces necessary for ... open political struggle towards victorious communist revolution’ (cited in Bideleux, 1985: 73). We have here a conception of development which is quite unilinear and mechanical. Lenin developed his ideas further in his turn-​of-​the-​century book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Lenin, 1967), considered by many as one of the best Marxist studies of the emergence of capitalism from feudalism. Lenin’s theme is the apparently technical one of how the home market of Russian capitalism was formed. His task was to demonstrate how the commodity economy became established in all branches of economic life, and how the division of labour became dominated by capitalism. Against the underconsumptionist arguments of the ‘populists’, Lenin showed convincingly that capitalism had created for itself a home market in Russia. Lenin’s conception of capitalist development is centred on the question of social differentiation, which he examined in detail in relation to the rural population. It should be pointed out that he clearly exaggerates the role of capitalism at this stage, treating as capitalist ‘economic structures which Marx explicitly described as pre-​capitalist’ (Harding, 1977: 87). Lenin did admit that his earlier writings had led to an ‘over-​estimation’ of the degree of capitalist development in Russian agriculture but the point is clear that Lenin’s early conception of development was absolutely focused on the internal development of capitalism in Russia. What Lenin, or Leninism, is better known for is his theory of imperialism. In terms of Marx’s view of the progressive function of capitalism on a world scale, and Lenin’s own analysis in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, this theory, elaborated during the First World War, was a watershed. It is only somewhat exaggerated to state, as Bill Warren did, that ‘In effectively overturning Marx and Engels’s view of the character of imperialist expansion, Lenin set in motion an ideological process that erased from Marxism any trace of the view that capitalism would be an instrument of social progress even in precapitalist societies’ (Warren, 1980: 48). From now on, the Marxist tradition would begin to view the world system as centre–​periphery, and imperialism as a block or impediment to development. Certainly, it was easy to understand that a political movement which was setting out

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26  Ronaldo Munck to gather support among the poor and downtrodden worldwide would find it difficult to maintain Marx’s stance on India, for example. Though Marx never ignored the negative effect of capitalist expansion worldwide he undoubtedly stressed the positive effect it would have on the productive forces. In the period of crisis, expectation, and uncertainty of the First World War, lofty, detached observation of this sort seemed out of place. Lenin’s work on imperialism is not, and was not intended to be, a major or innovative investigation. It was based largely on the works of others, like the Marxist Bukharin and the non-​Marxist Hobson. It outlined what it saw as certain key tendencies of the period, such as the concentration of capital, its export to ‘underdeveloped’ countries and the dominance of finance capital (a merger of industrial and banking capital). Lenin’s political objective was to counter Kautsky’s notion of ‘ultra-​imperialism’ which implied a fairly smooth and peaceful carve-​up of the world by the major powers. Instead, Lenin tried to show the inevitable trend towards world war implicit in increased worldwide competition. He was not really concerned with the impact of capitalist imperialism in the colonial world. He did recognise that: ‘The export of capital affects and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in these countries to which it is exported’ (Lenin, 1970: 718). Yet Lenin also moved towards the underconsumptionist positions he had criticised in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In particular, he became the forerunner of the neo-​Marxist underdevelopment school (Baran, Frank, and so on), with his argument that imperialism would become a fetter or a brake on development, referring to ‘the tendency to stagnation and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate, and in certain branches of industry, in some countries, for certain periods of time, it gains the upper hand’ (Lenin, 1970: 745). Gradually the latter tendency, to view imperialism and monopoly capitalism as the highest or last stage of capitalism, prevailed. Not only that, but the view also prevailed that imperialism was becoming the major obstacle to development. In regards to the colonial world, the communist movement now began to prioritise its alliance with nationalist movements. It is this political imperative which explains the resolutions explicitly and unambiguously portraying imperialism as retrogressive economically, and foreign capital investment not only as an affront to national dignity but also a simple drain on national resources. Development henceforth became synonymous with national development. Somehow capital acquired political colouring so that the same social relations of production could be seen as healthy if under national bourgeois control and exploitative if under international or imperialist control. The later school of ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Frank) has its intellectual/​political origins here. Leninism became transmuted into a veritable ideology of development for what was soon to become the ‘Third World’.The ideology of proletarian revolution in the West became the ideology of peasant mobilisation in the East, and then the ideology of modernising elites in the South. David Lane (1974: 31) puts it bluntly that ‘Leninism is the developmental ethic of Marxism’. Lenin had inaugurated this productivist-​economistic developmentalist version of Marxism with his notorious definition of communism in 1920 as ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of all the country’.

Socialism and underdevelopment Marx expected socialism to flourish in the most advanced capitalist countries but most socialist revolutions occurred in conditions of relative or absolute underdevelopment. Socialist practice seems to contradict socialist theory as socialism and development had

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Critical development theory  27 become practically synonymous in many parts of the world. It is hardly surprising that, in conditions of underdevelopment, wide sections of the population might come to view socialism as potentially liberating. Furthermore, Lenin advanced within his account of imperialism the notion that the world capitalist system would break at its ‘weakest link’. This points towards a realist interpretation of revolution, unencumbered by Marxist or any other teleology, where a whole range of political, strategic, or ideological factors may create a situation ‘ripe’ for revolution. It is not a question of simply waiting for the development of the forces of production to reach the point where a country is ready for socialism. Whether it is a paradox or a natural concomitant of uneven capitalist development, socialist regimes have almost always inherited the legacy of underdevelopment. The constraints on the fledgling socialist state are formidable. Not only must it seek a more even distribution of income, but it also needs to create a massive advance in terms of economic development. The ‘gigantomania’ of a Stalin is not just the product of his fevered imagination and lust for power. The country will, more than likely, be devastated by external or internal war. There will probably be a small industrial base and an underdeveloped internal market. Natural resources may exist but may well not be immediately available. Human resources will exist but will, on the whole, not be endowed with great training or education. These hardly add up to fertile conditions for the development of socialism. It is not surprising that Paul Baran once famously admitted that: ‘Socialism in backward and underdeveloped countries has a powerful tendency to become a backward and underdeveloped socialism’ (1968: viii). To the legacy of underdevelopment one must add the hostile international environment which socialist regimes faced from 1917 onwards. Being a ‘weak link’ in an imperialist chain may have facilitated a socialist revolution but, for sure, imperialist aggression would ensue. This was the case for Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, or Angola. Revolutionary nationalist self-​ determination had its place in the imperialist system. Wars, boycotts, external aggression, and blockades have been a fact of most successful revolutions. The transition to socialism has thus been ‘over-​determined’ by the conditions prevailing in the international political system. This situation can only exacerbate the already difficult internal conditions for democratic, let alone socialist, development. The internal balance of forces between democratic transformation and capitalist restoration was, inevitably, tilted towards the latter.While in the short term external aggression may hasten the transformation of social relations after the revolution, in the longer term it needs only to be maintained to fatally weaken the transformation project or turn it in an authoritarian militarist direction, as happened in Nicaragua. It is clear by now that the socialist regimes of the 20th century existed more in the ‘realm of necessity’ than in the promised ‘realm of freedom’. This meant that socialism, as it actually materialised, had to confront, above all, the problems of underdevelopment. As Ken Post and Phil Wright (1989) argue, the main characteristic of all socialist regimes was that they are ‘resource-​constrained economies’, the principal characteristic of which ‘is the continuous reproduction of shortages or, alternatively, continuous underproduction, in contrast to the overproduction of capitalism’. It is thus easy to see how, from the very start, there would be a tendency towards full reintegration into the world market in a bid to escape the critical resource constraints which the new socialist economies face. Socialism was once seen as the best means to ‘catch up’ with advanced Western capitalist societies. In 1936, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke for many Third World nationalist leaders when he declared that: ‘I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment,

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28  Ronaldo Munck the degradation and the subjection of the Indian people, except through socialism’. Yet 50 years after Nehru’s desperate leap of faith it was abundantly clear that ‘socialist development’ was just a pale imitation of its capitalist progenitor, with its own undesirable features and inefficiencies thrown in. By 1990, this attempt to surpass underdevelopment through socialism had failed.

Postdevelopment If until now we have largely taken for granted the concept of development itself, we must now question its meaning. We cannot simply assume, from a critical theoretical perspective, that development is a common human good. Recent attempts to deconstruct the development discourse have helped highlight its less than benign role. Gustavo Esteva (1992: 8) points to the apparent contradiction that while ‘development occupies the centre of an incredibly powerful semantic constellation ... At the same time, very few words are as feeble, as fragile and as incapable of giving substance and meaning to thought and behaviour as this one’. Development acts as a truism and its open-​ended significance renders it almost meaningless.Yet its conceptual inflation has led it to dominate almost all treatments of the non-​Western world. Development seems to act as a metaphor for the Western way of life; a word to represent a world to be built in its own image. Far from benign, a wholesome objective all political tendencies could agree to, development begins to appear as a disciplinary mechanism in the Foucaultian sense. Marxism might seem to be above this type of critique. After all, Marxism has hardly been on a par with Western imperialism as an agent of development. Yet, orthodox Marxism was an integral part of the modernist paradigm, in many ways its epitome. Development can, indeed, be seen as a central axis of the whole of Marx’s work. The Hegelian concept of history as an unfolding of the Spirit and Darwin’s concept of evolution merge and intertwine in the classic Marxist notion of development. As seen above, Marxism exudes confidence in the onward march of history and the inexorable progress of development. The Marxist stages of human history—​the sequence of modes of production—​are imbued with a modernist conception of development. But from a post-​ Marxist perspective we could establish some critical distance from this conception and contribute to the debate around postdevelopment. One way of illustrating this argument would be through a discussion of the radical, Marxist and otherwise, dependency theory. This is not the place to carry out a genealogy of the concept of dependency.The point is that the dependency approach emerged in the late 1960s as a supposedly radical critique of the orthodox, conservative theory of modernisation. But in all its tenets it simply reversed the arguments of the mainstream discourse.Where modernisation theory saw the diffusion of progress across the globe, the dependency approach saw simply the ‘development of underdevelopment’.Where one saw integration into the capitalist world economy as the only path to development, the other saw delinking from the world economy as the key to development.Where one saw capitalist development leading steadily towards democracy, the other saw only an inexorable slide into dictatorship or fascism. Thirty years later it would seem that modernisation had won the battle of ideas hands down with the rise of neoliberalism as uncontested development paradigm. Reform in development parlance had now become synonymous with neoliberal, free-​market doctrines, where once it conjured up images of agrarian reform and income distribution. If the modernisation and dependency theories are, at one level, simply mirror images of each other, what could break this impasse in development theory? From a post-​Marxist

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Critical development theory  29 perspective, both feminism and ecology appeared to be attractive alternatives.The various attempts to carry out an ‘engendering’ of development theory—​women in/​and development, gender and development, and so on—​have utterly transformed this area of study. In theoretical terms, however, some of the criticisms of development theory, such as its essentialism, can be applied equally to feminism, at least prior to the emergence of poststructuralist feminism. As to ecology, we now have a new radical/​reformist orthodoxy of ‘sustainable development’, a blanket term covering various perspectives, but imbuing them all with the warm glow of ‘motherhood and apple pie’. While these new critical approaches have taken over at the margins of development practice, the mainstream carries on being dominated by the technocratic/​Western-​centred/​evolutionist perspectives of modernisation theory which have even brought under their sway many erstwhile dependency theorists. We now see an emerging postdevelopment perspective that might merge with a version of post-​Marxism. From feminism, ecology, and other ‘new’ social movements we can take a critique of mainstream notions of development. From the emerging ‘anti-​development’ school (see Sachs, 1992) we can take the sharp deconstruction of the developmentalist discourse and puncture its self-​assuredness. Yet this school’s anti-​modernism hardly takes us ‘beyond’ modernism or even to a post-​Marxist terrain. There is something arrogant about the promotion of ‘another development’ which preaches non-​material values to the poor and evades the basic problems of material needs. The postmodern tack is a different one and at the very least it has carried out an effective ‘decentring’ of the white European male gaze that invented ‘development’ as discourse to deal with the rest of the world after colonialism was overthrown by the peoples of the Third World. A new era of scepticism towards metanarratives of progress is upon us, we stress self-​reflexivity more, and we are much more open towards difference and local knowledge than in the heyday of development theory in both its mainstream and Marxist variants. Recommended reading: Albritton et al. (2001); Bideleux (1985); Kapoor (2008); Munck (2021).

References Albritton, R., et al. (eds.) (2001). Phases of Capitalist Development. Booms, Crises and Globalization. Houndmills: Palgrave. Avineri, S. (ed.) (1969). Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization. New York: Anchor. Baran, P. (1968). The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Modern Reader Paperback. Bideleux, R. (1985). Communism and Development. London: Methuen. Brewer, A. (1980) Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Study, London: Routledge. Esteva, G. (1992). “Development,” in Sachs, W. (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power. London: Zed Books. Harding, N. (1977). Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol. 1. Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kapoor, I. (2008). The Postcolonial Politics of Development. London: Routledge. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (2019). Pluriverse: A Post-​Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Lane, D. (1974). “Leninism as an Ideology of Soviet Development,” in de Kadt, E., & Williams, G. (eds.), Sociology and Development. London: Tavistock. Lenin,V.I. (1967). The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin,V.I. (1970). “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Lenin,V.I. (ed.), Selected Works in three Volumes,Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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30  Ronaldo Munck Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1977).“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx, K. (ed.), The Revolutions of 1848. Political Writings, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Munck, R. (2021). Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives. New York: Palgrave. Post, K., & Wright, P. (1989). Socialism and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Sachs, W. (1992). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Shanin, T. (ed.) (1983). Late Marx and the Russian Road. London: Routledge. Warren, B. (1980). Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism. London:Verso.

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4  Race in/​and development Robtel Neajai Pailey

Race fundamentally structures the modern world and shapes the lived experiences of so-​called Global North and South actors.Yet, the nexus between race and development is insufficiently addressed in critical development studies. This chapter analyses how development scholarship, policy, and practice are fundamentally raced, using a broad range of disciplinary conventions from philosophy, critical race studies, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and so on. It explores development over the longue durée, assessing how its historical antecedents—​slavery, colonialism, imperialism—​and its contemporary manifestations—​ globalisation, neoliberalism—​have produced racialised ‘phenotypic others’ and hierarchies of race and place (Pailey, 2020a). This chapter takes as its starting point the important premise that ‘development’ is not an exclusively Global South phenomenon. By championing the need to interrogate inequalities within and between countries, I use race as a lens of analysis to reconcile debates between proponents of global development, who favour addressing inequalities within countries, and promoters of international development, who support confronting inequalities between countries. The chapter also asserts that critical development studies has much to learn from critical race studies and that the two fields of scholarly inquiry must be in conversation with one another (Pailey, 2020a). For example, while critical development studies is concerned with analysing systemic changes needed to achieve political, economic, social, and environmental justice (i.e., non-​mainstream, alternative development), it remains relatively silent on race. And although critical race studies is concerned with how race is foundational to lived experiences of subjugation, it only sees race within the context of American racism and jurisprudence, with little to no political economy analysis beyond the United States (Pailey, 2020a). In the discussion that follows, I explore critical race theories and how they graft on to concepts of development; examine key historical and contemporary moments in which race has been deployed implicitly or explicitly to justify development interventions; demonstrate how race intersects with other social qualifiers such as gender, class, caste, and ethnicity to influence development outcomes in the so-​called Global North and South; and provide readers with the tools to repeatedly speak and write race into development.

Race: what’s development got to do with it? Race is the idea that humans can be grouped into categories based on assumed shared physical and societal attributes such as phenotype and geographical origin. In this vein, we can think of race as socially constructed, relational, and historically fluid because it was invented to justify hierarchical relations of power, and its meanings have emerged DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-5

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32  Robtel Neajai Pailey ‘out of specific historical conditions’ (Kothari, 2006: 10; Omi & Winant, 2015: x). As such, race is neither consistent nor stable, but rather ‘continuingly being made and remade in everyday life … continually in formation’ (Omi & Winant, 2015: x, 2), in the same way that development represents broader processes of political, economic, social, and technological transformation in both the so-​called Global North and South. Accordingly, ‘racial ordering, racist institutional arrangement and racial control’ have been able to ‘circulate, cross borders’ thereby transforming voyages of brutal European conquest into chattel slavery, indentured servitude, colonial expansion, imperial extraction, and neoliberal marketisation (Goldberg, 2009: 1275). These processes have produced racialisation, the assigning of racial identities or attributes, inferior or superior status, to a group, relationship, or social practice previously unclassified as such, usually with the purpose of domination. For instance, people of African descent became racialised as ‘black’ through slavery just as people of Asian/​Middle Eastern descent became ‘Oriental’ through colonialism (Fanon, 1952; Omi & Winant, 2015; Pierre, 2020a; Said, 1978). Similarly, people in the so-​called Global South have come to be racialised as ‘non-​white’, ‘non-​Western’, ‘low-​ income’, ‘underdeveloped’—​with prefixes denoting their distance and distinction from white Western modernity—​through multiple systems of command and control. Race and racialisation enable racism, combining ‘essentialist representations of race (stereotyping, xenophobia, aversion, etc.) with patterns of domination (violence, hierarchy, super-​exploitation, etc.)’ (Omi & Winant, 2013: 964). Thus, racism is fuelled not only by individual biases and prejudices but also by structural and institutional discrimination and oppression. As such, cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy (1987: 36) makes a compelling case for examining racisms, plural, rather than racism, singular, because the dividing up of humanity into tiers of distinct races has changed across space and time (Mills, 2017: 4). For example, the racism of enslaving black African bodies in Brazil was fundamentally different from, though a precursor to, the racism of contemporary anti-​ black policing in the country’s favelas. In understanding race, racialisation, and racism as inventions of colonial and imperial control, we can begin to see how they shape and fashion development discourses, policies, and practices. According to Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2017: 36), ‘the plantation and colonial systems were the factories par excellence of race and racism’ in which ‘a material dimension and weight to the experience of being “raced” ’ surfaced (Crenshaw, et al., 1995: xxvi). As Cheryl I. Harris (1995: 277) argues convincingly, the seizure and appropriation of indigenous land coupled with the seizure and appropriation of enslaved African and indentured Asian labour, respectively, endowed whiteness globally with the privilege of ‘property’, thus making it synonymous with wealth and material assets. Examples of this include the structural and physical violence of white settler colonialism meted out against First Nations in the United States and Canada, Aboriginals in Australia and New Zealand, as well as blacks, Indians, and coloureds in apartheid South Africa. As an extension of these encounters, mainstream development could be considered a series of ‘racial projects’ in which resources are reorganised and redistributed to justify racial difference vis-​à-​vis economic exploitation (Omi & Winant, 2015: 13; White, 2002). Recommended reading: Crenshaw et al. (1995); Mills (2017); Omi & Winant (2015).

Development: what’s race got to do with it? While development is structured along hierarchies of race and place, glaring silences on race and racism enable Western practitioners and scholars ‘to avoid being accountable’

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Race in/and development  33 for the unearned powers and privileges that derive from whiteness (Kothari, 2006: 20). Mainstream development’s ‘colour-​blind stance’ thus inadvertently reveals a deafening silence on race ‘which both masks and marks its centrality to the development project’ (White, 2002: 407). According to critical international relations scholar Robbie Shilliam (2014: 32), race represents the ‘foundational ordering principle of modern world development’ and, as such, analysis of race and racism should be central to development discourse, policy, and practice. He identifies four periods of modern world development in which race, racialisation, and racism have featured prominently (Shilliam, 2014: 32–​34): 1. Euro-​American Atlantic slavery ordered and segregated individuals and societies along racial hierarchies. Enlightenment thinking depicted, for example, white Europe as human, evolved, more capable of rational thinking and deserving of rights, autonomy, and freedom compared to a ‘sub-​human’ and ‘degenerate’ black Africa. 2. Nineteenth-​century European imperialism advanced a ‘civilising mission’ to instruct ‘non-​white others’ in the ways of progress as defined by whites. 3. The Cold War era of Western dominance of development was resisted and challenged by a coalition of newly independent ‘non-​white’ nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America which shifted the discourse from universal progress to an interrogation of Euro-​American racism. 4. Post-​Cold War development discourses and practices have reproduced the ‘civilising mission’ while concealing development’s imperialist past. Mainstream development, therefore, advances ‘a dichotomy between a colonialism that is “bad”, exploitative, extractive and oppressive and a development that is “good”, moralistic, philanthropic and humanitarian’ (Kothari, 2005: 9). Such rhetoric constructs the so-​ called Global South as inept, with black, indigenous, and other women of colour stereotyped in particular as having problems and needs rather than capacities to make decisions or devise solutions (Amadiume, 1987; Mohanty, 1988). In the colonial imaginaries of race that underpin development, Africa is fixed as a continent of perpetual famine and fragility; Asia and Latin America remain regions of informality and overpopulation, crime, and instability, respectively. Race and racism become disguised through coded technical language in which ‘capacity’ must be transported from North to South. This ‘racial vernacular of development’ (Pierre, 2020b) enables categories of coloniser/​ colonised to morph into ‘developed’/​‘developing’ or ‘the West’/​‘the rest’ (Hall, 1992), ‘uncivilised savages’ to transform into the ‘underdeveloped third world’, and white ‘technical advisors’ and charity workers to replace colonial officers and missionaries. Disguised racial framing drives humanitarian and development interventions with whites often controlling the ‘levers of power’ (Pailey, 2020a: 735). For instance, while the United Nations doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was invoked to justify the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s illegitimate support of regime change during Libya’s 2011 revolution, R2P has not similarly been invoked to protect black people from anti-​ black policing in France, the United Kingdom, or the United States. Similarly,Teju Cole’s (2012) notion of the ‘white-​saviour industrial complex’ deconstructs how Global North actors prefer to parachute into the so-​called Global South as a means of fulfilling ‘white fantasies of conquest and heroism’ while conveniently ignoring how their unearned privileges reproduce inequalities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and entrench the socio-​economic deprivation of black, indigenous, and other people of colour in Europe and North America.

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34  Robtel Neajai Pailey Contrastingly, countries in the so-​called Global South have attempted to achieve development goals by explicitly invoking race and racial solidarity to address historical injustices. For example, Ghana used the 400th anniversary of the beginning of Euro-​ American transatlantic slavery to generate revenue from heritage tourism. Through the commercially driven ‘Year of Return’ in 2019, Ghana appealed to global black solidarity by marketing itself as an ideological haven and permanent home for people of African descent (Pailey, 2021: 94). For nearly 200 years, Liberia has maintained its ‘Negro clause’—​ a constitutional provision barring non-​blacks from obtaining citizenship—​as a policy of protectionism against anti-​black economic exploitation (Pailey, 2020a, 2021). And Brazil has legislated race-​based affirmative action policies to confront the disproportionately low numbers of black and indigenous people attending public universities in the country (Kent & Wade, 2015). In centring race as previously delineated, we are forced to interrogate poverty, power, and privilege, where they are situated, why, and how this came to be so. We are forced to reckon with the reality that development suffers from a ‘white gaze problem’ (Pailey, 2020a). Recommended reading: Kothari (2006); Shilliam (2014); White (2002).

The ‘white gaze of development’ The ‘white gaze’ is a term borrowed from the works of African-​American literary icons and public intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and so forth, who challenged one-​dimensional racist tropes about blacks in America. As I have previously theorised (Pailey, 2020a), the ‘white gaze of development’ assumes implicitly or explicitly that Western whiteness and modernity are the primary signifiers of progress, against which all others are deemed deviant, inferior, or incomplete. It is sustained through two interconnected logics (Pailey, 2020a). Conspicuous silences around race and racism in development are reproduced through what Mills (1997) calls ‘the racial contract’—​ an unnamed political, economic, and social system that reinforces white supremacy globally—​and through what Robin DiAngelo (2018) calls ‘white fragility’—​ the inability of white people to confront their unearned privileges and powers. Global white supremacy has manifested in the whitelash that brought ultra-​nationalists to power in the Americas while justifying the modern-​day lynchings of Afro-​Brazilian activist Marielle Franco and African-​American jogger Ahmaud Arbery, amongst others (Pailey & Niang, 2020). Despite these obvious manifestations of the ‘white gaze’, backlash persists against using race as a lens of analysis to explore political, social, and economic change, with some arguing that ‘anything so omnipresent must be mythic’ (Hartigan, 1997: 496). Nevertheless, while the ‘white gaze of development’ endures through colour-​blind framing and filtering, it has been intentionally and systematically subverted. A careful examination of the subordinate socio-​economic positions of most black, indigenous, and other people of colour in white settler polities of the so-​called Global North has compelled us to question the blasphemy of calling these spaces and places ‘developed’ and exposed the inherent racism of mainstream development (Pailey, 2020a). Similarly, although there remain racialised systems of domination amongst so-​called Global South countries, the emergence of alternative, non-​mainstream development actors—​including Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil, South Africa, China, India, Turkey—​and their engagements in ‘South–​South’ learning, policy transfer, and development cooperation have fundamentally upended faulty assumptions about the so-​called Global North as the epicentre of

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Race in/and development  35 expertise, knowledge, and resources. Countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are far from perfect as they exhibit high levels of inequality and poverty; however, black, indigenous, and other people of colour in these regions have proven their capacities to forge solutions in the most difficult circumstances. Notably, the ‘white gaze of development’ has been challenged by analyses featuring what so-​called Global South citizens have done to save themselves and others from COVID-​19, and how the so-​called Global North has much to learn from Senegal’s production of a US$1 diagnostic test, India’s use of robots in hospital care wards, Cuba’s medical humanitarianism, Liberia’s retrofitted rubbish bag personal protective equipment, Singapore’s robust testing and contact tracing, and Uruguay’s social welfare protections (Pailey, 2020b). That coronavirus has characterised a dual crisis of health and economics highlights how race and capital are mutually constituted. Recommended reading: DiAngelo (2018); Mills (1997); Pailey (2020a).

Excavating Robinson’s ‘racial capitalism’ While global domination and structural inequalities are constituted by economic and military power, they are reinforced and justified by racial power. In his seminal book Black Marxism, published in 1983, Cedric J. Robinson coined the term ‘racial capitalism’ to establish a connection between racism and capitalism. In an implicit critique of Engels’s and Marx’s erasure of race and racism in The Communist Manifesto, Robinson’s assertion that racism emerged with capitalism and that they are both inextricably entangled is perhaps the most important contribution to the literature on race and development. It underpins the work of critical development studies scholar Kalpana Wilson, whose book Race, Racism and Development picks up from where Robinson left off by exploring the symbiotic relationship between race and capital: the centrality of the idea of ‘race’ to Enlightenment thinking cannot be fully understood without foregrounding the enabling relationship between race and capital, and the accumulation from racialised slavery it allowed, which in turn made possible the establishment of European capitalism … constructions of race have been repeatedly transformed, reworked or reanimated in the context of both changing strategies of capital accumulation and resistance to them (Wilson, 2012: 6–​7). Deepening this analysis, Brodkin (2000: 237, 240) conceives of race as a relationship to the capitalist means of production (i.e., ‘a relationship that structures capitalist production’) in which a racial division of labour emerges. In essence, the further one is from controlling the means of production, the lower one is on the racial hierarchy; the closer one is to owning the means of production, the higher one is on the racial hierarchy. For example, US-​based Jews from the mid 19th century onwards went from being considered ‘white to off-​white and back to white’ largely based on their ‘changing relationships to the means of capitalist production’ (Brodkin, 2000: 240). Yet, the post-​slavery nation of Haiti represents the most acute historical example of racial capitalism.

Haiti as a prototypical case study of racial capitalism After slavery was instituted in 1681 in the French colony of Saint-​Domingue (later independent Haiti), nearly 500,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked to produce plantation

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36  Robtel Neajai Pailey crops like sugar, coffee, and cocoa for export to Europe (James, 1938). Saint-​Domingue became one of the most profitable colonies in the world, enabling French citizens to rely on its agricultural exports for their livelihoods. Racial hierarchies developed early on with white enslavers at the top, followed by free mixed-​race persons of colour (typically the result of French men’s predatory sexual violence) and enslaved black Africans.Yet, the latter, who faced a harsh climate, colonial cruelty, disease, and death, would unleash vengeance on their enslavers in what has come to be known as the first and only successful slave revolt in history. Led by formerly enslaved and self-​educated Touissant L’ouverture, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–​1804 ushered in the birth of the world’s first black republic, thus challenging racist assumptions about black inferiority and upsetting geopolitical and capitalist relations (James, 1938; Shilliam, 2008). The euphoria of black self-​rule would be short-​lived, however (Shilliam, 2008). Long after colonial French and Spanish Saint-​Domingue were unified, the French king in 1825 declared that France would only recognise Haiti’s independence in exchange for a 150 million franc ‘indemnity’ signifying losses from the ‘lucrative’ enterprise of slavery (Farmer, 2004).This tragic-​comedic compensation, worth ten times Haiti’s annual budget, was coercively sought as French war ships filled with 500 cannons were sent to ‘persuade’ the independent black republic to pay up. Haiti had to borrow 30 million francs from French banks to make the first two payments and eventually defaulted on the loans. In a show of military might, the French king in 1838 sent 12 warships to Haiti, prompting a revised ‘Treaty of Friendship’ which reduced the balance indemnity amount to 60 million francs; the total 90 million francs was five times France’s annual budget at the time, prompting some scholars to credibly assert that French prosperity has been built on Haitian poverty (Daut, 2020). When in 1838 France abolished slavery in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and French Guyana, the latter remaining a French territory, it compensated French enslavers 120 million francs in total, equivalent at the time to US$97 per enslaved person. Haiti was not able to pay off its loans (including high interest) to cover the indemnity until 1947—​ amounting to more than twice the original indemnity claimed by French colonists/​ enslavers. Thereafter, successive Haitian governments have levied high taxes on citizens, abandoned developing a national school system, underfunded healthcare, and neglected infrastructure (Farmer, 2004). Haiti has demanded restitution for slavery on multiple occasions, especially in light of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) declaration that post-​slavery nations are entitled to reparations. When then Haitian president Jean-​Bertrand Aristide insisted on formal recompense in 2002, his appeals fell on deaf ears; subsequent French presidents have continuously sidestepped their country’s debt to Haiti, calculated to be at minimum US$28 billion (Daut, 2020). By expelling France, Haiti became a pariah for challenging white supremacy in the most profound way. In particular, its reckoning with racial capitalism produced perpetual indebtedness, socio-​economic isolation, political interference, regime change, foreign military occupation, sanctions and embargoes, gross national product (GNP) decline, poor life expectancy, and abject poverty for the vast majority of citizens. Like other island nations that wrestled their independence from Europe, Haiti’s experience exposes how Euro-​American welfare states like France are actually built on racial capitalism. In essence, the enslavement of black bodies and extraction/​appropriation of ‘Southern’ resources, sometimes with the complicity of ‘Southern’ elites, has produced an economic racial hierarchy that rarely receives the attention it deserves in mainstream development discourses. Some scholars have argued convincingly, therefore, that disingenuous debates about aid,

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Race in/and development  37 what Kapoor (2008: 81) aptly calls ‘fraudulent kindliness’, should be replaced instead by meaningful conversations about the need to compensate formerly colonised spaces and places with long-​overdue reparations. Recommended reading: James (1938); Robinson (1983); Wilson (2012).

Mainstreaming race as an anti-​racist agenda for development Mainstreaming race as an anti-​racist agenda for development is more important now than ever before (Pailey, 2020a), as demonstrated by the surge of 2020 protests following the brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and from evidence globally that COVID-​19 has disproportionately impacted black and brown people. This mainstreaming must happen in the same way Marxist and feminist scholars have mainstreamed class and gender, respectively. Analysing race compels us to consider ‘development’ a global challenge, rather than solely a predicament of the so-​called Global South, because most black, indigenous, and other people of colour experience limited statehood, material deprivation, grinding poverty, and inequality in the so-​called Global North at alarming rates (Sen, 1999). Mainstreaming race exposes how racism manifests in relations of power between North and South and within North and South. It forces us to acknowledge that conditions in the so-​called Global North and South do not exist in a historical vacuum, and to debunk the ‘construction of development as a neutral, “technical” field’ (Wilson, 2012: 6). Centring race also compels us to adopt intersectional approaches to examine both inter-​racial and intra-​racial inequalities. In the latter analysis, we must interrogate how Malays have come to dominate the Indo-​Chinese in Malaysia; how India’s caste system has rendered the Brahmins superior to the Dalits; how Jews in Israel have used US-​ backed militarisation to occupy Palestinian territories; how mixed-​race Haitians have subordinated their darker-​skinned counterparts; and how Anglo-​Saxon whites have come to outrank Roma or Gypsies in Europe. While whiteness is generally hegemonic in its social construction, some scholars have made an important case for viewing all whites not as homogeneously dominant and privileged, but as heterogeneous and differentiated along lines of class, gender, geography, and so forth (Hartigan, 1997). Notwithstanding, critical ethnographers have taken up the charge to ‘anthropologise the West’ and white supremacy, interrogating systems of racial domination, studying and critiquing how wealth in the so-​called Global North is derived and operates (Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020; Rabinow, 1986: 241). In her careful examination of the black African presence in American literature, Toni Morrison offers an important way forward for critical development scholarship. She argues that American literary canonical texts written by whites which employ black characters as tropes and props ultimately unveil something about the psyche of the writer and his/​her own problematic preoccupations with racialised ‘otherness’. Morrison (1992: 90) urged us to ‘avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served’ in the same way that Laura Nader (1972: 289) challenged anthropologists to ‘study the colonisers rather than the colonised, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty’. Critical development studies scholars must challenge the invisibility of whiteness on one hand, while exposing its normalisation and naturalisation as a signifier of progress on the other hand (Loftsdóttir, 2009: 5). We must dissect and deconstruct the dysfunctional

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38  Robtel Neajai Pailey nature of power in the so-​called Global North and how it impacts the so-​called Global South. We must devise a completely different lexicon for depicting people, places, and processes, thus discarding racist, colonial binaries such as ‘Global North’ vs. ‘Global South’, ‘developed’ vs. ‘developing’, ‘first world’ vs. ‘third world’. We must cite, teach, and engage with radical thinkers from the so-​called Global South whose voices have been ‘deliberately silenced’ and/​or ‘preferably unheard’, to quote Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy. Last, but certainly not least, we must change our institutional, methodological, theoretical, and empirical approaches to development while respecting and upholding the dignity of black, indigenous, and other people of colour in the so-​called North and South. Recommended reading: Morrison (1992); Pailey (2020a); Sen (1999).

References Amadiume, I. (1987). Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books. Beliso-​De Jesús, A., & Pierre, J. (2020). “Introduction: Anthropology of White Supremacy.” American Anthropologist, 122(1): 65–​75. Brodkin, K. (2000). “Global Capitalism: What’s Race Got to Do with It?” American Ethnologist, 27 (2): 237–​256. Cole,T. (2012). “The White-​Saviour Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic, 21 March. www.theatlantic. com/​international/​archive/​2012/​03/​the-​white-​savior-​industrial-​complex/​254843/​. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (1995). “Introduction,” in Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, pp. xiii–​xxxii. New York: New Press. Daut, M. (2020). “How France Extorted Haiti for One of the Greatest Heists in Geopolitical History.” Quartz Africa, 4 July. https://​qz.com/​africa/​1877241/​how-​france-​extorted-​haiti-​for-​ the-​g reatest-​heist-​in-​history/​?utm_​source=email&utm_​medium=africa-​weekly-​brief&utm_​ content=9146297. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. New York: Penguin Random House. Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin,White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Farmer, P. (2004). “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology, 45(3): 305–​325. Gilroy, P. (1987). There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge. Goldberg, D.T. (2009). “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32(7): 1271–​1287. Hall, S. (1992). “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Hall, S. & Gieben, B. (eds.), Formations of Modernity, pp. 275–​332. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harris, C.I. (1995). “Whiteness as Property,” in Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, pp. 276–​291. New York: New Press. Hartigan, J. (1997). “Establishing the Fact of Whiteness.” American Anthropologist, 99(3): 495–​505. James, C.L.R. (1938). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker and Warburg. Kapoor, I. (2008). The Postcolonial Politics of Development. London: Routledge. Kent, M., & Wade, P. (2015). “Genetics Against Race: Science, Politics and Affirmative Action in Brazil.” Social Studies of Science, 45(6): 816–​838. Kothari, U. (2005). “A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies,” in Kothari, U. (ed.), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, pp. 1–​13. London: Zed Books. Kothari, U. (2006). “An Agenda for Thinking about ‘Race’ in Development.” Progress in Development Studies, 6(1): 9–​23.

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Race in/and development  39 Loftsdóttir, K. (2009). “Invisible Colour: Landscapes of Whiteness and Racial Identity in International Development.” Anthropology Today, 25: 4–​7. Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, C.W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C.W. (2017). Black Rights/​White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, C. (1988). “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review, 30: 61–​88. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books. Nader, L. (1972). “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying up,” in Dell, H. (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology, pp. 284–​311. New York: Pantheon Book. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2013). “Resistance Is Futile? A Response to Feagin and Elias.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(6): 961–​973. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial Formation in the United States (3rd edn.). New York: Routledge. Pailey, R.N. (2020a). “De-​centring the ‘White Gaze’ of Development.” Development and Change, 51(3): 729–​745. Pailey, R.N. (2020b). “Africa Does Not Need Saving during This Pandemic.” Al Jazeera English, 13 April. www.aljazeera.com/​opinions/​2020/​4/​13/​africa-​does-​not-​need-​saving-​during-​this-​ pandemic. Pailey, R.N. (2021). Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa:The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pailey, R.N., & Niang, A. (2020). “The US Government Kills Black People with Impunity Both at Home and Abroad.” The Nation, 16 June. www.thenation.com/​article/​world/​antiblack-​racism-​ africa-​us/​. Pierre, J. (2020a). “Slavery, Anthropological Knowledge and the Racialisation of Africans.” Current Anthropology, 61(22): S221–​S231. Pierre, J. (2020b). “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: A View from West Africa.” American Anthropologist, 122(1): 86–​98. Rabinow, P. (1986). “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-​ modernity in Anthropology,” in Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, pp. 234–​236. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, C.J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shilliam, R. (2008). “What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us about Development, Security, and the Politics of Race.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(3): 778–​808. Shilliam, R. (2014). “Race and Development,” in Weber, H. (ed.), The Politics of Development: A Survey, pp. 31–​48. Abingdon: Routledge. White, S. (2002). “Thinking Race, Thinking Development.” Third World Quarterly, 23(3): 407–​419. Wilson, K. (2012). Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. London: Zed Books.

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5  Development theory The Latin American pivot Cristóbal Kay

It could be argued that one of the origins of critical development studies in Latin America has been the writings of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1971). His main writings were published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in which he argued that the feudal landlord class and the national bourgeoisie allied with imperialism continually reproduced the system of exploitation and domination. He did not believe that the national bourgeoisie was able to perform the progressive role it had achieved in Europe. Hence, he advocated a socialist revolution so as to achieve the liberation of the oppressed classes and in particular of indigenous people. Contrary to many thinkers at the time, he foresaw the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peasantry. He was one of the early Marxists who tried to adapt Marxism to the Latin American reality as he understood it, and generally break with Eurocentric thinking (Quijano, 2000). In this sense, he foreshadowed structuralism and dependency theory, which I consider to be the main contributions to critical development theory to emanate from the region, as will be discussed in the next two sections of this chapter, respectively. However, while structuralism in its critique of the orthodoxy of the times only sought to reform the capitalist system, the Marxist strand within dependency theory aimed to overthrow it so as to achieve socialism. While the debate on ‘reform or revolution’ already emerged in the first decades of the 20th century, it acquired particular intensity after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Several governments in Latin America and the Caribbean followed some of the development policy recommendations of structuralism during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, but only to a limited extent, while dependency theory had far less influence on government policy at the time, although it was very popular among students, left-​wing political parties, and revolutionary social movements. With the rise of the counterrevolution in development thinking in the late 1970s and 1980s, neoliberal ideas gained prominence and shaped government policy not only in the developing world, but also in the developed countries. It was only in the early 1980s that structuralist thinkers were able to respond to the neoliberal challenge by proposing neostructuralist development strategies, as will be discussed in the third section. The chapter ends with some conclusions. Recommended reading: Kirby (2003); Munck and O’Hearn (1999).

Structuralist theory of development The emergence of what came to be known as the structuralist school or theory of development was haphazard. It originated with the path-​breaking and controversial publication of the Economic Survey of Latin America 1949, which was published by the United DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-6

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Development theory: Latin America  41 Nations Department of Economic Affairs in New York in 1951. The original Spanish text had been published in 1950 by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in Santiago de Chile. CEPAL, to use its Spanish acronym for Comisión Económica para América Latina, was established in 1948. The renowned development economist Albert Hirschman (1961: 13) referred to this publication as the ‘ECLA manifesto’ (which has echoes with another well-​known manifesto), and not without reason. The publication was penned by Raúl Prebisch, who had become head of the ECLA in 1949. In his analysis, he challenged the economic orthodoxy at the time, which argued on the basis of the theory of comparative advantages that international trade was beneficial for the trading nations concerned, and particularly for less-​developed countries. Instead of the income gap being reduced through trade, Prebisch argued that it actually increased. Such a conclusion had explosive consequences for relations between rich and poor countries, and thus it is not surprising that Prebisch was attacked and vilified by the powerful, particularly in the centre countries. But Prebisch knew how to defend himself and the institution he led. He had indeed assembled an extraordinarily gifted and transnational team of social scientists who he ably led and inspired (Kay, 2019). Prebisch divided the world into centre countries and periphery countries, which roughly correspond in conventional terminology to developed and less-​developed or developing countries, respectively. By using this terminology, Prebisch highlighted the power asymmetry between nations. Using historical statistics, he discovered that the long-​ term trend of terms of trade between Latin America (the periphery) and its main trading countries, largely the US and Europe (the centre) was deteriorating. Latin America was mainly or almost exclusively exporting primary products such as mineral and agricultural commodities to the centre countries, while it largely imported manufacturing commodities from them. While the terms of trade fluctuated over time, the trend was negative for the periphery, which is contrary to what the orthodox international trade theory sustained. Expressed more directly, this means that the periphery countries had to export an increasing amount of primary commodities to be able to import the same amount of industrial commodities from the centre countries. There was thus an unequal exchange between them. Prebisch did not necessarily argue that international trade was negative for the periphery, but that the fruits of international trade favoured more the centre than the periphery (Kay, 2019). This thesis is known in the literature as the ‘Prebisch–​Singer thesis on the deterioration of the terms of trade’ and has generated much controversy ever since. More generally, given Prebisch’s pioneering conceptualisation of centre–​periphery relations, some authors refer to structuralism as the centre–​periphery paradigm in development studies (Rodríguez, 1977). The lesson that Prebisch and his team at ECLA drew from this finding is that the periphery should shift its development strategy from being ‘outward-​oriented’ to one that is ‘inward-​oriented’. This was to be achieved by the state promoting the industrialisation of the periphery country through various means such as protectionism, subsidies, and infrastructure for the nascent industry, a process that became known as ‘import substitution industrialisation’, or ISI for short. The aim was to reduce dependence on exports of primary products and to shift the gravity of the economy to industry and the domestic economy. Many governments in Latin America, and elsewhere followed such an ISI development strategy during the 1950s until the 1970s and gave rise to what has been termed ‘state developmentalism’ given the centrality the state assumed in this process.This statist development strategy was much criticised by orthodox economists and was largely overturned by the neoliberal shift of the 1980s, as will be discussed later.

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42  Cristóbal Kay Another key idea introduced in the armoury of structuralism refers to the concept of ‘structural heterogeneity’. Pinto, who introduced the concept, argued that the ‘inward-​oriented’ ISI process was creating an internal duality between the new industries, with its relatively advanced technology, and the traditional workshops and industrial establishments which had a significantly lower productivity. Instead of a ‘trickle down’ and diffusion of technical progress within the domestic economy, as argued by orthodox economists, Pinto witnessed a growing polarisation within the industrial sector and, more generally, within the economy as similar polarisation processes were at work in the agricultural and service sectors. Thus the fruits of technological progress were furthering the concentration of capital. In short, the process of ‘structural heterogeneity’ reinforced and widened the unequal distribution of income (Pinto, 1970). Prebisch’s analysis of the unequal centre–​periphery relations led him to look beyond ECLA. He was the main driving force behind the creation of UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which was established in 1964 in Geneva with the remit of negotiating fairer trade relations between developed and developing countries. Prebisch became its first secretary general, but resigned in 1969 as he was unable to make much progress in his aim of seeking to establish a new international economic order. It was indeed a very ambitious goal, which remains unfulfilled to this day (Kay, 2019). First, the rise of Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and the subsequent rise of China, as well as other former periphery countries, in recent decades has reshaped, and is reshaping, relations between centre and periphery, but not exactly in the way desired by Prebisch and the structuralists, as it is taking place within the context of neoliberal globalisation. Recommended reading: Furtado (1964); Kay (1989, 2019); Rodríguez (1977).

Dependency theory A key critical perspective in development studies is dependency theory, which arose out of disenchantment with, and critique of, the ISI process. I am not referring to the critique by orthodox economists and neoliberals (of which more later), but to the critique arising from within structuralism, as well as by Marxists. Thus, within dependency theory, it is possible to distinguish at least two views: structuralist and Marxist. Despite their differences, they share the basic premise that the process of development of developing countries can only be understood in their relations with the developed countries. As formulated by Sunkel (1972: 520) from a structuralist perspective: ‘Development and underdevelopment … are simultaneous processes: the two faces of the historical evolution of capitalism’. Similarly, for Frank (1966: 18) from a Marxist perspective: ‘Contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now developed metropolitan countries’. This dependency has its historical origins in colonialism and imperialism but persists to this day. The two dependency views differ mainly in the analytical tools they deploy, and above all in their proposal for overcoming the dependent relationship. For obvious reasons, Marxists tend to use concepts derived from Marxist political economy. However, contrary to Marx, they argue that the development of capitalism in the dependent countries does not display the progressive features it has had in the dominant countries. Thus, some authors refer to this position as neo-​Marxist. As for solutions, structuralists believe it is

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Development theory: Latin America  43 possible to overcome dependence by radically reforming the capitalist system by creating a new international economic order (Sunkel, 1969), while Marxists believe that this is only possible by overthrowing the capitalist system itself and creating a socialist world order (Dos Santos, 1973). Dependency authors are quite an eclectic group. For example, they stress different factors for explaining the dependency situation even within the two views I propose. Within the structuralist view, Sunkel (1969) argues that the rise of foreign transnational corporations (TNCs) in the dependent countries, as a consequence of ISI, is leading to a process of national disintegration and the marginalisation of social groups, which are displaced by this process. Meanwhile, Furtado (1973) puts the emphasis on the ‘dependent patterns of consumption’ generated by these TNCs, thereby creating an industrial structure not suited for underdeveloped countries as it is too diversified and too capital-​intensive, thereby increasing the surplus population and perpetuating the high concentration of income, and hence the dependent pattern of consumption. Cardoso (1972), in contrast to Furtado and particularly Frank, argued that dependency does not mean stagnation, and, on the contrary, it can lead to economic growth, although with several undesirable features such as inequality and marginalisation. To emphasise this he coined the term ‘associated dependent development’. Also contrary to Frank, Cardoso (1972) highlighted the ‘diversity within unity’ instead of the ‘unity within diversity’, as for him the dependency situation varies between dependent countries due to their specific historical, economic, social, and political circumstances. With reference to the Marxist view, Frank (1966) coined the much-​quoted phrase ‘the development of underdevelopment’, by which he meant that the dependent relationship reproduces the underdevelopment of the developing countries instead of leading to a process of genuine development. Dos Santos (1973) argued that a key element in the dependent relationship arises due to the lack of a capital goods sector in developing countries. The ISI process had not enabled countries to produce their own technology as TNCs wanted to keep control over it back in their headquarters in developed countries. Hence, developing countries had become dependent on imports from developed countries to access productivity-​and growth-​ enhancing machinery, equipment, and other technological goods and services, to sustain their ISI and other economic sectors. Thus, ‘technological dependence’ is a key factor in the reproduction of the dependency relationship. Meanwhile Marini (1973) focuses on the ‘super-​exploitation of labour’ by capital that arises from the ‘unequal exchange’ between developed and underdeveloped countries. It is possible to speak also of a ‘Caribbean’ dependency view, which emerged largely from a group of scholars and activists linked to the University of the West Indies. While they were influenced by structuralist and Marxist dependency theorists, they argued that these had to be adapted to the particular context of the Caribbean countries, which were small island economies, that all had a recent colonial past (Girvan, 1973; Levitt, 2005). Dependency theory was particularly influential from the late 1960s to the 1970s. It provoked much debate and criticism. While the Marxist strand of dependency theory tended to morph into world systems theory, particularly in the case of Frank (Kay, 2011), the structuralist strand of dependency morphed into neostructuralism, which will be discussed next. Recommended reading: Kay (1989, 2011); Kay and Gwynne (2000); Munck and O’Hearn (1999).

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44  Cristóbal Kay

Neostructuralism and alternative development The neoliberal counterrevolution in development studies that was brewing during the 1970s gathered momentum at the turn of the decade with the victory of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 in the UK and the subsequent election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 to the US presidency. Both pushed forward the neoliberal agenda that aimed to dismantle many of the achievements of the welfare state and strengthened the forces pushing for neoliberal transformation in developing countries. With the debt crisis of the 1980s, which was particularly acute in Latin America, the neoliberal forces seized the moment and used the international financial institutions (World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)) and the aid programmes of the US and UK, among others, to impose certain conditions for the disbursement of credit and aid to the recipient countries. This package of wide-​ranging reform measures was labelled ‘structural adjustment programmes’ or SAPs, which led to the ‘Washington Consensus’, so named as Washington, DC, is not only the seat of the US government and treasury, but also of the WB, IMF, Inter-​American Development Bank (IDB), and Organization of American States (OAS), who all promoted neoliberalism. Among the required reforms were the dismantling of the developmentalist state and the protectionist measures of the ISI period so as to give free rein to global market forces (Saad-​Filho & Johnston, 2005). Chile under the dictatorship of General Pinochet (1973–​1990) already pioneered neoliberalism, which became the dominant policy discourse in many countries of the world. Some authors even consider Chile to have been the forerunner of globalisation by early on fully liberalising and opening its economy to the world market, thereby submitting the country to the ‘imperialism of free trade’ and creating a series of economic, social, and political contradictions (Ahumada & Torres, 2020). Among the first development institutions to take up the challenge of the neoliberal paradigm was ECLAC, previously known as ECLA, which now included the Caribbean in its name, hence the C added at the end of the acronym. As from 1990, they published a series of books in which they set out their new approach to development, which evolved from the earlier structuralism, seeking for its renewal, and thus referred to as ‘neostructuralism’. The foundational text of neostructuralism is Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity (ECLAC, 1990), whose intellectual author was Fajnzylber (Torres, 2006). Neostructuralists tried to come to terms with the demise of structuralism and dependency theory, the rise of the newly industrialising countries (NICs), and particularly the success of South Korea and Taiwan, the hegemony of neoliberalism, and the challenges of globalisation, as well as with the rise of poverty and inequality in Latin America as a consequence of neoliberal policies. The key elements of neostructuralism can be summed up as follows. First, it shifts from the structuralist emphasis on inward-​looking development to ‘development from within’ to selective domestic priorities, but increasingly to the world market in areas that offer the best opportunities for the strategic and long-​term development of the country. Thus, foreign trade was to become a more important sector than in the past, as it was now seen as having a more dynamic potential than the domestic market.The whole issue of unequal exchange was given less priority, sidelined, or not mentioned at all. Second, this required transforming the production structure of the country by shifting from traditional raw material exports to exports with higher value added, and

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Development theory: Latin America  45 especially towards industrial exports. Instead of continuing with the country’s comparative advantages, the state was now charged with developing its ‘competitive advantages’. Hence, the state was to expand education, improve standards, and promote technological skills and innovations. Third, to achieve this aim, a more nimble, competent, pragmatic, enabling, and catalyst state was required, as compared to the past clientelist, bureaucratic, and oversized state, so as to encourage the private sector to seek out the new opportunities of globalisation, as well as being able to adapt its policies according to changing international and national circumstances. The state was no longer required to create state enterprises, but could establish public–​private partnerships where this was the most appropriate way to stimulate investment, entrepreneurship, and high-​value economic activities—​in short, a developmentalist state ‘light’ (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2007). Fourth, a more flexible and open view of the market was taken. Thus, instead of using protectionist measures, price, and exchange rate controls, and so on, in a clientelist and indiscriminate manner as in the past, the purpose now was to ‘govern the market’, but in a purposeful manner so as to achieve certain developmental goals within a certain time frame so that state intervention did not become entrenched. Thus, an eye was always kept on market signals. Fifth, so as to be in a better position to face the world market, neostructuralists proposed a policy of ‘open regionalism’, meaning trade and investment agreements between countries of the region, but with a view that the region would negotiate agreements with other countries or regions in the world. Thus, bilateral country agreements were to be avoided, as single Latin American countries, especially the smaller ones, would have a weak bargaining position when dealing with rich and large countries. Sixth, last but not least, as markets tend to foster inequalities, especially those of a neoliberal kind, the state had to encourage measures that promote equity. One of the slogans was ‘growth with equity’, as without growth it would be difficult to finance equity measures. The achievement of social inclusion, cohesion, and poverty reduction was thus an important part of the neostructuralist development agenda. Neostructuralism was attacked by neoliberals as well as by the more radical Left. Neoliberals view it as too statist, interventionist, and too wedded to the worn-​out and discredited structuralism, while the radical Left view it as a new version, perhaps with a human face or a pragmatic kind, of neoliberalism and too close to what has been called the ‘post-​Washington Consensus’ (see Chapter 13 by Van Waeyenberge), in which specific social and poverty alleviation measures were introduced to the earlier ‘Washington Consensus’, which was seen as too harsh. The most comprehensive critical analysis of neostructuralism is by Leiva (2008). He faults neostructuralism for relegating power and power relations in its analysis and for jettisoning the core–​periphery model and the systemic approach of structuralism. Hence, by not focusing ‘on how economic surplus is produced, appropriated and distributed within a single, world capitalist system’ it is unable to provide a critical analysis of the development process (Leiva, 2008: xxvii). Indeed, Leiva may have a point in view of the experience of the so-​called ‘pink tide’, when centre-​left and left-​wing governments governed in several Latin American countries during the 1990s until the first decades of the current century. They all proclaimed to follow a post-​neoliberal and some even a postdevelopment path under a variety of slogans. However, they all ended up reinforcing an unsustainable extractivist development process and the rentier character of the

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46  Cristóbal Kay economy, the elite, and the state, albeit with a substantial reduction in poverty and some achievements in social inclusion. Thus, the power structures did not shift substantially, if at all, and the main pillars of neoliberalism remained in force, although with more state intervention and social policies (Acosta, 2013; Munck & Delgado Wise, 2018; Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). Recommended reading: Leiva (2008); Sunkel (1993).

Conclusions In this chapter, I have highlighted some contributions to critical development studies that have emanated from Latin America. What I find to stress is the encouragement which we can see in the ability of a group of thinkers, scholars, and activists to go beyond and even overturn the dominant orthodoxy of the times as they realised that those theories, largely emanating from developed countries, were unable to explain the complexities of the Latin American reality and other developing countries. Mariátegui and the Marxist dependency thinkers went beyond certain dogmatic interpretations of Marxism, seeking to apply it creatively to the Latin American context. Meanwhile, Prebisch and the structuralist thinkers challenged the orthodox economic and development theories of the time and created an alternative interpretation of the dynamics of the world system. Both streams in Latin American critical development theory aimed at transforming the existing capitalist system either by reformist or revolutionary means so as to achieve their respective aims. These aims have yet to be achieved. Hence, the continuing relevance of critical development studies, and the need to develop it further linking it to those social movements, organisations, and activists struggling for a more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable world (see Chapter 3 by Munck). It is encouraging to find that in recent years an increasing number of publications have been seeking the renewal of dependency theory (Kay, 2020; Kvangraven, 2020; Martins 2020), and, to a lesser extent, of structuralism (Fernández & Brondino, 2019) and neostructuralism (Bárcenas & Prado, 2015), although these cannot be discussed in this brief chapter. Recommended reading: ECLAC (2012); Munck (2013); Munck and Delgado Wise (2018).

References Acosta, A. (2013). “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” in Land, M. & Mokrani, D. (eds.), Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Amsterdam/​ Quito: Transnational Institute/​Fundación Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 61–​86. Ahumada, J.M., & Torres, M. (2020). “Chile, Globalization, and Imperialism,” in Ness, I. & Cope, Z. (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-​Imperialism. London: Palgrave. Bárcenas, A., & Prado, A. (eds.) (2015). Neoestructuralismo y Corrientes Heterodoxas en América Latina y el Caribe a Inicios del Siglo XXI. Santiago: United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Cardoso, F.H. (1972). “Dependency and Development in Latin America.” New Left Review, 74: 83–​95. Dos Santos, T. (1973). ‘The Crisis of Development Theory and the Problem of Dependence in Latin America,” in H. Bernstein (ed.), Underdevelopment & Development:The Third World Today, pp. 57–​80. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ECLAC. (1990). Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity. Santiago: ECLAC. ECLAC. (2012). Structural Change for Equality.An Integrated Approach to Development. Santiago: ECLAC.

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Development theory: Latin America  47 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) (1951). Economic Survey of Latin America 1949. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic Affairs. Fernández,V.R., & Brondino, G. (eds.) (2019). Development in Latin America: Critical Discussions from the Periphery. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Frank, A. (1966). “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review, 18(4): 17–​31. Furtado, C. (1964). Development and Underdevelopment: A Structural View of the Problems of Developed and Underdeveloped Countries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Furtado, C. (1973). “The Concept of External Dependence in the Study of Underdevelopment,” in Wilber, C.K. (ed.), The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, pp. 118–​123. New York: Random House. Girvan, N. (1973). “The Development of Dependency Economics in the Caribbean and Latin America: A Review and Comparison.” Social and Economic Studies, 22(1): 1–​33. Hirschman, A.O. (ed.) (1961). Latin American Issues: Essays and Comments. London: George Allen & Unwin. Kay, C. (1989). Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Kay, C. (2011). “Andre Gunder Frank: ‘Unity in Diversity’ from the Development of Underdevelopment to the World System.” New Political Economy, 16(4): 523–​538. Kay, C. (2019). “Raúl Prebisch,” in Simon, D. (ed.), Key Thinkers on Development, pp. 339–​345. London: Routledge. Kay, C. (2020).“Theotonio dos Santos (1936–​2018), the Revolutionary Intellectual who Pioneered Dependency Theory.” Development and Change, 50(2): 599–​630. Kay, C., & Gwynne, R.N. (2000). “Relevance of Structuralist and Dependency Theories in the Neoliberal Period: A Latin American Perspective.” Journal of Developing Societies, 16(1): 49–​69. Kirby, P. (2003). Introduction to Latin America:Twenty-​First Century Challenges. London: Sage. Kvangraven, I.H. (2020). Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Programme. Development and Change. DOI: 10.1111/​dech.12593. Leiva, F.I. (2008). Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-​Neoliberal Development. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Levitt, K. (2005). Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Mariátegui, J.C. (1971). Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Marini, R.M. (1973). Dialéctica de la Dependencia. Mexico City: Ediciones Era. Martins, C.E. (2020). Dependency, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Latin America. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Munck, R. (2013). Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony, and Social Transformation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Munck, R., & Delgado Wise, R. (eds.) (2018). Reframing Latin American Development. London: Routledge. Munck, R., & O’Hearn, D. (eds.) (1999). Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. London: Zed Books. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2007). “The Development State in Latin America: Whose Development, Whose State?” Journal of Peasant Studies, 34(3–​4): 371–​407. Pinto, A. (1970). “Naturaleza e implicaciones de la “heterogeinidad estructural de la América Latina.” El Trimestre Económico, 37(1): 83–​100. Quijano, A. (2000). “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3): 533–​80. Rodríguez, O. (1977). “On the Conception of the Centre–​Periphery System.” CEPAL Review, 3: 195–​239. Saad-​Filho, A., & Johnston, D. (eds.) (2005). Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press.

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48  Cristóbal Kay Sunkel, O. (1969). “National Development Policy and External Dependence in Latin America.” Journal of Development Studies, 6(1): 23–​48. Sunkel, O. (1972). “Big Business and ‘Dependencia’: A Latin American View.” Foreign Affairs, 50(3): 517–​531. Sunkel, O. (ed.) (1993). Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Torres, M. (ed.) (2006). Fernando Fajnzylber, Una Visión Renovadora del Desarrollo en América Latina. Santiago: CEPAL. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism:A Model for Latin America? London: Zed Books.

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6  Postdevelopment and other critiques of development Eduardo Gudynas

The 1980s not only saw a counterrevolution in development theory and practice—​a neoliberal approach that highlighted the virtues of free-​market capitalism and rejected the agency of the developmental state—​but a wide-​ranging search for ‘another development’, an alternative form of development that was human in scale and form, people-​centred and participatory, equitable and inclusive (particularly as regards women and the poor), sustainable in terms of the environment and livelihoods, and above all, initiated ‘from below and within’ rather than ‘from above and the outside’. However, towards the end of the decade this critique of mainstream development theory and practice was extended to the very notion of development, and at the early 1990s it consolidated in at least four different emphases. Some denounced the failure of development in any expression and the need to abandon it (Esteva, 1992). Others argued that development is essentially a Western belief, myth, or religion imposed on other cultures (Rist, 1997). Others questioned development, focusing on the role of economic growth as a central problem, and introduced the objective of degrowth (Latouche, 2009). Finally, another stream, known as postdevelopment, in the formulation of its best-​ known promoter, Arturo Escobar, argued that development should be considered as a discourse that expressed premises such as the modernisation or the appropriation of nature, legitimised as universal truths that subordinate other ideas (Escobar, 1995). A more detailed examination of postdevelopment shows that at least two stages must be distinguished: in the first, postdevelopment was emphasised as a form of critical analysis; in the second, criticism was mixed with alternatives, thus becoming more influential but weakening its accuracy. Recommended reading: Sachs (1992).

Postdevelopment as critique The initial formulation of postdevelopment as a critique was inspired by poststructuralism, especially in the analysis of ‘discourses’ as conceived by Michael Foucault. Hence, a more correct term should be a ‘poststructuralist critique’ of development (see an introduction to this perspective in Belsey, 2002; see also Gibson Graham, 2000). In this context, development ‘discourse’ includes not only statements of ideas, and how they are thought, expressed, and felt, but also concrete actions, the institutions that promote them, and modes of legitimation. In this way, issues such as the basic ideas in a development plan, the state agencies by which it is implemented, the actions they promote, and the ways of legitimation should be analysed. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-7

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50  Eduardo Gudynas This type of criticism pointed to the basic and shared features found in the different expressions of development, which in turn sustain it as a universal category that should be applied in all countries. It is the imposition of the image of industrialised countries as developed and simultaneously relegating all others to the status of underdeveloped. Therefore, development is both an imposition of specific knowledges and sensibilities and the exclusion of others. The postdevelopment perspective opens to a critical analysis those ideas that sustain development, such as conceiving it as a universal, progressive, essentially positive, linear process. The main engine would be economic growth, which is conceived as perpetual, and that in turn generates the material well-​being of people, and social, cultural, and political advances. Development, therefore, defends different versions of modernisation. Development in one way or another understands that society and nature are separate. Environmental and social impacts are denied or minimised, and scientific and technical optimism is defended. That economic emphasis produces an expanded commodification of the environment and social relations anchored in a Western lifestyle and consumption. Consumerism is reinforced and even a Western aesthetic is imitated. Patriarchal positions of various kinds are maintained, subordinating and making women invisible. In its more formal application, an analysis from postdevelopment considers the forms of knowledge (for example, the delimitation of disciplines, the conditions of validity, etc.), the subjectivities involved, the forms of representation of these discourses (including instances where there is violence and resistance), and the knowledge dynamics of power that cross all these spheres, from the role of experts to local demands or resistance to development (Escobar, 1995, 2012). In this way, the criteria of truth and falsity are determined as to what is development, the reasons for conceiving it as a positive process, acceptable conceptions of its constitutive ideas (such as welfare, efficiency, growth, etc.), and even forms by which we interpret our relationships with the social and natural environment. As we can see, the idea of development is not restricted to economic issues but spills over into social, cultural, and political dimensions, and even personal sensibilities and aesthetics.The postdevelopment critique shows that while development is not a unified field and does not have a precise meaning, basic attributes are repeated and there are processes of organisation, legitimation, and action that are analogous. So, development is also the grouping of some ideas and practices and the exclusion of others at the same time. In its shadow have emerged concepts of enormous influence, such as human capital or natural capital, and others, such as efficiency and equity, have been redefined. Recommended reading: Escobar (2005); Gibson Graham (2000); Gudynas (2014b).

Postdevelopment as a space for alternatives Postdevelopment in its initial stage made it possible to make a key distinction: on the one hand there would be ‘alternative developments’ and, on the other hand, ‘alternatives to development’ (e.g., Escobar, 1995: 215). The first are debates about instrumental adjustments or different ways of organising each variety of development; its conceptual foundations are not under discussion. Discussions, for example, are on the best ways to feed economic growth, and the role of the market or the state. The latter, as alternatives to any of the visions of development, became evident thanks to the critiques of postdevelopment thinkers.1 In its original formulations, postdevelopment understood that these alternatives aimed, for example, at shaping a discourse of difference

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Postdevelopment and other critiques  51 or to rescue the trials and resistances that started from the movements of the South. But from the mid-​2000s, little by little, a certain confusion spread. On the one hand, some understood that the prefix ‘post’ referred to a future development that would overcome the limitations of the present ones or would even include anti-​development positions (like those of G. Esteva). In this way the direct link with poststructuralism was weakened and some alternative developments were mixed with alternatives to development. On the other hand, Escobar himself contributed to this confusion by adding to postdevelopment the task of creating new discourses and representations, diversifying the agents of knowledge production or supporting resistances (Escobar, 2005). More recently, he added questions such as ‘discourses of transition’ (Escobar, 2012). Undoubtedly, in the initial work of Escobar, there was a certain overlap between the questioning of poststructuralist inspiration and the imagination of alternatives, but all this became more acute in this second stage (also see Ziai, 2007). This expansion, still in progress, generated a greater adherence to the postdevelopment label, especially from social militants, but at the cost of losing analytical specificity. In turn, while a postdevelopmental critique is powerful, it is not enough to generate alternatives, and in fact they need other instruments and analysis of their own (Gudynas, 2014b). Recommended reading: Gudynas (2014b); Ziai (2007).

Reactions and constancy in relation to postdevelopment Postdevelopment in its first stage was the subject of a number of critiques. Among the objections, for example, was the inability to understand heterogeneity in development practices or the romanticisation of social movements, and therefore some considered it to be only anti-​modern rhetoric (see, for example, Pieterse, 2000). According to several analysts the problem was not development itself but capitalism or poverty. Methodological problems were also pointed out, among them that the initial exercises were actually a partial or impoverished expression of poststructuralism (Ziai, 2004). However, postdevelopment remained a space of critical analysis and development response, including some new contributions that followed the poststructuralist perspective more rigorously. Simultaneously, from the field of development studies, initial rejection reactions gave way to more rigorous reflections that accepted some of the postdevelopment warnings (for a summary, see Ziai, 2015). Some limitations and precisions must be pointed out.The critique of postdevelopment, although it invoked direct links with certain social movements, was in fact primarily an academic exercise with weak connections with major political transformations. This was evident in South America, where one of the most radical development critiques, known as Buen Vivir, emerged. This conception is as much a critique of mainstream development thinking as the opening to postcapitalist and postsocialist alternatives. It is a position that emerged outside of academic exercises, and as a result of certain heterodox social and political practices and a remarkable diversity of actors with a substantial contribution of some indigenous actors (Gudynas, 2014b). Anyway, it is true that these criticisms show remarkable similarities with the initial postdevelopment. At the same time, the severe economic and financial crisis of 2007–​2008, which for some announced the end of capitalism, did not diminish the prevalence of development ideas, and only changed its components and expressions. Examples are the huge diversity of discussions around the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable

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52  Eduardo Gudynas Development Goals. Postdevelopment played a limited role in those discussions, but that permanence of the basic ideas of development shows that those components that are produced again and again are deeply rooted. In the same way, an examination of the most recent development strategies since the beginning of the 21st century shows a remarkable diversity in its instrumental expressions, but a great constancy in the basic components. Regimes, such as the European administrations defending neoliberal adjustments or the development plans formulated by the Communist party in China, are certainly different but at the same time they show common elements. A more detailed examination of the case of South America is even more striking, since diverse development strategies have been tested there over a very short period of time. These range from conservative positions (for example, in Chile, Colombia, and Peru) to heterodox trials invoking a 21st-​century socialism (in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela), through state regulation of markets under the ‘pink tide’ of ‘progressive’ governments formed in conditions of a primary commodity boom (in Brazil and Uruguay). The legitimation of these varieties of development in some cases referred to orthodox neoclassical conceptions, but in others, Marx or Lenin was cited as inspiration (as in Ecuador with President Rafael Correa, or in Bolivia with Vice-​president Alvaro García Linera). The diversity of development ideas and actions is clear in these experiences, and beyond their success or failures it is shocking to observe that basic elements such as the attachment to economic growth or the ambition of modernisation are repeated. Therefore, those basic understandings are prior to the different ideological political currents in any of these countries. In fact, we are dealing with conceptions and sensibilities that are common to different political and philosophical ideologies of modernity. Recognition of this feature is only possible by applying postdevelopment analysis in its original version. Recommended reading: Ziai (2004, 2015).

Rethinking critical development studies Faced with this paradoxical situation, given the diversity of instrumental expressions of development even in contexts of crisis and political change while maintaining a basic core, it is essential to take a critical approach from a postdevelopment perspective. This ‘critical’ perspective refers to different questions about the various manifestations of development. For some, ‘criticism’ is based on normative commitments or giving more attention to specific actors (e.g., the effects of development on the poorest or the situation of the Third World) or certain issues such as social justice or equity. For others, a critique of development is a means of challenging mainstream schools of economic and political thought (some question capitalism, others socialism). In recent years, it has become more commonly understood that critical development studies (CDS) provides a ‘leftist’ perspective on a broad range of issues, including political economy, social ecology, Marxism, postcoloniality, Buen Vivir, and feminism. Examples of such a critical perspective on development can be found in Kothari (2005), Schuurman (2009), and Veltmeyer and Delgado Wise (2018). Furthermore, an appreciable number of CDS advocates are heirs to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, rejecting positivism and defending socially and historically framed forms of knowledge that are oriented towards practices of transformation. Another perhaps more serious problem is that well-​known critical stances focus on capitalism, not development. These perspectives are usually very sharp at stripping the

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Postdevelopment and other critiques  53 dark side and contradictions of capitalism, but as they fail to address the roots of development they are unable to criticise it, proposing alternatives between development varieties from capitalist to non-​capitalist options. An example of this is Harvey (2015). Even more problematic was the attempt to reframe Buen Vivir into a form of socialist development (as promoted by actors linked to the governments of Ecuador and Bolivia)—​stripping it of its radical criticism. Several approaches end up being discussions between different varieties of development (labelled as strategies, models, ideologies, etc.), where some versions are attacked and others are postulated as alternatives that supposedly would be better. There is no doubt that capitalism and development largely overlap, but the restriction to capitalism as the main issue results in a self-​limiting approach for any CDS. For example, Munck argues that ‘it is not possible to overcome the challenge of critical development theory by moving away or abandoning development. The challenge is to imagine development differently and put it into practice in a different way’ (Munck, 2011: 76–​77). Thus, this understanding of CDS questions the capitalist backgrounds in development, and looks for alternatives in a non-​capitalist perspective that remains within development.This situation, namely that criticism and alternatives must necessarily be within and not outside development, is precisely what is questioned by postdevelopment. Of course, critical analyses of development with a left-​wing sensibility are very useful in dealing with certain varieties of development, but they are insufficient. To complete the field of criticism, to make it as rigorous and comprehensive as possible, it is necessary to go deeper. Recommended reading: Munck (Chapter 3, this volume); Veltmeyer and Delgado Wise (2018).

Levels of critical development studies It is possible to identify at least four levels on which critical development assessments operate (identified as 3, 2, 1, and 0). Level 3 is the most common and the most superficial. It corresponds to analyses of specific development actions, such as a rural credit programme or a housing development plan. Level 2 corresponds to sectoral development programmes; the actions indicated in the previous example correspond in turn to understanding about what might be ‘rural’ or ‘human’ development. It is obvious that actions at the third level are derived from sectoral programmes at the second level. At these two levels there operate well-​known development tools that deal for example with economic instruments, the differences between expected and obtained results, the generation of employment, and the promotion of economic growth. Level 1 corresponds to an evaluation within one of the major families of development varieties, such as capitalist development. A good example of the analysis at this first level is to question development as ‘ideology’, where criticism is made from philosophical-​ political stances (e.g., neoliberals attacking the premise of state planning in development, or socialists claiming control of the market). Other perspectives examine development as a ‘paradigm’, as ‘culture’, ‘myth’, etc. Also, at this level are well-​known CDS committed to popular sectors of society or with themes such as social justice, as mentioned above. Finally, there is a level 0 that corresponds to the concepts and sensibilities that are the basements of development ideas and practices, the ‘roots’ common to any of its varieties. This is the deepest stratum, where the conceptual and emotional roots of development are located. No doubt there are links between levels, since some are embedded in the others.

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54  Eduardo Gudynas But the critical instruments that are applied at one level are not necessarily the best for another level. For example, critical studies at level 1 may be useful at levels 2 and 3, but they are not best for level 0. Postdevelopment, in its initial understanding as poststructuralist criticism is appropriate for a critical evaluation of the zero level. It is clear that it is not the best tool to study, for example, the effectiveness of a particular development strategy, especially its known limitations in dealing with the heterogeneity of development. In turn, this type of analysis allows for appealing to other instruments that complement the critique on level zero. Given the intricacies and barriers of pre-​judgements, several complementary tools are required to excavate understandings and sensitivities that are deeply rooted.

A toolbox for the critical analysis of the roots of development For a zero-​ level analysis, which corresponds to what could be called ‘roots’ in the conceptions and sensibilities of development, it is possible to assemble a critical development root analysis toolbox. It would include the following tools: postdevelopment and other poststructuralist development discourses, deconstruction, certain ethnographies, various methodologies in ecological economics, environmental ethics in its treatment of the allocation of values, gender studies, critical epistemology, and some of the essays focused on so-​called ‘ontological openings’. This construction of these tools and their composition is the result of extensive work carried out in Latin America over the last two decades. Some attributes of these tools are discussed below. It is a critical root analysis in the sense that it points to the source of the ideas, practices, and sensibilities of development studies in all its expressions. It does not refer to a mere enumeration of errors; nor are they necessarily a means of proposing development alternatives or alternatives to development, although the belief or need to think about other options beyond development remains a major source of criticism. With this classification, postdevelopment in its strict sense would be one analytical tool among others available in this toolbox. In fact, it is difficult to defend the idea that there is a single tool that is the most effective in allowing us to completely unravel development to the zero level. In addition, each instrument has a certain specificity, so excluded features in one case could be evaluated by other tools. Using a complement of different instruments allows for a more complete analysis. We can highlight the basic features of some of these instruments. For example, deconstruction, a way of understanding the relationship between text and meaning originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, allows us to identify the hierarchical and binary conditions that impose certain ideas and sensibilities, and that in turn excludes others. Performativity serves to identify repeated practices by means of which discourse produces the effects to which it gives its name (Gibson Graham, 2000). The world of development is full of circumstances where actions generate acts that are defended as development. The new ethnographies of development address specific practices in specific undertakings and sites, unravelling, for example, how local actors process them, the networks of relationships that are created, and the resistances or reinterpretations that emerge (e.g., Mosse, 2005). Ecological economics, a different perspective from mainstream environmental economics (see Chapter 44 by David Barkin on this), provides tools for addressing, among other issues, the impossibility of perpetual economic growth, the actual metabolisms of the links between society and nature, and the ecological and economic effects of

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Postdevelopment and other critiques  55 environmental impacts (e.g., Martínez Alier & Roca Jusmet, 2000). In addition, it helps to rethink the valuation schemes by questioning the perfect commensurabilities. Environmental ethics, especially those that address the values of non-​humans themselves, whether living species or ecosystems, is fundamental to unravel the anthropocentric value base of modern developments. In this field there are heterodox approaches that incorporate the sensitivities of some indigenous peoples as more formal reflections (see, for example, Gudynas, 2014a; Naess, 2016). Many of the above instruments involve other ways of conceiving the generation of knowledge, and therefore are articulated with certain critical epistemologies. By way of example, Donna Haraway, in her non-​essentialist and feminist position, extends identities over others that are considered radically different (e.g., Haraway, 2004). Here too, the contributions of the coloniality of power and of knowledge perspective (inspired by, for example, Quijano, 2000) must be rescued. The foundations of development are a product of modernity, generating knowledge and sensibilities that have been built in a knowledge-​ as-​power framework that subalternises other knowledge and sensibilities (Sachs, 1992). Ontological openings allow us to approach other ways of understanding and feeling what is considered as the world in which we live (in the sense, for example, argued by De la Cadena, 2014). This perspective allows us to make explicit the great society–​nature divide, which is a basic component of all development ideas. Thus, the opening towards other ontologies such as the ones found in some indigenous cosmovisions that lack or close this gap provides a much-​needed critical tool for a zero-​level analysis (see also recent outstanding contributions from anthropology by Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Descola (2012). This toolkit for root analysis opens up enormous potential for a new generation of CDS scholars. They are being applied in different places, and in several cases they are used directly from the social movements. All have the potential to promote alternatives that avoid falling back into the chiaroscuro of development. Recommended reading: Gibson Graham (2000); Gudynas (2014b); Ziai (2007, 2015).

Note 1 Editors’ note. On these critiques and postdevelopment see, inter alia, Klein and Morreo (2019).

References Belsey, C. (2002). Post-​Structuralism. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De la Cadena, M. (2014). The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through Ontological Openings. Cultural Anthropology, January 13. https://​culanth.org/​fieldsights/​ 471-​the-​politics-​of-​modern-​politics-​meets-​ethnographies-​of-​excess-​through-​ontological-​openings. Descola, P. (2012). Más allá de naturaleza y cultura. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Escobar. A. (2005). “El ‘postdesarrollo’ como concepto y práctica social,” in Mato, D. (ed.), Políticas de economía, ambiente y sociedad en tiempos de globalización, pp. 17–​31. Caracas: Universidad Central Venezuela. Escobar, A. (2012). “Preface to the 2012 Edition,” in Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, pp. vi–​xLiii. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Esteva, G. (1992). “Development,” in Sachs, W. (ed.), The Development Dictionary, pp. 6–​ 25. London: Zed Books.

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56  Eduardo Gudynas Gibson Graham, J.K. (2000). “Poststructural Interventions,” in Sheppard, E. & Barnes, T.J. (eds.), A Companion to Economic Geography, pp. 95–​110. Oxford: Blackwell. Gudynas, E. (2014a). Derechos de la Naturaleza. Etica biocéntrica y políticas ambientales. Lima: CooperAcción, RedGE & CLAES. Gudynas, E. (2014b). “El postdesarrollo como crítica y el Buen Vivir como alternativa,” in Delgado Ramos, G.C. (ed.), Buena Vida, Buen Vivir: imaginarios alternativos para el bien común de la humanidad. Mexico City: UNAM-​CEIICH, pp. 61–​95. Haraway, D. (2004). The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2015). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London: Oxford University Press. Klein, E., & Morreo, C.E. (eds.) (2019). Postdevelopment in Practice. London: Routledge. Kothari, U. (2005). “A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies,” in Kothari, U. (ed.), A Radical History of Development Studies. Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, pp. 1–​13. London: Zed Books. Latouche, S. (2009). La apuesta por el decrecimiento. Barcelona: Icaria. Martínez Alier, J., & Roca Jusmet, J. (2000). Economía ecológica y política ambiental. Mexico City: Fondo Cultura Económica. Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating Development.An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto Press. Munck, R. (2011). “Teoría crítica del desarrollo”, in Veltmeyer, H., Farah, I.H., & Ampuero, I. (eds.), Herramientas para el cambio: manual para los estudios críticos del desarrollo, pp. 73–​77. La Paz: CIDES. Naess, A. (2016). Ecology of Wisdom. London: Penguin. Pieterse, J.N. (2000). “After Post-​development.” Third World Quarterly, 21(2): 175–​191. Quijano, A. (2000). “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3): 533–​580. Rist, G. (1997). The History of Development. From Western Origins to Global Faith. London: Zed Books. Sachs,W. (ed.) (1992). The Development Dictionary:A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Schuurman, F.S. (2009). “Critical Development Theory: Moving out of the Twilight Zone.” Third World Quarterly, 30(5): 831–​848. Veltmeyer, H., & Delgado Wise, R. (2018). Critical Development Studies: An Introduction. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publications. Veltmeyer, H., Farah, H., & Ampuero, I. (eds.) (2011). Herramientas para el cambio: manual para los estudios críticos del desarrollo. La Paz: CIDES. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004). “Perspectivismo y multiculturalismo en la América indígena,” in Surralles, A. & García Hierro, P. (eds.), Tierra adentro. Territorio indígena y percepción del entorno, pp. 37–​80. Lima: Grupo Internacional de trabajo sobre Asuntos Indígenas (IWGIA). Ziai, A. (2004). “The Ambivalence of Post-​Development: Between Reactionary Populism and Radical Democracy.” Third World Quarterly, 25(6): 1045–​1060. Ziai, A. (ed.) (2007). Exploring Post-​ Development. Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspectives. London: Routledge. Ziai, A. (2015). “Post-​Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts.” Development Change, 46(4): 833–​854.

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7 Feminist contributions to critical development studies Fernanda Wanderley

Feminist thought has expressed forceful criticism of the economistic and reductionist idea of development that sidelines social equity and individual and collective well-​being as the ultimate objectives in the construction of an economy. By adhering to the view of the economy as a social and institutional sphere, constructed by normalising political practices and decisions, feminism contributed to demystifying the neoliberal idea of the economy as supposedly natural and above society, while also rethinking its meanings and potential transformations. Besides the differences within feminism, the common ground is the understanding of the economy embedded in a patriarchal order, that is, a structure of power relations with a male dominance throughout organised society and in personal relationships. One of the main pillars of male dominance in the economic system is the sexual division of labour in the family and the market. Feminism’s contribution stands on an anti-​systemic position because it implies the need for a radical democratisation of every social sphere. By denouncing the patriarchal order, redefining the concepts of economy and work, revaluing and problematising the reproductive sphere, and calling for the recognition of care as a social right, it challenged the neoliberal economy, which deepens inequality and poverty, perpetuates the exclusion of a large majority from exercising human rights and citizenship, and reproduces inequitable social relations. These dynamics are interconnected to the pervasive problem of violence against women and gender inequality in political decisions. The feminist debate has been enriched by the incorporation of new dimensions and themes that have sharpened an awareness of the biophysical limits and the seriousness of the social and environmental crisis. New contributions were added from the perspective of ecofeminism associated with the ethics of care and depatriarchalisation, the struggle on the extractive frontier to reclaim territorial rights, indigenism linked to the collective rights of indigenous peoples, and to notions of Vivir Bien or living well, and social and political ecology (Farah & Vasapollo, 2011; Federici, 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018; Svampa, 2016). Feminism faces theoretical and political challenges in order to articulate with other perspectives and movements to build new development paths. From a pluralist perspective on the economy, new feminist viewpoints contribute to new understandings of solidarity, justice, and sustainability, and open questions about the relationship between home, community, market, and state in the political contention for an alternative development and ‘another economy’. This chapter follows feminist thinking and action about the economy, work, and gender equity. It summarises its contribution to new understandings of economy and DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-8

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58  Fernanda Wanderley work, alongside family and household internal dynamics. This scholarship led to the important claim of care as a social right and opened a debate with the social and solidarity literature and movement. These problems raised by feminism are at the heart of a critical debate on development.

Rethinking the economy and work During the 20th century, feminist thinkers identified the growing numbers of women joining the world of work and the public sphere more generally. These studies revealed occupational segregation, the wage gap between men and women, and discriminatory practices in the labour market. Instead of understanding the different patterns of labour participation of women and men as the result of their different levels of productivity in a competitive, free, and self-​regulated market, feminist studies showed that companies’ decisions regarding hiring, training, and promotion opportunities, and salary levels for men and women are influenced by socially constructed customs, prejudices, and stereotypes. In other words, gender constructions and discriminatory practices in the labour market explain much of the occupational segregation and wage gaps (Borderías & Carrasco, 1994; Kabeer, 1994). This interpretation builds on a new definition of the working realities of men and women. Both income-​generating activities and reproductive tasks within the family were now seen as work that equally generates economic value. Although the work done in the home and the community may not add or generate monetary value, it is essential for the reproduction of individuals, families, and society as a whole. Both require physical, emotional, and psychological effort as well as the availability of time to produce essential goods and services to sustain life.Thus, the concept of work ceased to be associated solely with income-​generating activities. This new theoretical perspective made it possible to understand the close relationship between unpaid work and paid work, and to explain the significant causal effect of the unequal division of labour inside the home on the limited opportunities women have to earn an income and achieve well-​being for themselves and their families (Benería & Roldán, 1987; Boserup, 1970). Recommended readings: Benería and Roldán (1987); Boserup (1970); Kabeer (1994).

Family and household: opening the black box This scholarship also provided evidence of the changes taking place in the family. Types of families are diversifying, with an increase in single-​parent families and female-​headed households, two-​parent families where both partners shared the responsibility for earning the household income, and families with different sexual orientations (Sunkel, 2006). These studies show that the household is not a homogeneous unit where there is no place for diverse age group and gender dynamics or differences in interests, expectations, responsibilities, and well-​being. By seeing households as diverse units it is possible to understand intersectionality; that is, how sex, age, and class structure interact to structure families’ dynamics and tensions. For example, for those in situations of poverty it is more difficult to combine earning an income with care work in a context of a lack of public care services.Women are the ones who experience this conflict most intensely, due to the still-​prevalent social and cultural mandate that assigns them the responsibility for caring for the dependent members of the household, naturalising this as ‘non-​work’ (Abramo, 2006; Arriagada, 2004; Hein, 2005).

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Feminist contributions  59 This goes in the opposite direction to the socio-​economic and cultural changes that would contribute to the emancipation of women. It is why the ways in which women are able to participate in the labour market still depend on the limited public policies and services for combining care and income-​generating work in many countries. Furthermore, households are dynamic spaces that change over time. Their life cycles are marked by various happenings and situations (the birth of children, the joining of new members living in the same physical space, illness, separation and death, or external circumstances such as a fall in the demand for labour or natural disasters). The social, economic, and family changes influence and aggravate the difficulties between their working life in the labour market and family life (Gutiérrez, 2007). Recommended reading: Abramo (2006); Gutiérrez (2007); Hein (2005).

Care as a social right The theoretical and empirical advancements in redefining economy and work allowed the identification of care as a public problem in the sphere of social rights (Pautassi, 2007).This led to the claim to expand the responsibility for organising care from family to new institutional spheres: the state, the community, and the market. From this broader perspective, the unequal position of families in the socio-​economic structure was revealed in terms of the public organisation of care. This literature shows how socio-​economic inequalities do not allow all families to care for their dependants in the way they would wish. This represents a key mechanism through which inequalities are perpetuated, not just between men and women within the family but also from one generation to the next (ILO, 2009). While high-​income families have market options for reconciling working and family life by, for example, buying care services (either by hiring a domestic worker or by paying for institutional childcare or out-​of-​school-​hours services), the majority of low-​income families are unable to buy these services in a context of scarce public childcare services. This situation obliges these families, and especially women, to adapt by ‘choosing’ paid jobs that allow them to keep their children with them, or part-​time work. This restricts the employment opportunities of women with family responsibilities and limits their education, training, or public participation possibilities. This scenario also has consequences for children. Because many families do not have access to market mechanisms to provide care, they have no other option than to delegate care responsibilities to children and adolescents themselves. These precarious care and protection arrangements mean that children, adolescents, the elderly, and people with disabilities in situations of poverty are exposed to all sorts of risks, including joining the labour market at a young age to the detriment of their education, teenage pregnancy, physical and emotional insecurity such as sexual violence within and outside the family, and health problems due to the absence of adequate social protection (Marco Navarro, 2007; Montaño & Calderón, 2010). As argued by feminists, care is clearly a public problem that enables us to understand the vicious circle whereby inequality and poverty are perpetuated from one generation to the next. It also leads us to question the naturalisation of care as belonging to the sphere of the family and the community, thus freeing the state and society as a whole from responsibility for the care required to sustain life for ‘living well’—​buen vivir in social solidarity and harmony with nature (to give an Andean indigenous twist to the discourse on social development) (Martínez, 2008; Wanderley, 2011). Recommended reading: Esping-​Andersen (2002); ILO (2009); Tilly and Scott (1978).

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60  Fernanda Wanderley

Feminism and the social and solidarity economy The claim of care as a social right is at the heart of the debate on economic alternatives to neoliberal public policies. The affinity to other lines of inquiry and movements, especially the social and solidarity economy, has opened a new agenda of theoretical and political debate. A new generation of feminism is bringing back the perspective of the plural economy proposed by Karl Polanyi (1957) and neo-​Marxist approaches (Hinkelammert & Mora Jiménez, 2013), emphasising the sustainability of social and natural life (expanded reproduction of life) as its main objective. From this perspective, adopted by social and solidarity economy scholarship, four principles of integration and institutional pattern structure economic order: exchange with competence (market), redistribution (centrality), reciprocity (asymmetry), and subsistence (autarky) (Polanyi, 1992). ‘Market’ is understood as a pattern embedded in social relationships that may vary and transform through collective action, that is, ‘nested markets’ in opposition to a homogeneous free and unregulated market portrayed by a neoliberal framework. The social and solidarity economy brought new light to interpret the alternative organisations and practices that have a long history in different regions, including Latin America. These experiences, built on the margins and interstices (local spaces) of the broader capitalist system and guided by the notions of solidarity, reciprocity,‘nested market’, and redistribution, were now understood as seeds to transform the capitalism system from within (Azzellini, 2017; Coraggio, 2015: Farah & Vasapollo, 2011; Gaiger, Nyssens, & Wanderley 2019). One important debate in this literature is the role of the state. For some, the state has an important role to strengthen and expand these experiences, not only in regulating market mechanisms but also articulating the other economic principles of integration and institutional patterns mentioned above. To accomplish this role, though, the state must be oriented by governments with a political project to build a new social order that ensures an equitable co-​existence among people and between people and nature. The dialogue between feminist economy and social and solidarity economy has not been without tensions. Even though both approaches emphasise the principle of subsistence and the autarky institutional pattern (household and community organisation) among other affinities, feminist scholarship made much progress in the analysis of the power relations and subordination of women in relation to men in all institutional spheres of the economy, including the household, the community, the market, and the state. In contrast, the social and solidarity economy scholarship emphasised class inequalities between capitalists and wage workers, and less on inequality between men and women within families, associations, cooperatives, and other popular economic organisations. Thus, this perspective still faces the challenge of incorporating seriously the agenda of feminism in the projects of ‘another economy’, which encompasses the transformation of patriarchal structure and the inclusion of care as a social right (Anderson, 2015; Chatterjee, 2015; Osorio-​Cabrera, 2017). A common ground to advance this articulation is in the defence of public and common goods. Both movements vindicate the centrality of public goods understood as services and goods that all members of a political community have the right to access and must be provided by the state, as well as common goods defined as services and goods that all members of a political community have the obligation to care for the sake of collective well-​being (Vivir Bien). Among public and common goods, there are ecosystem services, care, health, education, dignified habitat, and work.

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Feminist contributions  61 The discussion about what goods should be provided by the state (public goods) or be organised by society (common goods) led to the debate about the meaning of solidarity (Pagliccia, 2011) and, specifically, the distinction between systemic solidarity and solidarity of proximity (Wanderley, 2015, 2017).The feminist perspective, conscious of the importance of the public organisation of care, problematises the prevalence of solidarity of proximity over systemic solidarity within social and solidarity scholarship. The feminist critique argues that, in contexts of high precariousness and labour informality, the objective to advance towards an ‘alternative economy’ requires both the strengthening of systemic solidarity (universal protection based on care as a social right) and of solidarity of proximity (protection and care modalities based on personal bonds of primary and secondary sociabilities). Considering the difference between Latin American and European countries in terms of welfare regimes, it argues that in most of Latin America it is not possible to assume that systemic solidarity is already established or that it can be replaced by solidarity of proximity to provide certain goods and services essential to sustain life, although they may be complementary. This debate has raised issues in building different political horizons and analytical frameworks. Another important tension in this agenda, not yet overcome, is the struggle for individual exercise of rights claimed by feminism and the indigenous peoples’ fight for collective rights. Even though both movements converge in the care of nature (Madre Tierra), the fight against extractivism, and the loss of our natural heritage that puts humanity in danger, there is significant divergence on how to deal with gender inequalities and power relations versus indigenous traditions and customs (Farah & Wanderley, 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). In conclusion, the feminist understanding of care as a public and a common good is radical in claiming the transformation of relationships that cut across all social and biophysical spheres: including family, communities, state and market, territories, and ecosystems. This demand goes beyond the private and public sphere in questioning the power relations in every social relationship and between human beings and their environment. Recommended reading: Corragio (2015); Polanyi (1957, 1992); Verschurrr, Guérin, and Hillenkamp (2015).

Concluding remarks In line with other critical standpoints, feminism contributed to the denaturalisation of the economy as an abstract and ahistorical mechanism. The recognition of its embeddedness in environmental, social, cultural, and political structures makes it possible not only to get beyond essentialist views of the economy, but also (and most importantly) to contribute in building new paths in the direction of ‘another economy’. In the dialogue with movements seeking to democratise the socio-​economic order, feminists contributed with new angles such as the need to question patriarchal power structures and the social organisation of care. At the same time, a new generation of economic feminism has begun to adopt a plural economy perspective (Polanyi, 1957) to understand the structuring of the production and distribution of goods and services. This approach allows feminist thinking to see the range of possibilities to build new development paths, without losing sight of the contradictions and power relations present in diverse organisations and practices. By adopting intersectional and territorial perspectives, it focuses on the interaction among

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62  Fernanda Wanderley class, gender, ethnicity, race, and generation, the diversity of location-​specific social and economic dynamics, and the different types and thicknesses of the boundaries between reproductive and productive work (Byrne & Imma, 2019; Segato, 2007;Ypeij, 2015). Last but not least, feminism has an integral understanding of social, economic, and political dimensions. Other important political issues at the beginning of the 21st century are violence against women and unequal political participation (Segato, 2016). Gender-​ based violence is one of the cruelest expressions of patriarchal social structure. Violence against women is aimed at ensuring the maintenance of male power over women. It is then a mechanism for disciplining the behaviour of women, and its intensification in the last decades responds to the threat to male dominance posed by advances in women’s autonomy. The protagonist role of women’s movements in the processes of transformation of unequal gender relations was and continues to be decisive in the construction of state institutions and their relationship with civil society. In the 1990s, the principle of equality was placed on the public agenda. Since then, the participatory and consensus-​building processes sustained among women from various organisations at national and sub-​national levels have allowed the consolidation of political agendas in the fight for equity and political, social, economic, and cultural autonomy. In the last three decades, many countries have advanced the recognition of inequalities as well as the inclusion of the principle of equality between men and women in the set of state regulations. In spite of the rise of the proportion of women in decision-​making positions in the region, they continue to face obstacles to their autonomous political, social, and economic participation. Their actions have been limited due to the organisations of male power. Therefore, there is still a long way to go before the presence of women in decision making is translated into effective and autonomous participation in strategic positions. For this, it is necessary to transform the internal power dynamics of social, economic, and political organisations, and more specifically, to overcome practices such as harassment and micro-​ violence based on gender. In conclusion, feminist perspectives and movements have multidimensional consequences. These include the recognition of essential public and common goods and services to sustain life and the urgency to democratise family, community, market, and state as the key sites of patriarchal power. Once again, rethinking gender inequalities and the set of mediations that project them into institutional structures is a requirement to advance socio-​economic orders under the values of justice, equity, and sustainability.

References Abramo, L. (ed.) (2006). Trabajo decente y equidad de género en América Latina. Geneva: International Labour Office. Anderson, J. (2015). “Missed Opportunities, Mixed Messages and Lessons Learned: Collective Kitchens in Marginal Urban Communities of Peru,” in Verchuur, C., Guérin, I., & Hillenkamp, I. (eds.), Une économie solidaire peut-​ elle etre féministe? Homo oeconomicus, mulier solidaria. Paris: L´Harmattan. Arriagada, I. (2004). “Estructuras familiares, trabajo y bienestar en América Latina,” in Arriagada, I. & Aranda, V. (eds.), Cambio de familias en el marco de las transformaciones globales: necesidad de políticas públicas eficaces. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL and UNFPA. Azzellini, D. (2017). Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela. Building 21st Century Socialism from Below. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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Feminist contributions  63 Benería, L., & Roldán, M. (1987). The Crossroads of Class and Gender. Industrial Homework, Subcontracting and Household Dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Byrne, D.C., & Imma, Z. (2019).Why ‘Southern Feminisms’? Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 33(3): 2–​7. Borderías, C., & Carrasco, C. (1994). Las mujeres y el trabajo. Rupturas conceptuales. Madrid: Economía Crítica. Boserup, E. (1970). Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: Allen & Unwin. Chatterjee, M. (2015). “Organising Social Protection Through Solidarity of Women Workers: Experiences of the Self-​Employed Women´s Association, SEWA, in India,” in Verchuur, C., Guérin, I., & Hillenkamp, I. (eds.), Une économie solidaire peut-​elle etre féministe? Homo oeconomicus, mulier solidaria. Paris: L´Harmattan. Coraggio, J.L. (2015). Economía social y solidaria en movimiento. Quito: Editorial IAEN. Esping-​Andersen, G. (2002). Why we Need a New Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University. Farah, I., &Vasapollo, L. (2011).“Introducción,” in Farah, I. &Vasapollo, L. (eds.), Vivir Bien: ¿Paradigma no capitalista? La Paz: CIDES-​UMSA, Sapienza Universitá di Roma and Oxfam. Farah, I., & Wanderley, F. (2015). “El feminismo y la otra Economía. Una mirada desde América Latina,” in Coraggio, J.L. (ed.), Economía social y solidaria en movimiento. Quito: Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales. Federici, S. (2015). Calibán y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria. Buenos Aires:Tinta Limón. Gaiger, L.I., Nyssens, M., & Wanderley, F. (2019). Social Enterprises in Latin America. Theory, Models and Practice. New York: Routledge. Gutiérrez, M.A. (ed.) (2007). Género, familias y trabajo: rupturas y continuidades. Desafíos para la investigación política. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, Colección Grupos de Trabajo. Hein, C. (2005). Reconciling Work and Family Responsibilities. Geneva: International Labour Office. Hinkelammert, F.J., & Jiménez, M. (2013). Hacia una economía para la vida. San Jose, Costa Rica: Euna. ILO. (2009). Trabajo y familia: Hacia nuevas formas de conciliación con corresponsabilidad social. Santiago de Chile: ILO. Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London:Verso. Marco Navarro, F. (2007). El cuidado de la niñez en Bolivia y Ecuador: derecho de algunos, obligación de todas. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, Serie Mujer y Desarrollo. Martínez, F. (2008). ¿Arañando bienestar? Trabajo remunerado, protección social y familias en América Central. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, Colección CLACSO-​CROP. Montaño, S., & Calderón Magaña, C. (eds.) (2010). El cuidado en acción. Entre el derecho y el trabajo. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL and UNIFEM. Osorio-​Cabrera, D. (2017). “Economía solidaria y feminismo(s). Pistas para un diálogo necesario.” Comunicación Académica. Excerpted from the doctoral thesis Modos de vida vivibles. Economía(s) solidaria(s) y sostenibilidad de la vida. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. www.economiasolidaria. org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2020/​09/​Economia_​Solidaria_​y_​Feminismo_​s_​pistas.pdf. Pagliccia, N. (2011). “Solidaridad: el renacimiento de un viejo concepto socialista,” in Farah, I. & Vasapollo, L. (eds.), Vivir Bien: ¿Paradigma no capitalista? La Paz: CIDES-​UMSA, Sapienza Universitá di Roma and Oxfam. Pautassi, L. (2007). El cuidado como cuestión social desde un enfoque de derechos. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, Serie Mujer y Desarrollo. Polanyi, K. (1957 [1944]). The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Polanyi, K. (1992). The Economy as Instituted Process. In The Sociology of Economic Life. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2018). Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Segato, R.L. (2007). La Nación y sus Otros: raza, etnicidad, diversidad religiosa en tiempos de políticas de identidad. Buenos Aires: Prometeo.

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64  Fernanda Wanderley Segato, R.L. (2016). La guerra contra las mujeres. Buenos Aires, Prometeo. Sunkel, G. (2006). El papel de la familia en la protección social en América Latina. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, Serie Políticas Sociales, División de Desarrollo Social. Svampa, M. (2016). Debates latinoamericanos. Indianismo, desarrollo, dependencia y populismo. Cochabamba, Bolivia: CEDIB. Tilly, L., & Scott, J. (1978). Women,Work and Family. New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston. Wanderley, F. (2017). “Entre el concepto minimalista y el concepto maximalista de economía social y solidaria.Tensiones teóricas y agenda futura (Between the Minimalist and Maximalist Concept of Social and Solidarity Economy.Theoretical Tensions and a Future Research Agenda).” Revista Economía, 69(109): 13–​29. Wanderley, F. (2015). Desafíos teóricos y políticos de la economía solidaria. Lectura desde América Latina. La Paz: CIDES, Hegoa and Plural Editores. Wanderley, F. (2011). El cuidado como derecho social: situación y desafíos del bienestar social en Bolivia. Santiago de Chile: ILO. Ypeij, A. (2015). Weaving at the Crossroads of Gender and Ethnicity. Or can the Collective Entrepreneurship of Women Working in the Tourism Industry of Peru be Interpreted as Feminist Solidarity? in Verchuur, C., Guérin, I., & Hillenkamp, I. (eds.), Une économie solidaire peut-​elle etre féministe? Homo oeconomicus, mulier solidaria. Paris: L´Harmattan.

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Part III

System dynamics Capitalism, imperialism, development, and globalisation A major difference between development studies in the mainstream of the field and critical development studies (CDS), which might be viewed as a left-​leaning sidestream of development thinking, is a concern with and focus on the system dynamics of development, i.e., on the ways in which the structural forces and contradictions of the operating capitalist system shape the development process, inhibiting or preventing the institution of changes or actions that are needed to bring about a more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive form of development. That is, the system is viewed not as the solution but as the problem. On the other hand, within the mainstream of development studies it is taken for granted that capitalism provides not only the best but the only institutional and policy framework for delivering on the promise of development understood as progress in improving the social condition of the population. With this assumption, the system as such effectively disappears from development discourse and practice. Any questioning or proposed changes and actions are limited to institutional reforms of the system. Radhika Desai, in Chapter 8, elaborates on the CDS premise that capitalism suffers from a built-​ in propensity towards crisis. Departing from Marx’s theory regarding this crisis propensity—​that it is a law of capitalist development rooted in fundamental contradictions of the system—​Desai traces out the history of capitalist crises, with reference to different theories constructed to explain this history. She then constructs a theoretical model that serves as an analytical framework for examining the development dynamics associated with, or resulting from, the systemic propensity of capitalism towards crisis. As Desai constructs it, the propensity towards crisis has six sources, and two main forms giving us 12 different mechanisms of crisis. In Chapter 9 Henry Veltmeyer reconstructs the four concepts that are central to an analysis of the systemic dynamics of capitalist development, namely, capitalism, development, imperialism, and globalisation. In the following chapter S.A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills elaborate on what they describe as ‘critical globalisation studies’ (CGS) and how this field of enquiry relates to the CDS approach. They argue that these two fields of enquiry are closely connected with synergies that allow for a complementary analysis but also argue that we should do so in the form of a ‘radical transformative scholarship’. Andrew Mushita and Carol Thompson in Chapter 11 explore the theme of, and provide a critique of, philanthrocapitalism and development. Philanthrocapitalism defines a systemic change by large foundations choosing to advance private capital for the explicit goal of addressing social problems using business methods. The authors illustrate the pitfalls of this approach by examining the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, created by the Gates Foundation, and contrast it with grassroots farmer alternatives. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-9

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66  System dynamics In Chapter 12, Raúl Delgado Wise explores the migration–​development nexus in the neoliberal era. As he reconstructs it, this nexus can best be understood with reference to a fundamental ‘law’ of capitalist development, namely, two fundamental polarised ‘developments’: on one pole, a tendency towards the concentration and centralisation of capital, which can be traced out in the formation of multinational corporations that monopolise the markets in which they operate; and on the other, a tendency towards what Marx described as the ‘multiplication of the proletariat’, i.e., the conversion (‘proletarianisation’) of a society of small-​scale agricultural producers, or peasants, into a modern wage-​earning working class, or industrial proletariat. The chapter elaborates on the role of international migration in the resulting capitalist development process.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Political economists that deploy the CDS framework have identified what is described as a multidimensional crisis of global proportions. What form is this crisis taking today? 2. What role does imperialism play in the capitalist development process? That is, what is the difference between capitalism and imperialism? 3. What is the specific difference, if any, between CDS and CGS? What are the possible synergies and limits? 4. How do capitalism’s ‘laws’ relate to, or explain, the contemporary dynamics (South–​ North flows) of international migration?

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8  Capitalism and crises Radhika Desai

Capitalism is having a bad 21st century. The East Asian financial crisis of 1997–​1998 heralded it, the stock market crash of 2000 inaugurated it, and the 2008 financial crisis nearly destroyed it. However, capitalist classes retained political power and neoliberal financialised capitalism, the result of the still-​unresolved Long Downturn dating back to the 1970s, malingered on. While neoliberalism ideology continued celebrating capitalism, it clocked ever-​lower growth, generated ever-​greater inequality, and inflicted ever-​ more ecological damage. Millions of young people began striking school to demand governments and corporations act to halt the climate emergency, only to be interrupted by another disastrous result of capitalism’s dysfunctional relation to nature, the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic. The concatenation of public health, economic, financial and ecological crises that accompanied it threatens complete social and political breakdown. So, what is it with capitalism and crises? Capitalism’s proneness to crises was apparent from its earliest days. Businessmen bemoaned glutted markets and falling profits, fearfully contemplated the social and political consequences of rising unemployment or bank failures, and hatched schemes to reform monetary and financial systems to prevent the over-​or under-​supply of money. They also plotted with governments to manage and, if necessary, crush workers’ resistance and either colonise foreign territories or otherwise open them up to export surplus commodities and capital, import or export labour, and access cheap inputs to avert crises. Classical political economy, which emerged to comprehend the novel social form, openly acknowledged this. It registered capitalism’s paradoxes—​its equally prolific production of riches and misery, its booms and slumps—​but combined its insights—​only labour produced value, capitalism was prone to gluts—​with confusion and conundrum. Only capitalism’s greatest critic and analyst, Karl Marx, working with Friedrich Engels, resolved them in his unrivalled analysis (Desai, 2018; Dobb, 1973; Meek, 1973). Marx’s critique of political economy (Marx, 1867/​1977) portrayed capitalism as a system aiming to produce not the goods and services people needed, but value itself, its single commandment, ‘Accumulate!’ Such value or capital accumulation was a quixotic and contradictory enterprise, involving unjust exploitation and anarchic competition. However, Marx’s work remained incomplete. He recognised and discussed but did not fully develop another point: capitalism required practically impossible social arrangements that were perpetually close to failing or breaking down and burdened sociality itself to breaking point while also involving societies in competition and conflict. The mass of contradictions stemming from capitalism’s fragility, injustice, and anarchy regularly produced crises. Agencies outside the circuit of capital, usually the state, managed them. This modified capitalism’s workings but could not eliminate capitalism’s crises: they were DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-10

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68  Radhika Desai fated to destroy it. Humanity faced a choice: either transform capitalism into a radically different society—​recreating a strong, just, and orderly human society that produced what it needed, i.e., socialism—​or humanity would go to capitalism’s grave with it. The politically powerful naturally opposed such critique and supported currents that denied capitalism’s contradictions and crises: the ‘vulgar economy’ Marx derided, its culmination in neoclassical economics in the 1870s, which we know as neoliberalism today. If this was all, matters would have been simple. Clear blue intellectual and political water would have separated Marx’s analysis on the Left and neoliberalism on the Right. Unfortunately, the waters are very muddy. Marx’s heirs only briefly challenged neoclassical economics directly. As neoclassical economics penetrated universities, more and more intellectuals were trained in it before arriving at Marxism and they began pursuing ‘a policy of theoretical reconciliation’ between the two (Bukharin, 1914/​1972). This denatured Marx’s legacy—​replacing its complex historical understanding in which human agency was central—​with the positivism of neoclassical economics. In any case, given that Marxism and neoclassical economics were theoretically and methodologically opposed, such reconciliation only prompted Marxist economists to question one or more central aspects of Marx’s critique, including his explanations of capitalism’s crises (Desai, 2020b). No wonder the greatest crises of capitalism—​the Great Depression of the 1930s as much as the 2008 financial crisis—​found Marxism on the intellectual back foot. Meanwhile, when later critics of capitalism, such as John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi, mounted their critiques of capitalism in terms of a critique also of neoclassical economics, thanks to ‘Marxist economics’, they assumed Marx was little different from it and saw themselves as opposing Marx, despite strong links and similarities between their critiques and Marx’s. In what follows, we first outline how capitalism’s contradictions and crises were analysed by Marx and later critics of capitalism such as Keynes and Polanyi before going on to discuss the mechanisms of the sheer variety of crises that arise from capitalist value production and the social fragility it requires. Recommended reading: Desai (2018); Dobb (1973).

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its crises Marx got to the root of capitalism’s novelty: surplus extraction through contradictory value production. Hitherto surplus had been extracted forcibly. How could it be extracted in capitalism with its voluntary market exchange? The answer lay in the precondition of capitalism: free wage labour. Workers in capitalism had a paradoxical double freedom: free to choose employers, but also ‘freed’, through force or fraud, from any other access to the means of livelihood, the land.This separation privatised and commodified land and labour. It was the culmination of a long history of class exploitation (Marx, 1964) and involved the state centrally. Capitalism also transformed market exchange. For centuries, it was focused on acquiring useful objects: commodities were exchanged for money to acquire other, more useful, commodities in a C-​M-​C circuit, as Marx represented it. Capitalism, however, was generalised commodity production whose characteristic circuit, M-​C-​M’, began with money invested in the purchase of labour, raw materials, etc., needed in the production of commodities and ended with the sale of the new commodities, returning a greater sum than originally invested. The state was centrally implicated in organising the near-​ impossible conditions for this novel social structure.

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Capitalism and crises   69 Where such conditions are established (the process is far from complete on a world scale even today), exploitation takes a novel form. Workers sell their labour power, their capacity for work, and, when the ‘justice’ of markets prevails, capitalists buy it at its value. They nevertheless extract surplus value simply because the value of what the worker produces is far in excess of what her labour is worth, the comparatively small amount needed to keep her and her family. If it were not, would the capitalist, who seeks a return greater than the capital he invested, bother to employ labour? Many believe that Marx considered the resulting injustice, the vertical axis of value production, the private appropriation of the product of social labour, the most fundamental contradiction of capitalism (Desai, 2010). Finally, Marx showed how capitalists and other property owners struggle over the distribution of surplus value through relentless competition between industrial capitalists and political struggle between them and the owners of land and money. This anarchy formed the horizontal axis of value production. Competition determines the value of products, pushing down their price to their ‘socially necessary’ level, below which existing knowledge and technology will not permit it to go, destroying weaker firms and enlarging stronger ones in the process. Political struggle determines how much rentiers—​the owners of land and money—​are rewarded. No sooner had Marx published the core of this analysis in Capital’s first volume in 1867 than neoclassical economics emerged. Recommended reading: Marx ([1867]1977).

From vulgar economy to neoclassical economics It happened when Ricardo’s conviction that value arose from labour had given rise to Ricardian socialism, when Marx resolved classical political economy’s outstanding questions into a major indictment of capitalism, and when European working classes began organising on a mass scale. Capitalist classes could no longer politically afford acknowledgements of capitalism’s contradictions and antagonisms. They needed unambiguous justifications of capitalism (Clarke, 1991). The marginalist revolution of 1870 produced neoclassical economics as if on cue, refining and synthesising ‘vulgar economy’, the facile justifications of capitalism Marx had dismissed. Where classical political economy and Marx studied capitalist society as a historically distinct and evolving whole, made and unmade by the struggles of classes, parties, and states, and vulgar economy had insisted on laissez-​faire, neoclassical economics separated ‘the economy’ as a distinct social realm with its own laws. Unlike Marx’s dialectical laws, made and unmade by human actions, neoclassical laws were like those of nature, externally imposed, only to be obeyed. Max Weber, who was originally trained in neoclassical economics, constructed a veritable new social scientific division of labour around ‘the economy’, arguing that modern capitalist societies differentiate into autonomous spheres whose specific laws need separate study through separate disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science, etc. The generality of his argument notwithstanding, it was the economy’s autonomy that mattered most. In this separate ‘economic’ realm, neoclassical economics narrowed the focus of analysis to exchange, leaving out production; to prices leaving out values; and to the agency of individuals, leaving out classes and political action.This erased the problem of injustice and exploitation, which requires attention to production. As for anarchy, neoclassical economics bought into two fictions. First, Jean Baptiste Say’s ‘law’ that there could be no gluts in markets. It was

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70  Radhika Desai a critically important step in denying capitalism’s contradictions and crises. Secondly, there was Ricardo’s conception of comparative advantage claiming, against the evidence, that free trade benefited all nations, erasing the international contradictions of capitalism.Thus, neoclassical economics gave us ahistorical capitalism: stable, eternal, and unchanging. It was also cosmopolitan, conceiving a seamlessly unified world economy whose division into rich and poor countries was irrelevant. Now we lost the central plot—​of class and national struggles and competition—​that makes capitalism’s tumultuous history intelligible. For Western capitalists, neoclassical economics has been the gift that keeps on giving. It eliminates any discussion of capitalism’s fragility, injustice or anarchy and permits capitalists to keep control over the economy such that growth is reliant on capital accumulation.The ‘autonomy of the economy’ is conveniently invoked against state interventions favouring labour, while those in favour of capital proliferate, thanks, not least, to its contradictions and crisis tendencies. Recommended reading: Bukharin ([1914]1972); Clarke (1991).

Post-​neoclassical critiques of capitalism Neoclassical economics may have changed the discourse about capitalism but not capitalism itself and new critiques continued emerging. Take Keynes and Polanyi. John Maynard Keynes mounted arguably the next greatest indictment of capitalism through a critique of neoclassical economics amid the economic turbulence of two World Wars and a Great Depression. Although Keynes and Marx are contrasted as ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ respectively, not only is the intellectual relationship stronger than usually imagined—​for instance, Keynes derived his early critiques of Say’s Law from Marx’s distinction between the circuits of commodities and capital (Sardoni, 1997: 198)—​ the analyses are remarkably similar, focused on the working class, criticising Say’s Law and comparative advantage, and pointing to surfeits of commodities and capital as key problems (Desai, 2009). Karl Polanyi criticised capitalism for treating land, labour, and money as commodities when they were not, leading to the ‘double movement’—​the spread of markets and the response of social reform. Neither this argument in itself, nor its connection with Marx’s, is widely understood. In reality, classical political economy and Marx appreciated well enough that land, labour, and money were not commodities; special laws determined their prices. The term fictitious commodities became necessary as a questioning of the neoclassical assumption that everything offered for sale is a commodity (Desai, 2020a). The ravages of the commodification of the main elements of production had led in the 19th century to the double movement, but now needed consciously organised socialism. Recommended reading: Desai (2009, 2020).

Crises and their variations We must note four things before going on to outline the variety of capitalism’s crises. Contrary to neoclassical economics, there is not and cannot be, a ‘pure’ or ‘purely economic’ capitalism. Capitalism is everywhere born in non-​capitalist societies and can never entirely transform them. Engels noted that complete capitalism ‘does not exist even in England and never will exist’: revolutionaries like him ‘shall not let it get so far as that’. No actually existing capitalism is reducible to the mechanisms of value production alone. Secondly, in Capital Marx focused on showing how capitalism extracts surplus value and

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Capitalism and crises   71 how it is distributed among the non-​working classes even when capitalism is on its best behaviour and equal values are exchanged on the market. However, he well knew that capitalism frequently employs fraud and harnesses pre-​existing hierarchies, of say gender or race or the new-​found force of the state for its gains. Thirdly, Marx analysed myriad mechanisms of crises, with usually more than one at work in any given historical crisis, interacting in complex ways with one another. Finally, these crisis mechanisms and the pressures they generate force states to act to mitigate, if not eliminate, them through actions of domestic repression or reform and of international imperialist expansion or resistance to it. These actions further ensure that capitalism is not, and can never be, a purely ‘economic’ system but a political economy domestically and at the international plane, not a ‘global economy’ seamlessly unified by markets but a geopolitical economy in which states and their relations of competition and struggle are central. Marx identified a range of crisis mechanisms and examined some more fully than others in his incomplete work. Ernest Mandel identified overproduction (or underconsumption), disproportionality, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) as distinct crisis mechanisms in Marx’s work. Paul Sweezy likewise identified crises associated with falling rates of profits and realisation. We can, however, take a wider, more systematic, view. While crises certainly occur in production and circulation, the core realms of value production, capitalism relies on the right conditions in at least five other realms. Value is expressed and, critically for capitalists, preserved in money and states must furnish money of stable value. Money is inseparable from credit and states must ensure that financial systems function to facilitate accumulation. Further, states must create and maintain the legal and political framework of private property, to secure its growth and manage its crises. Internationally, the unevenness of capitalist development and the imperialist pressures generated by dominant states call forth the response of combined development, protectionist industrialisation, whether capitalist, as in Germany, the US, or Japan in the nineteenth century, or communist, as in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth. The resulting dialectic of uneven and combined development (Desai, 2013) ensures the plurality of nation-​states and competition, struggle, and conflict between them. Finally, like all other modes of production, capitalism relies on the free resources that nature provides. In each of these six spheres, crises may take two forms: an intra-​class horizontal form arising from competition and struggles among property-​owning classes; and an inter-​class vertical form, arising from class struggle between them and workers. These six sources and two forms give us at least 12 different mechanisms of crises (Table 8.1). Let us take them in turn. There is the TRPF because, in competing for market share, capitalists invest in cost-​ reducing technology. The ‘first mover’ firm initially enjoys increased profits because it can sell above its new lower cost while remaining below competitors’ still-​high costs. While some competitors go bankrupt, others catch up by making similar investments. As they do, they depress the price to the new, lower, ‘socially necessary’ level and also push down the rate of profit in that sector to the average unless counteracted, temporarily, by some factor. Those who dismiss the TRPF argue that no capitalist would invest unless it increased his profits. However, Marx’s argument was that the capitalists are ‘forced to introduce new machinery in order to keep … market share’ and that ‘[n]‌o capitalist knows in advance what the result of this decision to buy new machinery will be’ (Mandel, 1981: 35–​36). Both Marx and Keynes considered falling profits a secular trend, punctuated but not reversed by up-​ticks, weakening the impulse to invest as capitalism matured.The resulting

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Form/Source

Production

Realisation

Money

Finance

Intra-​class

TRPF*

Disproportion

Deflation

Inter-​class

Profit squeeze

Overproduction /​ underconsumption

Inflation

Credit crunch /​ Fiscal crisis speculative bubbles Mortgage crisis Legitimation crisis

* TRPF, tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

State

International

Ecological

Uneven vs. capitalist combined development Uneven vs. popular or socialist combined development

Corporate ecological destruction Ecological destruction from human desperation

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Table 8.1 Crises by source and form

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Capitalism and crises   73 surfeit of capital would spell the obsolescence of capitalism and capitalists. However, exactly how it contributes to crisis is not entirely clear. Marxists squabble over how exactly to measure the profit rate, but how its lowering slows investment sufficiently to constitute a crisis remains unclear. Certainly, differences in rates of profit explain why capital shifts from less to more profitable sectors. However, can it explain rises or falls in aggregate investment? Where reasonably developed financial systems exist, low profit rates should hardly prevent and could even spur investment if promising new technology appears. Meanwhile, high profit rates amid low demand and profit expectations only lead capitalists to hoard their money as financial ‘investment’, increasing the amount of capital seeking a share of existing returns, putting more downward pressure on profit rates (Freeman, 2013). Keynes had emphasised that investment is motivated by profit expectations as much as existing profit rates while the most ambitious attempt so far to explain the Long Downturn since the 1970s in terms of declining profit rates (Brenner, 1998) attributes them to overproduction and overcapacity in relation to existing demand, a more complex matter. Profits are squeezed when rising wages reduce rates of exploitation and profits. Many Marxist economists dismiss profit squeezes theoretically, arguing that rates of exploitation can rise even when profits are falling, and empirically by noting that other factors, particularly international price pressures, explained most of the decline in profitability between 1965 and 1973 (Brenner, 1998: 101–​102). Neither argument demonstrates, however, that rising wages cannot decrease profit rates and they did threaten profits at least in some countries in the economic crisis of the 1970s (Glyn, 2006) as productivity growth slowed. Crises of competition in circulation are classic symptoms of capitalism’s anarchy, leading to disproportionate production between sectors: for instance, too many investment goods and too few consumption goods, or vice versa: ‘too many shirts, too few tractors’. However, crisis in circulation arising from the injustice of class exploitation is far weightier. Since what workers are paid is always considerably lower than what they produce, and since there is no guarantee that the capitalist, who appropriates the rest, will spend it, whether on lavish consumption or investment, there is never any guarantee that all the goods arriving on markets will be sold. Periodic gluts are inevitable. They signify overproduction in relation to existing demand or underconsumption in relation to existing production. Though many Marxists favour the former term, they are interchangeable. Certainly, Marx believed that the ‘ultimate reason for all real crises remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses’ (Marx, 1981: 615). In emphasising that high wages and full employment were necessary to prolong, if not ultimately stabilise, capitalism, Keynes agreed. Marxist economists deny that paucity of consumption demand is a crisis mechanism by proposing that capitalism can be a never-​ending production of producers’ goods. However, while investment and consumption demand together make up aggregate demand, investment demand for production goods relies on demand for consumption goods (Desai, 2010). As Marx pointed out, the production of constant capital (his term for investment goods) is ‘ultimately limited’ by consumption demand because ‘production of constant capital never takes place for its own sake, but simply because more of it is needed in those spheres of production whose products do go into individual consumption’ (Marx, 1867/​1977: 420). We now leave the spheres of value production and realisation and venture to their preconditions. Capitalism inherits the state institution of money but requires it to behave like a commodity. Only states can create money even as capitalists suspect them of

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74  Radhika Desai devaluing it for its own political convenience. Capitalism also needs money to retain its value even though its own dynamics lead to fluctuations in that value. Competition pushes down prices unrelentingly, leading to deflation, increasing the value of money, and reducing the inducement to invest. While commodities tend to decline in value as capitalism develops, the fictitious commodities—​land, labour, and money—​whose prices are determined by their own special laws, can (arguably, must) rise, leading to inflation, devaluing money. Cost-​push inflation occurs due to high bargaining strength of labour or primary commodity producers. Meanwhile, the mismanagement of money by states can also lead to inflation. Within limits, inflation acts as a spur to spending, both consumption and investment, and can stimulate production. Beyond a point, however, it also undermines both. All money already being debt, the realm of capitalist finance is that of private credit. Though it is structured to appear just like any other form of profit making, it is actually entirely different. It produces nothing and relies on skimming off other incomes, whether wages, profits, or rent. It must also be heavily regulated, and supported, by the state, something that became glaringly clear when states and central banks bailed out financial institutions in recent financial crises. In the realm of finance, horizontal crisis mechanisms can be credit crunches—​one set of capitalists, bankers, being unwilling to lend, whether to other bankers or productive investors, as in 2008—​and asset bubbles as capitalists compete to corner returns for their idle capital through speculation in asset markets, driving prices up and returns down. As ever-​thinning margins require ever more borrowed money to keep speculation going, asset price crashes can also lead to banking crises, as in 2008. In the vertical, inter-​class, plane, the most common financial crises are mortgage crises, which occur with high default rates of credit extended for consumption to workers or petty producers whose wages are insufficient to service the debt. The recent ‘subprime crisis’ in the United States was an important but not the only instance: mortgage crises had preceded the Crash of 1929. In the state or political realm, capitalists cause fiscal crises—​state revenues falling short of expenditures—​by competing to off-​load the costs of the state running their common affairs to others through tax cuts and to appropriate the benefits of public action, like subsidies. Fiscal crises handicap states in ensuring accumulation. Tax cuts for the rich are justified with claims that they will invest, create jobs, and increase state revenues, though this is rare. The resulting fiscal crises usually result in curtailing social spending, which further contributes to declines in growth and legitimacy. This is precisely the form of inter-​class political crises of legitimacy which can require concessions unwelcome or intolerable to capital. In capitalism’s international relations, the geopolitical economy of capitalism that Marx termed ‘the relations of producing nations’, the very plurality of states, reflecting that of capitals, guarantees crises.They take an intra-​capitalist form when they arise from competition between nationally organised blocs of advanced capital, such as the competition for markets and colonies that culminated in the First World War. In our own time, they compete for limited markets, the underlying cause of the Long Downturn (Brenner, 1998), investment opportunities, resources, and labour. ‘Inter-​class’ geopolitical crises can take the form of refusals of the less-​developed periphery to provide outlets for advanced country excess capital and commodities and to contribute to the stability of core capitalism by keeping their exports cheap—​such as oil price increases of the 1970s or contemporary surges in commodity prices (Patnaik &

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Capitalism and crises   75 Patnaik, 2016)—​and by undertaking their own development, in capitalist (India, Brazil, South Korea) or socialist (Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China) forms. Finally, on a planetary scale, the capitalist organisation of production and labour, what Marx called our ‘metabolism with nature’, has everywhere led to the degradation of the very Earth that guarantees our existence. Here too, the two axes of value production result in distinct forms of ecological damage. Competition among capitalists to simply produce and sell us more and more products and services, to persuade us falsely that we need them, to corner resources to do so results in abuse and overuse of resources and land, pollution, reduction of biodiversity, and climate change. On the class exploitation axis, working people everywhere are forced to denude nature—​for firewood, land for houses, agriculture, or pasture, as unregulated waste dumps, or by buying cheap and shoddy goods representing a waste of resources—​because they are left with an ever-​shrinking share of the social product. The environmental issue is not economic growth and population, it is the capitalist organisation of our metabolism with nature. Recommended reading: Desai (2010).

Conclusion The mechanisms of value production and its conditions are rife with possibilities for crises. Every major crisis is a complex amalgam of more than one of these. If the argument of this essay is accepted, readers will see that the historically novel fragility, injustice, and anarchy of capitalism were noted by the earliest observers of capitalism and Marx laid the foundation for a larger coherent understanding of capitalism in his incomplete oeuvre, and later critics of capitalism added new elements to our understanding in ways that built on it. The picture we get is of a social form that requires so many things to go just right at once that its smooth functioning is an impossibility, leaving it perpetually prone to crisis on practically every front.

Reference Brenner, R. (1998). “The Economics of Global Turbulence.” New Left Review, I(229): 1–​265. Bukharin, N. (1914[1972]). The EconomicTheory of the Leisure Class. NewYork: Monthly Review Press. Clarke, S. (1991). Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (2nd ed). Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic and Professional. Desai, R. (2009). “Keynes Redux: World Money after the 2008 Crisis,” in Anthony, W. & Guard, J. (eds.), Bailouts and Bankruptcies, pp. 123–​144. Halifax: Fernwood Press. Desai, R. (2010). “Consumption Demand in Marx and in the Current Crisis.” Research in Political Economy,. 26: 101–​141. Desai, R. (2013). Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire. Future of World Capitalism series. London: Pluto Press. Desai, R. (2018). “Political Economy,” in Diamanti, J., Pendakis, A., & Szeman, I. (eds.), Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. London: Bloomsbury. Desai, R. (2020a). “Money as Fictitious Commodity: An Exploration,” in Desai, R. & Polanyi Levitt, K. (eds.), Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-​first Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Desai, R. (2020b). “Marx’s Critical Political Economy, Marxist Economics and Actually Occurring Revolutions against Capitalism.” Third World Quarterly, 41(8): 1353–​1370. Dobb, M. (1973). Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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76  Radhika Desai Freeman,A. (2013).“The Profit Rate in the Presence of Financial Markets:A Necessary Correction.” Journal of Australian Political Economy, 70: 167–​192. Glyn, A. (2006). Capitalism Unleashed: Finance Globalization and Welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mandel, E. (1981). “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Capital (Vol. III). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1858[1973]). Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1867 [1977]). Capital (Vol. I). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1964). Pre-​capitalist Economic Formations. New York: Monthly Review Press. Meek, R. (1973). Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (2nd edn). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Patnaik, P., & Patnaik, U. (2016). A Theory of Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sardoni, C. (1997). “Keynes and Marx,” in Harcourt, G. C. & Riach, P. (eds.), A Second Edition of the General Theory,Vol. 2, pp. 191–​207. London: Routledge.

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9  Development, capitalism, imperialism, globalisation A tale of four concepts Henry Veltmeyer

This chapter concerns a series of controversies that have long surrounded the concepts of ‘capitalism’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘imperialism’—​controversies as to what they have to do with the idea of ‘development’: whether or how these concepts can serve as descriptors of the dynamics associated with this idea. For example, the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’ refer to concepts and issues that are central to international political economy (IPE), a field of studies closely related to critical development studies (CDS), but reference to them is totally absent from mainstream development discourse. This absence from a CDS perspective is problematic, particularly in regard to the concept of ‘capitalism’, which makes reference to the system underlying the development process—​a system that has a lot to do with ‘development’ in that its institutional and policy dynamics cannot be understood without reference to the constraints and structural forces generated by the workings of the capitalist system. From a mainstream development economics perspective, capitalism not only provides an appropriate institutional and policy framework for expanding the available forces of production (progress, or economic growth), but it satisfies all of its system requirements, so much so that there is no need to question or study its workings and dynamics. Thus, capitalism as the operating system can be—​and normally is—​taken for granted by development economists, allowing if not compelling them to concentrate on its institutional and policy dynamics without having to concern themselves with the underlying operative system whose structural dynamics give meaning to the analytical construct ‘development’. Thus it is that the concept of capitalism features in development discourse by its virtual absence. This absence can be traced back to a tendency within the liberal philosophical tradition to separate the economic from the political, to treat both as independent systems that can be understood on their own terms. Within the liberal philosophical tradition, the political economy school of thought critiqued by Marx gave way to classical economics and political science as separate academic disciplines, both focused on the institutional and policy framework of the system rather than its pillars and structural dynamics. A consequence and feature of this mode of thinking was the virtual disappearance of ‘the system’ as a fundamental unit of analysis. Another consequence was a reductionist view of economics and politics as separate and distinct systems rather than as fundamentally interrelated institutions of capitalist development—​development of the forces of production and an associated process of productive and social transformation. Development studies as an academic discipline emerged in a post-​World War II context of an East–​West ideological divide; formation of the Bretton Woods system of global governance; and most importantly, the quest by a number of countries in Asia and Africa to free themselves from the yoke of European colonialism and British imperialism, and, DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-11

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78  Henry Veltmeyer in this context, the formation of social movements demanding national liberation and revolutionary change. In this situation, both the idea of development and the project of international cooperation were constructed with the aim and the purpose of ensuring that the erstwhile colonies would take a capitalist rather than a socialist path towards national development (Sachs, 1992). At least, this was the view of some scholars in the political economy tradition of development studies and of others in a broader tradition of CDS, which emerged in the 1980s in the context of what was described as a ‘theoretical impasse’ (Munck & O’Hearn, 1999; Schuurman, 1993). Whereas scholars and practitioners in the mainstream tradition of development studies tend to limit their concern to questions of institutional development and policy reform, adherents to a CDS approach are fundamentally concerned with the structural dynamics of the underlying system, which is to view capitalism as the fundamental problem, not as a system essential for delivering on the promise of development. This perspective is shared, inter alia, by adherents of Marxist political economy as well as proponents of critical theory and postdevelopment (on this see Chapters 3 and 6), and neo-​Marxist theorists of ‘dependency and underdevelopment’ (see Chapter 5) as well as proponents of ‘world system theory’ (on this see Chapters 2 and 10) .

Capitalism and extractive imperialism: the evolution of a system Although imperialist exploitation, colonial rule, and the projection of state power beyond the boundaries of the nation-​state pre-​existed the formation of capitalism as we understand it today by some three centuries (1500–​1800), it did lead to the accumulation of merchant capital, which, like the appropriation of natural resource wealth in the form of gold and silver, as well as plantation agrofood products (sugar, rum, cotton) extracted under conditions of colonial rule and imperialist exploitation of slave labour, was an essential ingredient for bringing about capitalism in the 19th century. But what capitalism required, according to Marx, in addition to the accumulation of capital in the form of money, was the formation of a proletariat, dispossessed from their means of production and thus available for hire. Marx described this process of class formation—​the separation of the direct producers or the peasantry from the land—​as ‘primitive (or original) accumulation’ (Marx, 1867/​1976). As Marx theorised, the capitalist development process thus would result in the ‘multiplication of the proletariat’ (a class dispossessed of their property in the means of production, owning nothing except their labour power) in a process of productive and social transformation. Marx theorised the resulting capitalist development process in terms of a General Law of Capital Accumulation, which specified a twofold tendency, on the one hand towards the centralisation and concentration of capital, and on the other, to the transformation of an agriculture-​based economy based on a traditional communalist culture and pre-​ capitalist relations of production (a peasant economy) into a modern industrial system based on the capital–​labour relation. The working of this law can be traced out in diverse historical and regional contexts on the periphery of what would evolve into a world capitalist system as a process of forced rural out-​migration and the formation of an ‘industrial reserve army’ of surplus agricultural labour. From a mainstream development economics perspective, articulated most clearly by the West Indian economist Arthur Lewis, the capitalist development of agriculture, and the consequent ‘unlimited supply of surplus labour’, functioned as a lever of capital accumulation, providing capitalists a source of cheap labour to fuel the development of

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A tale of four concepts   79 industry. As Marx saw it, this reserve army of surplus labour, resulting from the capitalist development of agriculture, also served as a lever of capital accumulation in holding down the cost of employed labour. Until the 1980s, and the institution of a new world order based on a fundamental belief in the virtues of free-​market capitalism, the development process more or less unfolded as both Arthur Lewis and Marx conceived of it. But the one aspect of this development process that Marx clearly anticipated, but neither he nor Lewis theorised, has to do with the globalising dynamics of capitalism, and its evolution as a world system with both a centre and a periphery, and the construction of an international division of labour that would lead to an uneven development of the forces of production, and—​according to Andre Gunder Frank among other ‘dependency’ or ‘world system’ theorists—​underdevelopment based on the superexploitation of workers and producers on the periphery. There are different ways of understanding the dynamics of this uneven capitalist development process. From a CDS perspective a determinant factor is the installation of a world order based on neoliberal principles and a programme of ‘structural reforms’ in macroeconomic policy, including ‘globalisation’, understood as the opening of the economies in both the centre and the periphery to the workings of free-​market capitalism (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2001). The outcome of these ‘structural reforms’, which were implemented in Latin America and Africa with particularly destructive force and devastating impact, was anything but the reactivation of the accumulation process promised by the advocates of free-​market capitalism and the boosters of ‘globalisation’ (Bhagwati, 2004; Wolf, 2004). The outcome, rather, included: (i) destruction of built-​up forces of production in both industry and agriculture; (ii) an exodus of the ‘rural poor’ from agriculture and their rural communities and their migration to the cities in search of work; (iii) the formation of an urban and rural semiproletariat, with one foot in the urban economy (in the informal sector, where the urban poor are forced to work on their own account rather than exchange their labour power for a living wage) and the other in agriculture and the rural communities; (iv) the rapid advance of resource-​seeking ‘extractive capital, and with it a reprimarisation of exports and a renewed dependence on FDI [foreign direct investment] and primary commodity exports’;1 and (v) generation of powerful forces of resistance to the advance of capital on the extractive frontier and to the neoliberal policy agenda of governments in the region (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2011).

Development as imperialism The idea of development, as understood by Sachs (1992) and his associates in postdevelopment theory, was deconstructed as a mechanism of neo-​colonial mind control, a means of subjecting the target population in ‘developing countries’ to the dictates of capital. As noted above, the idea of development (and the project of international cooperation), viewed through the lens of a CDS perspective, was understood and theoretically reconstructed as a means of ensuring that those countries in the process of liberating themselves from the yoke of colonial rule would pursue a capitalist development path. Subsequently the idea of development was reformulated as a project of development assistance delivered to the rural poor by the state with international cooperation—​to turn the rural poor away from the confrontational politics of the revolutionary movements and offer them the option of a land reform programme combined with micro-​projects of ‘integrated rural development’ (Veltmeyer, 2005).

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80  Henry Veltmeyer Overseas development assistance (ODA)—​ or, in more common parlance, foreign aid—​is viewed by many theorists in the mainstream of development studies as a catalyst of economic development, providing a needed boost to developing economies to assist them in the process of industrial development and modernisation already traced out by the more advanced countries that now make up the rich club of ‘developed countries’ at the centre of the system (Pronk, 2004). But it is possible to look at foreign aid in a very different way: as a means of advancing the geopolitical and strategic interests of the governments and organisations that provide this aid, designed to benefit not the recipients but rather the donors. In the early 1970s, in the throes of a systemic crisis that brought about the end of the so-​called ‘golden age of capitalism’, this view was expressed in the notion of ‘aid as imperialism’ (Hayter, 1971). The idea of ‘development’ itself is often traced back to the Point Four Program of ODA announced by President Truman on 20 January 1949. However, in its multilateral form it goes back to several projects funded by the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (subsequently known as the World Bank) in Chile in 1948 and in Brazil and Mexico the year after. The World Bank is an institutional pillar of the Bretton Woods system designed so as to resurrect a global form of capitalist development and a process of international trade. In regard to both bilateral and multilateral forms of ODA, the US government was the major donor by far, and the foreign policy geopolitical and strategic considerations of the US government the most relevant in shaping the form of ‘foreign aid’. These considerations were not of one size or in one direction. From the beginning, there existed an extensive policy debate, particularly within the US, as to the value and possible uses of ‘foreign aid’. The central issue in this debate had to do with whether or not and how the US’s economic and broader geopolitical strategic interests could be served by means of ODA. In this connection, a number of voices were raised to the effect that it would not be in the economic interest of the US to promote economic development in backward areas of the world and that efforts to contain the underdeveloped countries within the Western bloc would be ‘unrealistic’ and not fruitful for American interests. The dominant view, however, and the one that would eventually prevail, was that ODA was a most useful means of advancing the broader geopolitical interests of the US (to prevent the spread of communism) without, at the same time, damaging its economic interests. Indeed, in the context of this policy debate within the US, it was argued that ODA could be a useful instrument of US foreign economic policy in achieving the broad objective of containing communism. To prevent the system from falling apart, in a Herculean effort to save capitalism from itself and reactivate the drive to accumulate, the capitalist class in the US and other leading economies of the world capitalist system in the 1970s launched a class war against labour as part of a series of measures aimed at restructuring the system in the search for a way out of the crisis (Bello, 2006; Crouch & Pizzorno, 1978; Davis, 1984; Marglin & Schor, 1990). These restructuring strategies included abandoning the capital–​labour accord (an agreement for labour to share in productivity gains) that had not only kept the social peace throughout the postwar ‘golden age’ but brought about two decades of sustained economic growth and steadily rising wages. Other restructuring strategies included measures designed to reduce the share of labour (wages) in national income and thereby increase the pool of capital available for productive investment, geographic relocation of capitalist enterprises closer to sources of cheap labour, implementation of a more flexible

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A tale of four concepts   81 post-​Fordist form of production, technological restructuring of the global production apparatus—​and both financialisation and globalisation (Bello, 2006; Lipietz, 1982). The concepts of capitalism and imperialism are frequently conflated, the one reduced to the other. This is the case, for example, in the ‘new imperialism’ school of thought that emerged in the 1990s as an explanation of the globalising dynamics of capitalism unleashed by the installation in the 1980s of what was then a ‘new world order’ of neoliberal globalisation—​a system ostensibly designed to liberate the ‘forces of economic freedom’ (free-​market capitalism) from the regulatory constraints of the development state. This neoliberal world order not only served to liberate the ‘forces of economic freedom’ (the free flow of investment capital, the market, the operation of multinational corporations), but, according to exponents of the theory of the ‘new imperialism’, to weaken the state, particularly in countries on the periphery of the world system.The argument advanced by these theorists is that these multinational corporations, released from the regulatory constraints of the state, no longer needed the imperial state to open up and pave the road towards capitalism on the periphery of the system; they could rely on their own economic power as agencies of the new imperialism (Magdoff, 2003; Panitch & Leys, 2004; Robinson, 2007). Needless to say, this theory of new imperialism was subjected to intense debate and a sharp critique by Marxist theorists such as James Petras, who continue to insist that imperialism is fundamentally a matter of power exercised by the state to advance the interests of the international capitalist class (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2005).

Globalisation and capitalism Academic discourse in diverse fields including development studies over the past two decades has been dominated by a new lexicon surrounding the notion of ‘globalisation’, understood generally as the integration of societies and economies across the world into one system (Bowles, 2008).2 The notion of globalisation contains a description and explanation of processes and trends that hitherto unfolded at the national level but that over the past few decades have spilled beyond the boundaries of the nation-​state. In its most general sense ‘globalisation’ refers to the upsurge in direct investment and the liberalisation and deregulation in cross-​border flows of capital, technology, and services, as well as the creation of a global production system—​global capitalism (Robinson, 2007). It is in this sense that the term was apparently coined in 1986, in the context of the eighth round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations (Ostry, 1990). For the theorists of this process and its many advocates these flows, both in scope and depth, together with the resulting economic integration and social transformation, have created a new world order with its own institutions and configurations of power that have replaced the previous structures associated with the nation-​state, and that have created new conditions affecting people’s lives all over the world, including a greater interconnectedness (Holm & Sørensen, 1995; Therborn, 1999). The defining feature of what we might describe as ‘critical globalisation studies’ is that it takes the ‘world’ rather than ‘society’ bound within the nation-​state, or a sub-​unit of this ‘society’ (local communities, for example), as the fundamental unit of analysis—​as the setting and context for analysis. This approach has been particularly popular in development economics and political economy, with a focus on the structure and dynamics of capitalist development and international relations.

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82  Henry Veltmeyer Globalism has also been a prevailing trend in the study of development in its diverse permutations and dimensions—​economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological. In effect, it has provided for new forms of analysis of processes that transcend the nation-​ state—​that unfold on a global scale—​processes that have been analysed and theorised in terms of ‘globalisation’ rather than capitalist development, the central concern of CDS. As a description of widespread, epoch-​defining developments and a prescription for action, globalisation has achieved a virtual hegemony, and so is presented with an air of inevitability that disarms the imagination and prevents action (and even thinking) in the direction of a possible systemic alternative—​towards another world, a more just social and economic order. Emerging in the mid-​1980s as an alternative way of promoting a ‘new world order’ in which the ‘forces of freedom’ are liberated from the constraints of the welfare-​ developmental state, ‘globalisation’ has been viewed alternatively as a ‘project’, a means of ‘boost[ing] living standards’ (Rodrik, 2002), and as a ‘process’, or then again, as in the World Bank’s capitalist manifesto, the 1995 World Development Report, written to discourage workers around the world to resist, as both.3 In academe and in policymaking circles, globalism and globalisation are conceived of primarily in economic terms, i.e., as a process of economic integration. But it did not take long for the concept of globalisation to penetrate and feature in the academic discourse of other academic disciplines such as political science and sociology. As constructed by social scientists in these ‘disciplines’ within a globalist framework, ‘globalisation’ emerges as a multidimensional phenomenon rather than as strictly or narrowly ‘economic’. In this context it is conceived as the broadening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary life, encompassing ideas and information, and values and beliefs, as well as economic and political practices based on a computer-​ driven technological revolution that has brought about a new information-​rich postmodern form of society.

Conclusion The concepts ‘development’ and ‘globalisation’ both make reference to descriptors of dynamics associated with the evolution of capitalism as world system. As such, they provide different ways of understanding the dynamics of this system, albeit with a number of points of convergence and intersection. The major difference in the way that the development and globalising dynamics of the capitalist system are understood is between what we might describe as mainstream and critical conceptions of development and globalisation. In the mainstream both concepts, and associated areas of studies, are separated from their roots in the workings of capitalism on people and countries according to their location in the system. In mainstream development and globalisation discourse—​and thus analysis—​the underlying operative system literally disappears from view in a concentrated focus on the institutional and policy dynamics of the system.As for CDS and critical globalisation studies,4 they provide complementary analysis of the globalising dynamics of the capitalist development process.

Notes 1 On the advance of extractive capital in the development process, or ‘extractivism’, see Chapters 39 and 41; and Veltmeyer and Petras (2014). 2 Bowles identifies four schools of thought on ‘globalization: (i) globalization as a primarily technologically driven process that strengthens markets and market actors while weakening

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A tale of four concepts   83 and requiring adaptation by nation states; (ii) globalization as a ‘myth’ that has not significantly weakened the national basis of economic activity and the dominance of nation states; (iii) globalization as imperialism—​a strategy designed to advance the economic interests of the global capitalist class and the imperial powers by removing the barriers to the expansion of foreign direct investments and the operations of the multinational corporations; and (iv) globalization as an inadequate descriptor of the processes under way in the neoliberal era, better described as regionalization or regionalism’. 3 Development also can be viewed as either a ‘project’ or as a ‘process’. In either case, ‘development’ is the outcome of actions consciously or purposefully taken to bring about a desired outcome, but if the outcome is intended than we can assume that the actions taken or the underlying strategy was the causal factor or operating force. In many cases, however, the outcome was not intentional, but rather the unintended consequence of the action(s) taken. In these cases, ‘development’ can be viewed as the result of ‘structural’ forces. 4 On critical globalisation studies, see Chapter 10.

References Bello, W. (2006). “The Capitalist Conjuncture: Over-​ accumulation, Financial Crises, and the Retreat from Globalisation.” Third World Quarterly, 27(8): 1345–​1367. Bhagwati, J. (2004). In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Bowles, P. (2008). “Globalization: A Taxonomy of Theoretical Approaches,” in Veltmeyer, H. (ed.), New Perspectives on Globalization and Antiglobalization: Prospects for a New World Order, pp. 23–​34. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Crouch, C., & Pizzorno, A. (1978). Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968. London: Holmes and Meier. Davis, M. (1984). “The Political Economy of Late-​imperial America.” New Left Review, 143: 6–​38. Hayter, T. (1971). Aid as Imperialism. London: Penguin Books. Holm, H.-​H., & Sørensen, G. (eds.) (1995). Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War. Boulder, CO: Westview. Lipietz, A. (1982). “Towards Global Fordism.” New Left Review, 132: 33–​47. Magdoff, H. (2003). Imperialism Without Colonies. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Marglin, S., & Schor, J. (1990). The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Post-​War Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marx, K. ([1867] 1976). “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital (Vol. I, Part VIII), pp. 507–​509. New York: Penguin Books. Munck, R., & O’Hearn, D. (eds.) (1999). Critical Development Theory. London: Zed Books. Ostry, S. (1990). Governments and Corporations in a Shrinking World. Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations. Panitch, L., & Leys, C. (2004). The New Imperial Challenge. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2001). Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publications; London: Zed Books. Petras, J.,Veltmeyer, H. (2011). Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pronk, J.P. (2004). Catalysing Development: A Debate on Aid. Oxford: Blackwell. Robinson,W. (2007). “Beyond the Theory of Imperialism: Global Capitalism and the Transnational State.” Societies Without Borders, 2: 5–​26. Rodrik, D. (2002). “Feasible Gobalizations.” Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Sachs, W. (1992). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Schuurman, F.J. (1993). Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory. London: Zed Books. Stiglitz, J.E. (2002). Globalization and its Discontents. New York: Norton Press. Therborn, G. (1999). “What Does the Ruling Class do when it Rules? Some Reflections on Different Approaches to the Study of Power in Society.” Critical Sociology, 25(2/​3): 224–​243.

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84  Henry Veltmeyer Veltmeyer, H. (2005). “Foreign Aid, Neoliberalism and Imperialism,” in Saad-​Filho, A. & Johnston, D. (eds.), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, pp. 120–​127. London: Pluto Press. Veltmeyer, H. (2013). “The Political Economy of Natural Resource Extraction: A New Model or Extractive Imperialism?” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 34(1): 79–​95. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2005). “Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship.” International Critical Thought, 5(2): 164–​182. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism:A Model for Latin America? London: Zed Books. Wolf, M. (2004). Why Globalization Works. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Wood, M.E. (2003). Empire of Capital. London:Verso.

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10  Globalisation versus development Beyond dualism S.A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills

‘Globalisation’ and ‘development’ are highly contested general organising concepts, in both theory and praxis. The term ‘development’ emerged in English-​language usage in the 1840s (OED online, 2021), coinciding with rapid industrialisation, radical social transformation, and European imperialism. Its use spiked following the Second World War, coinciding with decolonisation and Pax Americana. Usage peaked circa 1980, on the threshold of a new period of neoliberal economic globalisation. Notably, ‘globalisation’ entered the English lexicon in the early 1980s, its usage rising steeply from that time onward, rapidly overtaking ‘development’ and even subsuming its meaning (James & Steger, 2014). The relationship between the ideas/​ideologies/​discourses of development and globalisation remains a matter of intense theoretical debate and empirical exploration. Both ‘development’ and ‘globalisation’ have widely served in the literature as abstract concepts for a set of complex historical processes of social and environmental transformation, constantly contested and negotiated among contending social forces, in arenas between states, corporations (public and private, and financial), people (all categories), and ‘nature’ (the web-​of-​life). However, development is relevant to socially constructed understandings of what constitutes the betterment of the human condition, whereas globalisation normally refers to the (new) social relations of ‘global’ dimensions transcending previously understood boundaries of space and time. Contestations around the concept of globalisation stem from several sources, including conflicting ideologies that underpin different interpretations, the complexity of phenomena to which the term refers, and a problematic ‘global imaginary’ shared between both affirmative and critical scholars that constitute a worldview socially constructed by theorists that are predominantly from the Global North. Some have argued that globalisation is a single, overarching, or dominant process, while others contend that there is a plurality of processes, or ‘globalisations’ (e.g., see the journal Globalizations at www.tandfonline.com/​rglo). ‘Globalisation’ indicates profound social transformations (e.g., wherein a rapid increase in the ‘quantity’ and speed of flows and interactions produces a new ‘quality’ wherein no ‘sovereign entity’ can operate independently of global forces and constraints nor solve major problems independently). ‘Globalisation’ also tends to imply all-​inclusiveness, the compression of social spaces, and time. In mainstream literature, it is widely used to signify ‘connectivity’ and mutual interconnectedness, or supra-​territorialisation (i.e., a post-​national condition transcending established borders based on territorial sovereign authority). It may imply a belief in the integration of the human community and of ‘the-​world-​as-​a-​single-​space’ established upon converging economic, cultural, and political relations (Robertson, 1992); a ‘global’ integration occurring at the expense of national and local autonomy, subsuming all into DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-12

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86  S.A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills a new overarching historical structure, a nascent or future ‘global society’ or ‘global state’ formation (Patomaki, 2020). There is a broad variety of conceptual framings and research approaches (Lemert, Elliot, Chaffee and Hsu, 2010), ranging in perspective from considering globalisation as a new period in world history; an inevitable process of human progress resulting from unprecedented acceleration in interconnectedness (a product of technological innovations); leading to greater economic openness among globalised societies; to the view that globalisation is only a new form of capitalist discourse orchestrated by a transnational class or cosmopolitan-​oriented global elite, ideologically constructing a new global hegemony wherein state-​centred discourses of ‘development’ lose their legitimacy; to a set of theories of ‘late modernisation’ wherein space–​time is compressed, creating new global risks; to its consideration as a multi-​century process of global stratification that can be traced back to the 16th-​century ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the expansion of European colonialism, or even earlier, to the period when new world religions first extended their global reach (Hodos, 2017). Sceptics have argued there is nothing new or surprising about today’s (economic) globalisation (Hirst, Thompson, & Bromley, 2009). Some divide the long world history of globalisation patterns into successive waves, e.g., cycles of expansion and contraction, and consider the most recent wave (starting from the end of the Cold War) as highly distinctive (Chase-​Dunn & Gills, 2005). According to such historical interpretations, globalisation has been multi-​centric (and the ‘centre’ ‘shifts’ across space and time) and cyclical, for example via ‘rise and demise’ patterns (Chase-​Dunn, 2020). Therefore, evidence of recent increasing global trade, financial, and communications integration is potentially ‘reversible’, and may yet (re-​)rise again from somewhere else, e.g., the ‘Global East’ where it had yet older ‘oriental globalisation’ historical roots (Frank & Denemark, 2016). There is now a large body of literature, structured around extensive studies addressing a broad range of global issues, including debates over theories, global structures, processes, and transitions, which together constitute a major field of study (Ritzer, 2016). This field has evolved from initially dominant reductionist accounts of globalisation that stressed structural standardisation processes (e.g., economic rationalisation, Americanisation, McDonaldisation, or cultural imperialism) towards more diversified accounts of the complexities of global transitions, requiring more interdisciplinary approaches (O’Byrne & Hensby, 2011; Turner & Holton, 2015). There is almost no major social, environmental, economic, political, or cultural issue that is currently left untouched by globalisation studies. In its broadest sense, globalisation studies interacts with not only development studies, but with numerous related fields, including international relations, (international) political economy, regional and global studies, political geography, political theory, communication and media studies, (cosmopolitan) political philosophy, (global) sociology and anthropology, and cultural studies, thus rendering contemporary globalisation studies profoundly interdisciplinary.1 Recommended reading: El Khoury (2015); O’Byrne and Hensby (2011).

An ideological divide The idea of globalisation has profoundly challenged pre-​existing discourses, theories, and practices of ‘development’. There are, however, significant resonances and overlaps between critical globalisation studies (CGS) and critical development studies (CDS). McMichael (2005: 111) argues, however, that the separation between the two academic

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Globalisation versus development  87 fields is ideologically constructed, and yet draws upon a widely shared but problematic dichotomisation, i.e., that between transnational analyses and state-​centred analyses of social change. State-​centred political discourses of ‘development’ have, it is claimed, increasingly lost their legitimating power. A critical approach is necessary to problematise this foundational and yet deeply misleading dualism between development and globalisation. This is particularly acute in the current context of what some call the ‘post-​ globalisation’ era (Latham, 2016), characterised by the weakening of previous patterns of global and regional integration, and a seemingly endless economic weakening following the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, the widespread resurgence of nationalist/​populist politics and ideologies, and the more recent impacts of the COVID-​19 global pandemic. CGS may be characterised across five foci, which are not mutually exclusive. Within each domain, there are multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives. There are also significant overlaps and exchanges between CGS and CDS. In the first focus, globalisation studies is concerned with the magnitude of the increase in the density of ‘large-​scale interaction networks’, communications, mobilities, and flows of capital, labour, knowledge, services, resources, and goods (Held, 2005; Negri & Zolo, 2003). The second focus has attempted to explore the bifurcating or polarising impacts of economic globalisation, highlighting those processes that entail growing social inequalities, disparities, or divergences within and/​or between societal, spatial, gendered, racial, national, or cultural groupings (Galbraith, 2012; Held & Kaya, 2007; Lindio-​McGovern & Wallimann, 2016; Piketty & Goldhammer, 2014). The third focus is on the webs of power relations (or ‘governance’) directed by the international financial institutions, powerful states, transnational corporations, ‘transnational capitalist class’ (or ‘global corporate elite’), their associated hegemonic (political) cultures and ideologies, and the expansion of these throughout the world, especially since the end of the Cold War (Cox, 2019). While the most powerful corporate and military elites and nation-​states in the current world (dis) order are still able to prominently shape the world’s direction, new political forces are simultaneously arising within and across many nations, drawing on anti-​globalisation sentiments and lived experiences of (mal)development practices, towards re-​constituting the global forces of resistance (Hosseini, 2010). The fourth focus, often assuming a logic of cause and effect, explores the impacts of globalisation at all societal levels from the ‘local’ to ‘global’, including the development of (new) social risks, socioecological problems (including eco-​destruction, climate change), food and energy crises, financial instability and socio-​economic predicaments, health inequalities and public health crises (‘epidemiological’ and ‘pathological’ profiles of global change), human insecurity, terrorism, violence, war, social disorders, crime, sex/​drug/​ organs/​human trafficking, migration, population mobility and displacements, identity crises (e.g., among youth), and social tensions (Chirico, 2019).The fifth focus is that placed upon transformative potential and (new) forces of resistance, that oppose ‘hegemonic globalisation’ processes (Veltmeyer, 2008) and promote a pluriverse of postdevelopment, post-​globalist alternatives (Kothari et al., 2019). Recommended reading: Bello (2018); Gills (2011); Veltmeyer and Petras (2014).

Beyond the divide In today’s world, cross-​societal communications and connections have increased and there are greater capacities for various modes of convergence. Nevertheless, social and cultural

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88  S.A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills divisions have also widened, while inequalities within and between countries are acute and becoming even more pronounced. The planet’s bio-​capacity to sustain the present form of global ‘development’ is nearly exhausted. Much of ‘development’ around the world could be characterised as ‘maldevelopment’, in which long-​term negative consequences tend to outweigh short-​term positive benefits (Amin, 2011), thus prompting the rise of postdevelopment theory, the call for ‘alternatives to development’, and the search for new roads to human empowerment and liberation (Gudynas, 2016). While many are the victims of globalising changes and the dominant paradigm of ‘economic development’, they have also continuously shown their capacity to respond, to resist, and to initiate ‘bottom-​up’ social transformation, and still in many cases seek to resiliently survive under intense pressures (Sen, 2018). All these complex and fluidly changing social responses, movements, and new patterns of transformative praxes cannot be theorised under one single umbrella term or a single theory of social change. We must be prepared to accept both the historicity and extreme complexity of both globalisation and development while embracing the call to liberate our minds from imprisonment in the past and from the centrality of Eurocentric thinking. New forms of ‘transversal cosmopolitanist’ praxes may be one avenue of hope for the future (Gills, Hosseini, & Goodman, 2017), with the scope to radically transform both globalisation and development in theory and practice. There are important lessons that the two fields of CDS and CGS can learn from one another through mutual reflections on their historical evolutions. CGS can play a more vigorous role in shaping its own future by reflecting on how CDS has evolved since its inception. The modernist, Keynesian, and nationalist theories of development and dependency of the 1950s–​1970s came under attack during the 1980s–​1990s by two major ‘beyond-​development’ discourses, one constructed by the market/​neoliberal globalist elite, and one raised by the poststructuralist and postcolonialist scholarly-​activist movements, known as ‘post-​development theory’ (Veltmeyer & Bowles, 2018). The former questioned the protectionist and interventionist role of the state and argued for yet greater economic liberalisation, rationalisation, and structural adjustment intended to undo the presumed fetters restraining the modernisation project within fixed territorial boundaries and the strictures imposed by developmental states. It, however, remained loyal to the centrality of the idea of ‘economic growth’ as the unquestionable high-​end goal, and to the Eurocentric epistemologies of orthodox developmentalism. By the end of the 1990s, the new trend had created its own brand, i.e., ‘globalisation’; a project backed up by neoclassical economics, liberal-​humanist discourses, and market-​ oriented policies, to reinvent and attempt to reinvigorate the failed development projects of the mid and late 20th century, in the post-​Cold War era (Gills, 2017). Developmentalism, however, did not wither away. It continued its influence on national policies by accepting a range of reforms through the United Nation (UN) programmes and discourses of development, such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘human development.’ This simultaneity of continuities (e.g., in the form of Human Development Index (HDI), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs policy discourses) and discontinuities (e.g., ‘Washington Consensus’, ‘economic globalisation’) created profound structural contradictions between the new and old paradigms, which became the subject of many studies in both CDS and CGS. CDS underwent a bifurcation between reformist currents, supported by inter/​ national civil society institutions and some UN-​dependent organisations (remaining loyal to the idea of development, but adding to it a human and/​or ecological face) and those who moved beyond the conventional idea of development, in either neoliberal globalist or poststructuralist

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Globalisation versus development  89 ways. The poststructuralist and postcolonialist turns in CDS (some with strong feminist contributions) criticised the underpinning by modernist, Eurocentric, and economistic assumptions of the old and the new developmentalist paradigms and the core idea of the unavoidability of development/​growth. Some argued for the necessity of exploring radically alternative ways of living, inspired by grassroots-​oriented, place-​based, self-​reliant, self-​governing, communal experiences and possibilities (Harcourt, 2016). We have now reached a stage where the above three paradigmatic trends in development studies face a theoretical and practical impasse. Many (state and corporate-​led) development(-​alist) projects still facilitate socio-​economic domination, despite the significant efforts by agents of civil society and/​or the public sector to reinvent and appropriate them for the interests of the so-​called developing societies. The neoliberal globalist projects have failed in practice to deliver the ambitious promises of market fundamentalist elites. The postdevelopment paradigm, despite two decades of active critique, has not yet gone beyond the romanticisation of postmodernist localised experiences. To be radically transformative, the postdevelopment critique needs to further construct political strategies for systemic change and to systematically outline alternative projects at all levels from the local to global (see Sklair, 2021). What can CDS learn from critical reflections on the historical evolution of CGS? From their early stages, social scientific studies of globalisation have been aware of the multiplicity of global transformations and of the serious structural contradictions promoted by globalisation. This trend is, however, not satisfactorily mature; it still requires greater efforts to become even more radically transformative in orientation.What remains puzzling is the situation whereby the more CGS has acknowledged the existing complexities, the more is added to our sense of analytical confusion(s); mostly as the result of addressing so many contradictory processes under a totalising framing. CGS can no longer be exclusively about globalisation, since the notion itself, whether in the sense of time–​space compression in all major aspects of life across the globe, or as an expansionist economic (neo)liberalisation trend, has exhausted its capacity to play the role of the ‘theory of everything’. In fact, it has already started to lose its conceptual centrality, reflecting the way recent major social transitions are now transpiring (for more debates on this, see Hosseini & Gills, 2020b; and Volume 18, Issue 5 of the journal Globalizations on ‘Globalization Matters’). A profound shift is needed, towards giving primacy to studies of existing, emerging, and potential alternatives to the dominant paradigms of development and globalisation as shaped and led by global capital. This requires a radical change in our conception of reality. The reality of most contemporary ‘development’ is an ever-​increasing accumulation of failure, destruction, and discontent. Thus, to consider ‘what is to be done’ as a secondary or utopian task is now ‘unrealist(ic)’. If a radical transformative scholarship aims to overcome the dystopian and unjust reality of the present and to contribute to the construction of realistic utopian futures, then exploring the critical truth of a viable utopia is arguably the most important feature of the radical imagination in this common struggle. To be perpetually locked into elaborating criticism of capital and its contradictions can unintentionally lead to reinforcement of its perceived supremacy (El Khoury, 2015). The radical change, in both theory and practice, is now the realistic; not fantasy or illusion. A transformative approach must thus start from exploring the alternative ways of living that are extant or that are now arising, and move forward to examine the methods of empowering them. While the number of studies of context-​specific alternatives has been growing in recent years, concrete projects to explore the potential for integrating these

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90  S.A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills into macro-​scale models of national, regional, and global transformations are still relatively absent. The commensurability of CDS and CGS lies in their critical approach, which provides us with a solid base for traversing their division. Although both CDS and CGS are broad interdisciplinary fields, we may speak of a joint imperative that the two are expected to pursue in reinterpreting what it means to be critical in the current perilous context (see the next section). Recommended reading: Escobar (2020); Veltmeyer and Delgado Wise (2018); Veltmeyer and Záyago Lau (2020).

A call for a radically transformative transformation beyond the critical As the crises of both the globalisation and development projects are deepening in our time, calls for radical re-​imagining of critical scholarship are gaining greater ground. The 2020s can be regarded as the most pivotal decade in the most critical century in human history, where ‘demanding the impossible’ becomes the only ‘realistic’ option for emerging transformative and revolutionary forces. The current conjuncture characterised by intensifying economic and eco-​biological crises will most likely translate into unprecedented discontent. In our epoch, we have reached a status where anomalies between theory and reality can no longer be resolved without obtaining insights from radical forces on the ground. A ‘radical transformative scholarship’ needs to be reinvented to focus on liberating praxis for progressive alternatives, as showcased by the authors of The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (see Hosseini, Gills, Goodman, & Motta, 2020). To presage the future change that we want to bring about (‘the change you wish to see’) is not enough. We also need to surpass the future change we are presently struggling to be by challenging the way the ruling systems have shaped the foundations of our imagination and inquiry. To do so, CDS and CGS need to be actively developing and systematically engaging in communities of communal enquiry, where facts and values are constantly re/​assessed in their contexts, and the emancipatory legacies of the past are put into dialogue with the utopian imaginaries of the future. Efforts for the liberation of our critical transformative imagination—​through self-​reflection and intellectual-​political engagement—​will keep pushing our debates beyond the contours of Eurocentric, postmodernist, or liberal humanist perspectives. And yet, radical transformative counter-​ hegemonic discourses and praxis have largely remained in a nascent phase and have not fully kept historical pace with the acceleration of increasingly catastrophic forces of global(ised) capital(ism). In the context of the recent and ongoing COVID-​19 pandemic, and with increasing popular knowledge of accelerating trends in global warming and ecological destruction, the pace and intensity of global dialogue in search of new forms of solidarity and action have markedly increased. During a historic era of the decomposition of capital’s hegemonic project, neostructuralist and poststructuralist critiques are also in jeopardy, facing the challenge of now what? To depart from this historical impasse, we need to radically revise our conceptual lexicons and restructure our political agendas. At the heart of this new struggle lies ‘the critical’ as a feature that defined several decades of diverse intellectual currents and movements of resistance concerning development/​ globalisation (Steger, 2016). The question is then: what does it mean to be ‘critical’ in an era of mounting acute contradictions and multiple crises, where de-​globalising social forces are going ‘global’, destructive maldevelopment is outpacing constructive development, and where criticism

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Globalisation versus development  91 runs out of steam as its objects of critique (globalisation-​development) fast approach a historical dead-​end? What new directions should, or could, a new radical transformative critical scholarship take? The first step is to question ‘the critical’ tradition anew, and the critique of extant forms of power/​hegemony and disobedience, rebellion, and resistance. The critical now needs to be made conscientiously transformative. Much greater analytical and political attention should be shifted to the radical imagination of utopian practices and visions that bear the potential to radically refashion human and non-​human life. Upon that basis, we can make increased efforts to explore innovative ways through which the historical, natural, and civilisational capacities for human liberation can be realised through radical transformative praxis. Without indulging in romanticising the past or emerging/​ future alternatives, a radical transformative scholarship should aim to discover the historical, ecological, and civilisational capacities and experiences of human emancipation. It is also necessary to facilitate cross-​fertilisation across context-​specific alternatives. Thus, the greatest challenge is to overcome the often-​chaotic nature of pluralism, without succumbing to totalising narratives of moral truth. This requires endeavours to furnish a common language where dialogical communication and collaboration between different historical projects can fruitfully happen. Such a new agenda in CDS/​CGS requires a shift in the epistemological underpinning of our theories, to embrace a ‘critical utopianism’, and a shift in our ontology from the dualism of humanity vs. nature and of the truth vs. the real, towards a new dialectic of the truth and the real (see Hosseini & Gills, 2020a, for a more extended discussion) The dominion of truths (what ‘right’-​fully ought to be and what ‘truly’ is) is occupied by the realm of what is sold to us as the real. An ontological recognition of the truth turns our critical scholarship to a transformative one by setting an action-​oriented agenda to explore the potential for liberation which starts from the liberation of critical knowledge from the imperatives of asymmetrical power relations between subject and object, Southern and Northern, modern and primitive. This requires us to more proactively engage in emancipatory projects defined and implemented together with grassroots social movements and communities, harvesting existing and actualising potential collective agency and solidarity in the socioecological nexuses of life (Hosseini, 2020). Last but not least, it is no longer enough to criticise power for obscuring reality. Power undermines human potentials for liberation by stripping historical agency off the social subjects, turning them into submissive creatures. Empowering democracy requires democratising the processes of knowledge construction and publicising resources of information through cooperative education. Radical transformative scholarship should then be critical of its own institutional infrastructures and take part in resisting the growing trend of the corporatisation of (higher) education and push for institutional transformations toward creating cooperative academia and knowledge commons. Recommended reading: Hosseini and Gills (2020a); Hosseini, Goodman, Motta, and Gills (2020).

Note 1 See, for example, the book series: Rethinking Globalizations, www.routledge.com/​Rethinking-​ Globalizations/​book-​series/​RG

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References Amin, S. (2011). Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure. Oxford: Pambazuka. Bello, W. (2018). “The End of Globalization,” in Veltmeyer, H. & Bowles, P. (eds.), The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies, pp. 153–​163. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Chase-​Dunn, C. (2020). “Twenty-​first Century Deglobalization and the Struggle for Global Justice in the World Revolution of 20xx,” in Hosseini, S.A.H. et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies, pp. 29–​43. London: Routledge. Chase-​Dunn, C., & Gills, B.K. (2005). “Waves of Globalization and Resistance in the Capitalist World-​System: Social Movements and Critical Global Studies,” in Appelbaum, R.P. & Robinson, W.I. (eds.), Critical Globalization Studies, pp. 45–​54. New York: Routledge. Chirico, J. (2019). Global Problems, Global Solutions: Prospects for a Better World. Los Angeles: SAGE. Cox, R.W. (2019). Corporate Power, Class Conflict, and the Crisis of the New Globalization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. El Khoury, A. (2015). Globalization Development and Social Justice: A Propositional Political Approach. London: Routledge. Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal Politics:The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Frank, A.G., & Denemark, R.A. (2016). ReOrienting the 19th Century: Global Economy in the Continuing Asian Age. London: Routledge. Galbraith, J.K. (2012). Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press. Gills, B. (2017). “The Future of Development from Global Crises to Global Convergence.” Forum for Development Studies, 44(1): 155–​161. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​08039410.2017.1264732. Gills, B.K. (ed.) (2011). Globalization in Crisis. London: Routledge. Gills, B.K., Hosseini, S.A.H., & Goodman, J. (2017). “Theorizing Alternatives to Capital: Towards a Critical Cosmopolitanist Framework.” European Journal of Social Theory, 20(4): 437–​454. Gudynas, E. (2016). “Beyond Varieties of Development: Disputes and Alternatives.” Third World Quarterly, 37(4): 721–​732. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01436597.2015.1126504. Harcourt, W. (2016). The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Held, D. (2005). Debating Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, D., & Kaya,A. (eds.) (2007). Global Inequality: Patterns and Explanations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirst, P., Thompson, G., & Bromley, S. (2009). Globalization in Question. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hodos,T. (ed.) (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization. London: Routledge. Hosseini, S.A.H. (2010). Alternative Globalizations: An Integrative Approach to Studying Dissident Knowledge in the Global Justice Movement. Milton Park, New York: Routledge. Hosseini, S.A.H. (2020). “On the urgency of (re)integrating with the radical.” Global Dialogue: Magazine of the International Sociological Association, 10(3). https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology. org/on-the-urgency-of-reintegrating-with-the-radical/ (retrieved 10 November 2020). Hosseini, S.A.H., & Gills, B.K. (2020a). “Beyond the Critical: Reinventing the Radical Imagination in Transformative Development and Global(ization) Studies.” Globalizations, March(Online): 1–​ 17. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14747731.2020.1736852. Hosseini, S.A.H. (2010). Alternative Globalizations: An Integrative Approach to Studying Dissident Knowledge in the Global Justice Movement. Milton Park, New York: Routledge. Hosseini, S.A.H. (2020). “On the urgency of (re)integrating with the radical.” Global Dialogue: Magazine of the International Sociological Association, 10(3). https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology. org/on-the-urgency-of-reintegrating-with-the-radical/ (retrieved 10 November 2020). Hosseini, S.A.H., & Gills, B.K. (2020b). “Reinventing Global Studies Through Transformative Scholarship: A Critical Proposition,” in Hosseini, S.A.H. et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies, pp. 13–​28. London: Routledge. Hosseini, S.A.H., Gills, B.K., Goodman, J., & Motta, S.C. (eds.) (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies. London: Routledge.

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Globalisation versus development  93 James, P., & Steger, M.B. (2014). “A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept.” Globalizations, 11(4): 417–​434. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1080/​14747731.2014.951186. Kothari, A., et al. (2019). Pluriverse: A Post-​development Dictionary. New Delhi, India: Tulika Books and Authorsupfront. Latham, R. (2016). The Politics of Evasion: A Post-​globalization Dialogue Along the Edge of the State. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Lemert, C.C., Elliot, A., Chaffee, D., & Hsu, E. (eds.) (2010). Globalization: A Reader. London: Routledge. Lindio-​McGovern, L., & Wallimann, I. (2016). Globalization and Third World Women: Exploitation, Coping and Resistance. London: Routledge. McMichael, P. (2005). “Globalization and Development Studies,” in Appelbaum, R.P. & Robinson, W.I. (eds.), Critical Globalization Studies pp. 111–​120. New York: Routledge. Negri, A., & Zolo, D. (2003). “Empire and the Multitude: A Dialogue on the New Order of Globalization.” Radical Philosophy, Jul-​Aug (120): 23–​37. O’Byrne, D.J., & Hensby, A. (2011). Theorizing Global Studies, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. OED Online/(2021), “development, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/51434. Patomaki, H. (2020). “The Political Economy Dynamics of Global Disintegration and its Implications for War, Peace and Security in the 21st Century,” in Hosseini, S.A.H. et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies, pp. 151–​164. London: Routledge. Piketty, T., & Goldhammer, A. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-​First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ritzer, G. (2016). The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Chichester,West Sussex:Wiley Blackwell. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Sen, J. (2018). The Movements of Movements. Part 2, Rethinking our Dance. Oakland, CA: PM Press; OpenWord. Sklair, L. (2021). “Development, post-development, and the pluriverse.” Globalizations, 1-10. doi: 10.1080/14747731.2021.1917870. Steger, M.B. (2016). “Reflections on ‘Critical Thinking’ in Global Studies.” Protosociology: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 33: 19–​40. Turner, B.S., & Holton, R.J. (eds.) (2015). The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies. New York: Routledge. Veltmeyer, H. (2008). New Perspectives on Globalization and Antiglobalization: Prospects for a New World Order? Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. Veltmeyer, H., & Bowles, P. (2018). “Critical Development Studies: An Introduction,” in Veltmeyer, H. & Bowles, P. (eds.), The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies, pp. 1–​27. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Veltmeyer, H., & Delgado Wise, R.I. (2018). Critical Development Studies: An Introduction, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing; Practical Action Publishing. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J.F. (2014). The New Extractivism: A Post-​neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-​First Century? London: Zed Books. Veltmeyer, H., & Záyago Lau, E. (2020). Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America. New York: Routledge.

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11  Philanthrocapitalism and development Andrew Mushita and Carol Thompson

An editorial from The Economist (2006) first named philanthrocapitalism to designate ‘leading new philanthropists who see themselves as social investors’, engaging in what they call ‘venture philanthropy’ (Bill Gates) or ‘strategic philanthropy’ (Paul Brest, Hewlitt Foundation). Philanthrocapitalism defines a systemic change by large foundations choosing to advance private capital for the explicit goal of addressing social problems using business methods.They argue their investment in social programmes, requiring efficiency and ‘evidence-​based results’, will benefit the recipients, as well as provide a return on investment back to their foundations; this approach results in win/​win outcomes of ‘doing well by doing good’. Their engagement with civic organisations, often via government and/​or United Nations programmes, can be long-​term and powerful through centralised management and impact measurement. The danger of philanthrocapitalism is that policy framing, technological advancements, social considerations, and public sector institutions are besieged by this narrative, as if there are no alternatives at the global level. To the contrary, people-​centred critical development is resisting and creating options that are sustainable, economically viable, and address climate change. A recent survey of 143 foundations reported that 81 per cent of total private philanthropic giving for international development, 2013–​2015, was provided by only 20 foundations, for a total of US$23.9 billion, or about US$8 billion per year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation surpassed any others by providing 49 per cent of the total (OECD, 2018: 123). The core group of contributors were mostly North American foundations: Warren Buffett, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Open Society, Hewlett, Mott, and MasterCard, with notable exceptions in the Aga Khan Foundation and Porticus Foundation (UK) (OECD, 2018: 96). Philanthrocapitalists share with wealthy donors of the 20th century the donation goal of advertising their generosity, garnering better publicity for their corporations. For example, many remember that Andrew Carnegie funded library buildings to provide free lending of books to all; few know details of the Homestead steel workers’ strike (1892) against the Carnegie Steel Corporation’s suppression of labour rights. True to his giving side, Carnegie did not direct library policies, nor ban any books; he simply paid for over 2000 buildings that were managed locally. In contrast, as will be explained, philanthrocapitalists closely direct policies for recipient organisations. Another similarity with 20th-​century philanthropy is that the wealthy continuously seek ways to avoid taxes. By donating funds to social services via their foundations, they gain tax write-​offs, and in the United States as an example, they receive a tax deduction DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-13

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Philanthrocapitalism and development  95 according to their official tax brackets. Today, the wealthier, such as the Gates Foundation, receive a tax write-​off of almost 40 per cent, meaning about two-​fifths of its ‘donation’ comes from what would have been public funds, for which citizens would be choosing expenditure priorities, not a private foundation (Thompson, 2018). The transformation toward philanthrocapitalism arose in the context of unprecedented and increasing inequalities within and between nations.Tracked now for several years, the 2020 Oxfam inequality report highlights two divides, wealth and gender: ‘The combined wealth of the world’s 22 richest men is more than the wealth of all the women in Africa’ (Oxfam, 2020: 6). For the United States, just the top three—​Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—​own more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent (160 million people) of the entire American population (Collins & Hoxie, 2017: 1). Because these statistics are almost too familiar now, COVID-​19 practices provide an update. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, provides sick leave for workers for just two weeks and only if they test positive for COVID-​19. With an estimated net worth over US$192 billion, offering sick leave would cost him about 11 days of his own income. The Walmart family still refuses sick leave, even at stores where employees have contracted the virus (Reich, 2020), and the records of others (e.g., Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg) are no better. This extreme inequity is translated by philanthrocapitalists into assertions that wealth becomes a proxy for expertise: a wealthy businessperson has the expertise to devise and direct solutions to intractable social problems, in almost any field.Three characteristics distinguish this approach. The focus of the debates features two aspects: advocating ‘business practices’ in public agencies (Bishop & Green, 2009; Edwards, 2010) and questioning whether the cash transfer is really a ‘gift’, since it arrives with conditionalities required by the private donor (McGoey, 2015). Edwards has been consistent in challenging that evaluation of social services can be measured mainly by cost accounting, because pandemics such as Ebola or COVID-​19 require organising public health interventions as much as any cash. In measuring business efficiency, it is also important what will be counted, or ignored. The second focus questions that the cash transfers be called ‘donations’ because of intensive and extensive controls over recipients’ use of it. Linsey McGoey (2015: 187) demonstrates in her study, No Such Thing as a Free Gift, how the Gates Foundation offers investment, not a gift: I argue that what is most novel about the new philanthrocapitalism is the openness of personally profiting from charitable initiatives, an openness that deliberately collapses the distinction between public and private interests in order to justify increasingly concentrated levels of private gain. Based on work with smallholder farmer networks in Southern Africa, this study offers a third distinguishing characteristic: philanthrocapitalists are not just promoting ‘business practices’, or demanding a ‘return on investment’ (ROI) instead of outright gifts, but more so, are requiring ‘business rule’ (Thompson, 2018). Goals and their assessment come from the top, with command as important as efficiency. By maintaining control of local decisions, the top-​down management mirrors corporate hierarchical rule. As Rhodes and Bloom (2018: n.p.) conclude,‘this giving culture … has a troubling merging political legacy, one in which democracy is sacrificed on the altar of executive-​style empowerment’. All three of these characteristics will be elaborated below in one example of a current philanthrocapitalist project, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Recommended reading: OECD (2018); Oxfam (2020).

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Philanthrocapitalism: trajectories from its neoliberal base As chapters in this volume demonstrate, neoliberalism has a long history and many different expressions. David Harvey (2005: 2) offers one of the clearest definitions: ‘Neoliberalism is … a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-​being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. Philanthrocapitalism is grounded in neoliberalism, especially in reducing the role of the state (Fine & Saad-​Filho, 2017); private foundations provide business criteria for civil society organisations addressing social problems: short-​term, measurable goals, cost-​ accounting, chain of command. Further, their programmes promote commodification to fight disease (vaccines, drugs over local public health organising), to educate children (standardised test achievements),1 and to increase food production (commercial seeds and fertilisers). Yet we suggest that philanthrocapitalism is best understood in its trajectories from its neoliberal base. First, commodification is the base, but in no way do philanthrocapitalists promote ‘the market’ or ‘free trade’. They operate deeply within cartels, whether of health services, or education, or agribusiness. It is such a deviation that many economists now reject ‘the market’ (market monotheism) as a concept. Replacing competition and ‘willing seller–​willing buyer’ is collusion over prices, conscious creation of scarcities, and speculation divorcing agricultural commodity prices, for example, from production costs or quantities. In 2008, people again went hungry not for lack of available food on the global ‘market’ but from financial speculation (algorithms buying/​selling within tenths of a second) raising commodity prices. ‘The market’ at the global level is a series of cartels, across different goods. What mega-​corporations are doing is not trade, nor even exchange that implies reciprocity, but rather, ‘transfers’, often within the same legal entity (Thompson, 2018: 52–​53). This transformation of the concept, heralding cartels as ‘the market’, is a trajectory from neoliberalism. Second, philanthrocapitalists are grounded in neoliberalism by using their surfeit funds to promote privatisation of production away from governments and to reduce its role in providing services, especially in education and in healthcare (Reckhow, 2013; Waitzkin, 2018; Wiist, 2010). In contrast to earlier expressions of neoliberalism, such as structural adjustment programmes under the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (1980s, 1990s), public agencies and services are not fully privatised. Private childcare or a seed bank requires the owner to accept any risks, depreciation costs, and losses; with governments still engaged, risk is socialised back to the public, while the philanthrocapitalists’ goals create their private profit. To venture philanthropy, ‘leveraging’ the funds of others is ‘smart business’, to fulfil private goals while lowering costs. The philanthrocapitalist goal of marshalling public funds for private purpose becomes a trajectory away from the neoliberal basic tenet of privatisation, because goals and profits are privatised but costs and risks remain socialised. This trajectory is best illustrated by the philanthrocapitalists’ approach to technological fixes. Looking through only a technology lens to see social problems makes solutions appear easy and profitable. Only with advances in computer technology could the 3.2 billion genes in a human genome be mapped. Technology allowed the CRISPR-​cas9 cutting enzyme to be discovered and manipulated without use of dangerous chemical or radioactive materials necessary for molecular biology well into the 1980s. Massive

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Philanthrocapitalism and development  97 amounts of public funds, not just private, were spent. Does ownership of the technology make living genomes private property, or what about the one gene inserted during gene editing? Governments have not been removed, but profits (especially with corporate tax avoidance: see Zucman, Fagan, & Piketty, 2015) are private and risk is not just socialised to humans but to all species in the ecosystem.This caveat becomes analysis in the next section.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa In 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created AGRA, spending over US$1 billion over 14 years. Its goals include increasing food production and farmer incomes across the continent by encouraging agribusiness practices: monoculture of improved seeds with adequate fertiliser and water.2 Monoculture, sowing one crop over a vast area, provides economies of scale in allowing machines to spread seeds and fertiliser, and to irrigate. One AGRA seed focus is a genetically modified ‘water-​efficient maize for Africa’ (WEMA), developed by Monsanto (now Bayer), to which the Gates Foundation contributes funds. By 2020, a group of scholars assessed AGRA’s own goals for production and income of farmers in AGRA’s 13 focus countries.3 In False Promises, financed mainly by Germany’s Bread for the World, they reported quite negative results (Bassermann & Urhahn, 2020: 20–​21). Millet production fell 24 per cent, cassava 6 per cent, tubers 7 per cent, and groundnuts (peanuts, a major source of protein) 23 per cent. Sorghum production grew 14 per cent. AGRA heralds Rwanda its major success story, with 66 per cent increase in maize production, but with the trade-​off of stagnant sorghum and rice yields, both major grains for the country. Highly diverse crop production (20–​30 varieties on one hectare) is the agroecology model promoted by most smallholder African farmers,4 using ‘nutrition density’ as a measure as important as yield. Such variety is also a hedge against adverse weather, for not all the crops, planted at different times, will fail. Farmers freely share seeds, reluctant to buy them from an unknown source such as Bayer. True to philanthrocapitalist practices, AGRA, therefore, used both leveraging of funds (‘business practices’) from governments and corporate command (‘business rule’) to convince farmers to monocrop AGRA maize. In Tanzania, AGRA provided an average of US$6.5 million per year for farmers to buy the genetically engineered maize seed and fertilisers, but that was just one-​seventh of what the Tanzanian government spent (US$50 million per year) to finance inputs. Malawi fared worse in that the government’s input subsidy programme spent about US$55 million per year, but AGRA only contributed US$2–​3 million per year (Bassermann & Urhahn, 2020: 18). Is it ‘philanthropy’ to leverage public funds from the poorest governments of the world for private goals of seed and fertiliser sales? The Gates Foundation’s net worth is many times the revenue of both the Tanzanian and Malawian governments. And the leveraging did not even work because the AGRA programmes had to use coercion, fining farmers if they were caught not monocropping, but growing traditional crops with the maize (Bassermann & Urhahn, 2020: 29). While philanthrocapitalists promote ‘business practices’, agribusiness practices of high-​ input costs (seeds/​fertilisers/​irrigation), monocropping, and inappropriate technology remain antithetical to agroecological practices. Increased production is the AGRA goal, but higher nutrition is as important as caloric intake. High-​tech fixes often fail; sorghum and millet are much more drought-​tolerant than WEMA and more nutritious; farmers’ seeds are freely shared as vital inputs.

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98  Andrew Mushita and Carol Thompson In addition, AGRA engaged in ‘business rule’ of top-​down, hierarchical command. AGRA programmes do not see farmers as ‘stakeholders’ in the discussions or decisions, treating farmers as passive customers. But they are producers and scientists (botany and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)) with vast experience in the multifunctionality of farming (Mushita & Thompson, 2019: 398–​400). The farmers at AGRA five-​star hotel conferences are what Africans call ‘cellphone farmers’, the urban upper class trying to keep in touch with farm managers. Engaging ‘business practices’ and ‘business rule’ to direct public funds for private goals poses questions about what is a gift or a donation. A third philanthrocapitalist goal of ‘dispossession’ challenges the future. A non-​ transparent but key objective of AGRA is to access African genetic resources, for free, without benefit sharing back to farmers who bred indigenous varieties (e.g., sorghum/​ millets) over thousands of years (Thompson, 2014). Because all 53 African governments refused to recognise patenting of life forms, Bayer (Monsanto) or AGRA can easily access African varieties. What agribusiness does, however, is to access the seed, genetically modify it, and then declare the whole species its private property. It is extraction of a natural resource, but not included in discussion of minerals and water, or land grabs (Veltmeyer, 2019: 1277–​1278). This natural living resource can reproduce itself, but if the whole species is privatised, then it disappears from the public domain, violating international laws for farmers’ right to plant, save, or share any seed.5 Deeply embedded in neoliberalism’s dispossession of nature, this technological abuse will fast become worse as gene drives replace earlier genetic modification. Genetically modified organisms are transformed within laboratories; gene drives occur in nature (called force génétique in French). Although gene-​editing species of Anopheles male mosquitoes to be sterile is already possible, scientists who developed the technology warn of unknown environmental impacts of removing whole species (even to eradicate malaria) from the ecosystem: gene drives are ‘one way in which the power to edit the genes of other species could prove to be more dangerous than any changes humans have made to the planet so far’ (Doudna & Sternberg, 2017: 148; Esvelt & Gemmell, 2017). Communities in Burkina Faso, where release into nature of sterile male Anopheles is planned, warn they have given no prior informed consent, required by international laws. As a key financier of Target Malaria, the Gates Foundation forefronts funding of gene drive research, including hiring Emerging Ag Inc. to lobby for it at United Nations meetings (ETC Group, 2019: 8,11). Agribusiness highly values gene drive research because it might annihilate selected crop pests. What will remain public of the technology, of the genomes? Where are the biosafety data? Although media discuss disabilities in humans that may be cured by gene editing (e.g., sickle cell anaemia), gene drives released into nature are receiving little attention or debate. It is neoliberalism’s dispossession of nature for private gain, ‘extractivism’ carried to a logical technological conclusion: species extinction … in this time of Holocene extinction. Recommended reading: AGRA (2016 and annually); Bassermann and Urhahn (2020); ETC Group (2019).

Farmer alternatives: integrated seed systems Smallholder farmer networks in Southern Africa ‘are on the ground, in the ground’ expressions of critical development alternatives. Farmers are not only resisting

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Philanthrocapitalism and development  99 philanthrocapitalist business practices, business rule, and privatisation of genetic resources (dispossession) but providing alternatives. As this volume demonstrates, critical development analyses must be ‘outside the framework’ of neoliberal development. As viable alternatives, farmers’ integrated seed systems mobilise the multifunctionality of agroecology. Central to building alternatives are community seed banks, owned and managed by members sustaining control over their seeds, a vital input. Members elect seed bank leaders for a limited term and decide the varieties to outgrow (in situ conservation) and the ones to conserve in plastic containers (ex situ). Designating land for propagation of larger quantities of selected seeds, they choose members to guide the task. Community seed banks prioritise farmers’ varieties to store and lend, setting the protocols for returning newly harvested seed; if no seed is harvested because of adverse weather, often the loan is forgiven (CTDO, 2018: 11–​13). In addition to maintaining ownership, control, and supply, community seed banks engage in participatory action research, incorporating TEK. Participatory plant breeding is quite the opposite of the corporate breeding favoured by philanthrocapitalists. Enhancing biodiversity, not monoculture, farmers are the breeders, not the ‘customers’ (Mbozi, 2015). Farmer research involves multi-​location trials and on-​farm characterisation that merge laboratory with field trials, saving time and money. They restore and enhance ‘lost’ plant genetic resources, through sustainable use of neglected and underutilised species, from blackjack, cat’s whiskers, to amaranth. Farmers validate the ecological adaptability, economic viability, and cultural acceptability of the new variety—​they are not outsiders only interested in quick profits (Mushita & Thompson, 2007: 215–​241). As important as production is realisation in the marketplace, but that term is much closer to Polanyi’s (1944: 57) understanding of socially embedded markets than to neoliberal global cartels. Smallholder farmer networks address value addition, such as solar-​ drying tomatoes for extended sales. However, farmers’ networks refuse to lock themselves into global ‘value chains’, responding instead to local opportunities.They share and reciprocally exchange, putting markets back into their socio-​cultural contexts. In Southern Africa, local markets are the major venue for much of the small grain and legume seeds exchange. In contrast, social networks (neighbours, friends) are the standard conduits for sharing planting material of vegetatively propagated crops, such as sweet potatoes, cassava, and bananas. Diversity of crops directs diversity of exchange, diversifying risk.These local, alternative economies do not register in World Bank statistics, but they offer alternative material bases from which to deter philanthrocapital agendas. Community seed banks and their participatory plant breeding are also a form of political action and a practical technological solution to genetic erosion. In the context of commercial seed failures coming from outside the African continent, with AGRA as the latest example, greater recognition in development circles of the multifunctionality of smallholder farming would begin to show that goals go much beyond production or cash profits: ‘Peasant agriculture goes where capitalist farms cannot go. It is anaerobic because it can survive without the oxygen of profit’ (Douwe van der Ploeg, 2013: 16). Further, one cannot speak of ‘wage labour’ for smallholder food production because it is about livelihoods. Critical development perspectives highlight alternatives to cash and emphasise other capitals beyond finance capital: intellectual (TEK), natural (seeds), and social. Social solidarity is a viable alternative to neoliberal ‘development’. Community seed banks, with participatory plant breeding, reveal the importance of social capital: local organising that mobilises other forms of capital.

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100  Andrew Mushita and Carol Thompson If the goal includes biodiversity, along with cash, the ‘results-​ based evidence’ demonstrates that sharing knowledge and seeds is more efficient than keeping them private. Accumulating cash often becomes a zero-​sum game, but increasing biodiversity is the opposite. Sharing knowledge and seeds increases both, for one gains by giving them away. Perhaps we can take the goal of philanthrocapitalist ‘efficiency’ and apply it not to the financial ROI but to social and natural capital returns on investment. Recommended reading: CTDO (2018); Mushita and Thompson (2019); Pimbert (2018).

Concluding into the future Smallholder farmer practices surpass ‘business practices’ of philanthrocapitalists commanding their ‘gifts’. Farmers’ networks gain natural capital return on investment without autocratic, exclusionary ‘business rule’. Community seed banks expand public wealth by increasing biodiversity via integrated seed systems, the opposite of privatisation of living organisms or ‘dispossession’ of nature for private profit. Farmer practices propagating new varieties advance adaptation to climate change.Working to conserve biodiversity of farmers’ seeds assures the future of food in this time of climate change.

Notes 1 Bill Gates hired the Rand Corporation to assess his use of business practices to improve US public education, and the conclusion was decisive: failure, after spending US$1 billion over seven years (Stecher, 2018). 2 As important as selling seed, the African Fertiliser and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) works to increase fertiliser use. Board members include Louis Dreyfus and Institute of Risk Management corporate representatives, but also Agnes Kalibata, current President of AGRA. 3 AGRA’s 13 focus countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia. 4 AGRA acknowledges that 80 per cent of all African farmers are smallholder farms, and family farms produce 98 per cent of food crops in sub-​Saharan Africa (AGRA, 2016: 254). 5 Two treaties, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, protect farmers’ rights.

References AGRA—​Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. (2016). Africa Agriculture Status Report. https://​ reliefweb.int/​sites/​reliefweb.int/​files/​resources/​assr.pdf. Bassermann, L., & Urhahn, J. (eds.) (2020). False Promises:The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Berlin: Bread for the World (Germany), FIAN International and New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Bishop, M., & Green, M. (2009). Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save The World. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Collins, C., & Hoxie, J. (2017). Billionaire Bonanza—​The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us. Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies. CTDO—​Community Technology Development Organisation. (2018). Annual Report—​25th Anniversary . Harare, Zimbabwe: CTDO. Doudna, J., & Sternberg, S. (2017). A Crack in Creation—​Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Douwe van der Ploeg, J. (2013). Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.

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Philanthrocapitalism and development  101 Economist. (2006). “The Birth of Philanthrocapitalism, The Leading New Philanthropists See Themselves as Social Investors.” The Economist, 23 February. Edwards, M. (2010). Small Change—​Why Business Won’t Change the World. San Francisco: Berrett-​Koehler. Esvelt, K.M., & Gemmell, N.J. (2017). “Conservation Demands Safe Gene Drive.” PLoS Biology, 15(11): November. ETC Group—​Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration. (2019). Gene Drive Organisms—​An Introduction to a Dangerous New Technology Putting Africans at Risk, September. www.etcgroup.org/ ​sites/ ​www.etcgroup.org/ ​files/​f iles/​ e tc_​g ene_​d rive_​ o rganisms-​ web_​ en.pdf. Fine, B., & Saad-​Filho, A. (2017). “Thirteen Things You Need to Know About Neoliberalism.” Critical Sociology, 43(4–​5): 685–​706. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbozi, H. (2015). Community-​ Based Seed Production Manual. Harare, Zimbabwe: Community Technology Development Organisation. McGoey, L. (2015). No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy. London:Verso. Mushita, A., Thompson, C. (2019). “Farmers’ Seed Systems in Southern Africa: Alternatives to Philanthrocapitalism.” Agrarian South—​Journal of Political Economy, 9(3): 391–​413. Mushita, A., & Thompson, C. (2007). Biopiracy of Biodiversity—​Global Exchange as Enclosure. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. OECD—​Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2018). Private Philanthropy for Development. Paris: OECD Publishing. Oxfam. (2020). Time to Care: Unpaid and Underpaid Care Work and the Global Inequality Crisis. London: Oxfam International. Pimbert, M. (2018). Food Sovereignty, Agroecology and Biocultural Diversity. London: Routledge. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Reckhow, S. (2013). Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics. NewYork: Oxford University Press. Reich, R. (2020). “America’s Billionaires Are Giving to Charity—​But Much of It Is Self-​Serving Rubbish.” The Guardian, 12 April. Rhodes, C., & Bloom, P. (2018). “The Trouble with Charitable Billionaires.” The Guardian, 24 May. Stecher, B., et al. (2018).“Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report.The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Through 2015–​2016.” Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation. Thompson, C. (2018). “Philanthrocapitalism: Rendering the Public Domain Obsolete?” Third World Quarterly, 39 (1): 51–​67. Thompson, C. (2014). “Philanthrocapitalism: Appropriation of Africa’s Genetic Wealth.” Review of African Political Economy, 41(141): 389–​405. Veltmeyer, H. (2019). “Resistance, Class Struggle and Social Movements in Latin America: Contemporary Dynamics.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46(6): 1264–​1285. Waitzkin, H. (2018). Health Care Under the Knife. Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health . New York: Monthly Review Press. Wiist, W. (2010). Bottom Line or Public Health Tactics Corporations Use to Influence Health and Health Policy, and What We Can Do to Counter Them. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zucman, G., Fagan, G.T., & Piketty, T. (2015). The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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12  The migration–​development nexus in the neoliberal era Raúl Delgado Wise

Migration is a critically important topic on the international agenda. According to recent United Nations figures there are 270 million international migrants and 750 million internal migrants worldwide (International Organization for Migration, 2021). This means that one out of every seven inhabitants and one of every three and a half members of the labourforce is a migrant. Notwithstanding the strategic importance of this issue,mainstream contemporary migration studies tend to offer a highly reductionist and biased view of human mobility. From this critical perspective, migration is conceived of as an independent variable abstracted from the actual process of capitalist development and social transformation associated with the conversion of small-​scale agricultural producers, or peasants, into an industrial proletariat, a wage-​labouring working class. The mainstream approach, exemplified in the theory of economic growth and modernisation (see Chapter 5), is essentially descriptive, schematic, and split by academic disciplines that limit and distort the understanding of migration in its connection to and implications for development. On the other hand, Marxist political economy provides a theoretical and methodological transdisciplinary framework with which to engage this topic, addressing it from a historical perspective and different structural and strategic angles. This alternative approach constitutes a source of critical thinking, in terms of which the problematic of contemporary capitalism, and the role of internal and international migration, can be understood—​and transformed. This chapter provides a theoretical and methodological framework for unravelling the nature of contemporary migration and its relationship with development in the contemporary neoliberal era.

The political economy of migration Marxist political economy addresses the phenomenon of migration at the highest level of abstraction; that is, in relation to the dynamics of capital in general and in terms of the following analytical categories: ‘primitive (or original) accumulation’ of capital based on separating the direct agricultural producers (the peasantry) from the land and their means of production; and surplus population, or the reserve army of labour. Original accumulation is linked to the rise of capitalism out of the ruins of feudalism in the 18th century. The separation between the producer and the means of production turned direct producers into ‘free’ individuals lacking means of production and subsistence. Said individuals were then forced to sell their only possession, labour power, to those in command of the means of production (Marx, 1975). Thus, the destruction of pre-​capitalist forms of production yielded a source of labour for the capitalist entrepreneur, and migration appeared as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-14

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The migration–development nexus  103 phenomenon associated with the violent expropriation of peasant land or artisan tools (Meillassoux, 1981). In the context of contemporary capitalism (and particularly within the framework of neoliberal restructuring), this analytical category is employed to characterise the liberalisation of the labourforce and the concentration of power and wealth among a reduced capitalist elite by means of what in the context of neoliberal globalisation (the current phase of capitalist development) is termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2007). This involves the commodification of public resources, the progressive dismantling of the welfare state, and a concerted attack on the social conditions of the working classes. This process has driven many into unemployment, fostering the unprecedented growth of the informal economy and bringing about a great increase in diversified modalities of forced migration (Delgado Wise & Márquez, 2007). In regard to the creation of a reserve army of labour, with the development of capitalism and the creation of its particular technical mode of production (the move from artisanal to industrial manufacture), the growth of capital and consequently accumulation ceased to depend on population growth. With the creation of its own mode of production, capital produces particular population dynamics and, unlike what Malthus posited, it is not population that determines economic growth and wealth, but on the contrary: the dynamics of capitalist accumulation generate an oversupply of labourers that is always higher than actual demand. By creating a redundant population mass, capital permanently ensures access to exploitable human resources beyond the dynamics of demographic reproduction. In order to address international migration, we must first consider the geographical aspect and the asymmetrical relations that characterise processes of capital accumulation among regions, nations, and areas within nations. The unequal geographical distribution of accumulation results in an also-​unequal distribution of surplus population on a global scale. More developed regions and nations with a larger accumulation capacity due to the persistence of unequal exchange relations (Emmanuel, 1972) tend to have less surplus population, a feature that is compensated by labour immigration hailing from countries and areas with reduced accumulation capacity. Marx coined the term ‘absolute surplus population’ in reference to the Irish case and this particular phenomenon (Marx, 1975: 880). This explains the existence of areas that serve as labour reserve sources and often experience acute migratory dynamics and permanent depopulation processes, especially in underdeveloped nations. International labour migration not only manifests the nature of the international capital/​labour relation, it also evidences the subjection of surplus population to conditions of extreme labour exploitation and social exclusion in a context of growing labour market transnationalisation, differentiation, and precarity. As far as the concrete subject of global capitalist development is concerned (that is, that of regions and nations, and taking into account the asymmetries inherent to capitalist development), a number of theoretical, Marxist, and heterodox approaches can be classified under the so-​called historical-​structural paradigm that runs counter to the functional-​modernist one (Castles, de Haas, & Miller, 2019). The most important are dependency theories, world system theory, cumulative causation, and dual labour market theory. Viewing development from a dependency theory perspective (see Kay in Chapter 5) results in a view of migration as a product and result of adverse conditions and the limitations of dependent or peripheral accumulation. Said theory was created during a

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104  Raúl Delgado Wise time when underdeveloped nations were focused on the internal market and therefore emphasised internal migration (Delgado Wise, 2014; Singer, 1974). World system theory (Wallerstein, 2005), on the other hand, derives from dependency theory but focuses on capitalism in a global context and not just in Latin America, adding the concept of a semi-​ periphery to notions of a centre and periphery in order to explain the phenemeonon of newly industrialising countries that are not located in either the centre of the world system or the periphery. International migration is seen as the product of the growing (and asymmetrical) expansion and integration of world capitalism, along with the domination of countries located on the periphery of the system by the advanced capitalist countries located in the centre. The theory of cumulative causation is based on the ideas of heterodox Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (1957). It maintains that capitalist development tends to deepen geographical and social inequalities in income and welfare. Migration is seen as a vicious circle that deprives communities of origin of their most valuable labourforce, increasing dependency and stimulating subsequent emigration. Finally, dual labour market theory states that international migration is a response to a permanent demand for labour in advanced industrial societies, leading to a segmentation of labour markets where foreign workers take the low-​profile jobs rejected by domestic workers (Piore, 1979). It might be pointed out that the above-​mentioned historical-​structural approaches are primarily centred on the structural causes of the phenomenon and on the asymmetrical relationships produced across the North–​South horizon. In contrast to functionalist and modernising perspectives, they offer a more comprehensive approach to the phenomenon. Admittedly, they do have a limited view of the strategic phenomenon of agency, which is why they are often characterised as deterministic. Recommended reading: Castles, de Haas, and Miller (2019); Delgado Wise and Márquez (2012).

The nature of contemporary capitalism A major and inescapable feature of the current form of capitalism, neoliberal globalisation, is unequal development. The global and national dynamics of capitalist development, the international division of labour, the imperialist system of international power relations, and the conflicts that surround the capital–​labour relation and the dynamics of extractive capital have made economic, social, political, and cultural polarisation more extreme between geographical spaces and social classes than ever before in human history. A conspicuous output of this development is the disproportionate concentration of capital, power, and wealth in the hands of a small elite within the capitalist class. In this context, migration acquired a new role in the international division of labour. Mechanisms of uneven development produce structural conditions such as unemployment and inequality, which catapult the massive migration of dispossessed and marginalised people. Needing access to means of subsistence, or at least minimal opportunities for social mobility, large segments of the population have been literally expelled from their territories to relocate within their own country or abroad. Under these circumstances, migration becomes essentially a forced population displacement encompassing five modalities: migration due to violence, conflict, and catastrophe (70.8 million, including 25.9 million refugees, 41.3 million internally displaced, and 3.5 million asylum seekers; UNHCR, 2015); smuggling and sex trafficking (21 million; ILO, 2015); migration due to dispossession, exclusion, and unemployment (at least 600 million international and

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The migration–development nexus  105 internal ‘economic’ migrants fall into this category); migration due to over-​qualification and lack of opportunities (around 30 million); and return migration in response to massive deportations. Recommended reading: Delgado Wise and Martin (2016).

The debate on migration and development: towards a Southern perspective The debate regarding the relationship between migration and development has been dominated by the almost sacrosanct belief that migration contributes to development in places and nations of origin. This view―promoted by the World Bank in line with the implementation of neoliberal policies―posits that remittances sent by international migrants have a positive effect on development within countries and regions of origin. Rooted in neoclassical and monetarist economic theories, this approach conceives of migration as an independent variable, and the link between migration and development is approached as a one-​way scheme in which remittances serve as a key source of development for countries of origin. This optimistic line of reasoning portrays the global market as the culmination of capitalist modernity and the end point of an inevitable process that has no reasonable alternative. Social concerns associated with development are overlooked or ignored, as it is generally assumed that a ‘free’ global market—​ignoring the outrageous concentration and centralisation of capital in a handful of large multinational corporations that control and regulate the global market in contemporary capitalism—​will operate as an inexhaustible source of economic growth and social welfare. Ultimately, the dominant approach, supported by the main principles and postulates of the neoliberal school of thought, is conceptually limited. It ignores the historical and political context of contemporary capitalism and fails to consider critical aspects of the relationship between migration and development. It disregards the root causes of migration, ignores the human rights of migrants, downplays the contributions of migrants to receiving societies, and overlooks the risks and adversities they face in countries of transit. This approach encompasses an optimistic view that fails to address the meagre—​and often unbearable—​living and working conditions experienced by migrants in receiving societies and the high socio-​economic costs that migration imposes on sending countries. It also fails to appreciate any potential connection between internal and international migration. This approach has also been referred to as migration management (Geiger & Pécoud, 2010). It is an approach to the relationship between migration and development that engenders contrasting views of migrants. In origin countries, they are portrayed as national heroes with the political purpose of ensuring the flow of remittances; in transit and destination countries, they are characterised as a burden and, more often, as a negative and polluting cultural and racial influence. From this viewpoint, international migration has been analysed in destination countries in a decontextualised manner. This ethnocentric and individualistic stance has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the complex and multidimensional nexus between migration and development. It has promoted a kind of methodological imperialism with a nativist focus on salary disparities, the displacement of native workers, illegality, and border security. This vision not only distorts reality but also obscures the underlying causes of migration and development-​related problems that are intrinsic to neoliberal globalisation. In a nutshell, through this lens:

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106  Raúl Delgado Wise remittances have become a new ‘development mantra’: The belief that remittances can be channelled into economic investments that will overcome underdevelopment. Or to put it less positively, the idea is that some of the most exploited workers in the world can make up for the failure of mainstream development policies (Castles & Delgado Wise, 2008: 7).

An alternative perspective In contrast to the dominant view, an alternative approach to conceptualising the relationship between migration and development rooted in the Latin American critical development school of thought has been brought into the debate. This perspective, also referred to as a Southern perspective, rather than a simple negation of the dominant/​Northern perspective implies a negation of the negation in dialectical terms, with the aim of building a comprehensive, inclusive, emancipatory, and libertarian approach to the nexus between migration and development (Delgado Wise, 2014). This alternative perspective is based on a deep understanding of the nature and contrasting characteristics of neoliberal globalisation along the North–​ South divide and between social classes. From this analytical prism the nexus between migration and development is characterised as a dialectical rather than a unidirectional relationship and is approached from a multidimensional framework that encompasses economic, political, social, environmental, cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, geographical, and demographic factors (Castles & Delgado Wise, 2008). While the mainstream perspective only focuses on the horizontal axis of Figure 12.1, from a decontextualised, ahistorical, reductionist, and unilateral standpoint, the alternative/​counter-​hegemonic perspective attempts to cover the whole spectrum of dialectical relationships. It also considers the ample spectrum of impacts along countries of origin, transit, and destination, and incorporates as a key analytical dimension the vertical axis. This axis—​intentionally hidden by the dominant approach—​incorporates two fundamental dimensions: (i) an analysis of the multiple violations of human and labour rights

Impact on migrants and their families

Impact on countries of origin

Transit countries

Impact on destination countries

ROOT CAUSES

Neoliberal Globalization Figure 12.1 The counter-​hegemonic/​Southern perspective: key analytical dimensions. Boxes on the horizontal axis indicate migrant flows and impacts on origin, transit, and destination countries. Boxes on the vertical axis link root causes of migration flows (neoliberal globalisation) to impacts on migrants and their families.

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The migration–development nexus  107 suffered by the migrants themselves and their families in origin, transit, and destination countries; and (ii) the root causes of the complex relationships between migration and development under neoliberal globalisation. The international debate on migration and development―associated with the need to establish a global governance migration regime―has not been linear. Several disruptive events have influenced the course of the debate: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dismantling of the former Soviet Union; the attacks on the twin towers of 11 September 2011; and the refugee crisis in Europe triggered in 2015. These events have contributed to an accentuation of nationalistic, xenophobic, and racial prejudices in the main migrant-​receiving countries, positing the need not only to advance towards a periodisation of the phenomenon, but to address an increasingly important and pressing topic in the debate: the securitisation issue. The securitisation issue in the early 21st century has been boosted by a xenophobic and populist/​nationalistic wave. It adopts the national security doctrine as a core element of the dominant or mainstream perspective on the relationship between migration and development. This perspective―as previously mentioned―ignores the context in which contemporary migration is embedded and focuses on the control of ‘illegal’ migration. In other words, it is an approach that embraces a critical shift in the social construction of the ‘other’ and criminalises migrants in line with the right-​wing populist discourse.

Critical issues in the migration and development agenda An important topic related to the analysis of the relationship between migration and development is the concept of transnationalism. Regardless of their degree of incorporation into the receiving society, migrants tend to maintain strong ties with their society of origin. Authors who support this view (Faist, 2008; Glick-​Schiller, 2005; Portes, 2005) argue that migrants maintain bonds to their place of origin in order to deal with racial inequality and other hurdles in the country of destination. They hold that migration is caused by global processes that supersede the nation-​state and in turn generate a global civil society that threatens the political monopoly exercised by the state, and that transnationalism gives way to a ‘third space’ that locates migrants in a social field that links together their country of origin and their country of settlement or destination. A distinction is often made between ‘transnationalism from above’, in which corporate, financial, and governmental agents promote mobility, and ‘transnationalism from below’, which is arranged and organised by migrants. Although Glick-​Schiller (2005) insists on the need to remain aware of the broader context (i.e., transnationalism from above), the overwhelming tendency has been to focus on transnationalism from below (Portes, 2005). Another critical issue is climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) has predicted that global warming will lead to an increasing frequency and severity of storms, cyclones, and hurricanes, as well as longer-​term sea level rise and desertification. These factors will severely affect people’s ability to live and work in many regions, especially in coastal areas, small islands, and river deltas. Global warming and the resulting effects on many parts of the world are well-​established scientific facts. The relationship of migration and climate change is not unidirectional. Climate change and contemporary migration are dialectically interconnected; actually, they are two sides of the same coin with neoliberal globalisation as its main driving force. In this regard, it is crucial to consider the complex structural social inequalities underlying the relationship of migration and environment (Faist & Schade, 2013). The unequal distribution of the

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108  Raúl Delgado Wise effects of climate change has a negative impact on nations and social groups that are most disempowered in the contemporary global order. However, these effects do not necessarily lead to more emigration (Castles, 2002). As mentioned above, under neoliberalism migration, far from being a free and voluntary act, becomes essentially a forced population displacement. According to the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees, most of the world’s forced migrants do not fulfil the Convention criteria (UNHCR, 1951),1 either because they have not crossed an international border, or because they are fleeing war or generalised human rights violations, rather than individual persecution. Given the increase in scope, scale, and complexity of refugee pressures and, in a broader extent, forced migrants, the need to build a global migration regime has become apparent. Recommended reading: Castles and Delgado Wise (2008); Delgado Wise (2014); Geiger and Pécoud (2010).

Conclusion: towards an inclusive agenda The effort to build an institutional framework for the global governance of migration has followed a complex and uncertain route. The non-​ratification of the 1990 UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families by most migrant-​receiving countries exemplifies the inherent complexity and limitations of this endeavour. Derived from the need to discuss pressing issues on the international migration agenda, a broader initiative for building a global migration regime was envisaged at the UN General Assembly in 2006 with its launch of the High-​Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (UN-​HLD). This initiative entailed focusing on the relationship between migration and development, in an attempt to avoid the negative connotations surrounding human mobility, particularly across the North–​South divide. The first UN-​HLD gave rise to the creation of a yearly state-​led, non-​binding, related forum, alternatively hosted by migrant-​receiving and migrant-​sending countries: the Global Forum on Migration and Development. In September 2016, the UN New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants was adopted, giving rise to an intergovernmental consultation and negotiation process that culminated with the adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees (UNHCR, 2018) and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Secure Migration (UN, 2018 on 18 December 2018. The US did not participate in the negotiation process and 14 countries did not attend the international conference in Marrakesh where this non-​binding agreement was embraced. At the heart of the debates surrounding the adoption of the Global Compact for Migration was the attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable positions: a human rights-​centred approach and the securitisation question which reaffirms the right of states to criminalise migrants under the façade of the right of states to control ‘illegal’ migration (Schierup et.al., 2019). The concept of human development coined by Amartya Sen and adopted by the UN in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda represents a positive step in the furthering of the development debate (UN, 2015); it cannot, however, adequately address the complex dynamics of unequal development, forced migration, and human rights infringements under contemporary capitalism. There is a need for further contextualisation; a clear identification of the competing social projects; the creation of viable pathways that lead to the political and institutional strengthening of social organisations, movements, and networks; and the definition of alternative and transformative agendas. This implies the need to rethink development in a much deeper way

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The migration–development nexus  109 in order to understand the dynamics of uneven development. In this regard, the Latin American critical development school of thought has made important contributions to advancing towards a counter-​hegemonic agenda on migration and development, capable of envisioning in theory and practice avenues to overcome—​and transcend—​Latin America’s asymmetrical and subordinated integration into the world capitalist system (Delgado Wise, 2014). At the same time and counterposed with the regressive model of development propelled by neoliberal globalisation, it is crucial to rethink development from a post-​neoliberal perspective. The consequences of the COVID-​19 pandemic are uncertain. An immediate effect of the pandemic has been the mass unemployment of broad segments of the population, exacerbating nationalist, xenophobic, and racial prejudices. Most likely, this situation will be further aggravated by a tendency to deepen automation in the face of population confinement. It will also accelerate the current trend toward monopolisation. The pandemic is also having devastating effects on social security, health systems, and all sectors associated with human mobility—​a situation that is already having severe impacts on millions of migrants and refugees, including fatalities of the disease. Beyond its adverse implications for the working class and particularly for its most vulnerable segments such as that made up of forced migrants, it is engendering the worst economic recession in the history of capitalism. The impacts of the recession on the migrants’ countries of origin will be even more devastating due to their structural weaknesses. The current decline of remittances is already affecting both the migrant family’s income and the balance of payments in the migrant-​sending countries. Access to foreign exchange becomes particularly critical in times of COVID-​19 not only to face the contingency, but also for a possible economic recovery in the medium and long term. What may come out from this epochal crisis—​for its metabolic relation with nature—​ is unpredictable, but what is certain is that it will radically transform the current economic and geopolitical global landscape. Recommended reading: Shierup et al. (2019).

Note 1 According to the 1951 Convention, a refugee is a person residing outside his or her country of nationality, who is unable or unwilling to return because of a ‘well-​founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion’.

References Castles, S. (2002). “Environmental Change and Forced Migration: Making Sense of the Debate.” Working Paper No. 70. Geneva: UNHCR. www.unhcr.org/​research/​working/​3de344fd9/​ environmental-​change-​forced-​migration-​making-​sense-​debate-​stephen-​castles.html. Castles, S., de Haas, H., & Miller, M. (2019). The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World (6th edn). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Castles, S., & Delgado Wise, R. (eds.) (2008). Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South. Geneva: IOM. Delgado Wise, R. (2014). “A Critical Overview of Migration and Development: The Latin American Challenge.” Annual Review of Sociology, 40: 643–​663. Delgado Wise, R., & Márquez, H. (2007). “The Reshaping of Mexican Labour Exports under NAFTA: Paradoxes and Challenges.” International Migration Review, 41(3): 656–​679.

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110  Raúl Delgado Wise Delgado Wise, R., & Márquez, H. (2012). “Contemporary Migration Seen from the Perspective of Political Economy: Theoretical and Methodological Elements,” in Vargas-​Silva, C. (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Migration. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Delgado Wise, R., & Martin, D. (2016). “The Political Economy of Global Labour Arbitrage, in Van der Pijl, K. (ed.), Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production, pp. 59–​75. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Emmanuel, A. (1972). El intercambio desigual. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Faist, T. (2008). “Migrants as Transnational Development Agents: An Inquiry into the Newest Round of the Migration–​Development Nexus.” Population, Space and Place, 14(1): 21–​42. Faist,T., & Schade, J. (eds.) (2013). Disentangling Migration and Climate Change. Methodologies, Political Discourses and Human Rights. London: Springer. Geiger, M., & Pecoud, A. (2010). The Politics of International Migration Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Glick-​Schiller, N. (2005). “Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism: Bringing a Theory of Power to Transnational Studies.” Anthropological Theory, 5(4): 439–​461. Harvey, D. (2007). “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1): 21–​44. ILO. (2015). “Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Slavery.” www.ilo.org/​global/​topics/​forced-​ labour/​lang-​en/​index.htm. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2007). Climate Change 2007—​The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Organization for Migration. (2021). World Migration Report 2020. Geneva: International Organisation for Migration. Marx, K. (1975). Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meillassoux, C. (1981). Maidens, Meal, and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myrdal, G. (1957). Rich Lands and the Poor. New York: Harper and Row. Piore, M. (1979). Birds of Passage: Migrant Labour in Industrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Portes, A. (2005). Convergencias teóricas y evidencias empíricas en el estudio del transnacionalismo de lo migrante. Migración y Desarrollo, 3(4): 2–​19. Shierup, K.-​U., et al. (2019). Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance. London: Routledge. Singer, P. (1974). Economía política de la urbanización. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. UN. (1990). International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. General Assembly resolution 45/​158 of 18 December 1990. New York: United Nations. UN. (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. www. un.org/​sustainabledevelopment/​development-​agenda/​. UN. (2018). Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. https://​undocs.org/​A/​ RES/​73/​195. UNHCR. (1951). Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva: UNHCR. UNHCR. (2015). Figures at Glance. www.unhcr.org/​figures-​at-​a-​glance.html. UNHCR. (2016). New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. September 19. www.unhcr. org/​new-​york-​declaration-​for-​refugees-​and-​migrants.html. UNHCR. (2018). The Global Compact on Refugees. www.unhcr.org/​gcr/​GCR_​English.pdf. Wallerstein, E. (2005). The Capitalist World-​Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part IV

Policy configurations for development

Development policy is the central concern of international development agencies and developing country governments. Policy involves international, state, private, and not-​ for-​profit actors in a multiplicity of ways, including policy design and implementation, the direct delivery of projects such as infrastructure, and in devising policy frameworks to deliver support to particular sectors or to particular sections of the population. While this may seem technocratic, it is deeply political in practice. A term often used in mainstream development studies refers to ‘policy interventions’. This gives the impression of a ‘natural’ economic order of markets into which governments then ‘intervene’ with policies. Critical development studies views policies differently. States and markets are both part of the same larger (capitalist) system and markets do not exist outside of state and society but rather are socially embedded in them. As a result, policy must be seen in the broader context of actors’ interests and power; policy may therefore take on different ‘configurations’ depending on whose interests it serves and what outcomes it is expected to achieve. The task, therefore, is to untangle whose interests are being served by what policies. The first two chapters in this part analyse policy configurations at the international level. Elisa Van Wayenberge analyses the post-​Washington Consensus in Chapter 13. The neoliberal policies introduced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s under the banner of the Washington Consensus (see also Chapters 1 and 2), gave way at the end of this period to a post-​Washington Consensus in which market failures were seemingly given great recognition. Van Wayenberge shows how this policy shift is best understood as a policy shift within, rather than away from, neoliberalism. Peter Kragelund’s chapter considers the changing contours of official development assistance and, in particular, whether the emergence of new aid donors of the Global South, such as China, provides recipient developing countries with greater bargaining power to influence the terms of aid.This chapter, together with Chapter 11 on philanthrocapitalism, demonstrate how ‘aid’ is being transformed by new state and non-​state actors. A particular form of the state, the developmental state, is the subject of Chapter 15 by Paul Bowles. Few states have caught up economically with the early industrialisers and this chapter analyses the policy configurations and societal structures used by the developmental state to achieve this end. The chapter also considers whether these predominantly national configurations are possible in today’s globalised world—​or whether they are desirable (a question also raised by Selwyn in Chapter 26). In Chapter 16, Milford Bateman critically analyses microcredit and financial inclusion, two related policies which have become very popular policy choices to address poverty. Contrary to all the hype which has often surrounded these policies, Bateman explains DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-15

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112  Policy configurations for development why the poor have not been the beneficiaries (see also Ashman’s analysis in this respect for the case of South Africa in Chapter 20).

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What are the main differences and similarities between the Washington and post-​ Washington Consensus? 2. What have been the impacts of the emergence of new aid donors for recipient countries? 3. Are ‘developmental states’ feasible or desirable as vehicles for national development? 4. For whom does microcredit and financial inclusion work or fail and why?

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13  The post-​Washington consensus Elisa Van Waeyenberge

When we seek to reflect critically on policy configurations for development the crucial role of an international financial institution (IFI) like the World Bank assumes centre stage. The World Bank has aspired to a leadership role in development since the McNamara presidency (1968–​1980), but its capacity to do so has depended on the broader environment within which it operates. During the 1980s, a set of events, including the debt crisis, the political turn to the right in major Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) economies, the Volcker shock, etc., coincided to enable such a leadership role for the Bank. At the same time, its broader policy framework shifted from an earlier Keynesian or more structuralist orientation towards a neoliberal frame, most aptly captured through the emergence of the Washington Consensus. Nearly two decades later, as the neoliberal policy experiment in developing countries failed to deliver on its projected benefits, attempts were made to move the policy paradigm towards a post-​Washington Consensus. This shift sought to capture the persistence of market failure in developing countries and the need for policy prescriptions to reflect such realities. Where previously, under the Washington Consensus, the state and market had been presented as alternative economic governance mechanisms, with a strong bias against resource allocation through the state, a more comprehensive approach now sought to project a partnership between the two institutional settings. The recognition of persistent market failure called for more extensive state intervention with the main aim of making markets work better. The primacy of both the market as a preferred resource allocation mechanism and the private sector as a preferred agent in development, however, remained unchallenged and the shift from Washington to post-​Washington Consensus is best understood as capturing a transition from one phase of neoliberalism to another.Where, for the Washington Consensus ‘rolling back’ the state to promote markets dominated the agenda, with the post-​Washington Consensus the state is recognised as indispensable to support market expansion and to manage the various contradictions that the initial phase of neoliberalism under the Washington Consensus engendered. Further, the transition from Washington to post-​Washington Consensus took place against the backdrop of an unprecedented expansion of private sector flows to the developing world, which was only temporarily punctured by the dramatic events of the global financial crisis (GFC). Since at least a decade, whether through the post-​Washington Consensus or not, development discourse has become entirely oriented towards the promotion of private sector (and financial) interests and this is perhaps most blatant in the recently reinvigorated promotion by the donor community of public–​private partnerships (PPPs) across any area of public service provision. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-16

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114  Elisa Van Waeyenberge This short contribution seeks to situate the emergence of the post-​ Washington Consensus within development policy discourse and practices. It first charts the rise of the Washington Consensus. It proceeds by sketching the way in which notions such as good governance and ownership became promoted in development rhetoric, as the Washington Consensus was extended across a broader policy terrain. And, finally, it discusses the nature and significance of the post-​Washington Consensus against the backdrop of changing global development-​financing realities. It undertakes this brief review with particular attention to the uneven and shifting relationship between the rhetoric, scholarship, and policies in practice of the World Bank against the backdrop of a constantly evolving neoliberal world.

The Washington Consensus The 1980s were characterised by the neoliberal turn in development and the World Bank played a crucial role in effecting this transition. This was facilitated by the introduction in the early 1980s of a new lending modality by the Bank. Lending for adjustment programmes provided balance-​of-​payments support not linked to any specific investment project. It did so, however, in return for changes in policy through conditionalities. Policy-​based lending bought the Bank a space at countries’ policy table and provided the opportunity for a paradigm shift that would reflect the broader turn to the right taking place in the institutions’ main shareholder countries. Policy-​based lending indeed easily lent itself to ideological affiliation with the right-​wing political sentiment in core Bank shareholders, tempering their initial hostility towards development cooperation as the substantive content of the new lending programmes came to reflect a new aid discourse focused on price incentives and perfectly working markets. Policy-​based lending, of course, was not new, being enshrined in the constitution of the Bank’s sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Bank’s venture into structural adjustment lending implied issues of overlap, which the institutions attempted to deal with through increased cooperation and collaboration. At the Bank, the Berg Report (World Bank, 1981) was emblematic of the shift to the right, with its representation of Africa’s deteriorating economic conditions entirely in terms of misguided government policies. The Report made a series of recommendations. These included: (i) to restore prices to ‘market’ levels; (ii) to devalue exchange rates; and (iii) to remove parastatals, subsidies, and price controls. In short, the Report sought a ‘restoration’ of the ‘superior’ allocative role of the price system and a ‘re-​establishment’ of the incentives deriving from private ownership. These features would come to characterise the structural adjustment programmes promoted by the Bank during the 1980s. The publication of the Berg Report indicated the rise of ‘monoeconomics’ in development economics (Hirschman, 1981). The idea came to prevail that ‘economic rationality’ characterised agents across time and regions and that the economic logic of individual optimisation leading to social optima characterised economic interactions in the developed as well as developing world. The appointment of Anne Krueger as Bank’s Chief Economist to replace Hollis Chenery in 1982 was emblematic of this shift. Hollis Chenery had made major contributions to structural development economics while Anne Krueger was a trade economist of the most orthodox (and neoliberal) kind. In the first issue of the World Bank Research Observer she left no doubt regarding her creed as she stated that: ‘Once it is recognised that individuals respond to incentives, and that “market failure” is the result of inappropriate incentives rather than of non-​responsiveness, the

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The post-Washington consensus  115 separateness of development economics as a field largely disappears’ (Krueger 1986: 62). For Williamson (1990: 19) as another spearhead of the neoliberal transformation of development scholarship, the rise of monoeconomics during the 1980s exposed the previous development literature as a ‘diversion from the harsh realities of the dismal science [of economics]’. None of the ideas that prevailed in previous development scholarship, such as the big push, balanced or unbalanced growth, surplus growth, surplus labour, mattered any more in a monoeconomic understanding of development. By the mid-​1980s, the ideas about economic management underlying the structural adjustment and stabilisation programmes promoted by the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) had become readily accepted orthodoxy in the official donor community. The policy conditions set by the World Bank and IMF sought to eliminate obstacles to a ‘perfect market’ as the presumed optimal path to growth. What came to be referred to as the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1990)—​to reflect a policy consensus shared between three Washington-​based institutions, the World Bank, IMF and US Treasury—​ embodied the twin imperatives of ‘stabilisation’ and ‘adjustment’, where the former was to proceed through tight controls on money supply growth and the latter necessitated a set of supply-​side measures aimed at boosting private sector activity. In essence, this boiled down to the mantra of deregulation, privatisation, and liberalisation. More specifically, the Washington Consensus included ten policy recommendations. First was ‘fiscal discipline’ necessitating strict control on budget deficits (which were argued to cause inflation and capital flight). Second, government subsidies needed curtailing and government expenditures were to be redirected towards education, health, and infrastructure. Third, tax reform sought to broaden the tax base and cut marginal tax rates. Fourth, interest rates were to become market-​determined, i.e., liberalised. Fifth, exchange rates were to be liberalised so as to become ‘competitive’ and stimulate exports. Sixth, tariffs were to replace quotas, and to be reduced as fast as possible (‘trade liberalisation’). Seventh, foreign direct investment was to be liberalised by dismantling barriers to entry. Eighth, state-​owned enterprises were to be privatised. Ninth, the economy was to be deregulated, i.e., regulations that impede the entry of new firms or restrict competition were to be abolished. And tenth, property rights were to be established and enforced. The Washington Consensus relied on the economic theory of perfectly working markets that derives from general equilibrium theory. According to this theory, the competitive market yields welfare-​maximising outcomes when a set of conditions are satisfied (no externalities, no public goods or natural monopolies, complete set of markets, given preferences, initial endowments and technology). The case for government intervention is limited to lump sum redistributions and the correction of a well-​defined set of market failures listed above. The priority for government policy is to allow prices to be ‘right’ (reflecting scarcity and preferences) so that individual economic agents can allocate resources efficiently in response to these signals. Mainstream economic theory has raised a set of objections regarding this framework as appropriate for the analysis of developing economies (see Van Waeyenberge, 2006). Fundamentally, however, the highly abstract assumptions upon which the policy prescriptions of the Washington Consensus proceed are incapable of accommodating real-​ world features as they fail to reflect the historic and context-​specific characteristics of a developing country in favour of universal principles of rationality and optimisation. This leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the interactions between private and public sectors and a persistent failure to understand economic and social outcomes, including

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116  Elisa Van Waeyenberge those deriving from ‘state’ or ‘market’ dynamics, as anchored on and deriving from specific social-​economic structures and relationships. The nature of the interests, including of private and foreign capital, served by the promotion of such a paradigm should not be treated as a moot point. Recommended reading: Gould (2005);Van Waeyenberge (2006).

Good governance and ownership The 1980s came to a close and the decade-​long experience with Washington Consensus-​ inspired policies failed to deliver promised results. For the Bank, however, the problem did not originate with its programmes but stemmed from the inadequate adoption of the policy prescriptions. It was the ‘lack of local capacity, both private and public, in their design and execution’ (World Bank, 1989: 62) that accounted for the lacklustre results of the adjustment programmes. Rather than revisit the flawed premise of the conditions imposed on countries through structural adjustment programmes, conditionalities were to be extended to areas responsible for the adoption of IFI-​advocated policies. Attention shifted towards mechanisms of policy implementation. This was supported by a growing conservative literature on the ‘political economy’ of reform in developing countries (Haggard & Webb, 1993; Krueger, 1993). For the IFIs, the implementation of macroeconomic reforms then necessitated ‘governance’ reforms and the traditional (economic) reform agenda of the 1980s was extended to incorporate issues of a traditionally more political nature. These encompassed public sector management, accountability and transparency of the public sector, the legal framework, corruption, military expenditure, and so forth. These were all put in the service of a core set of neoliberal policies. At the same time, and without any intention of parody, recipient governments were urged to adopt a more ‘participatory’ approach to formulating the development agenda. While remaining strongly committed to its core economic reform programme, the donor community argued that ‘effective change’ could not be imposed from outside and sought to cast the donor–​recipient relationship in a new light. In donor rhetoric, ‘ownership’ of the development agenda moved centre stage. Implementation of aid programmes involved ‘partnerships’ with recipient governments as well as non-​governmental organisations (‘civil society’). Aid-​dependent countries became caught between a dramatic narrowing of the policy space and an obligation to fulfil pre-​determined conditions of consultation and participation, apart from broader scrutiny of their public sector management in an attempt to satisfy the good governance agenda. By the end of the 1990s, the participation and ownership agenda became formally enshrined in the Poverty Reduction Strategy initiative. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) became a precondition for low-​income countries to access loans from the BWIs. These sought to incorporate a commitment to poverty reduction and at the same time to elevate the principles of consultation and ownership that had become celebrated by the BWIs in an attempt to improve the adoption of their policy conditionalities. The PRSPs combined with a more selective approach to the allocation of its aid funds on behalf of the World Bank, where the a priori assessment of a country’s performance in a set of policy domains, including macroeconomic policy, trade policy, financial sector policy, and public sector management and governance increasingly guided aid allocation decisions (see Van Waeyenberge, 2009). The onus for low-​income countries’ access to aid resources dramatically worsened to include a priori tests of their capacity to comply with

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The post-Washington consensus  117 a broadened agenda of policy reform ranging from economic, administrative, and governance issues as well as testing their capacity to deliver on prescribed forms of consultation. Recommended reading: Brown (2004);Van Waeyenberge (2009).

The post-​Washington Consensus The 1990s however had witnessed increased mobilisations against the BWI-​dictated policy order.The 50th anniversary of the institutions was marked by vocal campaigns that 50 years had been enough. The economic performance of the adjusting countries failed to impress and the social impact of the IFI-​promoted programmes had been deleterious. State provision across various sectors had collapsed, subsidy regimes of staple foods were eliminated with catastrophic impacts on standards of living, investment had failed to pick up, formal sector employment fell dramatically, real wages declined, and there was limited supply response across agricultural and manufacturing sectors. The World Bank could not ignore the manifold critiques of its adjustment programmes. It also faced questions from its second largest shareholder, Japan, over the way in which the Washington Consensus-​inspired policy reform programme sat with Japan’s own development history. The East Asian Miracle (EAM) Report (World Bank, 1993) ensued and within it the World Bank managed to reconcile a set of contradictory propositions. In the first instance, the Report admitted that there was a theoretical case for industrial policy. It then proceeded to refute its empirical importance for industrial performance in East Asia. And, finally, the Report argued that there were practical objections on why the policy was not transferable to other countries (Chang, 1999;Wade, 1996). However, even if the EAM Report endorsed a continuing market-​friendly approach, at the same time it facilitated a shift from a simple dichotomy of government versus market towards a more cooperative relationship between the two. Next, the Bank was to find a way to move beyond both structural adjustment and the EAM Report. Joseph Stiglitz was to take up the challenge with his proposal for a post-​Washington Consensus. This had become even more urgent against the backdrop of the disastrous results of IFI-​led transitions in Eastern European countries (see Florio, 2002), and the outbreak of a series of international financial crises during the mid to late 1990s (Mexico, 1994; East Asia, 1997–​1998; Russia, 1998; Brazil, 1999). And so the post-​Washington Consensus entered the policy stage, when, from the platform of the Annual United Nations WIDER Lecture, Stiglitz (1998a) openly denounced the failings of Washington Consensus with a talk entitled ‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post-​Washington Consensus’. For Stiglitz (1998a), the Washington Consensus was at best incomplete and at worst misguided. It had focused on a small set of instruments, including macroeconomic stability, liberalised trade, and privatisation, to achieve the narrow goal of economic growth. The singular focus on such policies as trade liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation had detracted from important conditions for stability and long-​term development. These included the legal and regulatory framework, competition policy, technology policy, investments in education, and so on. Further, development is not merely an interplay of economic variables, but has to be understood as a ‘holistic’ process. The post-​Washington Consensus tried, at least in principle, to move beyond the reductionist conception of the development process implied by its predecessor. It also sought to project a different view of state–​society interactions, and following the 1997 World Development Report (World Bank, 1997) development became understood as an inter-​sectoral cooperation process.

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118  Elisa Van Waeyenberge Such posturing was stronger on rhetoric than substance, and conveniently failed to extend its vision of past development thinking and policy to the pre-​Washington Consensus. Nonetheless, the projected antagonism between state and society/​market gave way to a notion of ‘partnership’: private and public sectors were now recognised to be intimately entwined (Stiglitz, 1998a). With the post-​Washington Consensus paradigm, market failure then acquired ontological status. The policy implications of such failure, however, were less clear-​cut. Where previously in the pre-​Washington Consensus era the recognition of the pervasive nature of market failure in a developing country setting provided strong arguments in favour of state interventions, with the post-​Washington Consensus a more ambivalent set of prescriptions emerged. Market failures no longer necessitated ‘old-​ style’ government intervention where the state acted instead of the market. Instead, new mediations of state–​market interactions had to be deployed. Furthermore, with different sources and degrees of market failure (and states with varying levels of ‘capability’), the implications for the role of the state could differ significantly across countries (World Bank, 1997).The issue then became a quest for a particular institutional set-​up (a ‘partnership’ between state and society across private profit and non-​profit sectors) that would maximise benefits to society. Crucially, the state was to make sure that market failures are overcome without imposing ‘unnecessary’ costs on society. As a result, when state ‘capability’ was low, it was to rely, as much as possible, on the relative strengths of the private sector, the community, the family, and the individual ‘citizen’ (Stiglitz, 1998b). The new agenda reflected a set of propositions that had become increasingly popular in development economics.These drew on a collection of mainstream economic innovations and through these theoretical innovations traditionally non-​economic issues became increasingly addressed within the discipline (see Fine, 1997, on economic imperialism). Hence, after a temporary retreat of development from economics during the reign of the Washington Consensus, a ‘resurgence’ of development economics seemed to be taking place. This new framework purportedly incorporated issues whose neglect had rendered the preceding analysis incomplete, and claimed to revisit important matters touched upon in the earlier debates on development of the post-​war period. Furthermore, the new approach allegedly anchored the economic analysis of development in its broader social reality. However, the extent to which the post-​Washington Consensus provides us with improved insights into the processes of development remains questionable. First, the restatement of an analysis of development proposed by Stiglitz essentially proceeds on the same principles of optimisation and choice as its predecessor. Its distinctiveness lays mainly in changes to the initial assumptions under which optimisation takes place. A softening of the assumptions as proposed through the post-​Washington Consensus, however, strengthens social (and development) theory on the basis of methodological individualism to the neglect of the social, historical, and the specific. Second, the extension of the analysis into traditionally non-​economic domains (including, for instance, institutions) proceeds at the expense of substantive content and analytical power. The analysis remains hampered by its ahistorical, asocial, and reductionist method. Accounts of economic and other social phenomena emerge as a result of individual choice and optimisation. Development, with its complex and uneven processes of social and economic change through technological progress, productivity growth, structural change, industrialisation, urbanisation, the spread of markets and the various conflicts and struggles these engender, is ill served by such a narrow and reductionist analytical prism.

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The post-Washington consensus  119 Finally, in the context of its propositions regarding the role of the state, it is true that compared to the ‘rolling back of the state’ precept of the Washington Consensus, some progress seems to have been made through the shift towards a post-​Washington Consensus, with its stronger recognition of the importance of the state for a sound working of the economy. The role of the latter, however, remains essentially confined to the creation of a conducive environment for the private sector to fulfil its allegedly dynamic role in development. The government is, in essence, to improve the institutional environment in which private agents steer their interaction in socially desirable directions. The abiding legacy of the new political economy, with its negative normative presumptions regarding the public sector, implies a persistent underlying bias against direct management of economic resources by the state: the market (but now also the non-​market non-​state) remains superior. Even in comparison with the pre-​Washington Consensus, McNamara era, the post-​Washington Consensus appears as a ‘regression’ (Fine, 2001: 15), contrasting with the former’s tolerance (and support) for state-​controlled development enterprises. The post-​Washington Consensus can then perhaps better be understood as a policy paradigm attached to a particular moment in neoliberalism, which necessitated a reorientation of state–​market interactions to the benefit of private capital as well as reflected the need to manage the contradictions engendered by the crude neoliberal policy prescriptions of the 1980s. It is indeed striking that as the post-​Washington Consensus took hold, private international capital flows to the developing world moved on to an exponential trajectory, dramatically accelerating the financial integration of core parts of the developing world. This expansion was temporarily halted as a result of the GFC, but picked up again soon after. Accompanying this trend, we have seen a significant redefinition of the purpose of development cooperation, recrafted now almost exclusively in support of the expansion of private flows. Since the early 2000s, the commitment to the public financing of development has indeed steadily eroded in favour of a view of development being spearheaded by mobile private capital (Van Waeyenberge, 2015). The position that attributes a pivotal role to the private sector in financing development was at the heart of the outcome document of the Third Financing for Development Summit held in Addis Ababa in 2015, which set out the framework through which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are to be financed.The official adoption by the international community of the principle that financing for development is increasingly to be provided through international capital markets has combined with strong statements in support of PPPs for infrastructure provision as a way to achieve the SDGs.The role of public sector flows has become redefined in support of private sector expansion, also to address basic needs in developing countries, rather than that public service provision is expanded through mobilisation of taxes (and official development cooperation) and the sustained efforts to combat illicit capital flows. Instead, the enormous glut of private savings that has emerged over the last decade is celebrated as providing the possibilities to finance basic needs provision in developing countries. Such a position can easily be supported through the post-​Washington Consensus, as long as there is sufficient attention to regulatory and other issues framed around improving incentives for private providers. This is to the detriment of any attempt to understand the distributional dynamics implied in these developments where the satisfaction of basic needs, including of health, education, housing, and other, of poor people becomes opened up for the extraction of revenues by private capital. Recommended reading: Bayliss and Van Waeyenberge (2017); Bayliss et al. (2011); Fine (2001).

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References Bayliss, K., Fine, B., & Van Waeyenberge, E. (eds.) (2011). The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research: London: Pluto. Bayliss, K., & Van Waeyenberge, E. (2017). “Unpacking the Public Private Partnership Revival.” The Journal of Development Studies, doi: 10.1080/​00220388.2017.1303671 Brown, D. (2004). “Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategies: Democracy Strengthened or Democracy Undermined?” in Hickey, S. & Mohan, M. (eds.), Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? pp. 56–​98. London: Zed Books. Chang, H.-​J. (1999). “Industrial Policy and East Asia.The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future.” Paper presented at the World Bank workshop on Re-​thinking the East Asian Miracle, San Francisco, February 1999. Fine, B. (1997). “The New Revolution in Economics.” Capital and Class, 61(Spring): 143–​148. Fine, B. (2001). “Neither the Washington nor the post-​Washington Consensus. An Introduction,” in Fine, B., Lapavitsas, C., & Pincus, J. (eds.), Development Policy in the Twenty-​first Century. Beyond the Post-​Washington Consensus. London: Routledge. Florio, M. (2002). “Economists, Privatization in Russia and the Waning of the Washington Consensus.” Review of International Political Economy, 9(2): 374–​415. Gould, J. (ed.) (2005). The New Conditionality. The Politics of Poverty Reduction Strategies. London: Zed Books. Haggard, S., & Webb, S. (1993). “What Do We Know about the Political Economy of Economic Policy Reform?” World Bank Research Observer, 8(2): 143–​168. Hirschman, A. (1981). “The Rise and Decline of Development Economics,” in Essays in Trespassing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krueger, A. (1986). “Aid in the Development Process.” World Bank Research Observer, 1(1): 57–​78. Krueger, A. (1993). Political Economy of Policy Reform in Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stiglitz, J. (1998a). “More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post-​Washington Consensus.” Wider Annual Lecture, Helsinki, 7 January. Stiglitz, J. (1998b). “Towards a New Paradigm for Development Strategies, Policies and Process.” 1998 Prebish Lecture at UNCTAD, Geneva, 19 October. Van Waeyenberge, E. (2006). “From Washington to Post-​ Washington Consensus: Illusions of Development,” in Jomo K.S. & Fine, B. (eds.), The New Development Economics.After the Washington Consensus. London: Zed Books. Van Waeyenberge, E. (2009). “Selectivity at Work: Country Policy and Institutional Assessments at the World Bank.” European Journal of Development Research, 21(5): 792–​810. Van Waeyenberge, E. (2015). The Private Turn in Development Finance. Working Paper Series, 140. Leeds: FESSUD. Wade, R. (1996). “Japan, the World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective.” New Left Review, 217, 3–​37. Williamson, J. (1990). “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Williamson, J. (ed.), Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. World Bank. (1981). Accelerated Development in Sub-​Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (1989). Sub-​ Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (1993). The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank. World Bank. (1997). World Development Report 1997.The State in a Changing World. NewYork: Oxford University Press, for the World Bank.

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14  International cooperation for development Peter Kragelund

Recently, international cooperation for development has undergone tectonic shifts. While official development assistance (ODA) was the cornerstone of planned interaction between the Global North and the Global South during and after the Cold War, ODA is now, at best, facilitating this interaction and is instead mainly used to accelerate other financial flows such as trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). This change in international cooperation for development affects both aid donors and aid recipients in several interrelated ways. For instance, it is changing how, and the extent to which, Northern donors shape policies in the Global South; it has undermined the hegemonic power of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in defining what development is and how to achieve it—​in part replacing it with the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC); and the degree to which governments in the Global South can define effective development cooperation and fund their own development policies. These developments have prompted researchers to talk of ‘Aid 2.0’, ‘beyond aid’, and a ‘post-​aid world’ (Janus, Klingebiel, & Paulo, 2015). In recipient countries, the effects of this post-​aid world are uneven and depend on factors such as the possibility of attracting alternative forms of finance (e.g., remittances, FDI, trade, and revenues from natural resources), their perceived attractiveness to external financiers (e.g., governance and conflicts), their geographical location, and the strength and coherence of their own development vision. This chapter outlines this tectonic shift in international cooperation for development and analyses how it affects international cooperation for development ‘as it was’. It further seeks to crack open the black box of what these changes might mean for the Global South. In order to do this, I first summarise the field of international cooperation for development ‘as it was’; then, I analyse the underlying reasons for this tectonic shift, focusing in particular on the role of new state and private development actors. Next I reflect on how this shift is affecting the donor landscape; and then I provide a preliminary assessment of its effects on the Global South. The final section concludes the chapter.

International development cooperation ‘as it was’ International development cooperation ‘as it was’ originated in the post-​World War II restructuring of the global economy. The Bretton Woods Conference held in New Hampshire in 1944 is often referred to as the beginning of development assistance and by extension of the development cooperation era. This conference led to the establishment of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the years that followed, the United Nations DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-17

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122  Peter Kragelund (UN) Charter was drawn up (1945), and organisations like the International Labour Organisation (1946), the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (1946), and the World Health Organization (1948) were established. Equally important was the so-​called Marshall Plan, i.e., the US-​funded recovery programme for Europe under which approximately $13 million were transferred from the US to war-​torn European countries between 1948 and 1951. The Marshall Plan is frequently lauded as the most effective development aid programme ever, and as such it is often used to ‘prove’ that aid can indeed succeed in stimulating growth and creating stability and prosperity by alleviating resource shortages and (re-​)establishing crucial institutions. In terms of thinking, however, the most important event was the publication of President Truman’s ‘Point Four Program’ in January 1949. In addition to the usual suspects of that epoch in international relations—​i.e., support for the UN family, the continuation of the Marshall Plan, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—​it proposed a ‘fair deal’ for the world, to be achieved by deploying technical and financial assistance to help ‘underdeveloped’ countries to become ‘developed’. Thereby, the Point Four Program ‘evoked not only the idea of change in the direction of a final state but, above all, the possibility of bringing about such change’ (Rist, 2008: 73). This was the official birth of international development cooperation and the initiation of the ‘development age’ that was preoccupied, policy-​and research-​wise, with how the Global South could—​as fast as possible—​emulate the Global North. Orthodox development thinking held that this emulation could be fast-​tracked through economic growth and modernisation, led by high savings rates facilitated by development aid. This thinking also informed the individual aid programmes established by bilateral donors in the 1950s and 1960s. The Marshall Plan had ‘proven’ that aid did indeed work, and the Point Four Program established the development-​oriented thinking that was necessary in order to set widespread aid programmes in motion. Concurrently, while Europe was gradually recovering from World War II, Africa experienced a wave of decolonisation. With increasing wealth and in order to maintain allies in the wake of the Cold War, Britain and France used aid to engage primarily with their former colonies while the US used aid to engage with the former colonies of Portugal, Spain, and Belgium. International development cooperation was maturing and new state actors were entering the field every year. To help them learn from each other, the Development Assistance Group was formed in 1960. It was originally made up of eight bilateral donors and the Commission of the European Economic Community, but in the years that followed more bilateral donors joined the group. In 1961, it was transformed into the DAC of the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD). From being an experience-​sharing entity, it changed into a norm-​making entity. In particular, DAC began a process of coordinating aid in order to improve standards of living for the inhabitants of less developed countries. Moreover, DAC worked to increase the amount of money available to finance development and focused on long-​term development issues. Based on this work, DAC became the hegemonic power in international development cooperation. DAC defined the purpose of aid (to promote economic and social development in developing countries), its terms (concessional), and its rationale (for developing countries to engage in the global economy and for people to overcome poverty). In order to compel members to abide by these aims and rationales, DAC developed common objectives and guidelines (e.g., untying aid and spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) on aid), established standards for monitoring and evaluation, and instituted recurrent peer aid reviews and high-​level meetings.

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International cooperation for development  123 Parallel to the increasing hegemonic power of the DAC donors, development aid began to play an increasingly prominent role in recipient countries’ development strategies. While the Cold War era was characterised by the large degree of sovereignty enjoyed by recipient country governments—​which was mainly due to the clear policy aims of the political elites in the decolonised states and competition between East and West which meant that donors were willing to ignore almost any non-​compliance or disobedience from the recipients—​this changed radically at the beginning of the 1980s. Aid to the newly established states in the ‘Third World’ did not produce results comparable to the Marshall Plan. As a result, Elliot Berg was asked to analyse the nature of the development problems facing African countries. The result was the Berg Report (World Bank, 1981) which, in short, argued that investment projects fail when policies are bad. It thus provided the analytical justification for donor interventions in recipient countries’ internal affairs. The economic justification for those interventions was, in turn, furnished by the debt crisis of 1982. The result was the structural adjustment and stabilisation programmes that turned the donor–​recipient power game on its head. In a single move, donors were able to tie loans and grants to macroeconomic policies and conditions in recipient countries. By the end of the Cold War, the West had secured a monopoly on aid which allowed donors to impose political as well as economic conditions, thus curbing recipient countries’ sovereignty even further (Fraser, 2008; Stokke, 1995). International development cooperation ‘as it was’ was thus characterised by a few dominant actors, including the World Bank, IMF, the UN family, and the DAC donors. Over a 50-​year period, their influence over policies and politics in the Global South increased steadily until all major policy documents were drafted by external donors, and bureaucrats in aid-​dependent countries also began to think and act like donors (Harrison, 2004). Recommended reading: Rist (2008); Stokke (1995).

The tectonic shift in international development cooperation This trend did not endure. The system did not sufficiently address global challenges such as climate change, epidemics, migration, and terrorism that span national boundaries. What is more, aid has been fragmented and poorly coordinated despite DAC’s efforts to direct and harmonise aid efforts (Janus et al., 2015). Moreover, the spatiality of poverty has changed: according to conventional measures there are now fewer poor countries in the world but many more poor people in middle-​income countries, the number of poor countries greatly dependent on ODA is falling, but within-​country inequalities are growing in both the Global North and in the Global South (Horner & Hulme, 2019).This spatial change has taken place simultaneously with the rejuvenation of ‘emerging’ donors,1 the growth of private development actors, and the exponential growth of other financial transfers from the Global North to the Global South (and within the Global South). Since the turn of the century, countries like China, India, and Brazil have gradually expanded their aid programmes and are now providing substantial amounts of ‘development finance’ (less ODA and more other official flows) to other countries in the Global South.These ‘new’ actors provide aid differently from the ‘traditional’ actors. Most notably, the aid modality, sectoral focus, and the form of aid differ—​resembling the ‘traditional’ aid of the 1970s–​1980s more than current DAC aid (Kragelund, 2019). Importantly, they offer an alternative development trajectory to that proposed by the (post)-​Washington Consensus and they insist on a policy of non-​ interference in recipient countries’ internal affairs.

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124  Peter Kragelund Likewise, the development arena has witnessed an explosion in the number and scope of non-​state actors engaged directly or indirectly in international development cooperation. Chief among these are private foundations, celebrity organisations, religious organisations, and private enterprises. Simultaneously, these new entrants into the field of development bring in additional finance for development and introduce new ways of approaching development challenges (via vertical funds, innovative financing mechanisms, technicalisation, privatisation, and commercialisation) (Fejerskov, Lundsgaarde, & Cold-​ Ravnkilde, 2017). Importantly, other financial flows have grown tremendously relative to ODA over the past couple of decades. This is especially the case for FDI and remittances that are now much more important in aggregate terms than ODA for most developing countries. None of these, however, are as predictable and as evenly spread as ODA. Moreover, they do not necessarily target the needs of the poor and vulnerable. Finally, the North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) also played a major role in transforming international development cooperation. First, the aid budgets of many ‘traditional’ donors were cut because of the crisis, recently (2018) amounting to a mere 0.3 per cent of GNI—​a far cry from the target of 0.7 per cent. Secondly, the Global South managed to quickly recover from the NAFC due largely to financial flows from ‘emerging’ donors. Essentially, this showed that the Global South could manage without the assistance of the ‘traditional’ donors. Linked hereto, the NAFC exposed shortcomings in the Global North. So far, the ‘traditional’ partners’ credibility rested on a combination of their financial power to provide aid, the fact that they were the world’s strongest and richest economies, and their hegemonic power to define the development agenda. The ‘new’ providers of development finance are challenging all these erstwhile advantages. They provide assistance of great symbolic value: for instance, the NAFC originated in the Global North, and the development path of a country like China shows that the (post)-​Washington Consensus is not the only road towards economic development. Rather, a plethora of routes exist that include aspects of gradualism and state-​drivenness, combined with market-​based learning, strong leadership, and attentiveness to agriculture and infrastructure (Kragelund, 2019). Moreover, ‘new’ development providers have been quick to brand themselves during the COVID-​19 crisis. The Jack Ma and Alibaba Foundations, for instance, quickly responded to the COVID-​19 crisis in the Global South. While most governments of the Global North focused on domestic challenges related to COVID-​19, these foundations already in March 2020 sent 20,000 test kits, 100,000 face masks, and 1000 sets of protective clothing to all governments in Africa. In April, another set of ventilators, suits, thermometers, gloves, face shields, etc. were sent to these governments. The combination of these ‘game-​changing trends’ led Mawdsley (2015) to suggest that ‘traditional’ donors are undergoing three interrelated crises: an ontological (donors no longer only come from the Global North), and ideational (‘traditional’ donors’ normative power is challenged) and a material (economic growth is largely taking place in the Global South) crisis. Whether this leads to more divergence and heterogeneity or a new equilibrium in international development cooperation based on processes of convergence and homogenising forces remains to be seen. No doubt, DAC is losing its hegemonic power—​largely because it has failed to persuade the majority of ‘emerging’ donors to join or to abide by its rules. New cooperation fora are therefore being established (Verschaeve & Orbie, 2016) and

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International cooperation for development  125 DAC donors are allowing themselves to be inspired by new actors. It is to these processes of convergence and divergence that we now turn. Recommended reading: Kragelund (2019); Whitfield (2008).

Effects on the donor landscape The modus operandi of the ‘emerging’ donors is encouraging ‘traditional’ donors to reconsider their relations with partners in the Global South. The perceived efficiency and successfulness of ‘emerging’ donors’ development cooperation have made major ‘traditional’ actors question the current development agenda and helped provoke a stronger focus on national interests among the main ‘traditional’ actors. In fact, we are currently witnessing a move towards a ‘development effectiveness paradigm’, where the focus in recipient countries is on economic growth and industrial productivity rather than on the social, and where the private sector in donor countries directly benefits from the transfers. ‘Traditional’ donors thereby replicate the ‘new’ development actors’ approach, focusing on ‘win-​win’ partnerships that involve companies directly in the execution of development interventions. The rise of ‘new’ donors is not the only factor that has triggered this process: neoliberalism, in general, and the rehabilitation of the private sector in development in the decades that followed the 1980s, in particular, have played a major role in this shift. However, what made ‘traditional’ donors describe the change openly was the rejuvenation of China, India, and Brazil as donors. In so doing, ‘traditional’ donors have triggered a process of convergence in international development cooperation.This is already visible in the UK, where funding for ‘economic growth’ for the recipient country has doubled in three years and now makes up one-​fifth of the total bilateral budget; new private sector partners have been engaged in developing future aid avenues; and civil society has also bought into the new reality of bilateral aid. Mawdsley (2018) calls this tendency the ‘Southernisation’ of development. Likewise, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the EU are moving in the same direction, i.e., focusing on economic growth in order to assist home country/​region firms (Kragelund, 2019). The novel element here is not that business is part of development (via corporate social responsibility and/​or cause-​related marketing), but that ‘traditional’ development organisations are outsourcing development cooperation to private sector actors and that business is becoming responsible for development. The process of convergence is further reinforced by ‘traditional’ donors’ efforts to establish dialogue fora with ‘new’ actors in order to persuade them to buy into the idea of international development cooperation ‘as it was’. For example, the OECD has sought to include the ‘emerging’ donors in its own existing framework, through the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness. Likewise, DAC has established a China-​DAC Study Group to facilitate mutual learning, and in 2011 DAC invited ‘emerging’ donor representatives to its yearly senior-​level meeting that charts the future direction of the DAC. Of late, a couple of ‘emerging’ donors have taken part in the DAC’s internal peer reviews of DAC members, thereby easing future cooperation (Kragelund, 2019). Changes are also taking place at the heart of international development cooperation ‘as it was’. Internal voices in the DAC have proposed replacing the ODA with a new official development effort measure, which in short returns to the core intention of the ODA, i.e., social and economic development in developing countries. It thereby excludes all the ‘transfers’ now included in the ODA that stay in donor countries, and instead

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126  Peter Kragelund only counts either grants or concessional elements of loans for development purposes in developing countries. Likewise, the changes have caused an internal power struggle among ‘established’ development actors to create an alternative to the DAC, i.e., the UN Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) and responsibility to negotiate a new development effectiveness norm shifted from DAC to the GPEDC (Brown, 2020; Hynes & Scott, 2013). However, most of these developments have to do with processes set in motion by the ‘traditional’ donors to balance the competition initiated by the reintroduction of ‘emerging’ donors in the donor landscape. Presently, major differences still exist, for instance in relation to the modality, form, and geographical coverage of aid. These differences are not offset by (also) including economic growth in donor countries as a critical allocation aspect, by establishing dialogue fora, or by promoting trilateral development cooperation, i.e., a development relationship in which a ‘traditional’ donor collaborates with an ‘emerging’ donor to work in a third country in the Global South. At present, the situation is therefore that countries of the Global South can, in theory, benefit from the destabilisation of international development cooperation either to negotiate more favourable deals or to get away with non-​implementation of agreed reforms. Recommended reading: Kragelund (2019); Mawdsley (2018).

Effects on the Global South The above-​mentioned changes in international development cooperation are of relatively recent origin. Hence, studies of the effects of the rejuvenation of emerging donors, for instance, are only just beginning to emerge. Despite this, the ‘China–​Africa literature’ is rich on examples of pre-​established conclusions of the effects of the rejuvenation of China’s interest in development. Most importantly, it is claimed that as China provides aid with ‘no strings attached’ it blindly supports rogue states. Related hereto, arguments like no conditionalities lead to increased corruption, a bad allocation of scarce resources, and poor governance are widespread in this literature. Moreover, it is argued that China’s use of loans (over grants) will re-​indebt recipient countries. The most recent body of literature seeks to open the black box of the effects of the rejuvenation of ‘emerging’ donors. This literature reveals a mixed picture. On the one hand, some studies perceive the situation as an opportunity to provide recipient governments with a choice of development partners, which leads to a strengthening of their negotiation power and carves out policy space to define and implement policies that affect social and economic development. They argue that the competition that is introduced into the aid system increases bargaining power vis-​à-​vis ‘traditional’ donors and offers the opportunity to ‘triangulate’ between donors. Moreover, emerging donors affect bargaining power in the international system and thereby potentially affect the terms and conditions that apply to loans and grants from international financial institutions to recipient countries (Harman & Brown, 2013; Woods, 2008). On top of this, the mere fact that an alternative exists to the (post-​) Washington Consensus provides recipients with leverage to negotiate new deals with ‘traditional’ donors. Amongst others, these studies have shown how Angolan elites have been able to extract favourable spot prices for ‘their’ oil when that oil is sold to China; the Ethiopian government has been able to use China to finance investment in sectors not supported by the West; Mozambique has secured funding for large-​scale infrastructural projects due to engagement with China; and the Rwandan political elite has been able to leverage its Western partners due to the negotiating power

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International cooperation for development  127 it gains from having more partners. Not surprisingly, therefore, these studies have been complemented by a growing belief in the ability of recipient countries’ political elites to challenge the existing power relations in the system. On the other hand, some studies question the recipient country governments’ ability to—​in the short term—​fundamentally alter the structural power relations between the Global North and Global South. In short, they argue that the new actors in international development cooperation do not radically alter the Global South’s place in the global division of labour, since many countries of the Global South remain suppliers of raw materials to the Global North.They therefore argue that the power gains of recipient country elites are limited to bargaining rather than structural change (Carmody, Kragelund, & Riberedo, 2020). Moreover, some of the cases most often highlighted as examples of changing power aid relations may indeed have to do with other factors. Angola, for instance, increased its policy space, but this may be more a consequence of rising commodity prices than interest shown by non-​traditional state actors. In contrast, the Ethiopian case shows how different interpretations of a key concept, debt sustainability, may be used for developmental purposes. Taken together, these studies inform us that the differences between ‘new’ and ‘old’ development cooperation actors may not be as great as first anticipated; that the group of ‘new’ development actors is extremely heterogeneous; and that processes of homogenisation are taking place between private and public actors and between ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ donors (Fejerskov et al., 2017). This new homogenised model increasingly focuses on the productive sector; it seeks to make sure that development interventions are of mutual benefit for both donors and recipients; it centres on short-​term measurable (and easily communicable) results; and it is based on public–​private partnerships. Recommended reading: Carmody, Kragelund, and Riberedo (2020); Woods (2008).

Conclusion This chapter sought to outline the tectonic shifts in international development cooperation and examine their consequences for the donor landscape as well as for the Global South. Most importantly, it established the differences between international development cooperation ‘as it was’, i.e., a relatively stable system governed by the DAC with increasingly more power to influence recipient countries’ internal affairs; and the current system of flux characterised by more state and non-​state actors, a variety of modalities, growing donor competition, and hence potentially more policy space for the Global South. What is clear, however, is that the tectonic shifts in international development cooperation have hitherto neither translated into a fundamentally different perception of what development aid is all about—​it still aims to bring about ‘development’—​nor have they profoundly changed the power relations between donors and recipients. What is new is that the number of donors has increased dramatically compared to the post-​Cold War era. Despite the major changes that we have witnessed lately, therefore, international development cooperation today bears many resemblances to international development cooperation ‘as it was’.

Note 1 ‘Emerging’ donors is the most widely used umbrella term for all the state development aid providers that are not members of DAC. As an analytical tool, it is not of much use. It overlooks

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128  Peter Kragelund the fact that most of these donors are in fact re-​emerging on the development arena and most of them do not perceive themselves as donors. Rather, they discursively construct themselves as equal partners. As ‘emerging’ donors is the most-​used term to describe state actors that either revived their development assistance programmes during the past decade or set up totally new ones, it will be used here.

References Brown, S. (2020). “The Rise and Fall of the Aid Effectiveness Norm.” The European Journal of Development Research, 32(4): 1230–​1248. Carmody, P., Kragelund, P., & Riberedo, R. (2020). Africa’s Shadow Rise: China and the Mirage of African Economic Development. London: Zed Books. Fejerskov, A.M., Lundsgaarde, E., & Cold-​Ravnkilde, S. (2017). “Recasting the ‘New Actors in Development’ Research Agenda.” The European Journal of Development Research, 29(5): 1070–​ 1085. DOI:10.1057/​s41287-​016-​0072-​1. Fraser, A. (2008). Aid-​Recipient Sovereignty in Historical Context, in Whitfield, L. (ed.), The Politics of Aid. African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (pp. 45–​73). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harman, S., & Brown, W. (2013). “In From the Margins? The Changing Place of Africa in International Relations.” International Affairs, 89(1): 69–​87. DOI: 10.1111/​1468-​2346.12005. Harrison, G. (2004). The World Bank and Africa. The Construction of Governance States. London: Routledge. Horner, R., & Hulme, D. (2019). “From International to Global Development: New Geographies of 21st Century Development.” Development and Change, 50(2): 347–​ 378. DOI: 10.1111/​ dech.12379. Hynes,W., & Scott, S. (2013). The Evolution of Official Development Assistance. Paris: OECD Publishing. Janus, H., Klingebiel, S., & Paulo, S. (2015). “Beyond Aid: A Conceptual Perspective on the Transformation of Development Cooperation.” Journal of International Development, 27(2): 155–​ 169. DOI: 10.1002/​jid.3045. Kragelund, P. (2019). South–​South Development. London: Routledge. Mawdsley, E. (2015). “DFID, the Private Sector and the Re-​centring of an Economic Growth Agenda in International Development.” Global Society, 29(3): 339–​ 358. DOI: 10.1080/​ 13600826.2015.1031092. Mawdsley, E. (2018). “The ‘Southernisation’ of Development?” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59(2): 173–​ 185. DOI: 10.1111/​apv.12192. Rist, G. (2008). The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (3rd edn). London: Zed Books. Stokke, O. (1995). “Aid and Political Conditionality: Core Issues and State of the Art,” In Stokke, O. (ed.), Aid and Political Conditionality (pp. 1–​87). London: Frank Cass. Verschaeve, J., & Orbie, J. (2016). “The DAC is Dead, Long Live the DCF? A Comparative Analysis of the OECD Development Assistance Committee and the UN Development Cooperation Forum.” European Journal of Development Research, 28(4): 571–​587. DOI: 10.1057/​ejdr.2015.27. Whitfield, L. (ed). (2008). The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors. Oxford: OUP. Woods, N. (2008). “Whose Aid? Whose Influence? China, Emerging Donors and the Silent Revolution in Development Assistance.” International Affairs, 84(6): 1205–​1221. World Bank. (1981). Accelerated Development in Sub-​Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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15  The developmental state, globalisation, and structural transformations Paul Bowles

History shows that the now industrialised countries (the ‘developed’ world) did not reach their current status by following the neoliberal policies that have been widely prescribed to developing countries over the past four decades. Neither did the few countries (or economies) that have successfully closed the gap and reached ‘developed’ country status over the past hundred years. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and erstwhile challenger China have all relied heavily on state intervention—​on a developmental state. While other chapters in this volume point to the particular contributions of Latin America to development theory, including dependency theory, Bello (2009) has described the developmental state as the East Asian contribution to development theory. It has proven to be the one development model capable of enabling countries to reach the same levels of living standards as those found in the countries that initially went through the industrial revolution and claimed their places at the top of international hierarchy. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Singapore is close to that of the US, Hong Kong’s exceeds Germany’s, and South Korea’s is higher than that of Spain.1 But these examples are very much the exception rather than the rule (see Wade, 2020). The theory of the developmental state is primarily a theory of industrialisation and it takes the industrial revolution as its starting point (rather than, say, European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th century and the formation of a ‘world system’). The role of the state is, of course, one of the central issues in the study of development.The dominant neoliberal paradigm ascribes to the state the basic functions of establishing and protecting private property rights, providing infrastructure, and facilitating education and health services as well as security in a military sense. All of this should be provided by a competent, transparent administrative arm adopting the principles of ‘good governance’. In the economic sphere, the state is seen as advancing the development process by adopting ‘market-​friendly’ policies, ‘getting prices right’, and allowing and ensuring that markets operate to mobilise and allocate those scarce resources available to developing countries. This policy orthodoxy reached its zenith with the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1989). This remains the main policy thrust today, even if some wrinkles, such as the need to better regulate financial markets and allow some capital controls, are more common. Under Trump, protectionism and economic nationalism re-​emerged in the US but it is not aimed at providing a development ladder for others but at preserving old hierarchies. This chapter discusses three main issues. The first is what analytically constitutes a developmental state, drawing upon East Asian country experience. The second concerns whether, and in what forms, developmental states are possible given the current configurations of power at the global level and the organisation of global capitalism, in DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-18

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130  Paul Bowles short, in the face of ‘globalisation’. The third issue concerns the desirability of the model, given the oppression that has, historically, accompanied it. Recommended reading: Bello (2009); Wade (2020).

The analytics of the ‘classic developmental state’ In the 1960s, the post-​independence developing states expected to make the most economic progress were typically identified as resource-​rich countries such as Ghana and Brazil. Resource-​poor, population-​dense countries in East Asia were not expected to become the next industrialising countries. And yet they did. By the 1980s, it became clear that a select number of states were making the transition from primarily agricultural to industrial countries at remarkable speed and with considerable success, as measured by rising GDP per capita. They achieved this in part by success in export markets.The rise of the so-​called newly industrialising countries (NICs) in the 1980s was initially interpreted by mainstream development economists as proof of the follies of import-​substituting industrialisation strategies and the ‘export pessimism’ of dependency theory. The East Asian NICs proved this thinking wrong, it was argued, and the success of export-​oriented industrialisation was seamlessly translated into proof of the efficacy of trade openness and free-​market policies in general. This interpretation of the NIC experience was subject to detailed critique by a group of critical development scholars who convincingly demonstrated that the NICs’ success posed a major challenge for free-​market orthodoxy and provided definitive evidence of the possibility of an alternative development path based on state activism. Bienefeld (1981) argued that the position of the NICs in the international political economy demonstrated that some of the key propositions of dependency theory were still relevant for explaining the success of the NICs. To expand on this point, the external environment still played a crucial role in determining states’ development prospects although, in this case, by providing a positive window of opportunity. The geographical location of the NICs—​all in East Asia—​was no coincidence. This was the region of the world in which capitalism confronted communism in its most brutal form, war. This was not just the region of a ‘Cold War’, fought at the ideological level, but of actual war fought on the ground in the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam. South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore were all potential dominoes and central to the fight against communism. For this reason, they received unquestioned military support from the US and pursued economic policies with a degree of autonomy that was not afforded to other countries; access to the US markets for exports was not a problem either. Furthermore, land reforms were instituted in South Korea and Taiwan that led to relatively equal land holdings and were designed to remove the basis for peasant revolution. In all these respects, the East Asian NICs were unusual, a deviance from the more typical position of developing countries, resulting from their unique geopolitical location in the fight against communism (Stubbs, 2012). This geopolitical position also had internal consequences. National survival was by no means guaranteed and economic development was imperative. National survival provided the state with the legitimacy to play a leading role in the economy and to shape the mobilisation and allocation of resources to meet the economic development imperative. Critical development scholars argued that the starting point for analysing how this was done was not the free-​market thinking of Adam Smith, as mainstream development economists would have us believe, but the state interventionism of theorists such

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The developmental state  131 as Friedrich List (1841) and Alexander Gerschenkron (1962). These theorists argued that ‘late industrialisation’ in Europe by Germany and France, for example, required a degree of state intervention much greater than the initial industrialiser—​Great Britain—​because the obstacles which they faced in competing with the world’s dominant industrial powerhouse of the time demanded it. The theory of ‘late industrialisation’ was equally relevant, it was argued, for the analysis of the success of the ‘late, late industrialisers’ of East Asia. Pioneering work of Amsden (1989) and Woo Cummings (1991) on South Korea and Wade (1990) on Taiwan showed how state policy was critical in shaping development and, in Wade’s famous phrase, ‘governing the market’. Referencing Japan’s earlier development trajectory (as analysed by Johnson, 1982), Amsden and Wade demonstrated that the state had played a central role in the economic development success story of the two countries and that, furthermore, the suite of policies followed were consistent and coherent to the point that they could constitute an alternative model of (capitalist) development. The basic pillars of what became known as the theory of the classic developmental state were as follows. Firstly, the state was focused on and committed to national development as a security and survival requirement and had a relatively competent and corruption-​free bureaucracy which implemented policy decisions. Secondly, the political underpinnings required a state that was supportive of, but also relatively autonomous from, capital. Thirdly, market interventions were necessary in the key areas of finance, trade, technology, industry, and labour to ensure that markets were governed in ways that maximised resource mobilisation and optimised long-​term resource allocation; free markets with their short-​termism could not be trusted to deliver this. In the area of finance, finance capital was subject to the needs of industrial capital. Bank-​based systems dominated (as in Japan and Germany) with only a minor role for stock markets. Furthermore, the banks were subject to state-​directed policy loans that supported key firms and industries at subsidised interest rates. Setting the interest rate on loans low in this way was one example of how these developmental states were, in Amsden’s words, deliberately ‘getting prices wrong’ in contrast to the ‘getting prices right’ policy advice mantra of the Washington Consensus. In the realm of trade, the state set companies’ and industries’ export growth targets. To avoid the balance-​of-​payments-​constrained growth that had plagued many developing countries, state policy sought to expand exports and generate the foreign exchange necessary to pay for rising imports of technology and consumer goods. These export targets did not take the form of blank cheques but rather were more akin to contracts between firms and governments. In an environment of undervalued exchange rates and in return for access to policy loans and to technology, firms had to prove themselves and meet their export targets; if they did not, they risked governments closing their access to policy loans, merging firms, or supporting rival firms instead. South Korea and Taiwan had different industrial structures, with South Korea favouring the large-​conglomerate, chaebol, model and Taiwan characterised by more medium-​sized and family firms, but they were similar in their approaches to export targeting. In short, firms were disciplined by their need to be competitive in export markets but, equally importantly, they were disciplined by the state in their access to capital. The state also intervened in the field of technology, sponsoring domestic research and innovation, supporting key sectors, and ensuring that imports of the latest technology were available to firms; technological acquisition and adoption were facilitated by the role of foreign direct investment assessed on its ability to contribute to this goal. This was particularly evident in information communication and technology

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132  Paul Bowles (ICT) industries and the global success of Taiwanese company Acer and South Korea’s Samsung, for example, would not have happened without state support and intervention from the earliest stages. As well as constraining capital as described above, the developmental state disciplined labour. Mobilising and directing resources for investment left no room for organised labour to directly stake a claim for an increased share of the national income; the East Asia developmental state was authoritarian.To prevent wages rising, trade unions were initially banned and the fight for labour rights, as well as the wider transition to democracy, was often bloody and brutal. Industrialisation may have been shortened compared to the early industrialisers but it came with many of the same struggles. The East Asian path also had a clear gender dimension too, with ‘export-​led growth’ also capable of being described as ‘female-​led growth’ given the preponderance of young, unmarried women employed/​ exploited in export-​processing zones (see Berik, 2005, for review). The success of the NICs in the last two decades of the 20th century therefore challenged conventional development thinking.The classic developmental state model, sometimes also known as the East Asian model, became a contentious point in the development debate. The World Bank, in its 1993 East Asian Miracle report, sought to again claim the NICs’ success for its policy stance, an attempt that Wade (1996) termed ‘paradigm maintenance’. Ironically, within a few years though, leading mainstream economists were all too pleased to attribute statism to the NICs and other Asian countries and to blame this for the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The developmental state model with its high levels of state-​directed credit and ‘crony capitalist’ relations between states, banks, and firms was identified as the culprit. But the proclamations of the superiority of the Anglo-​American financial system proved ill judged, as the global financial crisis in 2008 showed. But the implications of the ‘forces of globalisation’ for the developmental state became a key question. Recommended reading: Amsden (1989); Bienefeld (1981); Stubbs (2012); Wade (1990).

Developmental states and globalisation The classic developmental states posed a significant challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy and provided examples of the key role that has been played by state activism in the development process, but the subsequent processes of ‘globalisation’ have widely been seen as reducing the feasibility of national development models. New forms of economic nationalism and state capitalism have also emerged over the past decade but the impacts of globalisation remain of central importance. In order to examine this further, I briefly consider the implications of four globalisation processes: finance, production, trade, and climate change (see Bowles, 2020, for an extended discussion). The globalisation of finance, and the rise in international capital flows associated with it since the 1980s, has been argued to significantly constrain the ability of states to undertake autonomous policies of national development. During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, erstwhile star developmental state South Korea was hit hard and this served to undermine the case for the model. However, state activism in the financial sector still continues in South Korea (Thurbon, 2016) and the political scope for intervention in financial markets to support domestic production more generally has increased over the past decade in many parts of the world, including during the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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The developmental state  133 The globalisation of production, meaning the sub-​division of the production process and its distribution between different firms and across countries in the form of global value chains or global production networks, poses a more serious threat to national economic development models. The lead firms in these networks, global in operation and powerful in practice, do impose limits on the ability of national governments to promote and influence their own economic structures. Thus, a running shoe, for example, may be designed in the US, manufactured with low-​cost labour in Vietnam, using imported leather from Australia, in a factory managed by a Taiwanese firm, with the accounting and trade functions undertaken by a Hong Kong firm, and marketed in North America and Europe by a German firm. This, far from atypical, description of global production, poses significant challenges for a developmental state; how can policy interventions be made in the face of such a global value chain to promote national industrial development? For many developing countries, the policy choice seems to have been reduced to how best to ‘strategically couple’ with large global firms so that they can become part of a global chain and, hopefully, capture higher parts of the value chain over time. This is a far cry from the conditions necessary to promote genuine national industrial development and technological capacity in the way that the classic developmental states were able to. Some countries, especially large ones, may still be able to develop and promote their own ‘national champions’ but even China has found this challenging and is in many ways integrated into global networks. While COVID-​19 has placed the operations of and reliance on global value chains under scrutiny, especially in the medical equipment sector, a longer-​term shift away from global value chains is open to question (Gereffi, 2020). The globalisation of trade has a number of complex implications for the possibility of the developmental state in the current period. Firstly, the policy space for national development has shrunk as a result of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade rules, as well as those embedded in regional and bilateral trade agreements. The overarching aim of trade rules has been to ensure that all producers are treated ‘equally’, meaning that preferential treatment for domestic producers, local content procurement policies, ‘subsidies’ of any number of varieties, are seen as undesirable and violations of the rules. This places states in a ‘straitjacket’ and removes from them much of the policy space that is needed for developmentalist aims. Not only that, it removes from contemporary states the policies which the now-​industrialised countries used to reach their current status. This situation has been described by Chang (2002) as ‘kicking away the ladder’, the removal of the ability of countries to use the policy tools of trade protectionism, infant industry support and industrial policies, and credit policies, for example, which variously enabled Britain, Germany, France, and the US to become the industrial powers that they are today. Secondly, the globalisation of trade over the past four decades is partly the result of China’s re-​emergence as a global manufacturing centre, a process which has undermined the ability of other developing countries to compete and to fashion their own industrial paths in the way that the classic East Asian developmental states did in an earlier period. Thirdly, however, another side of China’s growth has been its demand for raw materials and a global commodities boom during the 2003–​2014 period. It was in this context that the resource rents generated by this boom led to discussion of possibilities for resource-​ rich countries in Africa and elsewhere to adopt developmental state policies (Singh & Ovadia, 2018). This also opened up the possibility for new forms of the developmental

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134  Paul Bowles state, based not on close state–​business relations, but on new configurations of state–​ society or state–​labour relations. It also broadened the focus of the developmental state from focus on economic aggregates to general welfare measures. The globalisation of trade therefore has complex implications for the workings of the developmental state and its applicability in the contemporary period. The same can be said of a fourth globalisation process, that of global climate change. The role of the classic developmental state in supporting industrial development and in overcoming the opposition of powerful interests—​such as landlords—​which opposed some policies, has resonated with some who see the state as similarly necessary to support a green industrial transition and to overcome the opposition of powerful interests such as fossil fuel corporations. The guiding role of the state is needed to force a ‘green transition’ in the face of the market failures and powerful corporate interests which have led to global climate change. In addition, a number of states are now vying to gain a lead role in the provision of green technology and products for transition to a low-​carbon future through policy interventions as is evident in Singapore, South Korea, China, and India, for example (Dent, 2018; Kemp & Never, 2017). However, this type of developmental state activity is no longer reserved only for developing countries—​it has also been applied to the EU and some of its member states, and even to the US. This represents a quite different evolution and application of the developmental state model. Recommended reading: Bowles (2020); Chang (2002); Singh and Ovadia (2018).

Structural transformations The developmental state paradigm has historically been seen as the path for industrialisation and catch-​up for late industrialisers. Its interest for critical development scholars has been in the success, in economic terms, that has been achieved for the handful of countries that have ‘caught up’ with the initial industrialisers, a success which has been achieved following policies many of which are inimical to neoliberal orthodoxy. The contemporary period has seen the efficacy of the paradigm questioned by globalisation but, as we have seen, this is a complex question. The global commodities boom and the challenge of global climate change have seen the developmental state paradigm adapted to new situations, which move the analysis well beyond the East Asian countries to which it was originally applied. Countries in Africa and Latin America have been included as examples and paths to higher human welfare and to low-​carbon structural transitions have been examined in addition to the path to industrialisation. The developmental state in practice, however, despite its success in mobilising resources for investment, and creating and transferring surplus to industry, has done so in ways which have been socially wrenching and destructive. The classic developmental state in East Asia produced many of the same brutalities of industrialisation that occurred among the early industrialisers and which are being heaped upon the Chinese working class today. While efforts to construct a ‘democratic developmental state’ in South Africa, for example, have been examined based on the African National Congress (ANC)’s explicit endorsement of this strategy (Edigheji, 2010), scepticism is still warranted (see Ashman, Chapter 20, this volume). Whatever structural transformations are envisaged, whether from a primarily agricultural to an industrialised economy or from a high-​carbon to a low-​carbon world, the class structure of the state, and who gains and who loses, and who has agency in the

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The developmental state  135 transformational processes, are central questions for critical development studies. State-​ led models of development, of which the developmental state is a prime and influential example, must always confront these questions. Recommended reading: Edigheji (2010); Selwyn (Chapter 26, this volume).

Note 1 Based on 2019 gross domestic income per capita (Atlas method, current US$) figures available from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database.

References Amsden, A. (1989). Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bello, W. (2009). “States and Markets, States Versus Markets: The Developmental State Debate as the Distinctive East Asian Contribution to International Political Economy,” in Blyth, M. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE): IPE as a Global Conversation, pp. 180–​ 200. London: Routledge. Berik, G. (2005). Growth with Gender Inequity:Another Look at East Asian Development. Geneva: United Nations Research Institue for Social Development . Bienefeld, M. (1981). “Dependency and the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs): Towards a Reappraisal,” in Seers, D. (ed.), Dependency Theory: A Critical Assessment. London: Frances Pinter. Bowles, P. (2020). “The Developmental State and the Study of Globalizations.” Globalizations, 17(8): 1421–​1438. DOI: 10.1080/​14747731.2020.1724245. Chang, H.-​J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. London: Anthem Press. Dent, C. (2018). “East Asia’s New Developmentalism: State Capacity, Climate Change and Low-​ Carbon Development.” Third World Quarterly, 39(6): 1191–​1210. Edigheji, O. (ed.) (2010). Constructing a Democratic Developmental State in South Africa: Potentials and Challenges. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Gereffi, G. (2020). “What Does the COVID-​19 Pandemic Teach Us About Global Value Chains? The Case of Medical Supplies.” Journal of International Business Policy, 3: 287–​301. https://​doi. org/​10.1057/​s42214-​020-​00062-​w. Gerschenkron, A. (1962). Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, C. (1982). MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–​ 75. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kemp, R., & Never, B. (2017). “Green Transition, Industrial Policy, and Economic Development.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 33(1): 66–​84. List,F.(1841).The National System of Political Economy (translated by Lloyd,S.).London:Longmans,Green. Singh, J., & Ovadia, J. (2018). “The Theory and Practice of Building Developmental States in the Global South.” Third World Quarterly, 39(6): 1033–​1055. Stubbs, R. (2012). “The Developmental State and Asian Regionalism,” in Beeson, M. & Stubbs, R. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Asian Regionalism, pp. 90–​99. London: Routledge. Thurbon, E. (2016). Developmental Mindset: The Revival of Financial Activism in South Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wade, R. (1990). Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wade, R. (1996). “Japan, the World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective.” New Left Review, I(217): 3–​36.

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136  Paul Bowles Wade, R. (2020). “Rethinking the World Economy as a Two-​Bloc Hierarchy.” Real-​World Economics Review, 29: June 4–​21. Williamson, J. (1989). “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Williamson, J. (ed.), Latin American Readjustment: How Much has Happened. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. Woo-​Cummings, M. (1991). Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. World Bank. (1993). The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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16  Local economic development, microcredit, and financial inclusion Milford Bateman

Every so often in the field of development policy an idea or concept comes along that is simple, it seems to work very quickly, it ‘feels good’, and it receives a boundless amount of financial and other forms of support from the global community—​yet it is a fundamentally misconceived concept and time inevitably shows that it does not actually work in practice. The once-​universally celebrated concept of microcredit is now seen as one of the most important recent examples of this phenomenon. First making an appearance in Latin America in the 1960s, but essentially popularised in the 1980s by the Bangladeshi economist and subsequent (in 2006) Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit model perfectly reflected the free-​market zeitgeist of the time (Yunus, 1989). The new neoliberal era beginning in the early 1980s claimed that private entrepreneurship and free markets should be the dominant drivers of development and economic growth. Since the microcredit model provided the tiny loan sums—​microloans—​that could assist the poor in the Global South to move into petty entrepreneurship projects and self-​employment, it could hardly fail to be a popular intervention among the new generation of neoliberal policymakers. Sure enough, almost right away the microcredit model was being very widely described as the key to poverty reduction in the Global South.Yunus famously went on record as saying that the microcredit model would ‘eradicate poverty in a generation’. From the mid-​1990s onwards the microcredit model began to receive massive amounts of financial, technical, and political support, and by the mid-​2000s it was being widely described as the most effective international development policy of all time. Yet almost immediately after such heady rhetoric reached its peak the case in favour of the microcredit model began to implode with astonishing rapidity. The beginning of this reversal in fortunes can be very accurately timed to April 2007, when the now-​giant Banco Compartamos, Mexico’s largest microcredit bank, underwent an initial public offering (IPO). Long self-​described as making massive inroads into poverty in Mexico, the reality exposed by the IPO process turned out to be something completely different. Thanks to very high interest rates (from 98 per cent to as much as 195 per cent per year at times), its senior staff became multi-​millionaires and its outside shareholders made hundreds of millions of dollars in gains, while no evidence was produced then (or since) to show that this egregious private enrichment had been of any meaningful benefit to Mexico’s poor. In the wake of the IPO there was understandable astonishment and anger within the microcredit community. But this only lasted a short while. Very quickly, in fact, the Compartamos IPO was reborn as the ‘role model’ for managers and shareholders attached to other microcredit institutions to use in order to also become spectacularly rich. The global microcredit sector had been ‘Wall Street-​ised’ and turned into a money-​making DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-19

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138  Milford Bateman machine designed to benefit its CEOs, senior managers, shareholders, external investors, so-​called ‘social entrepreneurs’, advisors, and others also hoping to get rich by ostensibly ‘helping the poor’. A further hammer blow was then inflicted from 2010 onwards, thanks to the introduction of much more accurate evaluation methodologies. This important development was to reveal that it was not just in Mexico that there was no evidence to confirm that microcredit imparted a positive impact on poverty and local economic development.The positive results of even the most trusted studies and impact evaluations were soon being over-​turned and debunked all across the Global South. One of the reasons why microcredit was increasingly seen as problematic was because far too many microcredit institutions were shown to be pushing out levels of microcredit that were ultimately way beyond the capacity of the local economy to productively absorb. As on Wall Street in the run-​up to the 2008 financial crash that was driven by greedy bank CEOs sanctioning the oversupply of sub-​prime mortgages to the poor in developed countries, many unscrupulous microcredit institutions realised that they, too, could make huge profits by sanctioning the oversupply of sub-​prime (i.e., high-​r isk) microloans right across the Global South. Spectacular levels of individual over-​indebtedness began to arise across the world’s poorest communities, which naturally greatly contributed to —​rather than resolved—​their poverty, insecurity and deprivation.When over-​indebtedness finally began to peak and inevitably turn into default, this precipitated a rapid growth in the number of destructive ‘microcredit meltdowns’. The first of these ‘microcredit meltdown’ events took place in Bolivia in 1999, but from around 2007 ‘microcredit meltdowns’ broke out in Bosnia, Nicaragua, Morocco, and Pakistan. And then in 2010 there was the largest and most destructive meltdown to date in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, a collapse very clearly precipitated by the reckless growth strategies pursued by the CEOs of the ‘big six’ microcredit institutions, all of whom hoped to get very rich very quickly (Arunachalam, 2011). The most problematic country at present is Cambodia, which possesses the world’s largest (on a per capita basis) and most profitable microcredit sector, but also, and not coincidentally, the most over-​indebted client population in the world (Bateman, 2019). By the end of 2019, many other developing countries were also poised for a meltdown. This includes Peru, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and India (once again, but this time in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal) (see Bateman, Blankenburg, & Kozul-​Wright, 2019). Perhaps worst of all for the microcredit movement, the evidence began to suggest that microcredit was actually destroying those poor communities that had placed their trust in it as a way of developing the local economy and reducing poverty. With financial support for all manner of informal microenterprises rising dramatically in recent years, and much more productive and transformational formal small and medium enterprises (SMEs) increasingly starved of financial support as a direct result, far too many local communities in the Global South soon found themselves trapped in a de-​industrialising and informalising ‘poverty trap’ of their own making. In other words, microcredit ‘crowded out’ the more productive and dynamic SME sector. Not surprisingly, the original purveyors of the microcredit model were forced on to the defensive. However, while even long-​time microcredit advocates began to concede that the microcredit model was dead in the water in terms of its local economic development and poverty reduction effectiveness, it was still nowhere near finished as an international development community intervention. Within neoliberal policymaking circles

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Microcredit and financial inclusion  139 any criticism of microcredit, and the central role that individual entrepreneurship supposedly plays in the development process, was seen as criticism of capitalism itself. Accordingly, the World Bank was selected to mount a rescue plan to save the microcredit model. The way found to do this was to redefine microcredit as but one component of a much wider set of micro-​financial interventions, known collectively as ‘financial inclusion’. Imbued with a new (false) aura of humanitarian concern, legitimacy, and effectiveness, the failed microcredit model lives on within the architecture of the new financial inclusion movement. More recently, huge excitement has been created by the arrival of new financial technologies—​‘fintech’ for short—​which many hope will prove to be a game-​changer for the microcredit industry because it enables microcredit to be offered ‘at the touch of a button’ via a mobile phone or smart device. Even more recently, one of the outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is to have thrown very many microcredit institutions into crisis due to the non-​repayment of microloans by poor clients who, for a variety of reasons, were no longer in possession of an income. It remains to be seen what the long-​term damage to the global microcredit sector will be. However, the rapid provision of various bail-​out programmes is a strong indication that the international development community intends to save as much of this private infrastructure as possible. Recommended reading: Bateman, Blankenburg, and Kozul-​Wright (2019).

Four key claims to consider Microcredit reduces poverty through the creation of informal microenterprises and additional incomes The basic idea behind microcredit was that it would provide the crucial wherewithal—​a microloan—​which the poor would be able to creatively use in order to begin a range of informal income-​generating business activities. This, it was assumed, would create an income for that individual and thereby a gradual exit from poverty. A number of other benefits were also envisaged, notably gender empowerment. When, in the 1990s, the global microcredit sector was commercialised and privatised, and the supply of microcredit began to increase quite dramatically, the excitement grew even further. Microcredit advocates argued that the developing world was on the cusp of massive poverty reduction. By the early 2010s, however, the evidence began to turn against the microcredit model in a very big way. Duvendack et al.’s (2011) systematic review of virtually all the impact evaluation evidence to date proved to be one of the most devastating studies, finding almost no real evidence to confirm that there was a positive impact. Indeed, such was the categorically negative nature of their findings that the authors were forced to conclude that the microcredit concept had effectively been ‘built on foundations of sand’ (Duvendack et al., 2011: 76). Many of the one-​time leading advocates of the microcredit model grudgingly began to accept the rather awkward reality that experience, as well as the deployment of supposedly more accurate evaluation methodologies, showed that microcredit did not work for the poor in general (Bateman, Blankenburg, & Kozul-​ Wright, 2019) or for women in particular (Maclean, 2017). What had gone wrong? One of the most important explanations for the microcredit model’s failure to reduce poverty is actually quite simple.The basic idea was to use microcredit to help the poor to produce a simple item or provide a basic service that, it was assumed, would always generate an income. The heroic assumption made here was that

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140  Milford Bateman there would never be any problems profitably selling these outputs in the local community. It was held to be a valid assumption even in the very poorest communities, where by definition the poor are engaged in a life-​or-​death struggle to afford the simple items and services conducive to their day-​to-​day survival, and which were quite readily available to them—​if they just had the cash. However, this fundamental assumption was wrong.Those who constructed the microcredit model had overlooked one of the most famous fallacies in economics—​the mistaken idea that supply creates its own demand. As Amsden (2010) argued, the core poverty problem in the Global South over the last 30 or so years was not an insufficient supply of the basic goods and services needed by the poor to survive, but the poor’s sheer lack of purchasing power (effective demand) necessary to actually obtain these things. This very simple fact, as Bateman (2010) points out, very largely accounts for why Yunus’s microcredit model essentially failed to resolve poverty. One of the most disturbing illustrations of what went wrong in practice comes from South Africa, in the early 1990s one of the test-​beds for the global microcredit movement. In the post-​apartheid era after 1994 there was a marked uptick in the formation of new microenterprises (entry) but also an equally high number of failures (exit) brought about because of the limited local demand. This resulted in much less net job creation in the poorest townships and rural communities than was expected. Moreover, these limited employment gains were completely swamped by an astonishing overall decline in average informal sector self-​employment incomes that resulted from (among other factors) the increased competition within the informal economy (Bateman, 2015). Recommended reading: Bateman (2015); Duvendack et al. (2011); Maclean (2017). Microcredit promotes local economic development in the longer term With virtually no evidence to show that microcredit was making a positive short-​term impact on poverty, microcredit advocates were forced to shift their position. A fallback argument was deployed that took a new line: that the most important impacts of microcredit were actually to be found in the longer term. The main argument developed here was to partially concede that new microcredit-​assisted informal microenterprises would always meet local demand constraints, and that there may also be market fluctuations, declining average incomes, and ‘job churn’ (a high level of entry but an equally high level of exit) that actually disadvantaged the poor in the short term. But the microcredit model would nevertheless eventually create a thriving local economy because it would gradually expand, consolidate, and inter-​connect the local economy. Among other things, at least some of the many more informal microenterprises created would evolve into formally registered SMEs, which economic history shows form the dynamic core of most successful local economies. However, critics argued that, just as with regard to the short-​term impact, the longer-​ term impact of microcredit is also absent, if not the exact opposite to that proposed by the leading advocates of the microcredit model. Most notably, this negative view applies to Latin America under two decades of neoliberalism (the 1980s and 1990s). Due to economic activity shifting over to low productivity informal microenterprises and self-​ employment ventures during this period, not least because of the stimulation provided by the super-​abundance of microcredit, the result was rapidly declining levels of innovation, technology adoption, scale, and so also productivity. Bateman (2013) argues that this change very much helps explain the economic and social calamity that took place

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Microcredit and financial inclusion  141 in these turbulent years. Importantly, this negative view was indirectly backed up by many economists at the Inter-​American Development Bank (IDB) (Pagés, 2010: 6), who collectively described the programmed shift of economic activity into the informal microenterprise sector and self-​employment ventures as the single most important cause of the continent’s rapidly rising levels of poverty and deprivation during the neoliberal era. Clearly, helping create more microenterprises was not the solution to poverty. All across Africa, too, the microcredit-​ supported expansion of the informal microenterprise sector has been found wanting. Largely, this is because it has also come at the expense of the formal SME sector, which has been starved of credit on affordable terms and maturities. As Chang (2010: 157–​167) and Cramer, Sender, and Oqubay (2020: 65–​72) all point out, Africa effectively remains trapped in its poverty precisely because its increasingly microcredit-​dominated financial structure has in the last 30 years or so patently helped to evolve a hugely unproductive microenterprise-​dominated economic structure right across the continent (see also Chang and Andreoni, 2021). Recommended reading: Cramer, Sender, and Oqubay (2020); Pagés (2010). Microcredit is all about helping the poor It is an object of faith that the pioneers of microcredit were overwhelmingly motivated by nothing other than their burning desire to help the global poor escape their poverty. Even when under US government and World Bank pressure in the 1990s to convert the microcredit model into a for-​profit business model, the feeling was that this important development would allow the microcredit model to even better serve the global poor. Critics would argue, however, that the microcredit movement was actually given its wings in the 1980s because of anything but genuine concern for the plight of the global poor. Rather, the microcredit model was supported because of its obvious serviceability to the neoliberal project. While the global microcredit movement is unequivocally associated with the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the 1980s, its actual genesis as a policy intervention is located in the extreme concern permeating the US government and US business establishment in the 1960s, which was that increasingly restive poor populations around the globe were evolving the potential and capacity to challenge the established US-​led global political and economic order. Above all else, the US government feared the prospect of the global poor organising collectively through trade unions, pro-​poor leftist political parties and elected governments, social movements and, worst of all, Cuba-​style revolutions, and thus evolving a successful and equitable non-​capitalist development model. However, it was hoped that with the help of microcredit and a major public relations effort in all corners of the Global South, beginning in Latin America, the poor could instead be seduced into believing that the most realistic way of escaping their poverty was through engaging in individual entrepreneurship. By ‘bringing capitalism down to the poor’ in such a way, the US was attempting to avoid real structural change taking place. As it turned out, by denying the poor the choice of their own tools to resolve their poverty collectively, and thus shutting down the opportunity to follow in the path of the richest countries that had earlier used exactly such tools in the course of escaping their own poverty and underdevelopment, the poor could be and were ‘contained’ (Chang, 2007). Another reason why microcredit was perfectly attuned to the neoliberal agenda was because it was discovered to be a way not just of disempowering the poor organisationally and politically, but financially too. As Mader (2015) shows, poor communities around the

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142  Milford Bateman globe are now being programmatically drained of their remaining wealth under cover of ‘promoting poverty reduction’. Managers working within the main microcredit institutions, and even the CEOs employed in supposedly selfless microcredit advocacy bodies (famously in the case of such high-​ profile global microfinance advocacy bodies as the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA) and Accion—​see Sinclair, 2012), all began to demand and receive multi-​million-​dollar salaries, massive pension payments, and ultra-​generous bonus packages. Foreign investors and private commercial banks, many of them registered in tax havens, increasingly began to seek out microcredit institutions to buy out and turn into ‘cash-​cows’ that could coldly extract as much value from the poor as possible. Finally, as the example of Kenya and its iconic M-​Pesa money transfer system demonstrates (see Bateman, Duvendack, & Loubere, 2019), by gradually eradicating cash and instead mediating the petty financial transactions of the global poor via their mobile phones or smart devices, including their demand for microcredit, fintech has opened up the possibility for corporations and investors to ‘digitally mine’ massive amounts of value from the Global South. By the end of the 2000s, all pretence of a social mission had been abandoned in the world of microcredit. As clearly intended by some, the commercialisation and more recent digitalisation of the microcredit industry have resulted in an unprecedented global scramble for profit. What has followed is the creation of a massive flow of financial resources moving up from poor individuals and communities in the Global South, and into the hands of a small number of global banks, hedge funds, pension funds, and special microfinance investment vehicles (MIVs), all located in the main global financial centres or offshore tax havens. Microcredit in the neoliberal era was thus turned into one of the purest, and most exploitative, sub-​categories of what has been termed the ‘financialisation’ of the global economy. Recommended reading: Bateman, Duvendack, and Loubere (2019); Mader (2015). The new financial inclusion movement represents a bold new move that will help the poor even more than before With no genuine evidence to confirm its effectiveness as an anti-​poverty intervention in either the short or the longer term, the international development community ended up with a serious problem on its hands: microcredit did not work. Yet it was impossible for the international development community to simply ditch the failed microcredit model, since that would also mean invalidating the central role of informal microenterprises and self-​help which were otherwise the key ideological foundations of the local neoliberal model preferred by the international development community. Accordingly, the microcredit model was subsumed within what became known as the ‘financial inclusion’ movement. Defined as the drive to endow the poor in developing countries with the most basic financial tools routinely used in the developed countries (credit, savings accounts, payment cards, mobile money systems, etc.), the financial inclusion movement was set up to act as a sort of witness protection programme for the failed microcredit model. It provided the microcredit model with a new life, a new name, and it was no longer as visible to outsiders. Effectively led by the World Bank (2014), the financial inclusion movement was launched in the mid-​2000s and it quickly went on to become the new darling of the international development community.

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Microcredit and financial inclusion  143 Legitimation for the financial inclusion movement was provided by a number of long-​time advocates of the microcredit model. One very important early contribution on this theme was provided by Porteous and Hazelhurst (2004).Their argument was that financial inclusion was a way of ‘democratising finance’, with equal access to finance theorized as being of immense benefit to the poor. However, the argument now was not about securing poverty reduction. Ensuring the poor were ‘included’ in the local financial system, and thus given equal access to a range of suitably scaled-​down financial instruments, would simply help the poor to manage their poverty much better. Arguing along similar lines were Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, and Ruthven (2009) in their best-​selling book Portfolios of the Poor. Importantly, as in the work by Porteous and Hazelhurst, there is a refusal to go into the rather central issue of how and why the poor find themselves in such a desperate situation in the first place, who might be benefiting from the prevailing social arrangements, and could they be changed to benefit the poor? Critics argue that the mass of evidence from the field does not offer any support for the financial inclusion movement’s main contentions. As Mader (2016) shows, the central claims of the financial inclusion narrative are all based on not much more than mere assumption. Notably, while financial sector deepening per se may indeed be positively related to economic development, as King and Levine (1993) reported many years back, there is absolutely nothing in this important literature that suggests that this applies in the special case of financial sector deepening with regard to the poor and to it financing even more informal microenterprises.This is not least because the data used in this literature all refer to the important rise in credit allocated to the enterprise sector as a whole, and not to how much the informal microenterprise sector received compared to small, medium, and large enterprises. Recommended reading: Mader (2016).

References Amsden, A.H. (2010). “Say’s Law, Poverty Persistence, and Employment Neglect.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 1(1): 57–​66. Arunachalam, R. (2011). The Journey of Indian Micro-​finance: Lessons for the Future. Chennai: Aapti Publications. Bateman, M. (2010). Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism. London: Zed Books. Bateman, M. (2013). “The Age of Microfinance: Destroying Latin American Economies from the Bottom Up.” Working Papers, No. 39. Vienna, Austria: Austrian Research Foundation for International Development. Bateman, M. (2015). “South Africa’s Post-​ apartheid Microcredit Experiment: Moving from State-​enforced to Market-​enforced Exploitation.” Forum for Social Economics, DOI: 10.1080/​ 07360932.2015.1056202. Bateman, M. (2019). “Cambodia: The Next Domino to Fall?” in Bateman, M., Blankenburg, S., & Kozul-​Wright, R. (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit: Development, Debt and Disillusion, pp. 166–​193. Oxford: Routledge. Bateman, M., Blankenburg, S., & Kozul-​Wright, R. (eds.) (2019). The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit: Development, Debt and Disillusion. Oxford: Routledge. Bateman, M., Duvendack, M., & Loubere, N. (2019). “Is Fin-​tech the New Panacea for Poverty Alleviation and Local Development? Contesting Suri and Jack’s M-​Pesa Findings Published in Science.” Review of African Political Economy, 46(161): 480–​495.

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144  Milford Bateman Chang, H.-​J. (2007). Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World. London: Random House. Chang, H.-​J. (2010). 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Chang, H-J., & Andreoni, A. (2021). “Bringing Production Back into Development: An Introduction.” The European Journal of Development Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-021-00359-3. Collins, D., Morduch, J., Rutherford, S., & Ruthven, O. (2009). Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cramer, C., Sender, J., & Oqubay, A. (2020). African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duvendack, M., Palmer-​Jones, R., Copestake, J., Hooper, L., Loke,Y., & Rao, N. (2011). What is the Evidence of the Impact of Microfinance on the Well-​being of Poor People?. London: EPPI-​Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. King, R., & Levine, R. (1993). “Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Growth: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Monetary Economics, 32(3): 513–​542. Maclean, K. (2017). “Microfinance and the ‘Woman Question,’” in Bateman, M. & Maclean, K. (eds.), Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon, pp. 251–​264. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press; University of New Mexico Press. Mader, P. (2015). The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financialising Poverty. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mader, P. (2016). Questioning Three Fundamental Assumptions in Financial Inclusion. IDS Evidence Report 176. Brighton, UK: IDS. Pagés, C. (ed.) (2010). The Age of Productivity:Transforming Economies from the Bottom Up. Washington, DC: IDB. Porteous, D., & Hazelhurst, E. (2004). Banking on Change: Democratising Finance in South Africa 1994–​ 2004 and Beyond. Cape Town: Double Storey. Sinclair, H. (2012). Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How Microlending Lost its Way and Betrayed the Poor. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-​Koehler. World Bank. (2014). Global Financial Development Report 2014: Financial Inclusion. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yunus, M. (1989).“Grameen Bank: Organization and Operation,” in Levitsky, J. (ed.) Microenterprises in Developing Countries. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

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Part V

Inside the BRICS

The BRICS—​referring to Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—​is a term which was coined in the early 2000s to describe the greater role being played by these countries in the 21st century. Initially excluding South Africa, it was a grouping whose economic growth was projected to propel the countries to a role challenging the dominance of the G7 countries (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada) in the global economy by 2050. In 2010, South Africa joined the group and summits are held annually.The BRICS became not just a series of growth lines on a chart but a group with organisational capacity, as evidenced by the formation of the New Development Bank by the BRICS countries. This raises the question of whether the BRICS are posing a challenge to the post-​1945 structures of international power. Radhika Desai in Chapter 8 and Peter Kragelund in Chapter 14 discussed some of these issues. But while it is possible to find many articles and books written about the global implications of the ‘rise of the BRICS’, what of the BRICS themselves? What do their development experiences look like notwithstanding their alleged global trajectories? The chapters in this part answers these questions by considering in turn the development successes and failures of four of the BRICS from a critical development perspective. In Chapter 17, Ana Garcia and Miguel Borba de Sá trace Brazil’s complex and often contradictory development phases, showing how global factors have deeply influenced its development outcomes. In Chapter 18, John Harriss sheds light on India’s ‘tortuous transition’, how economic growth has been prioritised over redistribution, and how India remains a country with many challenges in terms of creating the employment and incomes that are needed to lift the many out of poverty and in providing people with necessary education and healthcare. Yin-​Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So, in Chapter 19, critically analyse and evaluate the ‘China model’ and delineate its main features. They show that despite rapid growth and rising average incomes, China is beset by problems of inequality, environmental degradation, and limited technological development. The inequalities evident in China are also found in South Africa. In Chapter 20, Sam Ashman shows how post-​apartheid South Africa continues to face many challenges, including racialised inequality and poverty, precarious employment, financialisation, and climate change. She shows how the legacies of the colonial and apartheid regimes continue to dominate the country’s political economy.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-20

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146  Inside the BRICS

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. 2. 3. 4.

Does it make sense to refer to ‘the BRICS’ as a homogeneous group? Do the BRICS, either collectively or individually, offer a ‘development model’? What dimensions of inequality are evident in the countries of the BRICS? How has global capitalism influenced, and been influenced by, the BRICS?

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17  Brazil Development strategies and peripheral conditions Ana Garcia and Miguel Borba de Sá

The quest for development has been a central feature of Brazilian history and social thought. For about a century (ca. 1850–​1950), there was a history of disputes, both theoretical and practical, between unequivocally free-​market proposals, on the one hand, and several particular industrialising initiatives, or even broad national-​developmentalist planning programmes, on the other. The result of this non-​linear trajectory was that the Brazilian economy gradually transformed itself, even if erratically, both in terms of the composition of its productive matrix and also regarding the destination of its increasing productive capacity. Hence, at each disruption of the international division of labour, caused either by wars or economic ‘depressions’ in Europe and the United States (as in the years 1873, 1914, 1929, 1939), Brazilian business operators tended to respond with ‘import substitution’, i.e., the launching of domestic production of industrial goods, initially of low organic composition of capital, as investments became more oriented towards domestic markets too. In this process, both the traditional agrarian-​exporting class and the mercantile bourgeoisie gradually became more complex as they were transformed into industrial and financial bourgeoisies as well.

ECLAC and the struggle against the primary-​export model The economic debate carried out within the framework of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) since its creation in 1948 should be regarded as both an inheritor and a promoter of a heterodox lineage which dates back a century. By the time Raúl Prebisch wrote The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (1950), the crucial issue for the main economies of the continent, such as, Brazil was not how to get away from the primary-​export model for the first time, but rather a matter of resisting the strong impulse towards returning to it. In his view, the core–periphery structure of the world economy led to a trend towards a longterm deterioration in the terms of trade between the periphery and the industrialised centre. According to Prebisch, the great risk of the 1950s was a temptation to reprimarise the economy as the window of opportunity opened by the intra-​European and North American crises began to close after the Second World War. Unlike the nationalist developmentalism of earlier populist years (ca. 1930–​1945), Prebisch did not see industrialisation as a panacea; nor did he advocate endogenous or ‘autarchic’ growth for peripheral economies. For Prebisch, the solution was not to delink from the world system, but rather to discover the conditions under which greater dividends could be gained from actively participating in it. As we see it, his argument was DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-21

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148  Ana Garcia and Miguel Borba de Sá more cosmopolitan than nationalistic, designed to persuade decision makers rather than to confront them with a popular mobilisation of the underprivileged classes. What is most innovative in Prebisch’s approach is neither his critique of Latin America’s ‘agrarian vocation’, nor his defence of industrialisation as a way of ‘retaining some of the fruits of technical progress’ (Prebisch, 1950: 10).What distinguishes Prebisch’s formulations is that they played a major political role precisely at the climax of century-old polemics about free trade and the pros and cons of the primary-​export model within the international division of labour. In their historical context, Prebisch and ECLAC were able to formulate a critique of David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in a way that was palatable for broad sectors of the Latin American, European, and North American political elites, thus having a huge impact on decision-​making processes regarding economic development. Not surprisingly, Prebisch’s critique was intended to make peripheral capitalism work for Latin America. It was never designed to move beyond it. A concern for income distribution, as a sine qua non condition for achieving genuine economic development, was another central feature of ECLAC. Hence, redistributive policies became a crucial factor distinguishing the ECLAC tradition from orthodox economics. The rejection of methodological individualism, so typical of orthodox economic development theories, for the sake of historical and structural analysis, led ECLAC’s preferred methodology to be dubbed ‘Latin American structuralism’. Brazilian economists Celso Furtado and Maria da Conceição Tavares were other prominent names connected to ECLAC. Both sought to warn about the deleterious effects of Brazilian elites’ patterns of consumption, which, by emulating European and American lifestyles, ended up wasting scarce foreign currency (dollars) reserves needed to reinvest in diversifying the country’s economy. Vulnerability to sudden capital flights, reinforced by the peculiarities that US hegemony posed for Latin America, then created a situation somewhat more difficult than under the previous British (sterling) hegemony. ‘Dualism’ is another hallmark of this intellectual tradition. According to its social ontology, a great heterogeneity in the productive apparatus would give rise to ‘two worlds’ co-​existing simultaneously—​the modernised elite, on the one hand, and the backward masses, especially the rural ones, on the other—​without merging into an integrated market, nor indeed constituting one single society. The closure of this social gap—​the major goal of ECLAC development policies—​would ultimately depend on a broad reform of the world economy as a whole, one that could do away with the core–​periphery structure, thus enabling capitalism to flourish in countries such as Brazil that were historically disadvantaged by the old international division of labour. Recommended reading: Furtado (1965, 1979 [1954]); Prebisch (1950); Tavares (1973).

Marxist dependency theory and the question of sub-​imperialism The emergence of Marxist dependency theory was largely the result of the atmosphere of political radicalisation that erupted throughout the continent during the 1960s. In Brazil, with the military coup of April 1964, class struggles became overtly more violent, demanding new political responses from both the Left and the Right (Aarão Reis & Ferreira de Sá, 1985). The response of the Marxist Revolutionary Organization-Worker’s Politics (POLOP) symbolised a watershed moment, when it published in 1961 the ‘Socialist Program for Brazil’. For the first time, the characterisation of the ‘Brazilian Revolution’ as immediately socialist meant a decisive departure from the etapismo scheme (the linear succession

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Brazil: Development strategies  149 of modes of production), which regarded Brazil as a semi-​feudal society in need of a national-​democratic revolution (to be achieved by class conciliation with nationalist sectors of the bourgeoisie), a thesis long advocated by the Brazilian Communist Party. Ruy Mauro Marini was among the group of militant intellectuals who joined POLOP while developing the conceptual apparatuses that would soon figure in the literature of Marxist dependency theory. Marini (1965) drew attention to the effects of the ‘imperialist integration’ with regards to the changes in the Brazilian economy and its position vis-​à-​ vis the United States. Marini soon realised that the new arrangement promoted by the military regime was not aimed at deterring Brazil’s industrial development, but rather stimulating its rapid growth and modernisation. However, this model of capitalist industrialisation at the periphery had as one of its main characteristics the ‘superexploitation’ of labourforces: a mechanism of compensation to local capitalists for the unfavourable terms of trade in the world market against peripheral countries. One effect of this overexploitation was the rupture between the sphere of production and that of circulation, since what is produced is far detached from the consumption capacity and the needs of the working masses. Internal demand was thus sacrificed in favour of foreign markets to both raw materials and low-​level industrialised products manufactured (or assembled) in Brazil. The emergence of a ‘military–​ industrial complex’ in Brazil was a result of this ‘dependent development’ model. Integrated industrialisation into the world capitalist economy meant that the internal productive structure had to converge with US-​based industries. A new pyramidal hierarchy of the capitalist countries was thus formed, where middle-​size centres of accumulation, and the related emergence of middle-​layer capitalist powers, such as Brazil, could find a relevant place. The export of manufactured goods paved the way towards the exports of capital too, a process that Marini called ‘sub-​imperialism’. Sub-​imperialism is the form taken by a dependent economy when it reaches the stage of monopoly and financial capital, with a high degree of concentration and centralisation of capital, accentuated by foreign investment in association with domestic enterprises. Its main components are a medium organic composition of the productive apparatuses and a relatively autonomous, expansionist foreign policy. In Marini’s (1977) view, in Latin America only Brazil fully fulfilled these conditions. Brazilian sub-​imperialism was the result of an economic phenomenon (the financial boom of the early 1970s) and the political project of a civil–​military dictatorship. The Brazilian state set up a legal and institutional framework for attracting external resources and securing investments from abroad, while repressing the working classes at home. At the same time, Brazilian investments were expanded to Latin America and Africa. Hence, Brazil redefined its role within an ‘interdependent’ world economy rooted on financial capitalism, attracting monetary flows, and reintegrating them into the movement of international capital. According to Marini, since that period Brazil entered—​albeit in an ‘associated and dependent’ form—​an advanced stage of capital exports and the pillaging of raw materials and overseas sources of energy such as oil, iron, and gas around the globe. Theotônio Dos Santos was another major theorist known for his contributions to Marxist dependency theory (on this, see Chapter 5). He argued that there was a historical sequence in forms of dependence over time, beginning with ‘colonial dependence’, passing through ‘financial–​industrial dependence’, until we arrive at ‘industrial–​technological dependence’. Here, large monopoly corporations transfer obsolete but not yet amortised technology to peripheral countries in order to produce and sell into the domestic market

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150  Ana Garcia and Miguel Borba de Sá of dependent countries, targeting those composed of a small yet wealthy comprador bourgeoisies and expanding middle classes (Dos Santos, 1970: 232). Dos Santos also recognised the condition of ‘overexploitation of the labourforce’ in dependent economies, but he did not believe that intermediate solutions could long delay the contradictions of ‘dependent development’ such as the reformist stances stemming from ECLAC. The only solutions in face of the strong political radicalisation were represented by a dilemma between ‘strong governments that open the road to fascism’ or ‘popular-​revolutionary governments that open the way to socialism’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 236). For more than a decade, the struggle between increasingly brutal military regimes versus clandestine left-​wing organisations that opted for armed struggle seemed to confirm his prognosis. Recommended reading: Dos Santos (1970); Marini (1965, 1977).

Neoliberalism and social crisis Brazil,Argentina, and Mexico suffered strong debt crises throughout the 1980s, when these economies were virtually excluded from international capital markets until the turn of the 1990s inaugurated a new phase.The ‘solution’ presented by mainstream economists to these crises was to adopt the so-​called ‘Washington Consensus’—​a set of measures agreed to by private lenders, multilateral financial institutions, and US Treasury representatives. If strictly followed, these and other such measures were designed to facilitate the return of countries such as Brazil to international credit markets, which in fact occurred, in the Brazilian case, in 1995, when US interest rates fell and the supply of dollars in search of outflow destinations became great again. The 1990s were marked by a virtual suppression of the country’s economic debate, with Marxist intellectuals ignored and ECLAC economists either discredited or transformed (in the Gramscian sense) into the new advocates of liberalisation. For this reason, the decade was known for the supremacy of the neoliberal ‘single thought’, which sought to narrow the limits of debates as to how to implement policies that were transmitted as the only viable model (Fiori, 1998). The neoliberal agenda in Brazil consisted of a vast privatisation programme, which included the sale of public companies in strategic areas such as energy and telecommunications, sometimes at prices below their market value, as in the case of the giant mining company Vale in 1997. On the international relations front, the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994–​2002), which largely coincided with the Clinton administration in the US, sought to join international regimes on the assumption that participation in the new world order would allow Brazil to have greater credibility (Vigevani & Cepaluni, 2007). This resulted in Brazil’s deep involvement with the neoliberal trade regime, shown by admission to the World Trade Organization, the consolidation of the common external tariff in Mercosur, and the start of negotiations around a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—​all in 1994. The negotiations for the creation of the FTAA reignited deep and extensive debates in Brazil as to which development model to pursue. Had it been consolidated, Brazil’s regional integration initiatives, especially Mercosur, would have lost, some argue, one of its main pillars, like a regional strategy of productive integration from which countries in the region could derive mutual benefits (Guimarães, 2000). Gradually, the ‘fable of globalisation’, which sought to convince the public that Brazil was part of a benign global capitalist village, was unveiled, at last, as a sort of globalisation

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Brazil: Development strategies  151 as perversity (Santos, 2000). In reality, the attempted homogeneous world in which public institutions were deemed to become subordinate to the power of large corporations and private investors led to high unemployment, precarious labour conditions, the downsizing of public services, and huge losses in the purchasing power of wages (Soares, 2002). This boosted the articulation of anti-​neoliberal social movements across the continent, of which Brazil was an important convergence site with the formation of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in the 1980s and the creation and holding of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001. Recommended reading: Fiori (1998); Guimarães (2000); Santos (2000).

Neodevelopmentalism, social liberalism, and Brazil’s new international role The failure of neoliberal policies at home and the economic collapse of neighbouring Argentina in 2001 were fertile ground to the rise of a strong political opposition from the Left. Brazilians chose to change course in 2002, electing the Workers Party (PT) to the presidency of the country for the first time, under the leadership of its iconic figure, Lula da Silva. After that point, economic debates were given a breath of fresh air. PT governments (Lula da Silva 2002–​2010 and Dilma Rousseff 2010–​2016) sought to combine monetarist, orthodox economic policy, including interest rate policy, on the one hand, with special credit lines for large, nationally based companies, on the other; together with basic income policies, alongside with progressive increases on the national minimum wage. Some have dubbed this model ‘social liberalism’ (Antunes, 2013), while others have presented it as ‘post-​neoliberal’ (Sader, 2003). However, both advocates and detractors tended to employ the notion of ‘neodevelopmentalism’ to characterise most economic policies pursued by the PT governments. This new developmentalism would be exemplified by the resumption of the state as a central actor in the management of the country’s economic expansion. However, unlike the so-​called (old) ‘developmentalism’, the state should now be concerned with maintaining competition between state and private enterprises, enhancing the capacity of exporting high-​value-​added products, establishing criteria for regulating movements of capital, and acting as an inducement to investment—​not always as a direct producer—​ within the framework of a national development strategy (Bresser Pereira, 2009). From this perspective—​consolidation of an endogenous ‘corporate core’ for solid economic growth and capitalist development - strong business groups, partly boosted by public funding, should be able to participate on an equal playing field with the heavy weights of international trade and investment competition. In this connection it was argued that a ‘strong state’, coupled with a ‘strong national business sector’, was a necessary requirement for the successful pursuit of economic development under 21st-​century conditions (Sicsu et al., 2005). The aim of fostering Brazilian companies and conglomerates abroad was in line with the foreign policy of the PT regime, which privileged relations with other ‘Global South’ countries and regions. Brazil sought to affirm itself as an emerging ‘intermediate’ power in global capitalism and also a representative of the aspirations of the Global South (Soares de Lima & Hirst, 2006). Some saw the alignment with other developing countries as an indication of Brazil distancing itself from the orbit of Washington. Others have warned that Brazil’s international projection, which combined diplomacy and private investments, was by no means dissociated from monopoly capital or bourgeois (i.e., capitalist) interests,

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152  Ana Garcia and Miguel Borba de Sá calling for more cautious appraisals of the alleged progressiveness of PT development strategies (Garcia, 2015). Rather than a rupture with North American monopoly capital, it would then seem more appropriate, as Marini (1965) suggested during the heyday of dependency theory, to interpret the situation as one of ‘antagonist cooperation’ between two centres of accumulation. Nowadays, Luce (2013), for example, has also drawn on the contributions of Ruy Mauro Marini, taking part in a renewed debate about the sub-​imperial role of Brazil in both South America and Africa. In turn, Fontes (2010) recognised the strength of Marini’s formulations, but felt the necessity to further develop his ideas, characterising Brazil’s position at the ‘capital–​imperialist spiral’ as a comprehensive process that needs to be understood in terms of the complex interactions of imperialism and class struggles over time. Thus, while some research agendas focus on concepts such as ‘reprimarisation’ and de-​industrialisation (see, for example, Gonçalves, 2012), others start with the opposite assumption, namely, that industrial capital had already reached its finance and imperialist phase in Brazil, making it unlikely that the country could regress to a peripheral status, or to the old primary-​export model (Zibechi, 2013). Recommended reading: Bresser-​Pereira (2009); Fontes (2010); Sader (2003).

Hyper-​liberalism and the Far Right in Brazil: a return to lumpen development? The constellation of contradictions within the new developmentalist project started to produce their most visible signs when massive protests broke out across the country, opening an era of contestation (and stigmatisation) of PT governmental policies and political legacy. Although most dissatisfactions had their roots in popular agonies concerning the effects of corporate domination over public services (such as the protests in 2013), it was the Far Right that benefited the most from the climate of political upheaval. The gradual downfall of the Left resulted, among other factors, from the financial crisis of 2008 and its effects on the Brazilian economy precisely at a time when dubious spending priorities, like hosting the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016), generated widespread criticism, let alone the alleged corruption charges at high-​level posts in PT administrations. Since then, conservative and reactionary discourses have steadily gained momentum in public debates, pushing the political spectrum as a whole towards the Right. The controversial ousting of President Dilma Rousseff in a coup d’état orchestrated by a media–​ parliamentary alliance (closely monitored by US agencies) in 2016, together with the subsequent imprisonment of former president Lula da Silva, paved the way for the victory of a former army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, in the 2018 elections, amidst overall applause from the Brazilian political and economic establishment. In terms of development policies, this move presaged a return to a Ricardian logic of comparative advantage, one that privileges the expansion of the agribusiness frontier over the country’s forests and natural ecosystems, as well as unrestrained extractivism even within environmentally protected areas or indigenous reserves. Bolsonaro’s first years in office introduced a record number of pesticides and genetically modified crops that are banned in many countries, not to mention his cabinet’s vast deregulation policies that grant official warrants for high-​impact projects such as gold mining in territories

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Brazil: Development strategies  153 inhabited by traditional communities. The pandemic of COVID-​19 in this sense, in the words of Bolsonaro’s Environmental Minister, was viewed as or turned out to be an opportunity to ‘open the gates’ to such a predatory model of development. Ironically, this ‘conservative wave’ (Demier & Hoeveler, 2016) arrived precisely at a time in which parts of the Latin American Left were formulating a critique of the neodevelopmentalist agenda from the standpoint of affected communities negatively impacted by the extractivist policy agenda of recent (and the current) governments, thus questioning the so-​called ‘pink tide’ of left-​leaning ‘progressive’ governments of South America in the new millennium1 for their commitment to a just and environmentally sustainable social order. Far from a postdevelopmentalist leaning towards the indigenous notion of Buen Vivir, Brazilian social movements are now on the defensive, trying to preserve the gains of the last two decades, such as gender and racial equality, public housing, or university access.The political Left seems perplexed, in a state of ideological confusion, unable to either create a common front against the Far Right currently in power or to produce a renewed leadership after the end of Lula da Silva’s PT regime. The current scenario of hyper-​liberalism has yet to prove its durability in Brazil, as the structural adjustments implemented by Bolsonaro’s free-​market agenda have not been able to deliver the economic growth that was expected. While the private sector might be seen to benefit from widespread deregulation, at the same time important sectors are starting to feel the impact of measures taken towards the opening up of strategic areas to competition from abroad. While internal contradictions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie are not new, it is unclear if declining or losing fractions would opt for resuscitating a form of social liberalism (or pragmatic neoliberalism) such as that implemented by the PT regime, or some newer alternative to the total self-​regulated market envisaged by the current administration. What is clear at this point is that the trajectory of economic development in Brazil, both in theory and in practice, defies conventional assumptions and available interpretative frameworks. From the rich conceptual apparatuses discussed in this chapter, today’s Brazil invites an analytical reengagement with, among other schools of critical development thinking, dependency theory, adapted to new realities. See, for example, the formulations of the ‘new dependency’ (Dos Santos, 1998). This seems crucial because concepts such as ‘lumpen development’ (Günder Frank, 1972) characterise quite well the erratic evolution of one of the most powerful capitalist economies of the 21st century, particularly when we consider the recurrent behaviour and the strategic options pursued by its ruling classes that provide clear evidence of what Marxists and dependency theorists have described as a comprador capitalist class and a lumpen bourgeoisie. Likewise, formulations such as Theotônio dos Santos’s (1970) harsh choice between fascism or socialism are back on the agenda, after having been discredited for the past three decades with the return of democracy in Brazil in the 1980s under the hegemony of diverse neoliberal or social liberal arrangements. Recommended reading: Demier and Hoeveler (2016).

Note 1 On this ‘pink tide’, see Chapters 6 and 29 in this volume. More generally, see Petras and Veltmeyer (2019).

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References Aarão Reis, D., & Ferreira de Sá, J. (eds.) (1985). Imagens da Revolução: Documentos políticos das organizações clandestinas de esquerda dos anos 1961 a 1971. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Marco Zero. Antunes, R. (2013). “Inglaterra e Brasil: duas rotas do social-​liberalismo em duas notas.” Currículo Sem Fronteiras, 13(2): 204–​212. Bresser-​Pereira, L.C. (2009). Developing Brazil: Overcoming the Failure of the Washington Consensus. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Demier, F., & Hoeveler, R. (2016). A onda conservadora: ensaios sobre os atuais tempos sombrios no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X. Dos Santos,T. (1970).“The Structure of Dependence.” The American Economic Review, 60(2): 231–​236. Dos Santos,T. (1998).“La teoría de la dependencia y el sistema mundial.” Herramienta, 8 (October). Fiori, J.L. (1998). “Globalização, hegemonia e império,” in Fiori, J.L. & Tavares, M.C. (eds.), Poder e dinheiro. Uma economia política da globalização. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes. Fontes,V. (2010). O Brasil e o capital-​imperialismo: teoria e história. Rio de Janeiro: EPSJV/​UFRJ. Furtado, C. (1965). “Development and Stagnation in Latin America: A Structuralist Approach,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 1(11): 159–​175. Furtado, C. (1979 [1954]). Formação econômica do Brasil, 16th edn. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Editora Nacional. Garcia, A.S. (2015). Multinacionais brasileiras durante o governo Lula: uma análise crítica da relação entre capital e Estado no Brasil contemporâneo. Saabrucken: Novas Edições Acadêmicas. Gonçalves, R. (2012).“ ‘Governo Lula e o nacional-​desenvolvimentismo às avessas,” Revista Sociedade Brasileira Economia e Política, 31(February): 5–​30. Guimarães, S.P. (2000). Quinhentos anos de periferia. Uma contribuição ao estudo da política internacional. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contraponto. Gunder, Frank, A. (1972). Lumpen Bourgeoisie and Lumpen-​Development: Dependency, Class and Politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Luce, M. (2013). “O subimperialismo, etapa superior do capitalismo dependente.” Crítica Marxista, 36: 129–​141. Marini, R.M. (1965). “Brazilian ‘interdependence’ and imperialist integration.” Monthly Review, 17(7): 10–​29. Marini, R.M. (1977). “La acumulación capitalista mundial y el subimperialismo.” Cuadernos Políticos, 12. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2019). Latin America in the Vortex of Social Change. London: Routledge. Prebisch, R. (1950). The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations Department of Economic Affairs. Sader, E. (2003). A vigança da história. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial. Santos, M. (2000). Por uma outra globalização. Do pensamento único à consciência universal. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record. Sicsu, J., De Paula, L.F., & Michel, R. (2005). “Por que um novo desenvolvimentismo.” Jornal dos Economistas, 186(January): 3–​5. Soares, L. (2002). Os custos sociais do ajuste neoliberal na América Latina, 2nd edn. São Paulo: Cortez. Soares de Lima, M.R., & Hirst, M. (2006). “Brazil as an Intermediate State and Regional Power: Action, Choice and Responsibilities.” International Affairs, 82(1): 21–​40. Tavares, M.C. (1973). Da substituição de importações ao capitalismo financeiro: Ensaios sobre Economia Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores. Vigevani, T., & Cepaluni, G. (2007). “A política externa de Lula da Silva: a estratégia da autonomia pela diversificação.” Contexto Internacional, 29(2): 273–​325. Zibechi, R. (2013). Brasil potencia: entre la integración regional y un nuevo imperialismo. Lima: Fórum Solidariedad Peru/​Programa Democracia y Tansformación Global.

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18  India Critical issues of a ‘tortuous transition’ John Harriss

In January 1947, speaking before the Constituent Assembly that had the task of drawing up the Constitution for independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru—​who was to become the first Prime Minister of the country—​said, ‘The first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity’. It was a remarkable statement, anticipating Amartya Sen’s definition of what development should mean—​the enhancement of the capabilities of everyone to lead lives that they have reason to value. Nehru clearly argued that the raison d’être of government in modern, independent India, was to liberate the minds and bodies of ordinary Indians by purposeful acts of economic and social transformation. In the years that followed, India, then still an overwhelmingly agrarian economy and society—​in 1951 agriculture accounted for two-​thirds of gross domestic product (GDP) and three-​quarters of employment—​became the archetypal developing economy. In practice, in spite of Nehru’s brave words, promising an approach to development that would be more than the pursuit of economic growth, the governments that he led, and those that have followed them, have given absolute priority to growth—​with varying degrees of success—​although, as Table 18.1 shows, the rate of growth has been higher, and more consistent, in the period since about 1980 than it was before. The redistributive measures that are required if every Indian is to have the fullest opportunity to develop herself according to her capacity have never been tackled. Perhaps the most egregious failure of Indian governments during Nehru’s lifetime (he died in 1964) was in regard to redistributive land reform, such as was necessary for the country to have resolved its agrarian question—​and so to have created a more dynamic and productive agricultural economy, whilst also improving the livelihoods of the mass of rural people (such as happened over the same period, in China). The unwillingness to tackle this redistributive measure followed from the political power of landlords and rich peasants in the ruling Congress Party. And although there were powerful voices in India at the time of independence favouring socialism—​as a social democratic path of development—​ the Constitution of the country guaranteed the rights of private property. Big business was rather looked down upon at first by political leaders, but anti-​capitalist rhetoric was never translated into practice, and by the 21st century the promise of ‘socialism’ in the Preamble to the Constitution was clearly disappointed. The political influence of big companies and of particular individual capitalists was increasingly evident in the course of the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014, and in the subsequent history of his administrations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-22

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156  John Harriss Table 18.1 Independent India’s decadal growth rates Period

Growth rate per annum (%)

Growth rate per capita per annum (%)

1951–​52–​1959–​60 1960–​61–​1969–​70 1970–​71–​1979–​80 1980–​81–​1989–​90 1990–​91–​1999–​2000 2000–​01–​2009–​10 2010–​11–​2014–​15 1951–​52–​1979–​80 1980–​81–​2009–​10

3.5 4.0 3.0 5.6 5.8 7.3 6.1 3.5 6.2

1.7 1.8 0.7 3.4 3.7 5.7 4.8 1.4 4.3

Source: calculations by Joshi (2017, Table 2.1).

Successive Indian governments have offered some welfare support to the poor people of the country, through a whole plethora of measures intended to alleviate poverty, but not social development.This remains true, even in the early 21st century, following striking legislative interventions that have given rural households a right to employment (with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005), that promise food security (with the Food Security Act of 2013), and that have at last provided for the right to eight years of elementary education (with the Right to Education Act of 2009). Yet, in the years since the passage of the Right to Education, the proportion of Indian children attending private schools has increased, a trend that in part reflects the failures of public education (with evidence showing declining educational outcomes over this period, especially in public schools). Public expenditure on education, and health—​the most vital elements in a programme of social development—​as a share of GDP remain very low by international standards. In 2017–​ 2018, for example, according to the Government of India’s Economic Survey 2020–​21 (www. indiabudget.gov.in/​economicsurvey/​), expenditure on education was only 2.8 per cent of GDP, whereas that on health was 1.4 per cent. Having decent nutrition and health is fundamental to human capability, and the extent to which they are lacking in India is shown up in the fact that at least a third of all Indian children are undernourished. One way of understanding the central problem of Indian development is explained by the economist Pranab Bardhan in his argument that India is experiencing a ‘tortuous transition’.The members of the National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector—​all of them radical economists—​made much the same point with the idea of a ‘lopsided transition’. The argument is that the structural transformation of the Indian economy has not taken place in spite of years of high rates of growth. In India the declining share of income from the agricultural sector has not been accompanied by an equivalent sectoral decline in employment. Agriculture now contributes less than 15 per cent of GDP but still employed 50 per cent of the labourforce up until the second decade of the 21st century—​or at least partially so, for many would have been employed for some of the time in non-​agricultural jobs as well (see Table 18.2). As Table 18.2 shows, relatively few workers have been absorbed into manufacturing, and latterly this sector has employed fewer people rather than more. Most new entrants to the labourforce have found employment in construction and the ‘old’ service industries—​ trade and transport—​and a very large number of young people are outside the labourforce. The great majority of the new jobs were not ‘good jobs’ in the organised or formal sector,

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India: A ‘tortuous transition’   157 Table 18.2 India: employment by sectors (% of total) Sector/​years

1993–9​ 4 1999–​ 2004–0​ 5 2009–​10 2011–​12 2015–​16 2017–​ Net 2000 18* increase 2004–​ 05 to 2017–​18 (millions)

Agriculture 63.3 Manufacturing 10.2 Other industry† 4.1 Services 20.4 Unemployed 1.9 NEET (age group 15–​ 29 years), millions

60.4 10.5 5.0 22.0 2.2

57.2 11.5 6.3 22.8 2.3 70.3

52.1 10.8 10.3 24.7 2.0

47.8 12.3 11.4 26.3 2.2 83.9

45.8 9.8 12.4 28.6 3.4 103.3

44.8 8.9 12.9 29.9 4.4 115.6

–​ 43.8 –​ 9.0 +34.6 + 40.9 + 11.1

* Estimates. † ‘Other industry’ includes construction, mining and the production of electricity, gas, and water. Construction has become the most important component. NEET, not in education, employment or training. Sources: author’s calculations from Mehrotra, S. et al. (2014). “Explaining Employment Trends in the Indian Economy.” Economic and Political Weekly, 49(32): 49–​57, Table 1; and Mehrotra, S. (2019). “India does have a real employment crisis—​and it’s worsening.” The Wire, February 6, Table 1. Both report National Sample Survey data; and the second also data from Annual Survey 2015–​16, Labour Bureau.

or in the most dynamic and productive sectors of the economy, but were in forms of informal employment, outside the purview of most employment legislation, often not very productive, usually low-​paid, with work and incomes commonly irregular, though also involving long hours and hazardous workplaces. It is estimated that about two-​thirds of India’s GDP comes from such unregistered, informal activity, and that it accounts for more than 90 per cent of jobs—​ more than half of them being generated from self-​employment. While a classic theory holds that those employed (or often self-​employed) in informal activities constitute a ‘reserve army of labour’, necessary for the development of industrial capitalism over the longer run, it has been suggested that in India now a large share of the labourforce as a whole is better described as ‘excluded’, being unnecessary for the growth of the economy as a whole, and surviving in a wide range of activities that are of only marginal significance for the dynamic, corporate sector (Sanyal & Bhattacharyya, 2009). Whatever one makes of this argument, it is clear that the narrative of structural transformation and societal transition breaks down in regard to modern India. The failure of the structural change in employment that, historically, has accompanied the change in output between sectors of the economy in the course of development reflects critical issues of India’s development: the pattern and the dynamics of economic growth; employment, or what has come to be described as ‘jobless growth’, and the possibility that much of the labourforce is ‘excluded’; the problem of agriculture; and the persistence of poverty and the continuing limitations of ‘human development’. We consider each of these in this chapter. Recommended reading: Bardhan (2009); Harriss et al. (2020); Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009).

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Economic growth: scale, pattern, and process In 2015, amid much fanfare, it was declared that India’s rate of economic growth had at last overtaken that of China, and that the country now was the fastest growing of all the major economies. It was a great moment for those political leaders and bureaucrats for whom this had long been the target. Scepticism was expressed about this by some economists, however. It was noted that the way in which the official measurement of growth is carried out had been revised in the previous year, with the result that the Indian economy was found to be growing much faster than had previously been calculated. Later, the respected Indian journal, the Economic and Political Weekly, published an editorial under the title ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics’ (11 June, 2016), noting ‘glaring anomalies in the GDP data’, and pointing out, for example, that the old series of growth numbers for manufacturing showed 1.1 per cent growth in 2012–​2013, while the new method reported 6.2 per cent. Defining and measuring the size of an economy, and then assessing change over time, are of course matters that involve many assumptions, and it is to be expected that there may be radical differences between estimations. There are questions, therefore, about the size and the rate of growth of the Indian economy, and questions too about economic strategy and the historical pattern and process of growth. These are partly reflected in Table 18.3, which compares data from the ways in which the economist Arvind Panagariya, a keen advocate of liberalisation, on the one hand, and Atul Kohli, a sceptic, on the other, have defined different periods of India’s growth history. Growth rates have varied widely from year to year, so there is significant scope for different ways of understanding the historical pattern. Both scholars identify the early years after India’s independence in the time of the first three five-​year plans as a period of tolerably successful growth, and Kohli’s data show how very effectively India industrialised during this time. Industrial development, however, depended significantly upon public investment, which governments found increasingly difficult to sustain. Development was driven from the supply-​side, and there was little demand-​side stimulus, at least partly because of the failure of agrarian reform that might have delivered higher incomes and more consumer demand in the rural economy. This continues to be a factor in India’s path of economic development. Protection and the system of licensing allowed for inefficient industrial development that was nonetheless very profitable.The initial approach to planning became fiscally unsustainable by the mid-​ 1960s. Thereafter growth slumped, and the later 1960s and 1970s saw a growth rate of around 3 per cent, barely ahead of the rate of growth of the population. The 1980s saw a resurgence of growth. Kohli argued that this came about in part because of the coming

Table 18.3 Two analyses of phases of India’s economic growth Panagariya

Kohli GDP growth (annual average)

1951–​65 1965–​81 1981–​88 1988–​2006

4.1 3.2 4.8 6.3

1950–​64 1965–​79 1980–​90 1991–​2004

GDP growth (annual average)

Agriculture

Industry

3.7 2.9 5.8 5.6

3.1 2.3 3.9 3.0

7.4 3.8 6.5 5.8

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India: A ‘tortuous transition’   159 together of government and private capital. Government became ‘pro-​capital’. India took off on to a higher rate of growth in this period, and according to Kohli (2012) the growth rate may have been higher in the 1980s than in the first decade or so following India’s adoption of pro-​market liberalising economic reforms in 1991. He questioned, therefore, whether the ‘pro-​market’ reforms had been decisive. Panagariya’s data, on the other hand, led him to argue that these reforms that had been decisive, and that they had put India on to a much higher growth trajectory (Panagariya, 2008). There remains debate about the determinants of India’s economic growth; about the reasons for the step-​up in growth rates from 2003 until the end of the decade when they averaged between 7 and 8 per cent; and the reasons for the decline since then (growth even dropped below 5 per cent in 2019). This reflected in part the accumulation of bad debts by the banks, and this the crony capitalism of the earlier boom years. Debate continues about how far growth is constrained by what is supposed to be the ‘inflexibility’ of labour markets, and by the limited privatisation of public sector enterprises. For liberal reformers like Panagariya reforms are never adequate. What is clear is that India’s growth has been driven by services, which now account for two-​thirds of GDP, while manufacturing has remained stuck at about 16 per cent, with manufacturing growth generally lagging behind the growth of GDP. This has come to be regarded as a major problem for India. The country has probably missed the boat with regard to employment-​intensive industrialisation of the kind that drove China’s very rapid economic growth. Recommended reading: Chandrasekhar et al. (2015); Kar and Sen (2016); Kohli (2012); Panagariya (2008).

‘Inclusive growth’ or ‘jobless growth’ and ‘excluded labour’? ‘Inclusive growth’ was the theme of India’s Eleventh Five Year Plan, for the period 2007–​ 2012 (Planning Commission, Government of India, 2008). Manmohan Singh, the then Prime Minister, in his Foreword to the Plan, spoke of the need to ensure that ‘income and employment are adequately shared by the poor and weaker sections of our society’. Seventy million new ‘work opportunities’ were projected, but subsequent findings of the National Sample Survey showed that productive jobs were not created at anything like the rate that was required for ‘inclusive growth’. After 2004–​2005 the rate of growth of the labourforce declined quite sharply, and this has been put down to the effects of increasing enrolments in elementary and secondary education, a reduction in child labour, and the withdrawal of women from the labourforce. In this period labour at last started leaving agriculture behind, but it was pulled out principally by jobs in construction, and even though the generation of non-​agricultural jobs did accelerate—​it was still not at a rate that was nearly sufficient to absorb the increasing supply of workers. It appeared that India experienced not inclusive but ‘jobless growth’, or even after about 2013 ‘jobloss growth’. The promise of creating better employment opportunities for India’s youthful population—​supposed to give India a ‘demographic dividend’ (because of the numbers of new entrants to the labourforce outweighing the increase in numbers of dependants)—​ played an important part in bringing Narendra Modi into power in 2014. And shortly after he took up office as Prime Minister, Modi launched a ‘Make in India’ campaign, intended to make India a second China. As he has said, ‘We launched the Make in India campaign to create employment and self-​employment opportunities for our youth … we want the share of manufacturing in our GDP to go up to 25 per cent in the near future’ (in a speech of 13 February 2016). Such a step-​up in manufacturing was expected

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160  John Harriss to generate 100 million new jobs. The question of whether or not these objectives can be attained—​they certainly had not been achieved by 2020—​remains one of the crucial issues of Indian development. Modi made much of the so-​called ‘Gujarat model’ of development, referring to the success of economic growth in his home state during the period in which he was chief minister there. But this did not augur well for the country, given that Gujarat’s growth had not been employment-​intensive. The argument that there is extensive ‘excluded labour’ in India carries some conviction, and the numbers of migrant workers who sought to move back from insecure workplaces in the cities to their village homes at the time of the COVID-​19 pandemic is symptomatic of extensive ‘footloose labour’. This reflects India’s limited structural transformation. Recommended reading: Breman (2019); Jha (2016); Kannan and Raveendran (2019).

The problems of agriculture Even though, given the declining share of agriculture in its GDP, India is no longer an ‘agrarian economy’, agriculture remains a vitally important industry.Village studies show the increasing diversification of employment, and very large numbers of rural people are engaged in multiple forms of work, sometimes involving commuting from village homes, and often short-​or long-​term migration, much of it circular (when people move to and fro between village homes and distant work sites, both urban and rural). Employment is often under conditions of ‘neo-​bondage’, because the debts that the workers have usually incurred in securing their jobs mean that they are subject to coercion, and a form of servitude. It is estimated that the numbers of circulating migrants have reached 100 million. Yet agricultural work, both wage labour and in the cultivation of the small farms (of one hectare and less) that account for 70 per cent or more of the total numbers of operated holdings in the country, remain the basis of very many livelihoods. So, as the London Economist put it (13 March 2010: 15), ‘the [Indian] government cannot achieve the “inclusive” growth it aspires to without robust progress in agriculture’.This point was also made by key Indian policymakers, who expressed regret that agriculture had been growing at a rate of only about 2 per cent per annum, as against the target of 4 per cent set in the Eleventh Plan. The rate of agricultural growth is actually hard to calculate, because it is so volatile, but there is no doubt that agriculture is in bad shape. This is the result of the very high incidence, now, of marginal holdings, of the costs of inputs, the degradation of the natural resource base, declining public investment, and decreased access to public sector credit. One tragic but powerful marker of the challenges facing many cultivators is the apparently high rate of suicides amongst them, that began to be reported in the later 1990s. Neither liberalisation nor the earlier mode of state intervention in agriculture effectively addresses fundamental problems having to do with the inefficient and often wasteful use of agricultural resources—​including the failure to use irrigation water efficiently, partly because of neglect of the maintenance of irrigation structures and limitations of their design; excessive use of chemical fertilisers; and degradation of soils. There is a long history of poor use of key agricultural resources in India, by comparison with China and elsewhere in East Asia. What to do about these problems remains a critical question. One answer, favoured by liberal reformers, is that land markets should be opened up and contract farming encouraged. But it is clear supermarkets and other corporates are not interested in transacting with large numbers of small farmers. So what is the future for the vast majority

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India: A ‘tortuous transition’   161 of Indian farmers? The sequencing here is all important—​and there are very good reasons for fearing that in the absence of employment opportunities outside of agriculture then their exclusion from contract farming, and even more the displacement of small farmers by the corporate takeover of agricultural land, will lead to further impoverishment. Recommended reading: Ramachandran and Rawal (2010);Vaidyanathan (2006).

Poverty and social development It is widely known that India is home to more of the world’s poorest people than any other country.Yet, early in the 21st century, different official bodies in India have come up with widely divergent estimates of the incidence of poverty in the country, ranging between 25 and 80 per cent of the (rural) population. This very wide gap should be a reminder that poverty, understood in terms of income deprivation, is only a construct, depending upon more or less arbitrary judgements. One leading economist, A. Vaidyanathan, argued that ‘it is not possible to arrive at a definitive estimate of poverty incidence that can be used as a reasonably robust benchmark’ (Vaidyanathan, 2013: 41). It is widely argued, however, that income poverty has been greatly reduced over the last quarter century, as a result of the trickle-​down effects of growth. The evidence referred to above, about employment trends and the state of the agricultural economy, leads to questioning of such confident claims, and as Anirudh Krishna (2017) has shown, there is extensive movement all the time into poverty as well as out of it. Very many Indians remain within the shadow of poverty. And deprivation in terms of income is only one, limited, way of conceptualising poverty. As Vaidyanathan also said, poverty has to be assessed in regard to minimum desirable levels of the components of living standards ‘such as food intake, unemployment and underemployment, housing, connectivity and indicators of health and education status’ (Vaidyanathan, 2013: 41). In regard to the latter, there is every reason to doubt the claims that are being made about improvements in the quality of life of the mass of the people of India. What can be done to improve education and healthcare are amongst the most crucial questions of Indian development. Yet, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, India has seen some remarkable legislation in recent years, that has established what has been described as a ‘new welfare architecture’. The implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (as it is now called), that is supposed to provide up to 100 days of employment each year for every rural household, matters a great deal for the livelihoods of very many people; as does the implementation of the Food Security Act that should provide subsidised foodgrains for about two-​thirds of the population. Now there is debate over whether it may not be more efficient and effective to replace these programmes with cash transfers, or even to provide a universal basic income. Such measures, however, will not reduce the vital need for the improvement of healthcare and education. Recommended reading: Dreze and Sen (2014); Krishna (2017);Vaidyanathan (2013).

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted the continuing tension of Indian development, between the achievement of high rates of economic growth and the realisation of well-​being for the mass of the people.The failure to meet the objective of ‘inclusive growth’ and the manifest evidence of deepening inequality have deeply worrying political implications, not least for the relations between different ethnic groups within India’s diverse society.

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References Bardhan, P. (2009). “Notes on the Political Economy of India’s Tortuous Transition.” Economic and Political Weekly, 4(49): 31–​36. Breman, J. (2019). Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandrasekhar, C.P., Ghosh, J., & Patnaik, P. (2015). ICSSR Research Surveys and Explorations: Economics. Delhi: Oxford University Press Dreze, J., & Sen, A. (2014). An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harriss, J., Jeffrey, C., & Brown,T. (2020). India: Continuity and Change in the 21st Century (Chapters 2–​ 4). Cambridge: Polity Press. Jha, P. (2016). Labour in Contemporary India. Oxford India Short Introductions. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Joshi,V. (2017). India’s Long Road:The Search for Prosperity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kannan, K.P., & Raveendran, G. (2019).“From Jobless to Job-​loss Growth: gainers and losers during 2012–​2018.” Economic and Political Weekly, 54(44): 38–​44. Kar, S., & Sen, K. (2016). The Political Economy of India’s Growth Episodes. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohli, A. (2012). Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Krishna,A. (2017). The Broken Ladder:The Paradox and the Potential of India’s one Billion. Delhi: Penguin Random House India. Panagariya, A. (2008). India:The Emerging Giant. New York: Oxford University Press. Planning Commission, Government of India. (2008). Eleventh FiveYear Plan (2007–​2012): Inclusive Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramachandran,V.K., & Rawal,V. (2010). “The Impact of Liberalisation and Globalisation on India’s Agrarian Economy.” Global Labour Journal, 1(1): 56–​91. Sanyal, K., & Bhattacharyya, R. (2009). “Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production and the New Locations of Labour.” Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (22): 35–​44. Vaidyanathan, A. (2006). “Farmers’ Suicides and the Agrarian Crisis.” Economic and Political Weekly, 41(38): 4009–​4013. Vaidyanathan, A. (2013). “Use and Abuse of the Poverty Line.” Economic and Political Weekly, 48(44): 37–​42.

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19  Interrogating the China model of development Yin-​Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So

The buildup of economic and political tensions between the US and China during the 2010s has captured much media attention. Beginning with the Obama administration’s 2012 ‘Pivot to East Asia’ regional strategy, the tensions were deepened with the launch of a trade war by the Trump administration in 2017 and the outbreak of the COVID-​19 pandemic in 2019/​2020. These tensions cast a shadow over China’s economic future and question the viability of the China model, which had been trumpeted by the media and mainstream development studies at the turn of the century. This chapter contends that a useful starting point to understand the evolving tensions and challenges confronting China is to analyse the China model, both its original form and its changing configurations.The following will outline the model and proceed to a deeper understanding of it through the examination of six controversial features. Notions like ‘the rise of China’ or the ‘China model’ of development were coined by the mass media or the policy circle to capture China’s fast-​speed economic growth. Since 2004, the two terms have been upgraded to ‘the Beijing Consensus’, representing the alternative development model to the North’s ‘Washington Consensus’, which is a US-​led strategy for reforming and developing the economies of Third World countries. Indeed, China was the world’s largest exporter and second-​largest importer of goods in 2018. In the same year, its trade surplus in goods with the US reached a pinnacle of US$323.3 billion, though it dropped by 8.5 per cent to US$296 billion in 2019. China has held the largest amount of foreign reserves globally since the early 2000s and, in March 2020, the amount reached over US$3 trillion. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual average of 10 per cent between 1978 and 2008. Although the 2008 financial crisis resulted in the rate’s persistent decline, it still averaged at 7.4 per cent between 2011 and 2018. Three decades of sustained expansion allowed the Chinese economy to overtake Japan in 2010 as the second largest economy of the world. It also increased the country’s share of world GDP from a mere 1.7 per cent in 1980 to 15.8 per cent in 2018, according to World Bank statistics. All these have allegedly been attributed to China’s grasp of advanced technology, enhanced competitiveness, and expansion of inward foreign direct investment. The China model is said to have the following three distinctive features: state-​led, investment-​driven, and export-​oriented. It is based on massive state-​led investment in infrastructure and, recently, research and development (R&D) to facilitate industrial development and thence export of manufactured goods to the global market. China’s success in hosting the 2008 Olympic Games has supposedly led some developing countries to revere its development model. In the 2010s, China also sought to export its development model to other countries through the China-​led Asian Infrastructure DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-23

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164  Yin-Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So Investment Bank to finance the ‘Belt-​Road Initiative (BRI)’, which is designed to facilitate massive infrastructure construction to link China, Central Asia, and thence to Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia through railway and seaborne traffic.The initiative’s potential for heightening China’s global influence led security experts in the US to view it with grave caution, though financial burdens associated with the BRI induced some countries, e.g., Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, to suspend cooperative projects in recent years. How to think about China? Mainstream development studies and policymakers have been awed by China’s fast-​speed economic growth and failed to scrutinise the negative side of China’s development. This chapter argues that the features of the China model are highly contested and the celebration of China’s fast-​speed economic growth is premature. This module identifies six critical issues to interpret the origins, nature, impacts, and global implications of the China model of development. Recommended reading: Fukuyama (2016); Lin (2011); Ramo (2004).

The legacy of the communist era: an impediment or a facilitator? The China model denotes that China’s fast-​speed economic growth started only in 1978, after China had discarded the harmful revolutionary heritage in the communist era (1949–​1976). In this interpretation, the communist experiment under Mao was a disaster. The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s led to famine and the death of tens of millions of Chinese. The ten years of Cultural Revolution (1966–​1976) turned Chinese society upside down and resulted in political anarchy. Only in 1978, after the rise of Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatist, who paid little attention to the revolutionary ideology of Mao, did China’s march to modernisation begin. The above account, however, overlooks the fact that China did achieve rapid economic growth and significant structural transformation during the three-​decade socialist experiment. China’s GDP grew annually at an average rate of 7 per cent between 1952 and 1978, and at 5 per cent between 1960 and 1981, which compared most favourably with the 1 per cent achieved by all the ‘low-​income countries excluding China and India’ (Nolan & Ash, 1995: 981). Furthermore, Chinese industry grew at about 11 per cent per year between 1952 and 1976. China’s fast-​speed economic growth over the past 40 years actually owed much to the communist era (1949–​1976). Despite many shortcomings, China was then dominated by a strong Leninist party-​state that commanded a high degree of legitimacy and autonomy, which allowed it to build a strong organisational framework capable of mobilising popular energies for large-​scale development projects. Specifically, it was during the Great Leap Forward that the state mobilised millions of peasants to construct and improve dams, reservoirs, drainage networks, and irrigation systems. It was also during the socialist experiments that rural industries were set up in the communes, local officials accumulated managerial expertise through running the commune and brigade enterprises, and local governments were asked to promote development in the community. The Maoist commune model and its decentralisation policy provided the medium to tap local resources, to train local leaders, and to arouse local initiatives. It was on the basis of this infrastructure and institutions that agricultural productivity increased rapidly in the early 1980s, rural entrepreneurs emerged quickly from the local official stratum, and local township and village enterprises played the leading role in China’s industrialisation between 1978 and the mid-​1990s. Recommended reading: Bramall (1993); Lippit (1982); So and Chu (2016).

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Autonomous development or head servant of the US? The China model emphasises that China has a highly autonomous, independent development. Apart from its formidable power as a global factory, China has taken other steps to strengthen its economic positions. Beginning in the 1990s, the country has striven to boost internal demand as a means to lessen its export dependence. In 1997, the government introduced the ‘going out policy’ and encouraged competitive Chinese firms to expand overseas with a view to taking advantage of overseas markets and resources and engage in economic and technological cooperation. Since 2009, the country has sought to ‘internationalise the Renminbi (RMB)’ and thus strengthen the country’s global financial position. Taken altogether, proponents of the model argue that China demonstrates the ways to fit into the international order that allows the South true independence in a world with a single powerful centre of gravity. The China model contains a theory of self-​determination, one that stresses using leverage to move big, hegemonic powers that may be tempted to tread on your toes. From a critical development studies perspective, however, the autonomy attained by China is limited. Notably, the country depends heavily on multinational corporations. According to an EIU (2004) report, the portion of China’s exports manufactured by foreign-​invested enterprises (FIEs) increased from 41 per cent in 1997 to 55 per cent in 2003. Although the portion dropped to 38.4 per cent in January 2019, the FIEs’ share was still considerable (MOC 2019). Above all, even though there were some exceptions, China was mostly responsible for the final assembly of imported components and occupied the low-​value-​added ends of the global value chains. The case of the iPhone is well known. As argued by Hung (2009), China is merely ‘the head servant’ of the US and transnational corporations, leading other countries in the South in providing cheap exports to the US. Furthermore, despite China’s increasing emphasis on internal demand since the 1990s, the country’s exports as a share of GDP continued to rise, peaking at 36 per cent in 2006, though decreasing persistently thereafter to reach 19.5 per cent in 2018 (World Bank, 2020). Instead of demonstrating China’s success in shifting to a reliance on internal demand, the flattening of China’s GDP growth rates in the 2010s illustrated the country’s dependence on export expansion to maintain its high GDP growth. In fact, the 2008 financial tsunami led to a 4.58 per cent decline in China’s GDP growth rate and more than 20 per cent decrease in its export in 2009, thus revealing the country’s vulnerability to fluctuations in the capitalist world economy. The 2008 financial tsunami made transparent the limitations of an export-​dependent development model and the excess capacity of the Chinese economy. Specifically, the excess capacity results directly from the investment-​driven China model, or the ways the Communist party-​state, local governments, and state enterprises keep throwing resources into the Chinese economy, constructing factories, roads, and bridges, apartment towers and shopping malls, etc. New investment projects prop up GDP to make China look good in development indicators, but only at the expense of the health of the overall economy. The long-​term suppression of manufacturing wages restrains the growth of China’s consumption power, making it exceedingly difficult for China to reorient its development model to achieve a balance between domestic consumption and exports. Trapped by export-​led and investment-​driven industrialisation, China could not free itself from dependence on the US consumer market, nor could it be transformed into a high-​waged, sustainable economy to improve the quality of life for the Chinese grassroots population.

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166  Yin-Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So This bottleneck in China’s development is one of the reasons underlying the slowdown of the country’s GDP growth rate in recent years. Finally, China’s RMB internationalisation initiatives have hardly altered the reality of a dollarised world. In the fourth quarter of 2019, RMB ranked fifth and accounted for 1.96 per cent of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) allocated foreign exchange reserves. In April 2020, RMB ranked sixth and accounted for 1.66 per cent in global payments by values according to Swift. Even though the ever-​increasing trade surplus may inflate China’s global financial power (in the form of expanded holdings of debt), until China can successfully internationalise the RMB, it has no recourse but to turn its hard-​earned surplus into risky US debt. Indeed, despite the Sino–​US trade war, it is widely considered that China would be hurt more than the US if China were to dump its holdings of US Treasury bonds.The 2008 financial tsunami and the Sino–​US trade war had together exposed China’s external economic dependence and gave further support to Hung’s ‘head servant’ argument. Recommended reading: de Graaff et al. (2020); Dirlik (2004); Hart-​Landsberg and Burkett (2004); Hung (2009); So (2012).

Technological upgrading or technological dependence? The China model stresses that China has modernised its educational system, upgraded its R&D capabilities, and participated in high-​tech production. Because of China’s growing importance as a market for technology, its large reservoir of skilled-​but-​inexperienced scientists, and its expanding pool of affluent and tech-​ savvy consumers, foreign corporations including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle, and Siemens began to set up research laboratories or transfer a significant amount of their R&D activity to China in the 1990s. By the 2010s, China began to move up the value-​added ladder of production and to compete with Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan in spheres such as electronics and machine tools. Huawei’s 5G technology is a prime example. However, a critical development studies perspective points out that the transnationals tended not to export their most current technology to China and place the exported technology under strict control to prevent dissemination. Furthermore, the export-​ oriented growth model cultivates strong inertia, locking China at the lower end of the value-​added chain. China’s global factory status only denotes the successful integration of Chinese firms into the global commodity chains; these kinds of ties have not led to significant technological upgrading or forward-​and-​backward linkages that characterise the shift to developed country status. Huawei and other local technology firms are the exceptions which, together with the party-​state, have invested heavily in R&D. In 2018, China’s R&D expenditure amounted to US$293 billion, making it the second largest spender globally. Even then, China’s intellectual property (IP) import was six times its IP export, indicating the country’s continual reliance on imported technology (Woetzel et al., 2019). Recommended reading: Buckley (2004); Schneider-​Petsinger et al. (2019).

Poverty reduction or rising social inequality/​r ising class conflict The China model underlines the country’s fast-​speed economic growth and success in eliminating poverty. Between 1981 and 2006, the share of China’s population living on less than US$1 per day was reduced from 64 to 16 per cent. By 2016, no more than 0.5 million

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Interrogating the China model  167 (0.036 per cent) of the population in China was living under the international poverty line of US$1.90 a day. In other words, the China model has worked more effectively than the IMF-​designated structural adjustment programme in the Washington Consensus model for sub-​Saharan Africa and the ‘shock therapy’ for Russia. In turn, success in poverty alleviation is said to have endowed widespread legitimacy in the Chinese Communist party-​state so that, unlike its communist counterparts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Chinese state is not under any threat of revolution. Critical researchers contest the above assertion, pointing instead to China’s worsening income inequality.The Gini coefficient for household income in China rose from 0.33 in 1980 to 0.40 in 1994, and to the all-​time high of 0.49 in 2008. A study of 2013 data found the level of income inequality in China to be worse than all Asian countries and was only better than South Africa and Brazil among the world’s 25 largest countries (Jain-​Chandra et al., 2018). Although China’s Gini coefficient decreased to 0.465 by 2019, the level was high by most standards. For critical researchers, China’s stark income inequality was caused by the party-​ state’s resolve to pursue fast-​speed export-​led industrialisation even at the expense of bankrupting the countryside and prolonging the unlimited supply of low-​cost migrant labour to coastal export industries. Indeed, to stifle labour costs, keep the exports of Chinese factories competitive in the world economy, maintain a favourable environment to attract foreign investment, and encourage transnational corporations to relocate their labour-​intensive production lines, the Communist party-​state has adopted authoritarian policies to discipline workers and suppress labour protests. Despite this, there are limits to the success of these policies. By the 2010s, the ‘unlimited’ supply of low-​cost migrant labour dried up. Given its one-​child policy, China’s demographic surplus is vanishing, and its population is ageing rapidly. At the same time, widening social inequality has generated much social discontent. In 1993, the number of ‘mass incidents’, which include strikes, protests, riots, demonstrations, collective petitions, and other forms of civil unrest, stood at 8700. The number increased to 87,000 in 2005 and 127,467 in 2008 (China Labour Bulletin, various years). No comparable statistics have been released in subsequent years. However, the Hong Kong-​based China Labour Bulletin has gleaned information on labour protests by examining newspapers and, in recent years, social media reports. A total of 11,920 collective protests were identified for the period 2011 to 2018. According to one estimate, this represents about 5–​10 per cent of the total incidents (Crothall, 2018). The period saw the surfacing of several large-​scale labour protests, including Foxconn, Honda, and Toyota in 2010; the Lide shoe factory and the Yue Yuen shoe factory in 2014; and the Jasic incident in 2018. On the whole, however, most protests were small in scale and short in duration. The scale also declined in recent years: whereas 10 per cent of all protests in 2013 involved 1000 workers or more, only one such incident was found in 2017. The decline in large-​scale protests may be attributed to China’s economic structural change, the introduction of the 2008 Labour Contract Law, and the increase in minimum wage. Just as important, the Communist party-​state also introduced hard and soft authoritarian measures, relying on officials, unionists, and even thugs, to dissuade disgruntled workers from engaging in collective action. Taken together, the benefit of high-​speed economic growth for China is at best ambivalent. The development of the past 40 years threw tens of millions of workers out of the state factories and ruined the foundation for long-​term development of China’s countryside. In escaping from poverty, workers endured long hours, low wages, and harsh discipline, and many died from or were injured by industrial accidents without

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168  Yin-Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So due compensation. Although the party-​state took some remedial action in the late 2000s, it continued to deprive workers of the right of autonomous organisation and to debase their humanity with authoritarian measures. Aside from the social costs, the effectiveness of such measures in maintaining the party-​state’s legitimacy in the long term remains to be seen. Recommended reading: Crothall (2018); Elfstrom and Kuruvilla (2014); So (2013, 2019).

Rapid growth versus environmental sustainability Proponents of the China model have as a rule turned a blind eye to the problems of environmental degradation. Critical researchers, however, have drawn attention to the widespread disregard for environmental sustainability in the country’s rush to entice foreign investments and promote exports. In the 1980s and 1990s, China embraced the relocation of many heavily polluting industries, such as fabric dyeing, paper manufacturing, leather processing, and petrochemicals, without requiring them to install proper waste disposal mechanisms. By the 2010s, China still handled much of the e-​waste generated globally by using primitive and highly polluting methods. The need for enormous and inexpensive electricity supply led China to tolerate power plants that used inferior and unwashed coals as well as rely on inefficient burning practices. The need for wood and pulp also resulted in considerable deforestation. As a result, China has suffered from serious pollution. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment reported that, in 2002, 40.9 per cent of the monitored sections in China’s seven main river basins was below Grade V standard, which meant the water was unsuitable even for industrial or agricultural use. The percentage stayed well above 20 per cent until 2008. Similarly, in 1998, the air quality of 72.4 per cent of the prefecture-​level cities was below Grade II standard, which meant that it did not meet the requirement for residential, business, or general industrial usage when taking into account the levels of total suspended particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. Although the portion declined to 17.5 per cent in 2009, the country surpassed the US in the same year to become the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and, by extension, contributor to global warming. China revised the Environmental Protection Law in 2014 and invested heavily in renewable energy, which in 2017 amounted to US$127 billion or 45 per cent of the global total. However, these policies have achieved mixed outcomes in eradicating pollution. Although the share of monitored water sections in China’s seven main river basins at below Grade V standard decreased to 3.4 per cent in 2019, the portion of groundwater classified as poor or very poor increased from 43.9 and 15.7 per cent in 2013 to 66.9 and 18.8 per cent in 2019, respectively. Similarly, although the portion of cities meeting the more stringent standard of air quality, introduced in 2013, increased from 4.1 per cent in 2013 to 46.6 per cent in 2019, China was still responsible for emitting 28 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide and the exposure in China to PM2.5 was 3.7 times higher than the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) average in 2016 (Woetzel et al., 2019). Setting aside the hesitant progress in China’s environmental protection, it remains the case that pollution has exacted heavy social costs ignored in the discussion of the China model. Most ostensibly, some 459 villages in China were dubbed ‘cancer villages’ in 2010 due to their exceptional levels of death by cancer. Recommended reading: Liu and Diamond (2005); So and Chu (2016);Wang et al. (2013).

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A model or a culprit to pull down global wages? Although China is portrayed as the model to emulate, many countries see it as a competitor for foreign investments and jobs. An Economist (2001) report noted the ‘alarm and despair’ with which China’s neighbours reacted to its rise: ‘Japan, South Korea and Taiwan fear a hollowing out of their industries, as factories move to low-​cost China. … Southeast Asia worries about “dislocation” in trade and investment flows [to China]’. In addition, Global Labour Strategies (2008) reported that workers, communities, and countries throughout the world are confronting the challenges posed by China’s emergent role in the global economy. About 25 per cent of the global workforce is now Chinese. The ‘China price’ increasingly sets the global norm for wages and working standards at both high and low ends of the production chain. As a result, the hard-​won gains of workers in the Global North are being rapidly undermined while the aspirations of workers in the Global South are being dashed as China becomes the wage-​setting country in many industries. Therefore, China as an export powerhouse only intensifies economic tensions and contradictions through the South—​to the detriment of workers everywhere. In sum, although the mainstream literature wants to highlight the positive features of the China model—​such as fast-​speed economic growth, export-​led industrialisation, independent nation-​state, and poverty reduction—​a critical development studies perspective is quick to point to the harmful consequences of the China model, such as rural bankruptcy, dependency on the US market, rising social inequality, social conflict, and the downward pull of global wages. A critical perspective tends to see the China model as an exercise in ideology of construction to justify the global reach of the Chinese party-​state and transnational corporations. Recommended reading: Economist (2001); Hart-​Landsberg and Burkett (2004); Global Labor Strategies (2008).

References Bramall, C. (1993). In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buckley, C. (2004). “Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China is a New Hotbed of Research,” The New York Times (13 September). www.nytimes.com/​2004/​09/​13/​technology/​let-​a-​thousand-​ ideas-​flower-​china-​is-​a-​new-​hotbed-​of-​research.html. China Labour Bulletin. (various years). The Workers’ Movement in China. https://​clb.org.hk/​content/​research-​reports. Crothall, G. (2018). “China’s Labor Movement in Transition.” www.chinoiresie.info/​chinas-​labour-​ movement-​in-​transition/​. De Graaff, N., ten Brink, T., & Parmar, I. (2020). “China’s Rise in a Liberal World Order in Transition—​Introduction to the Forum.” Review of International Political Economy, 27(2): 191–​ 207. DOI: 10.1080/​09692290.2019.1709880. Dirlik, A. (2004). “Beijing Consensus: Beijing ‘Gongshi’: Who Recognizes Whom and to What End?” https://​pdfs.semanticscholar.org/​f04f/​ca2644cfef01a937c8e777d12b7be1b752fc.pdf?_​ ga=2.162994428.1552259182.1591604262-​1250043226.1589173885. Economist. (2001). “A Panda Breaks the Formation.” Economist, 25: August. EIU. (2004). Coming of Age: Multinational Companies in China. http://​g raphics.eiu.com/​files/​ad_​ pdfs/​MNC_​report.pdf. Elfstrom, M., & Kuruvilla, S. (2014). “The Changing Nature of Labor Unrest in China.” Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 67(2): 453–​480. http://​digitalcommons .ilr.cornell.edu/​articles/​1001.

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170  Yin-Wah Chu and Alvin Y. So Fukuyama, F. (2016). “China’s Road or the Western Way: Whose Economic Development Model will Prevail?” South China Morning Post, 14 January. Global Labor Strategies. (2008). “Why China Matters: Labor Rights in the Era of Globalization.” https://​laborstrategies.blogs.com/​global_​labor_​strategies/​files/​why_​china_​matters_​gls_​report. pdf. Hart-​Landsberg, M., & Burkett, P. (2004). “China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle.” Monthly Review, 56(3): 1–​116. Hung, H.-​F. (2009). “America’s Head Servant? The PRC Dilemma in the Global Crisis.” New Left Review, 60(November-​December): 5–​25. Jain-​Chandra, S., Khor, N., Mano, R., Schauer, J., Wingender, P., & Zhuang, J. (2018). “Inequality in China—​Trends, Drivers and Policy Remedies.” IMF Working Paper. www.elibrary.imf.org/​ doc/​IMF001/​25174-​9781484357538/​25174-​9781484357538/​Other_​formats/​Source_​PDF/​ 25174-​9781484360972.pdf. Lin, J.Y. (2011). “China and the Global Economy.” China Economic Journal, 4(1): 1–​14. Lippit,V.D. (1982). “Socialist Development in China,” in Selden, M. & Lippit,V. (eds.), The Transition to Socialism in China, pp. 116–​158. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Liu, J., Diamond, J. (2005). “China’s Environment in a Globalizing World.” Nature, 435(June): 1179–​1186. MEE (Ministry of Ecology and Environment, PRC). (various years). Report on the State of the Environment in China. http://​english.mee.gov.cn/​Resources/​Reports/​soe/​. MOC—​Ministry of Commerce PRC. (2019). “Regular Press Conference of the Ministry of Commerce.” 14 February 14. http://​english.mofcom.gov.cn/​article/​newsrelease/​press /​ 201902/​20190202835091.shtml. Nolan, P., & Ash, R.F. (1995). “China’s Economy on the Eve of Reform.” The China Quarterly, 144(December): 980–​998. Ramo, J.C. (2004). “The Beijing Consensus,” The Foreign Policy Center. https://​fpc.org.uk/​wp-​ content/​uploads/​2006/​09/​244.pdf. Schneider-​Petsinger, M., Jue Wang, Y.J., & Crabtree, J. (2019). US–​China Strategic Competition: The Quest for Global Technological Leadership. Chatham House. www.chathamhouse.org/​sites/​default/​ files/​publications/​research/​CHHJ7480-​US-​China-​Competition-​RP-​WEB.pdf. So, A.Y. (2012). “The Global Capitalist Crisis and the Rise of China to the World Scene,” in Berberoglu, B. (ed.), Beyond the Global Capitalist Crisis: The World Economy in Transition, pp. 123–​ 144. Burlington: Ashgate. So, A.Y. (2013). Class and Class Conflict in Post-​Socialist China. Singapore: World Scientific. So, A.Y. (2019). “The Rise of Authoritarianism in China in the Early 21st Century.” International Review of Modern Sociology, 45(1): 49–​70. So, A.Y., & Chu,Y.-​W. (2016). The Global Rise of China. Cambridge: Polity. Wang, F., Kuehr, R., Ahlquist, D., & Li, J. (2013). E-​waste in China: A Country Report. https://​ collections.unu.edu/​eserv/​UNU:1624/​ewaste-​in-​china.pdf. Woetzel, J., Seong, J., Leung, N., Ngai, J., Manyika, J., Madgavkar, A., Lund, S., & Mironenko, A. (2019). China and the World: Inside the Dynamics of a Changing Relationship. McKinsey Global Institute. www.mckinsey.com/​featured-​insights/​china/​china-​and-​the-​world-​inside​the-​dynamics-​of-​a-​changing-​relationship. Word Bank. (2020).“Exports of Goods and Services (% of GDP)—​China.” https://​data.worldbank. org/​indicator/​NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?locations=CN.

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20  South Africa An economy of extremes Sam Ashman

South Africa is marred by remarkable economic, social and environmental extremes. Inequality, unemployment, poverty, violence, including that against women, levels of HIV/​AIDS infection and tuberculosis, diabetes, hunger and obesity—​all stand amongst the highest in the world. So do carbon emissions, as a consequence of a coal-​dominated energy system. And so, too, do social protests and resistance. None of these phenomena is unique to South Africa, but the South African path of development has meant they take particularly acute and extreme forms. Despite social progress towards reversing the racist practices which pervaded all aspects of life before 1994, South Africa profoundly marred by its past, many features of which continue to be reproduced in the present. The transition to democracy in 1994 followed 300 years of colonialism, 50 years of the racist apartheid white minority regime (under which the black majority were barred from voting), and the emergence of an (at times) powerful and dynamic liberation movement. Yet the government of the African National Congress (ANC), since coming to power in 1994, has presided over widening inequality, increasing unemployment and precariousness for those in work, a gathering climate crisis, and growing levels of corruption (Ashman, 2019). The adoption of a mainstream neoliberal economic framework by the ANC has helped develop the financialisation of the economy, which is a critical cause of many contemporary negative features of the economy. Financialisation has undermined already skewed productive structures, bloated the financial sector, fuelled wage decline for workers and pay rises at the top, and is powering rising debt. Services are increasingly privatised and commodified. At the same time, the offshore listings of many major companies have led to the expatriation of vast amounts of wealth. South Africa today is officially a middle-​ income economy and Africa’s most industrialised country. It has changed since 1994, but not transformed. The change has been from one flawed system to another: from the apartheid-​era ‘minerals–​energy complex’ (MEC) (Fine & Rustomjee, 1996), discussed below, to a neoliberal, financialised MEC, which has left South Africa in a crisis of development, and with a crisis of the state. This chapter looks at three key issues: inequality; the crises of work and social reproduction; and the climate crisis.

Inequality South Africa has the highest level of inequality in the world, of those countries keeping data, and this inequality remains racially based, even though there has been some growth of a black elite and middle class. This inequality is based fundamentally on income inequality: the 10 per cent highest-​income earners take 60 per cent of the total income DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-24

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172  Sam Ashman in the country (Statistics South Africa, 2019). The poorest half of the population get 10 per cent of all income. Wealth inequality is even higher. The richest decile of the population possess 95 per cent of all wealth, and the top 1 per cent own 67 per cent, while the poorest half have no significant wealth/​measurable assets whatsoever (Orthofer, 2016; Statistics South Africa, 2019). Income inequality is so extreme that it compares to worldwide inequality and defies well-​established international regularities. More than half of all household expenditure is spent by the richest decile of the population.The bottom 50 per cent of the population account for less than 10 per cent of total household expenditure. Some 60 per cent of the population is officially poor as defined by the ‘upper bound poverty line’ of Statistics South Africa, and half of these are considered to be ‘extremely poor’. In a stark example of uneven and combined development, mass poverty and unemployment intertwine with a relatively advanced economy where a small proportion of the population enjoys living standards comparable with the average of the richest countries, and who exist alongside the majority who have incomes typical of the poorest countries. The racialised character of inequality persists. Black South Africans, 80 per cent of the population, have an average income around 20 per cent the average income of whites, who represent around 10 per cent of the population. These percentages have risen over the post-​apartheid period, especially for the relatively small ‘coloured’ and ‘Asian/​Indian’ populations, but inequality in South Africa remains deeply racialised. Nonetheless, a new ‘black’ political elite and capitalist class, in agreement with old-​order capital, has emerged so that today inequality between black Africans is even higher than between race inequality. Whilst 50 per cent of the population is trapped in what is deemed ‘chronic’ poverty, another quarter of the population precariously moves in and out of poverty and are classed as either ‘transient’ or ‘vulnerable’ (Zizzamia, Schotte, & Leibbrandt, 2019). The high level of unemployment, which stands at over 40 per cent when ‘discouraged’ work seekers are included, is an important part of understanding this income inequality. And this income inequality ripples out and is deeply interwoven with every aspect of life in South Africa—​life expectancy, health, hunger, education, housing, access to medical treatment and basic services. Inequality did not improve with democracy as a consequence of the failures of economic restructuring in the post-​apartheid period (Ashman et al., 2014). Historically, the economy has been structured by colonialism, and the needs of mining capital in particular, following the discovery of minerals, diamonds, and then particularly gold, from the 1870s onwards. Capital and state established, over time and through trial and error, a migrant labour system whereby Africans migrated from ‘reserves’ (land allocated to them) for periods of work on the mines, housed in compounds and subject to terrible conditions. Through conflict and compromise within the elite (Lacey, 1981), African labour was also ‘allocated’ to farming capital and to the new urban centres, with movement strictly controlled by pass laws, and compounds or hostels built in urban centres too. Land dispossession underpinned this, as embodied in the 1913 Land Act which gave only 13 per cent of the land to Africans. This was clearly not enough for the majority to survive on, thus forcing Africans to look for work. A colour bar, which reserved certain jobs for whites, meant black workers were denied better-​paying skilled jobs, and job reservation schemes provided employment specifically for white labour. Under apartheid (1948–​ 1994), as well as a barrage of racist legislation, forced labour continued, and a skewed industrial structure developed further, dominated by minerals and connected sectors, but weak in more employment-​generating sectors. Big

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South Africa: An economy of extremes  173 state-​owned enterprises were at the core of a ‘development’ project aimed at benefiting only a minority of society. Eskom generated cheap electricity from coal, providing cheap power to the rest of mining and industry and to the white minority. Iscor, the iron and steel corporation (later privatised), helped to develop industry, and Sasol developed liquid fuel from coal.This core of the economy was therefore both capital-​and carbon-​intensive, and produced an economy uniquely dependent on cheap electricity. The economy today remains characterised by extreme labour exploitation, racial oppression, and migration. Unsurprising, then, that the term ‘racial capitalism’ was first used in relation to South Africa (Legassick & Hemson, 1976). Wage/​income inequality, the root of inequality in South Africa, is therefore a deliberate consequence of the pattern of development before 1994. This has continued since 1994, particularly as financialisation has developed apace, driving up earnings at the top, pushing corporations to maximise shareholder value, and weakening employment even further. At the same time, some have done very well, including the companies which grew up under colonialism and apartheid. For example, two of the richest people in South Africa today are Nicky Oppenheimer of the Anglo-​American mining company, and Johann Rupert of the Rembrandt/​Remgro group. The latter developed on the basis of tobacco and alcohol sales from the 1940s onwards, and now has interests spreading from luxury watches and handbags to the internet, banking and financial services, food, and private medical care. Recommended reading: Ashman, Fine, Padayachee, and Sender (2014); Zizzamia, Schotte, and Leibbrandt (2019).

The crises of work and social reproduction Growth over the post-​apartheid period has been weak, and largely jobless. Under the impact of COVID-​19 in 2020, some 1.7 million people lost their jobs, taking the expanded unemployment rate (including discouraged jobseekers) to 43.1 per cent (11.1 million people). The unemployment rate for Africans is 47.4 per cent, for African women it is 51.4 per cent, and in the Eastern Cape unemployment for all races is 51.2 per cent. Work is not a means out of poverty either. Stagnant incomes for the majority combine with rising food and energy prices, and with households depending on unsustainable levels of debt. There is strong gender bias, as well as a racial one. Women are more likely to be unemployed, and women workers earn around 30 per cent less than male workers. Marais (2020) points how the contemporary crisis of waged work in South Africa is linked to global trends. Low wages are being driven by the spread of casualised and sub-​ contracted labour. This has produced a decline in wages for low-​skilled workers along with job losses in areas with previously strong trade union organisation such as mining and manufacturing. A small core of full-​time skilled workers now exists alongside a large tier of less-​skilled and outsourced workers without benefits or rights. Here apartheid’s legacies combine with global trends. For example, the liberalisation of agricultural markets, previously dominated by white commercial farmers, has seen farmers integrated into global value chains bringing new competitive dynamics of casualisation (Meagher, 2019). In the fruit industry, employment has halved while seasonal work has increased relative to permanent work. Labour brokers and a variety of intermediaries mediate these processes, in ways not dissimilar to the old intermediaries involved in the migrant labour system. Minerals and energy and related sectors and finance still dominate, the latter blocking the structural change of the economy by fuelling debt and speculation.

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174  Sam Ashman Poverty is deepest in rural areas, where a third of the population lives. Small-​scale agriculture is a source of income for only a few, and the majority rely heavily on government social grants in order to survive. Better-​paying jobs such as teachers, nurses, or local government administration work are relatively scarce, and many younger people are forced to go to urban areas for work. ‘Custom’ remains important in rural areas, particularly around processes for gaining access to land in the former reserves (including but not limited to the role played by unelected chiefs), and land and property rights are important for establishing a rural homestead, far cheaper to run than in urban areas. ‘De-​agrarianisation’ may be occurring, but access to land is still critical for rural social reproduction (Cousins et al., 2018). Whilst the term ‘structural unemployment’ is correct, the idea of a ‘relative surplus population’ captures the situation more adequately, given how much of the society is surplus to the immediate needs of capital at any one time, with a smaller proportion of this relative surplus population acting as an industrial reserve army of labour (Marx, 1990). There is a close connection between racialisation and the creation of surplus populations, as formerly unfree labour becomes the core of the surplus population. This ‘surplus’ is not outside capitalist development and circuits of accumulation, but historically created by it, and integrated into it through a variety of channels, even if outside formal waged work. This ‘secondary exploitation’ takes place through debts and rents (Marx, 1993; Soederberg, 2014) with the exploitation of debt, rent, and the labour process mutually reinforcing (Marx, 1990). Social grants are key to social reproduction, indeed survival. But these are not beyond the sphere of secondary exploitation either. Contemporary social welfare systems are increasingly reflecting the interests and motives of finance-​dominated capitalism as old forms of redistribution and social provisioning are replaced by instruments of financial inclusion, credit, and debt. Ideas about, and the promotion of, financial inclusion have allowed private financial technology (fintech) firms (and others) to bring new consumers (i.e., the poor) into credit markets through cash transfers. Social grants in South Africa are the largest social grants payments system in Africa and the South African social grants crisis of 2015–​2017 is an important example of finance predatorily attaching itself to the poor; of the private national distribution of welfare for financial gain. The contract to distribute social grants was won by Cash Paymaster Services, owned by Net1, a firm founded in 1989 and which operates in South Korea, India, Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere as a financial services and payment technology provider. Net1 partnered with Grindrod Bank to administer the bank accounts for social grant recipients, Grindrod being part of the Remgro group mentioned above. The system went into crisis in 2015 as it emerged that Net1 was making illegal direct debits from social grant recipients’ bank accounts (revealed thanks to a series of legal challenges by Black Sash), most of which were through Net1 Mobile Solutions, which allows subscribers to use their grants to pay for pre-​paid water, electricity, gas, and airtime, payments which were deducted directly from Grindrod bank accounts. Two other Net1 subsidiaries deducted for loan repayments and insurance premiums. It used its new ‘client base’ for marketing and advertising—​SMSs, and adverts on grant payment receipts. In 2015, and as criticism grew, Net1 began transferring grant recipients over to a new bank account (still functioning) called EasyPay Everywhere (EPE)—​again administered by Grindrod. Transferring over was made a condition for receiving Moneyline loans. To date EPE has over three million accounts. These new accounts allowed Net1 to avoid the government’s ban on direct debit deductions. In effect, Net1 has been able to build

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South Africa: An economy of extremes  175 a customer base which is now independent of the state contract for social grants (which Net1 has now lost), and it turned social grants into collateral to receive loans and to acquire debt. Many social grant recipients report having to take out extra credit, including from mashionisas (loan sharks), in order to be able to survive (Torkelson, 2020). Recommended reading: Cousins et al. (2018); Marais (2020); Torkelson (2020).

The climate crisis The climate crisis is not a future event, but already with us. The Southern African region as a whole is considered to be a climate change ‘hot spot’—​a region more vulnerable than average to climate change. Such hot spots are understood in relation to two dimensions: firstly, the amount of climate change the region has been, and will be, exposed to, and secondly, the ability of natural and human systems to cope with this expected amount of change (Scholes, Engelbrecht, & Vogel, 2020). Southern Africa is warming faster than the global mean, and is expected to continue to do so given it is near to the tropics but outside the equatorial high-​rainfall zone. Temperatures have risen across Southern Africa over the last 60 years at twice the rate of global warming (Scholes, Engelbrecht, & Vogel, 2020). While much of the world is getting warmer and wetter, Southern Africa is getting drier.This is because of a high rate of temperature increase; the southward movement of waves of cooler air that move over Southern Africa and which bring rainfall to the Cape; and changes in global ocean circulation, the El Niño effect, which mean a higher risk that drought periods will last for several years. Southern Africa is likely to get drier in future years, flooding is likely to be heavier because as rainfall declines overall, a larger portion of that rainfall will come in the form of ‘extreme rainfall events’: destructive storms where the rainfall exceeds the capacity of the land to soak up the water. As sea levels rise, due to ocean warming and the melting of ice bodies, coastal areas are made vulnerable. South Africa’s coastline is relatively steep, but Mozambique is highly vulnerable, as in 2019 when Cyclone Idai, the worst recorded flood disaster in Southern Africa, had a devastating effect on Mozambique, as well as Malawi and Zimbabwe. On the second dimension, that of ‘coping’, Southern Africa faces two difficulties: firstly, as a ‘mega-​diverse’ area of the world it has a greater number of species to care for. Secondly, it is made up of largely poor developing countries with basic infrastructure, poorly developed disaster management systems, and high debt levels. Key sectors of the economy are highly energy-​intensive and produce relatively large quantities of greenhouse gases, discussed further below. South Africa is amongst the 30 most water-​stressed countries in the world (Ngam, 2020). Over the last ten years it has gone through a series of prolonged, multi-​year droughts. Persistent drought has pushed many households in South Africa into deeper food vulnerability. Poor management or mismanagement of water resources by local authorities adds to the lack of water caused by drought. Government estimates show that in 2020 there were three million households without access to reliable drinking water; 14.1 million households without access to safe sanitation; and 36 per cent of households without a reliable water supply service (Ngam, 2020). So South Africa, like the rest of the region, is disproportionately as risk. At the same time, the economy as a whole is disproportionately responsible, in the sense that the pattern of industrial development is particularly carbon-​intense. South Africa’s contribution to global warming is so large that it is amongst the top 20 greenhouse gas emitters

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176  Sam Ashman in the world—​with that position changing slightly year to year and according to which data are included (Scholes, Scholes, & Lucas 2015). South Africa is certainly the largest emitter in Africa. Energy remains approximately 85 per cent generated from coal by the state-​owned power company Eskom, and Eskom/​the energy system is primarily responsible for South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions. The extreme and particular dominance of fossil fuels is explained by the historical evolution of state and capital, as discussed above. Coal has been a critical commodity, both a source of export revenues, and a source of cheap (because state-​subsidised) supply of power which benefited the large corporate consumers of electricity who historically bought the lion’s share—​particularly the other sectors of mining. Frequently, coal suppliers and electricity consumers were the same people, like Anglo American and Gencor, which became BHP Biliton.The state used coal contracts to develop local mining capacity amongst those with political ties to the state, developing new (white) ‘Afrikaner’ capital as distinct from (white) English or ‘imperial’ capital (Fine & Rustomjee, 1996). This mining and carbon-​intensive core of the economy was extended further with the state establishment of Sasol in 1950 (privatised in 1979) which makes liquid fuels from coal. Subsidies were extended to Sasol as the state pursued economic development for the white minority, and later in the 1970s became increasingly concerned about energy security in the face of possible sanctions against the apartheid regime. This historical state support has created a system of ‘cheap’ fossil fuels. Both Eskom and Sasol have been, and continue to be, significant beneficiaries of state subsidies, which have helped effectively to ‘lock in’ carbon dependence over time, and subsidies have continued since 1994 (Burton, Lott, & Rennkamp, 2018). This also involved support to the so-​called ‘other oil companies’ which operate in South Africa, including Shell, BP,Total, Chevron, and Engen.The coal sector has evolved since 1994, but it remains reliant on Eskom as the largest user of coal. There are links between coal-​mining interests and the ruling ANC, and Eskom has become increasingly embroiled in corruption. Indeed Eskom, threatened with privatisation at the time of the transition and so unable to plan, has become increasingly crisis-​r idden post-​apartheid, with load shedding (planned power outages) now a regular occurrence as the system cannot meet demand. In the face of crisis, Eskom did what it knows best: it commissioned two new giant coal power stations, Medupi and Kusile, with a generating capacity of 4800 MW, funded by a loan from the World Bank. The ongoing importance of coal also has implications for water, and for the provision of water infrastructure, with a large government spend on water infrastructure taking place in the Waterberg area for these coal-​fired plants, at the same time as there is severe drought elsewhere. Whilst wind and solar power are increasing as a proportion of the energy mix, coal will be dominant for some time to come. Today there is a distinct lack of vision as to how to move South Africa beyond its coal dependence.Yet social, racial, and ecological injustice have long gone hand in hand. The costs of the climate crisis in terms of lives and livelihoods are borne by the marginalised and precarious and are highly racialised. A long-​term strategy is needed to transform the economy from dependence on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy, a strategy which sees climate justice and social and racial justice as interconnected, and which makes central ‘climate jobs’—​the creation of employment in the process of ensuring a just transition (Ashman, Newman, & Tregenna, 2020). Recommended reading: Ashman, Newman, and Tregenna (2020); Scholes, Engelbrecht, and Vogel (2020).

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Conclusion Even before COVID-​19 and its effects, South Africa was in an acute and deepening crisis. The legacy of past development bequeathed the ANC in 1994 a skewed economic structure, and high levels of racially based poverty and unemployment in a low wage economy. The neoliberal course taken since 1994 has intensified many of the features of apartheid-​era political economy, with the financialisation of the MEC producing rising inequality, jobless growth, low wages, and precarity for those in work, debt-​driven consumption, and reliance on fossil fuel accumulation. These are all central features of global capitalism today. Playing out in the South African context, they are remarkably extreme in their impacts. Low investment, low employment, low wages, and low productivity combine with a crisis of public provision and corruption in the state. COVID-​19 has had huge costs—​including a 50 per cent drop in industrial production over 2020. Yet fiscal contraction and austerity are the policy order of the day, risking another lost decade and a possible downward structural shift in the economy. COVID-​19 is, of course, not an exogenous shock as many like to present it, but is rooted in industrial agricultural production and its impacts (Wallace et al., 2020). For South Africa, a fundamental rethink and reorganisation of the economy are necessary. Without this, the realities of life within the financialised semi-​periphery of global capitalism will continue to be harsh.

References Ashman, S. (2019). “Financialized Accumulation and the Political Economy of State Capture.” New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, 75: 6–​11. Ashman, S., Fine, B., Padayachee,V., & Sender, J. (2014).“The Political Economy of Restructuring in South Africa,” in Bhorat, H., Hirsch, A., Kanbur, R., & Ncube, M. (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Economics of South Africa, pp. 67–​74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ashman, S., Newman, S., & Tregenna, F. (2020).“Radical Industrial Policy,” in Chang, H.-​J., Cramer, C., Kozul-​Wright, R., & Oqubay, A. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy, pp. 178–​206. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burton, J., Lott, T., & Rennkamp, B. (2018). “Sustaining Carbon Lock-​In: Fossil Fuel Subsidies in South Africa,” in Skovgaard, J. & van Asselt, H. (eds.), The Politics of Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Their Reform, pp. 229–​245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cousins, B., Dubb, A., Hornby, D., & Mtero, F. (2018). “Social Reproduction of ‘Classes of Labour’ in the Rural Areas of South Africa: Contradictions and Contestations.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(5–​6): 1060–​1085. Fine, B., & Rustomjee, Z. (1996). The Political Economy of South Africa: From Minerals–​Energy Complex to Industrialisation. London: Hurst. Lacey, M. (1981). Capitalist Roots of Apartheid –​Working for Boroko. The Origins of a Coercive Labour System in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Legassick, M., & Hemson, D. (1976). “Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa.” Foreign Investment in South Africa Discussion Series No. 2. London:Anti-​ Apartheid Movement. Marais, H. (2020). “The Crisis of Waged Work and the Option of a Universal Basic Income Grant for South Africa.” Globalizations, 17(2): 352–​379. Marx, K. (1990). Capital,Vol. I. London: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. (1993). Capital,Vol. III. London: Penguin Classics. Meagher, K. (2019). “Working in Chains: African Informal Workers and Global Value Chains.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 8(1–​2): 64–​92.

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178  Sam Ashman Ngam, R. (2020). “South Africa is Drying Up—​and it is Only Going to Get Worse.” Daily Maverick, 28 October, www.dailymaverick.co.za/​opinionista/​2020-​10-​28-​south-​africa-​is-​drying-​up-​ and-​it-​is-​only-​going-​to-​get-​worse/​. Orthofer, A. (2016). “Wealth Inequality in South Africa: Evidence from Survey and Tax Data.” Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth, Working Paper No. 15. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. http://​redi3x3.org/​sites/​default/​files/​Orthoferper cent202016per cent20REDI3x3per cent20Workingper cent20Paperper cent2015per cent20-​ per cent20Wealthper cent20inequality.pdf. Scholes, B., Engelbrecht, F., & Vogel, C. (2020). “Climate Change: Effective Action Based on Enhanced Understanding.” Emancipatory Futures Studies, Climate Science Thinkpiece. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand. Scholes, R.J., Scholes, M.C., Lucas, M. (2015). Climate Change: Briefings from Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Soederbergh, S. (2014). Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population. London: Routledge. Statistics South Africa. (2019). Annual Report 2019/​2020. www.statssa.gov.za/​?page_​id=368. Torkelson, E. (2020). “Collateral Damages: Cash Transfer and Debt Transfer in South Africa.” World Development, 126: 104711. Wallace, R., Liebman, A., Chaves, L.F., & Wallace, R. (2020). “COVID-​19 and Circuits of Capital.” Monthly Review, 1 May. https://​monthlyreview.org/​2020/​05/​01/​covid-​19-​and-​circuits-​of-​ capital/​. Zizzamia, R., Schotte, S., & Leibbrandt, M. (2019). “Snakes and Ladders and Loaded Dice: Poverty Dynamics and Inequality in South Africa Between 2008–​2017.” Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper No. 235. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. www.opensaldru.uct.ac.za/​bitstream/​handle/​11090/​950/​2019_​235_​Saldruwp.pdf?seqence=1.

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Part VI

Poverty, inequalities, and development dynamics

A fundamental characteristic of capitalism—​ indeed, a presumed law of capitalist development—​is a propensity towards uneven development and the generation of social inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income, as well as access to productive resources and opportunities for self-​development. Indeed, many theorists, including the French economist Tomas Piketty in his treatise on capitalism in the 21st century, have described inequality in the social relations of production (the structure of social class) and international relations along a North–​South axis, as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as a system (on this also see other books by Piketty, such as The Economics of Inequality (2015)). The fundamental contradiction of capitalism in terms of social inequality, poverty, and uneven development is that global poverty reduction is both a fundamental mandate of the World Bank and other agencies of international cooperation and the inevitable by-​product of capitalist development—​of the system that these very same agencies present and promote as the solution to the problem of poverty. The chapters in this part elaborate in different contexts this fundamental dynamic of capitalist development, with a central focus on the poverty problematic in the development process. In Chapter 21 Henry Veltmeyer elucidates the centrality of social class in the development process of capitalist systems. He outlines the diverse understandings and uses of the concept of social class and the associated dynamics of social inequality, the production of poverty in wealth, and uneven international development. The other chapters in this part, as well as several of the chapters in Part VII—​Chapters 26, 28–​30—​expand on these dynamics in diverse regional contexts (China, the Gulf Arab states, Latin America, South Africa). Alberto D. Cimadamore identifies the systemic forces that reproduce relations of social inequality and poverty, and analyses them in the context of the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. In this context, he analyses the structure and agency-​ based models (theoretical representations used to cut through the complexities of the development process in order to make analysis possible) used by theorists to deconstruct the poverty problematic of capitalist development, pointing towards a possible solution to the problem of global poverty. Naila Kabeer, in Chapter 23, elaborates on this poverty problematic and its development dynamics but does so with a gender lens. The chapter provides a brief history of feminist contributions to two fundamental approaches to the poverty problematic: one focused on shortfalls in basic needs satisfaction at a particular point in time, and the other concerned with understanding changes in the reproduction of poverty over time. Fiona MacPhail in the following chapter uses the same feminist lens in regard to the issue of gender inequalities at work, illustrating her argument with reference to the cases DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-25

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180  Poverty, inequalities, and development dynamics of Cambodia and China. Her feminist perspective on gender inequalities is based on an analysis of the structural and policy dynamics of economic development, including globalisation and export-​oriented, neoliberal development strategies. Her conclusions include the judgement that gender equality in relation to the social institution of work may contribute to women’s economic empowerment, In Chapter 25 Ted Schrecker explores the dynamics involved in the production and reproduction of inequalities in the health system and the global policy agenda. A notable feature of his critical development study of the global and systemic dynamics of health inequalities is his conclusion that COVID-​19 has changed everything. For one thing, it revealed the homicidal dimensions of austerity in the form of fatal under-​investment in basic public health infrastructure across a wide range of countries. For another, it revealed the failings of what one leading researcher called ‘a broken ecosystem for making vaccines’ because of the dependence on the returns on profit-​oriented capitalist enterprise and private sector investment in the necessary basic science and clinical trials.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What are the fundamental causes of world poverty? 2. What are the major dimensions, and causes, of inequality identified in the chapters? 3. A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report published in 2010 argues that ‘there exists a direct correspondence between the advance of globalisation, neoliberalism, and the advance of poverty, social inequality, social inequity’. What explains this correspondence? 4. The same report argues that ‘the most explosive contradictions … are given because the advance of globalisation marches hand in hand with the advance of poverty and social polarisation’. Would it be possible to solve the problem of global poverty by searching for another more sustainable form of capitalism?

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21  Development Class matters Henry Veltmeyer

There are three different ways of understanding ‘society’—​as: (i) a collection of individuals, each motivated to better themselves or to seek self-​advantage; (ii) a system of institutionalised practices that sets rules and limits to the action of individuals; and (iii) a system of inter-​connected social groups with shared experiences, able to act collectively on the basis of these experiences. The first conception of society is widely shared by economists and political scientists in the liberal tradition, who view individuals as rational calculators of self-​interest in their individual and collective actions, citizens who are equal in their opportunities for self-​advancement. The second and third ways of understanding society accord with what could be described as the ‘sociological perspective’, which is to view the problems, experiences, and actions of both individuals and nations as a function of their position in the broader system and understood in terms of the way society or the economy is organised.This is to say, neither individuals nor nations are free to choose and act in any way they please; the structure in which they are enmeshed limits or conditions the choices and opportunities available to them and their actions. In this ‘structural’ context, individuals—​and, at a different level, nations—​are constrained by forces that arise from the structure of the system—​from conditions that are objective in their effects according to their position or location in the system. This does not mean that ‘structures’ are determinant and that the choices and actions of individuals do not matter —​that they do not have a role to play in explaining the course of events, or the dynamics of the development process. As Marx noted, individuals are a product of their circumstances, but nevertheless it is people who make history, although not under conditions of their choosing. What this means is that individuals (and also countries) do indeed have a degree of freedom or the ability to act, but that actions are constrained or limited by forces that they do not control but to which they can respond with social consciousness and collective purpose. What Marx means is expressed in the notion of ‘class in itself ’ (as defined by a structural analysis) and ‘class for itself ’ (when people act with conscious awareness of their situation and circumstances). On this point, see the discussion below on the politics of class struggle. As Marx saw it and many sociologists argue as a matter of principle, people generally enter society under conditions that are not of their choosing and that shape their actions according to their class position, i.e., their social relationship to production. Under these conditions, the actions of people can be analysed in structural, i.e., scientific, terms. And the same applies to international relations among entire nations in the world capitalist system. However, this ‘structural’ analysis of class is but the first step in the methodology of class analysis. The second step is to analyse the actions taken by individuals when they DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-26

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182  Henry Veltmeyer become class-​conscious, i.e., aware of their class position and the collective actions taken on the basis of this awareness. As Marx expressed it, individuals are only fully constituted or formed when they become class-​conscious—​when they are transformed from a ‘class in itself ’ (as determined by scientific analysis of their class position) into a ‘class for itself ’. We have here the fundamental precepts of what we might term critical development studies, critical sociology, or political economy in the critical tradition.

Different forms of class analysis The distribution of socio-​economic conditions in society, and their association with different social groups and classes, is never haphazard but the result of how society is organised, and the institutionalised practices associated with the relations of production and power in society. Notwithstanding significant differences in the social structure of different societies, there is nevertheless a surprising consistency in the pattern displayed by these practices—​in the limits of variation in the social condition of the people, in what we might well define as the social structure of advanced capitalist societies and the typical class structure of societies on the periphery of the world capitalist system. Social class as structure and agency An analysis of this ‘structure’ has been represented by sociologists and development theorists in four ways. One is in terms of the dominant social relations of production, which defines two basic classes: the bourgeoisie, or the owners of the means of production; and the working class, those who, dispossessed from their means of production, are compelled to exchange their labour power for a living wage. In addition, the class structure of many societies typically includes the petite bourgeoisie, a class of small-​property owners or business operators that have been conceived of as the core of the traditional ‘middle class’, as well as a managerial-​professional class of service providers, conceived of by some sociologists as the ‘new middle class’ (Portes & Hoffman, 2003). In addition, societies on the periphery of what has been described as the ‘world capitalist system’ typically also include a class of small-​scale independent commodity producers, whose relations of production are pre-​capitalist and who are generally viewed, or view themselves, as ‘peasants’ (Bernstein, 2010). With the capitalist development of agriculture and industry over the past five decades a large part of this so-​called ‘peasantry’ has been effectively or partially proletarianised, converted into a rural semiproletariat of landless workers and a peri-​urban proletariat of self-​employed street workers (Delgado Wise & Veltmeyer, 2016; Tokman, 1992). For example, close to one-​half of the Latin American working class today work not for wages in factories and offices but ‘on their own account’ on the streets in the so-​ called ‘informal sector’ of the burgeoning urban centres and cities of the Global South (Davis, 2006). Guy Standing (2011) has defined this semiproletariat in terms of the concept of precariat, with reference to the insecurity, lack of predictability, and precarious conditions of work (‘precarity’) associated with this urban semiproletariat. The emergence of this class—​on the formation of this class also see the important work of the distinguished Mexican theorist Adrian Sotelo Valencia (2015)—​has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism on the periphery of the world system, although Standing has argued that the emergence of this precariat has become a serious issue in 21st-​century Europe in the context of a populist reaction to the neoliberal policy agenda.

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Development: Class matters  183 Classes as occupational groups A second way of understanding the social structure is in terms of the division of labour formed through the capitalist development process. The process, as it has unfolded in different parts of the world over the past century and a half, implies the transformation of an agriculture-​based society, characterised by pre-​capitalist relations of production and a traditional culture of social solidarity, into a modern urban-​centred capitalist system based on industry and a culture of possessive individualism. In these terms, the social structure is generally defined in terms of major occupational groups, relations among which are understood in functional terms (i.e., in a relation of complementarity, structural interdependence, and social solidarity). In contrast, when the social structure is defined in terms of the dominant social relations of production, they are typically understood in Marxist terms as relations of economic exploitation and class conflict. Conceptualised in these terms, the social structure of broadly defined occupational groups can be described as a status hierarchy in which all individuals, according to their location in the social structure, are allocated by society a certain ‘coefficient of well-​ being’—​income, and other ‘rewards for effort, talent and skills, commensurate with their occupational status’. In these terms, the distribution of income and wealth in society is viewed as a function of the importance that society attaches to certain functions within a scale of modern values. Social class as an individual’s life chances A third way of viewing the social structure is in terms not of an individual’s relation to production, but his or her relation to consumption, or the market—​what Max Weber conceived of as an individual’s life’s chances. In these terms, often combined (by theorists of social stratification) with the notion of occupational class, the categories of social class analysis are upper, upper-​middle, middle, lower-​middle, and lower. In the mainstream of development studies, the central focus is on policies and practices that result in lifting the poor, those deprived of the resources, opportunity, and income needed to meet their basic human needs, out of poverty and into the middle class (i.e., those individuals with the resources and income to not only meet their basic needs, but secure a decent standard of living). Income class as a statistical grouping of the population Another form of class analysis is employed by many economists in the mainstream of development studies. Here, ‘class’ is understood in terms of income: the distribution of national income per deciles or quintiles of the population. In this approach, classes are statistical constructs rather than social groups defined by their location in the social structure and a corresponding identity or class consciousness. This is important, because classes can only be viewed as ‘actors’ to the degree that they act.What this means is that income class has limited analytical utility; it serves as a useful analytical tool only as regards the first step in class analysis. Recommended reading: Bernstein (2010); Davis (2006); Delgado Wise and Veltmeyer (2016); Portes and Hoffman (2003); Sotelo Valencia (2015); Standing (2011).

Class as a social relation of production No matter how the social structure is conceptualised—​and often these four different forms of class analysis are combined—​Latin American societies are characterised by

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184  Henry Veltmeyer Table 21.1 Income distribution, percentage share, and Gini coefficient for selected Latin American countries, 1990–​2010 Poorest 40%

Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Ecuador Mexico Venezuela

Richest 10%

Gini

1990

2010

1990

2010

1990

2010

15.0 12.1 18.5 20.8 25.4 22.6 25.7

15.5 11.2 20.3 21.2 24.6 24.0 27.9

34.6 38.1 43.9 40.7 30.6 36.6 28.7

32.1 35.4 41.0 38.4 32.7 34.4 24.8

0.50 0.54 0.63 0.55 0.46 0.54 0.47

0.51 0.57 0.58 0.52 0.50 0.52 0.41

Source: ECLAC—​Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (2010: 75–​78).

structured relations and conditions of social inequality: what the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) terms ‘the structure of social inequality’, a structure that underpins the social distribution of wealth and income. However, because of the limited form in which statistics are collected and available, the social structure of this distribution is constructed on the basis of a statistical rather than a social grouping of the population. Thus, the methodological procedure is to break the population into deciles or quintiles of income earners, and to determine the share of each in national income; and also, via the Gini index or a ratio of top-​to-​bottom groupings, to compare countries. For example,Table 21.1 presents in statistical terms the structure of social income distribution for countries in Latin America. The table points to a structure of social inequality that has exhibited remarkable persistence over time, relatively immune to fluctuations in the rate of growth and also resisting efforts of the ‘development community’ of international organisations in the 1990s under the post-​Washington Consensus to bring about a more inclusive form of development based on a new social policy of poverty reduction. For an analysis of these structural and policy dynamics, see Veltmeyer and Tetreault (2013).

The middle-​class conundrum: what is it? And where is it? In practice, in the mainstream of development studies, improvements in the social condition of the people are measured in terms of income distribution—​to determine the income shares of different social groups and classes. It is evident that such distribution is not random, but that it is ‘structured’ (i.e., associated with the position that individuals and groups occupy in the social structure).The social structure in capitalist societies assumes a hierarchical form, with each ‘class of human functionary’ (to use Durkheim’s expression) assigned a ‘certain coefficient of well-​being’ (a share of the wealth, a quota of income-​to-​ reward effort and talent). The problem is how to identify the basic elements of this structure, and to connect the pattern of social distribution to these elements. Above, we identified sociological theories of an analysis of the social structure. However, the main way of analysing the distribution of income both within and among diverse societies and nation-​states is in terms of the methodology favoured by economists, which is to group people statistically in terms of average income earned or received by people in each group. In these terms, the share of different statistical groups (deciles or quintiles)

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Development: Class matters  185 can be compared and calculated. For example, the share of total income that accrues to the poorest 10–​40 per cent can be compared to the share received or appropriated by the richest 10 or even 1 per cent. In this analysis, the ‘middle class’ is constructed not as a social group, but as a statistical artefact: all individuals in the middle range of income distribution—​from the 40th to the 90th percentile of income distribution, for example, or 50 per cent of the population. World Bank economist Branco Milanovic, one of the most astute and perceptive of economists analysing global inequality, measures class using this type of methodology. For example, in a study published in 2012 he used this type of approach to define the ‘emerging global middle class’. That is, the ‘global middle class’ is defined by its position in the global distribution of income. He characterises the current distribution of world income as one ‘with a bulge around the median with significantly rising incomes for the entire second third (or more) of the global income distribution. That is the new aspiring global middle class’ (Milanovic, 2012: 16). Thus, the middle class is defined by its position in the global income distribution. From this, Milanovic was then able to conclude that the ‘middle classes of the emerging market economies’, along with the top 1 per cent of global income earners, were the big ‘winners’ from globalisation (Milanovic, 2012: 12). But this depends on a definition of the ‘middle class’ based entirely on an arbitrary labelling of the global income distribution. In previous work, he used a different way of defining and calculating the size of the ‘middle class’. In Milanovic and Yitzhaki (2002: 155), they divided the world population into three groups: ‘the rich (those with incomes greater than Italy’s mean income), the poor (those with incomes less than Western countries’ poverty line), and the middle class’. On this basis they calculated that the ‘world middle class’ was only 11 per cent of the population. We should also remember that the inequality of world wealth distribution is much greater than the inequality in the distribution of world income. Worldwide, as well as nationally, a small minority owns most of the wealth. The bottom 95 per cent hold only 28.4 per cent of world wealth in its different forms, including property. The top 1 per cent, Forbes’ multibillionaire club, owns more than one-​half of world wealth, and over the past two decades this grossly unequal distribution has increased, the top 1 per cent having appropriated up to an estimated 80 per cent of the new wealth generated (see the World Inequality Report 2018 (World Inequality Lab, 2018) as well as Oxfam, 2020a, 2020b). The 2153 billionaires listed in Oxfam’s report on global inequality, a very small group within the global capitalist class, today account for more wealth (US$8 trillion) than 4.6 billion people. A small group within this class (the top 100), it has been estimated, has appropriated at least $30 billion in profits just over the last eight months of the global pandemic. An even smaller group within this class, the 26 richest billionaires, today are worth US$1.4 trillion combined. The concentration of wealth and its growth in excess of labour incomes have been documented by Piketty (2014); his conclusion is that major global inheritance taxes are needed to prevent class structures simply reproducing themselves. The methodology used by economists to measure wealth and income distribution, and the size of the middle class, is problematic at a number of levels. First, if the middle class is defined as all those who are neither rich nor poor, then—​depending on the defined poverty line—​up to 50 per cent of the population in many developing societies would automatically fall into the middle class, a dubious and rather meaningless proposition. It would of necessity include, and lump together, a large category of low-​income earners with a very restricted capacity to consume with individuals in an upper-​income bracket and a high level of consumption.

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186  Henry Veltmeyer Another problem is to extend the definition of the middle class downwards to the poverty line. For example, The Economist (12 May 2011: 58) cites a report commissioned and prepared by the African Development Bank in which one-​third of all Africans are placed in the ‘middle class’, defined as all those who are in a position to spend from $2 to $20 a day.Ten years earlier, the Bank notes, only 25 per cent of Africans were in this middle-​class position. But what does this possibly mean? A large swathe of low-​income earners, and even some of the poor, by statistical fiat, materialise as the ‘middle class’! A more sensible and analytically useful approach would be to use a Marxist conception of class in which the population can be categorised and divided into four classes, two formed around the capital–​labour relation and two with a more indirect connection to this relation: (i) the capitalist class, in its dominant forms (financial, industrial); (ii) the working class, in its multitudinous and changing forms including workers in the informal sector; (iii) the petite bourgeoisie—​an old middle class of small proprietors, independent farmers and business owners, artisans, and a new middle class of professionals and functionaries, providers of diverse ‘business and corporate services’, who, like all members of this ‘upper-​middle class’ trade on their knowledge and other forms of intangible means of production; and (iv) the peasantry, a class of small land-​owning farmers who do not work and live to accumulate capital, but respond to a different development logic. In this method of class analysis, the middle class can also be viewed in structural terms, but not in terms of the relation of individuals to production; rather, social class is defined in terms of the capacity of individuals to consume, which defines its fundamental role in the capitalist development process: to constitute the market on which capitalism depends for its expansion and normal functioning—​‘to create a group of consumers large enough to sustain broad economic spurts in the services and manufacturing sectors’ (The Economist, 12 May 2011). In the current conjuncture of globalising capital, the middle class is expanding most rapidly in the ‘emerging markets’ of Asia, particularly China and India. This corresponds to Milanovic’s findings but starts from class structures rather than simply class counting. Recommended reading: Oxfam (2020b); Piketty (2014).

The politics of class struggle and resistance From a critical development studies perspective, class analysis has two dimensions: structural and political. The first step in class analysis is to determine an individual’s class location—​to locate individuals in the social structure, no matter how this structure is conceptualised and theorised. At this level, we can conceive of a class in itself, with reference to conditions that are given and ‘objective’ in their effects on the individual. This is to determine the impact of forces that operate on people according to their class location. The next step is to determine the strategic or political response of different class groupings to these conditions and forces, on the basis of their class or political consciousness, i.e., awareness of their objective situation, an awareness that, according to Marx, is only or best achieved in the process of class struggle. It is in these terms that Marxists generally do their analysis and politics (i.e., based on the assumption that to each advance of capital in the development process, there corresponds a certain form of collective action and resistance based on this consciousness) in specific contexts. For example, in Latin America, in the 1950s and 1960s, the class struggle was advanced and primarily took the form of land struggle and the labour movement. This was in response to the dynamics of

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Development: Class matters  187 capitalist development at the time—​the proletarianisation of the direct producers, their transformation from peasants into a working class. In the subsequent period of capitalist development, typically referred to as the neoliberal era, the class struggle took the predominant form of resistance to the neoliberal policy agenda, which was used by governments to liberate the forces of economic production from the regulatory constraints of the welfare development state and to facilitate and effect the advance of capital. The resistance here took the form of opposition to the neoliberal policy agenda rather than as a land struggle or over the industrial labour process. The agency of this struggle was new social movements based on the peasantry and the semiproletarianised rural landless workers.This resistance paved the way for the return of the Left to state power in the form of a post-​neoliberal political and policy regime in the early 2000s (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2009). In the new millennium, in conditions of a transition towards a new phase in the capitalist development process and a progressive cycle in Latin American politics, the class struggle has taken diverse forms, including organised resistance against the destructive operations and negative socio-​economic impacts of extractive capital on both livelihoods and the environment, the enclosure of the commons (land, water, territorial resources), and a struggle to reclaim the right of access to the commons. The forces and agencies of this resistance are various class-​and community-​based social movements on the extractive frontier (Bebbington & Bury, 2013). The activism of these movements in the resistance has raised questions, and generated an as-​yet unresolved debate, about the relationship between class consciousness and the community as a possible agency of revolutionary change—​a ‘collective revolutionary subject’, in the words of Barkin and Sánchez (2017), written with reference to the Latin American process of capitalist development and the advance of extractive capital in this process. At issue in the debate (see Chapter 44 in this volume) is the notion of community as a relatively homogeneous entity with the capacity of consciousness and thus collective action. For some sociologists, with the exception of indigenous communities, a community so defined does not exist or only rarely does, class-​divided and fractured as most communities are.This, they argue, explains the lack of revolutionary ferment on the extractive frontier. It also explains the lack of dynamism of the community-​based eco-​territorial movements on the frontier. Arguably—​and the point is debatable (see Chapters 35 and 44 in this volume)—​a process of revolutionary transformation on the frontier of extractive capital is predicated on uniting the diverse forces of class-​based resistance on both the extractive frontier and elsewhere (the countryside, electoral politics, etc.), and thus awaits the formation of a class for itself capable of uniting these forces in a class struggle against the forces of capitalist development. Recommended reading: Bebbington and Bury (2013).

References Barkin, D., & Sánchez, A. (2017). “The Collective Revolutionary Subject: New Forms of Social Transformation.” Unedited paper for ‘Revolutions: A Conference’. Winnipeg, September. Bebbington, A., & Bury, J. (eds.) (2013). Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and Gas in Latin America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bernstein, H. (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax: Fernwood. Davis, M. (2006). A Planet of Slums. London:Verso.

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188  Henry Veltmeyer Delgado Wise, R., & Veltmeyer, H. (2016). Agrarian Change, Migration and Development. Halifax: Fernwood. ECLAC—​ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. (2010). Time for Equality: Closing Gaps, Opening Trails. Santiago, Chile: ECLAC. Milanovic, B. (2012). “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now.” Policy Research Working Paper No. 6259. Washington, DC: World Bank. Milanovic, B., & Yitzhaki, S. (2002). “Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does the World have a Middle Class?” Review of Income and Wealth, 48(2): 155–​178. Oxfam. (2020a). “World’s Billionaires have More Wealth than the 4.6 Billion.” Press release, January 20. Oxfam. (2020b). Time to Care. Ottawa: Oxfam Canada. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2009). What’s Left in Latin America? Farnham: Ashgate. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-​First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Portes, A., & Hoffman, K. (2003).“Latin American Class Structures:Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review, 38: 41–​82. Sotelo Valencia, A. (2015). The Future of Work: Super-​Exploitation and Social Precariousness in the 21st Century. Boston: Brill. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat:The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic Tokman, V.E. (1992). Beyond Regulation: The Informal Sector in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Veltmeyer, H., Tetreault, D. (2013). Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development Pathways. Sterling,VA: Kumarian Press. World Inequality Lab. (2018). World Inequality Report 2018. wir2018-​full-​report-​english (1).pdf.

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22  The dynamics of poverty production A political economy perspective for the SDGs era Alberto D. Cimadamore

Understanding the social dynamics of poverty requires the identification of the systemic forces that feed and condition the production and reproduction of poverty. The interaction of agents operating within diverse types of structures is relevant for explaining the persistence of poverty in a world where there are enough resources to eliminate it, at least in its most extreme forms. This issue is particularly relevant today due to the prominent place poverty reduction (if not eradication) has in the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development (UN, 2015). It has been argued that development cannot be understood in a mechanical way using linear analysis of structure and agency (Munck, 2018: 1). I am conscious that both structure and agency-​based models typically involve large numbers of interactions and complexities due to the multidimensionality involved in the production and reproduction of wicked social problems like poverty. However, the level of abstraction involved in structural approaches allows for a simplification that is useful not only for the understanding but also for the eventual solution of such problems. The examination of agents and agencies´ use of opportunities and relative power would allow us to overcome most of the common problems coming from linear and mechanical analysis referred to by Munck and others. The significance of the issue highlighted in the first paragraph is apparent at a time when the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is being implemented globally, its deadline is approaching, and the current COVID-​19 pandemic has worsened socio-​economic conditions and indicators for sustainable development worldwide. Sound political choices are required to achieve the objectives of Agenda 2030 and particularly to end poverty and hunger while pursuing an integral and indivisible set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. To make political choices based on a theory explaining the sources of the persistence of problems like poverty is arguably more effective than the alternative. For this reason, I try to synthesise a theoretical framework aimed at explaining the structural conflict between market and states forces that conditions the efficacy of the ‘leave no one behind’ policy. This structural conflict, which can be traced out at both national and international levels, is at the core of the political economy of poverty production and reproduction. A theoretical model showing the relationship between states and markets can be used to clearly indicate where there is potential to change poverty dynamics. I will argue that historical forms of the state can be seen as part of the problem, but also as part of the solution to poverty within the sustainable development set of challenges posed by the 2030 Agenda. Recommended reading: Deacon (2016); UN (2015). DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-27

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190  Alberto D. Cimadamore

Understanding structural forces in IPE: a two-​level model Structural forces are substantially different at national and international levels due to specific characteristics of each system. In order to show their differential impact, I will outline a two-​level model using critically basic elements of international political economy (IPE) theory and frame them into the broader social science problematic known as the structure–​agent debate. This way, the chapter brings in one of the most relevant issues in social theory that emerges from two uncontentious truths about social life: first, that human agency is the only moving force behind the actions, events, and outcomes of the social world; and second, that human agency can be realised only in concrete historical circumstances that condition the possibilities for action and influence its course (Dessler, 1989: 443). To develop a theory able to capture the complex interactions between agents and the systemic environment that conditions decision making is well beyond the limits of this chapter. In fact, its objective is much more modest. It simply aims to point out where the problem resides (i.e., absence of a counter-​structure at the international level to balance the concentration effect produced by the globalisation of markets) and where to operate to positively affect the dynamics of poverty (i.e., the state). To put it briefly, this chapter discusses why the state can be seen as the only structural force capable of limiting market failures and production of poverty as well as articulating the political and economic incentives to achieve SDG 1. Structural factors operating at international and national levels pose constraints on the effectiveness of public and private actors to distribute and use resources. Therefore, a good starting point to alter the dynamics of poverty is to identify the sources of accumulation and distribution problems and, consequently, ways to solve them. This is a main objective of problem-​solving theories and approaches such as sustainability science, which is concerned with long-​term trends and transitions and how to better account for the variation in human–​environment interactions in moving towards a more sustainable system (Cimadamore et al., 2016). The chapter’s argument is quite simple. States and markets are the most relevant structures we have in social sciences. However, they are ‘invisibles’ and need to be defined according to theoretical and ideological perspectives that allow us to ‘observe’ how different stimuli condition the distribution of resources in contemporary societies. The organising principles of both structures differ substantially. The state is based on a hierarchical organisation of its constitutive elements—​constitutional order, government, territory, and population—​that historically creates and distributes power, while the market is formally a non-​hierarchical structure that creates and distributes wealth based on the relative efficiency of economic agents. The structural conflict emerges from the reciprocal interactions between states and markets because while the former is based on the concepts of territoriality, loyalty, exclusivity, and monopoly of the legitimate use of force, the latter rests on the notion of competition, efficiency, functional integration, and interdependence. The contradictions and conflicts become much more complex when we introduce a two-​level (national and international) structural model aimed to explain why poverty and inequality are produced and reproduced all over the world (Table 22.1).

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The dynamics of poverty production  191 Table 22.1 The international political economy of poverty production: a two-​level simplified model Main constitutive elements of the political subsystem Level 1: national systems Structure 1. State = territorially exclusive governance structure with regulatory and policy-​ making capabilities Agents 1. Government 2. Social groups and organisations concerned mainly with relative power 3. Citizens Ordering principle 1. Hierarchical, based on a constitutional order and a monopoly of the use of force Level 2: international system Structure 1. Community of states (formally non-​hierarchical) Main agents 1. Intergovernmental organisation representatives 2. Government representatives 3. Non-​governmental organisation representatives Ordering principle Anarchy, based on community principles with low capacity to regulate (e.g. sovereign states, ‘formally equals’) and power relationships that are reflected in existing international regimes

Main constitutive elements of the economic subsystem

Structure 1. Domestic market = non-​territorially exclusive structure which creates incentives to produce and distribute wealth Agents 1. Individual producers and consumers concerned mainly with absolute gains 2. Consumer and producer organisations Ordering principle 1. Non-​hierarchical, based on economic logic (i.e., maximisation of net benefits) Structure 1. International market (non-​hierarchical) Main agents 1. Firms (multinational corporations, international banks, etc.) 2. International producer organisations (OPEC, etc.) 3. International organisations (World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc.) Ordering principle Anarchy, based on economic logic and very loose or limited regulations that tend to benefit capital (capital moves relatively well and quickly across borders while labour cannot due to—​among other things—​moving costs and regulations at the national level)

OPEC, Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries ; IMF, International Monetary Fund; WTO, World Trade Organisation. Source: Cimadamore (2008).

Poverty is at the centre of the SDGs. It is a social construction that emerges from actions and omissions of agents operating under systems that allow and tolerate it. The different organisational principles of the ‘structure’, as shown in the above two-​ level model, induce quite different forms of social organisation and distribution of resources. Markets tend to avoid all obstacles—​political or otherwise—​to the supply-​and-​ demand mechanism in relation to fixing prices, while states have the capacity to orient or direct economic activities towards certain social goals, for instance, collective welfare. Markets also tend to overlook poverty and inequality. As nominal places where forces of supply and demand operate to trade goods and services, they are functional to wealth production and distribution without focusing on the social cost of maximising private benefits. In fact, they can create wealth, poverty, and inequality at the same time.

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192  Alberto D. Cimadamore In contrast, states have the capability—​although too many do not use it—​to reduce, eliminate, and prevent poverty by regulating the undesired effects of a market´s operation and promoting welfare actively through social, economic, fiscal, and environmental policies. This can be visualised succinctly when poverty levels are measured without the effects of state intervention. For example, when ‘market poverty’ is measured in the US, it aims to expose the rate without taking into consideration state intervention (i.e., tax credits and/​or other social policy benefits). In this way, we observe that market poverty in the US rose from 27 per cent in 1967 to 28.7 per cent in 2012. During the same period, poverty incidence measured in the standard manner (i.e., taking into consideration state intervention) was about half of the above percentages, showing how it was mitigated by the use of social policy and other state instruments (Cimadamore, 2016, 2018). The model in Table 22.1 also shows why the globalisation process is prone to produce poverty. It is apparent that at the international level there is no structure of governance similar to states that is capable of avoiding the wealth concentration that free markets tend to produce. Thus, global poverty can be seen as a result of the absence of a counter-​ structure to limit the negative effects of wealth creation and distribution resulting from the market’s organising principles. The operation of the most powerful agents in the international system without the regulations and restrictions that states can impose to redistribute resources facilitates the enormous accumulation of wealth that globalisation has allowed, along with the high level of poverty we can observe. Recommended reading: Cimadamore (2016).

Ideas, structural conflict, and the role of the state A systemic view is a good starting point to address complexity. In order to capture the essential elements of a system we need to ask ourselves which of them make the system work as it does.The response is normally the structure. However, this response has a complexity in itself because structures are intellectual or ideological creations that cannot be found in the material world. Therefore, we are in an intellectual realm where ideas and perspectives are the instruments with which we create explanations for systemic forces influencing an agent’s perceptions, actions, and reactions. Mainstream economic science and political discourse point out the role of markets in producing growth and development. Neoliberal understanding of the political economy of development stresses the role of economic structures (e.g., markets) to produce growth and welfare and minimises the role of the state in articulating the multiple dimensions (social, economic, environmental) of development. It is pretty clear by now—​judging from relevant indicators of these dimensions—​that general recipes on how to achieve growth and development need to be critically assessed in order to face the monumental challenges of the 2030 Agenda and to achieve the SDGs. Most important, perhaps, is for decision makers to focus on where to find possible solutions. It has been argued that states are as much part of the problem as they are of the solution (Dean et al., 2005). The result will depend on the historical conditions and changing dynamics of specific societies. However, the dynamics of a society are heavily influenced by political and economic decision making and the ideas the agents have on where to find the solution. The neoliberal consensus provides a set of answers focused on the market, while this chapter suggests otherwise: to find convenient equilibriums

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The dynamics of poverty production  193 and balances (which may well differ for each society) requires starting from the potential ability of the state to deal with the multiple dimensions of sustainable development. The two-​level model presented here is an attempt to interpret the empirical evidence registered during the past half a century or so, showing that globalisation and markets tend to produce wealth as well as environmentally damaging growth, economic concentration, and inequality. Furthermore, the only structure available to regulate and balance the undesirable consequences of the market’s distribution of resources is precisely the state that was minimised in the neoliberal narrative. This is one of the reasons why I can argue that states are the locus where social justice and sustainable development can logically be realised (Cimadamore, 2016). So how does the structural IPE conflict and results (e.g., poverty) affect the effectiveness of social policies and state action to reach SDG 1 and the indivisible and integral set of SDGs? The response to this key question depends to a great extent on the theoretical and ideological views we have on the structural characteristics, constraints, and incentives that are peculiar to the international system. If the achievements of the integrated and indivisible set of goals of Agenda 2030 depend on an effective governance structure mimicking the state at the international level, we need to ask ourselves if this is even possible in the foreseeable future. So far, such a governance structure does not exist, and what we have at hand is a community of states sharing a set of agreed goals and targets. We can go even further and express certain scepticism vis-​à-​vis the possibility that such governance systems could emerge at the international level as long as the main units continue to be states. This point of view is supported by some of the most potent theories of international relations, such as neorealism and structural realism. These approaches explain with variances why such an international structure would never be in place: there is a systemic bias towards the perpetuation of anarchy, i.e., the absence of a formal structure of governance with the monopoly of the legitimate use of force (Buzan et al., 1993; Waltz, 2010). Anarchy is a key concept that needs precise definition since it is usually mentioned in an equivocal way in colloquial language. It is defined here and elsewhere as the absence of central government over the units in the systems (as opposed to hierarchy, which assumes a central government over all the units) (Cimadamore, 2016). The argument defended by neorealism is that states are like-​units subject to the survival logic of self-​help and thus push towards sovereignty. Therefore, if all the units are sovereign, the organising principle amongst them is anarchy. Anarchy is a self-​reinforcing principle because it ‘tends to generate like units and like units, by pursuing sovereignty, generate anarchy’ (Buzan et al., 1993: 38–​39). In the current international system and despite many decades of increased globalisation, a centralised authority seems to be impossible to achieve under present systemic conditions. It is undesirable for the most powerful units of the system, which benefit from the current world order, as well as for those who value sovereignty and diversity among societies. Nevertheless, we still need to find ways to make the commitments contained in Agenda 2030 enforceable under a reliable and effective system with high levels of de-​centralisation. This is logically possible since the states are the units from which goals and targets ought to be reached.The 2030 Agenda is in line with this idea and acknowledges that states have

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194  Alberto D. Cimadamore primary responsibility for their own economic and social development, where national policies are the main instruments for achieving the SDGs (UN, 2015: paragraph 63). The simplified model as presented here provides the rationale to concentrate efforts at the national level for designing the socio-​economic policies towards poverty eradication and prevention. Within this frame, social policies and social protection arise as states’ relevant tools to address poverty and other SDGs and targets. Naturally, social policies need to be part of a consistent set of economic, fiscal, and environmental policies advancing national and sub-​national development strategies. Otherwise, their proven effect could be easily and swiftly neutralised. The relevance of social protection is as evident today as ever. The lack of access to social protection constitutes a major obstacle to economic and social development. Social protection policies are a way to reduce poverty and fulfil basic human rights. Those policies and initiatives that combine labour market interventions, social insurance, and/​or social assistance in cash or in kind contribute to inclusive and sustainable growth. Combinations of income support to the poor with enhanced access to social services in areas such as health and education not only have the potential to reduce poverty but could also (particularly when income transfers have a large coverage) have a modest impact on the reduction of inequality. It is important to note that only a small proportion of global gross domestic product (GDP) is required to provide the poor with a minimum of social security (Cimadamore, 2018). Notwithstanding, social security systems are not playing a salient role in development strategies globally, despite the fact that they are clearly needed to achieve the SDGs and mitigate the effects of the ongoing global pandemic. An ideological explanation for their insufficient role could be plausible. The rise of neoliberal ideology accompanying the current globalisation cycle coincided with a shift in poverty reduction strategies and in the role of the state in promoting development and welfare. The extraordinary impact of the global pandemic may well force a change. The political economy as it is presented here can help us to understand why poverty increases even in the presence of economic growth. The basic explanation is related to the way in which markets and states interact and produce concrete results in the distribution of wealth. This explanation calls into question the standard recipe for reducing poverty: economic growth. History shows how certain forms of state are better suited than others to distribute the wealth created by markets. It also shows how other forms of state are prone to poverty creation—​particularly in countries in the Global South where vested interests support voluntarily or involuntarily the policies that produce poverty (Wilson, 2001) or let the free market regulate the distribution of wealth. In other words, history shows how the state can be part of the problem as much as the solution. In any event, the performance of the state in such matters is susceptible to empirical evaluation (Dean et al., 2005). Even though the trend towards globalisation has been robust, the states and their agents, the governments (as one of the four constitutive elements of states along with population, territory, and constitutional order), have instruments to resist what many consider the negative effects of the increasingly globalised market economy. A logical implication of the two-​level model presented here is that regulations and socio-​economic policies seem to be the most effective instruments to work consistently towards poverty reduction within the frame of the SDGs. However, the colonisation of states by special interests and predatory elites can impede social progress. Regulatory capture, understood not only as the subversion of regulatory agencies by the firms they

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The dynamics of poverty production  195 regulate (Posner, 2013) but also as the establishment of legislation and regulations that serve mainly the private interests of firms leaving aside the public interest or the interest of most vulnerable people, is undermining forms of government (democracy) and states, thus having a corrosive impact on democracy and the dynamics of poverty. The capture of the state by special interests is perceived everywhere. It is apparent that it is a tool to take away the resources needed to finance social security systems and other measures required to alleviate poverty. A recent regional poll conducted in 18 Latin American countries shows that the percentage of the population that is convinced their governments work to benefit the most powerful groups of their societies increased from 61 per cent to 79 per cent between 2006 and 2018. In countries like Brazil and Mexico these percentages reached 90 per cent and 88 per cent respectively (Latinobarómetro, 2018). Recommended reading: Fischer (2018).

Final remarks An approach focused on the interaction of the two main structures existing in social sciences (states and markets) can help to understand the dynamics of poverty and to observe the structural barriers and opportunities to reduce or even eradicate poverty. It also can indicate where to find the structural forces and resources needed to finance social transformation. States are structures with the capacity to deal with social problems emerging from either local or global levels by creating the right incentives to politics, policies, laws, and regulations. Progressive taxes, elimination of capital flight, pro-​poor regulations (including the neutralisation of regulation capture) and laws, social policies providing social protection for all, budget laws (at both national and subnational levels) allocating sufficient resources to produce pro-​poor growth, and distribution consistent with the SDGs are examples of components of a consistent strategy and plan to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. This is how states can increasingly become part of the solution. Two decades after the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) there is no comprehensive strategy to eradicate and prevent poverty. It is about time to concentrate efforts to improve the incentives provided by states and markets and allocate resources to produce the necessary transformations leading to the achievement of SDG 1 as an indivisible part of the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development.

References Buzan, B., et al. (1993). The Logic of Anarchy. Neorealism to Structural Realism. New York: Columbia University Press. Cimadamore, A.D. (2008).“Las políticas de producción de pobreza: construyendo enfoques teóricos integrados,” in Cimadamore, A.D. & Cattani, A. (eds.), Producción de pobreza y desigualdad en América Latina. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Cimadamore,A.D. (2016).“Global Justice, International Relations and the Sustainable Development Goals’ Quest for Poverty Eradication.” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 32(2): 131–​148. Cimadamore,A.D., et al. (2016).“Human Development and Sustainability Science:Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Positive Social Change,” in Cimadamore, A.D. et al. (eds.), Development and Sustainability Science: The Challenge of Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Social Change. London: Zed Books.

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196  Alberto D. Cimadamore Cimadamore, A.D. (2018). “Development and Poverty in the Twenty-​first Century: A Challenge for Research and Social Transformation,” in Fagan, H. & Munck, R. (eds.), Handbook on Development and Social Change. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Deacon, B. (2016). “SDGs, Agenda 2030 and the Prospects for Transformative Social Policy and Social Development.” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 32(2): 79–​82. Dean H., et al. (2005). “Introduction,” in Cimadamore, A.D. et al. (eds.), The Poverty of the State. Reconsidering the Role of the State in the Struggle Against Global Poverty. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Dessler, D. (1989). “What’s at Stake in the Agent-​Structure Debate?” International Organization, 43(3): 441–​473. Fischer, A.M. (2018). Poverty as Ideology. Rescuing Social Justice from Global Development Agendas. London: Zed Books. Latinobarómetro. (2018). Informe 2018. Santiago de Chile: Corporación Latinobarómetro. Munck, R. (2018). “Development and Social Change: A Genealogy for an Era of Complexity,” in Fagan, G.H. & Munck, R. (eds.), Handbook on Development and Social Change. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Posner, R. (2013). “The Concept of Regulatory Capture,” in Carpenter, D. et al. (eds.), Preventing Regulatory Capture. Special Interest Influence and How to Limit it. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​CBO97 81139565875.005. United Nations General Assembly. (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Res. A/​70/​L.1, 25 September. www.un.org/​ga/​search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​ RES/​70/​1&Lang=E. Waltz, K. (2010). Theory of International Politics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Wight, C. (2006). Agents, Structures and International Relations. Politics as Ontology. NewYork: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, F., et al. (2001). “Introduction: Poverty, Power and the State,” in Wilson, F. et al. (eds.), Poverty Reduction:What Role for the State in Today´s Globalized Economy? London: Zed Books.

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23  Poverty analysis through a gender lens Naila Kabeer

We can distinguish between two approaches to poverty analysis. The first focuses on shortfalls in basic needs satisfaction at a particular point in time: poverty as ‘state’. The second, poverty as ‘process’, seeks to understand changes in the distribution of poverty over time. It is concerned with the underlying causes through which poverty is generated and reproduced over time.The two are, of course, closely interrelated: basic needs deprivation at a particular point in time is an outcome of past processes of impoverishment; it is also likely to shape future trajectories. This chapter provides a brief history of feminist contributions to both approaches.

Poverty as a state Money-​metric measures Mainstream concerns with the ‘state’ of poverty defined it in terms of the poverty line, the minimum income an average household needed to meet its basic needs. Households whose incomes were below this minimum were classified as poor. An early insight into the gender dimensions of poverty using this household level analysis pointed to the greater poverty of households headed by women relative to those headed by men. However, it made an important distinction between de facto and de jure female heads. The former were made up of married women who assumed headship responsibilities in their husband’s absence (a result of migration or polygamy) and hence could not rely on access to male earnings. De jure female headship resulted from marital dissolution, desertion, abandonment, or husband’s illness.These women were generally the primary breadwinners of their household.Women’s lower earning power, discussed below, meant that it was this category of female-​headed households that was over-​represented among households below the poverty line. There were important limitations to the use of household income as a measure of poverty because it assumed that households were internally unified, their incomes equitably distributed among members, and hence all members of poor households were equally poor. This was challenged by growing evidence showing that the distribution of household income systematically discriminated against women and girls, leading to intra-​ household gender inequalities in health, nutrition, and education. If meeting basic needs was the ultimate criterion of poverty, then poverty was clearly not equally distributed within the household. Combining household poverty measures with measures of individual well-​being both acknowledged discrimination within households and contributed to a more multidimensional understanding of poverty. Recommended reading: Chant (2003); Kabeer (2003a). DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-28

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198  Naila Kabeer Qualitative insights Qualitative assessments of poverty contributed further to this multidimensional understanding while illuminating other gender dimensions of poverty (Narayan et al., 2000).While these assessments pointed to the harsh nature of the trade-​offs faced by poor people, feminist researchers noted that these trade-​offs could differ for men and women. For instance, while the poor in general were often prepared to accept their dependency status within patron client relations as a necessary price for some degree of security in times of crisis, women often accepted their subordinate status within marital relationships as as a necessary price for male provision and social acceptability. Not all women accepted this trade-​off: some opted out of such relationships to head up their own households because lack of income was preferable to lack of control (Chant, 2003). Another overlooked gender dimension of poverty related to violence. The class-​based nature of the violence experienced by poor people had been widely acknowledged in early literature, but not its patriarchal character (True, 2012). My own study in Bangladesh offered insights into this (Kabeer, 1991). It suggested that class-​based violence frequently took a sexual form when it came to women: young women in my study spoke of their vulnerability to sexual harassment by employers or by young men from affluent families in their village. The study also found that domestic violence in poor households was inflected by class through its link to shortfalls in basic needs. Conflicts revolving around food emerged as a frequent trigger for violence: women were beaten if there was not enough food, if it did not taste right, or if they were found tasting it before their husbands had eaten. Recommended reading: Narayan et al. (2000); True (2012).

Poverty as a process Causal inequalities Analyses of the processes of poverty can be divided into those which explain why poor people remain poor over extended periods of time, the so-​called ‘poverty trap’, and those which explore processes of impoverishment. A focus on processes necessarily draws attention to the unequal distribution of the means and opportunities through which people seek to meet their needs and make provision for the future. A gendered analysis of poverty processes goes deeper to examine gender inequalities in the distribution of means and opportunities within households which are themselves disadvantaged in the overall distribution. As the livelihood literature pointed out, households in poverty generally lacked the material means of production and relied on family labour as the primary, often sole, asset at their disposal. Gender analysis pointed to marked asymmetries between men and women in their ability to dispose of their own labour, to command the labour of others, and to translate their labour into earnings. The first, and most widespread asymmetry related to the fact that while households everywhere had to allocate the labour at their disposal between earning a living and caring for families, women bore a disproportionate share of the unpaid work of caring for the family in much of the world.This ‘reproductive tax’ on women’s time meant that they had less time for paid or productive work.Those who had to combine their care responsibilities with productive activity—​particularly true of women in poor households—​suffered from exhaustion and ‘time poverty’, reflecting their longer working days compared to men.

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Poverty analysis through a gender lens  199 In certain regions, such as South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), cultural restrictions on women’s mobility in the public domain further curtailed their capacity to dispose of their own labour. They could either work as unpaid family labour on male farms and enterprises or in their own home-​based activities in which their returns were low and frequently appropriated by male household members. In contexts where women had greater freedom of movement, other forms of gender asymmetry came into play. In West Africa, for instance, husbands and senior males had prior and non-​reciprocal rights over the labour of wives and female members for their own cultivation efforts. These obligations clearly restricted the amount of time that women had for their independent economic activities and for their ability to purchase the labour of others. Where poor households did own productive assets or skills, these tended to be monopolised by male family members, giving them additional advantages over women in the labour market. But there were also external barriers that differentiated the ability to translate own labour into earnings. A combination of cultural norms and unequal assets meant that labour markets across the world tended to be organised as gender-​segmented hierarchies, channelling men and women into different and unequally remunerated segments of the hierarchy. Women were most often found in forms of self or waged employment that were extensions of their roles within the family: caring, emotional, and sexualised labour. Men occupied a wider range of occupations and were more likely to occupy positions of authority. Labour market analysis highlighted the need for an intersectional approach. While women were generally positioned lower than men in labour market hierarchies, gender intersected with other forms of social identity to position poor women from marginalised groups (lower castes or minority ethnic groups, for instance) at the very bottom of the hierarchy, in the poorest-​paid activities and most likely to be characterised by precariousness, stigma, and exploitative working conditions. Recommended reading: Kabeer (2003b). Idiosyncratic shocks and natural disasters While the idea of the ‘poverty trap’ captured the way in which multiple and reinforcing inequalities kept poor people in poverty, research into the way in which households coped with various forms of crisis provided useful insights into the processes through which they could slide into greater poverty. A first wave of such studies focused on particular categories of ‘shocks’: idiosyncratic (such as illness in the household); generalised but recurring and hence anticipated (such as seasonal floods); and unanticipated (such as natural disasters). Analysis of household strategies to deal with such shocks suggested a systematic pattern. Priority was given in the early stages to responses characterised by greater reversibility or posing less threat to the household productive assets. These included income-​based responses (intensified earning efforts, including temporary migration), expenditure-​saving responses (cutting back on number of meals, purchasing less nutritious foods, foraging for wild food, letting illness go untreated, taking children out of school), debt, and divestment (borrowing from neighbours, money lenders or wealthy patrons, depletion of household stores, selling off smaller consumer durables). Later in the sequence came the distress sale of productive assets, likely to undermine the household’s chances of recovery. The final stages could include permanent migration or the breakdown of the family unit.

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200  Naila Kabeer While the shocks in question were not confined to poor households, what distinguished poor households was their greater exposure to certain kinds of shocks (illness in the family; seasonal unemployment) and their lower likelihood of recovery from any kind of shock. With fewer options available to them, they arrived at the later, more irreversible stages of the sequence outlined with greater rapidity while their slide into greater poverty was more likely to be permanent. Gender-​disaggregated analyses of the ordering of these sequences, and the consequences associated with them, showed that they were rarely neutral between family members. For instance, efforts to cut back on consumption often bore more severely on female than male members. Thus, the mortality rates of girls peaked sharply relative to boys in times of drought in the Indian context. Fluctuations in household per capita income led to greater fluctuations in women’s nutritional status relative to men in Brazil. And a drought in Zimbabwe led to a decline in women’s nutritional status, but not men’s, with the negative impact stronger among women from poorer households. The gender of children taken out of school appeared to vary according to whether girls’ education was seen as less essential or whether boys’ earning capacity was considered more necessary. At some point in the sequence, however, not only did education become unaffordable for all children, but it became essential to put as many of them to work as possible. Indeed, at some point in the sequence, members of the household who were not normally in employment—​married women with young children, the very old, and the very young—​were forced to take on earning responsibilities. And given restrictions on their earning opportunities, this often meant hazardous and demeaning forms of livelihood such as begging or sex work. Gender also differentiated the sequence of household divestment strategies. In South Asia, assets owned or controlled by women (stores of fodder, fuel, household utensils, jewellery) were generally sold off earlier in the sequence. This meant that further down the spiral into greater poverty, when family inter-​dependencies began to break down, women had fewer resources to fall back on than men. The final stages of impoverishment were characterised by more drastic measures—​the wholesale migration of family members, the sale of children, or abandonment of weaker members. Able-​bodied male earners were generally the first to abandon the family unit, leaving women to look after the very young and the very old. At extreme levels of destitution, mothers abandoned their children to fend for themselves as best they could. Recommended reading: Agarwal (1990); Kabeer (2015). Policy-​induced shocks The onset of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s in the wake of the debt crisis experienced by countries in sub-​Saharan Africa (SSA) and Latin America signalled the beginning of a worldwide shift to market-​led growth strategies. It was spearheaded by neoliberal governments in powerful donor countries and promoted across the world through the lending policies of international financial institutions. SAPs consisted of a number of key policy measures: downsizing the state’s role in the economy, cutbacks in public expenditure, promotion of private enterprise, deregulation of labour and capital markets, and liberalisation of trade and financial flows. The hypermobility of international capital and the exposure of countries to fluctuations in global markets inaugurated by these policies ushered in an era marked by a series of

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Poverty analysis through a gender lens  201 financial crises, of which the East Asian crisis in 1997–​1998 and the global financial crisis of 2008 were only the most dramatic. This brought the concept of ‘policy-​induced shocks’ into the development lexicon and led to a second wave of crisis-​coping studies. These highlighted the relevance of some of the early insights of the feminist literature: female headship as an indicator of growing impoverishment; the exacerbation of domestic violence in the face of precarity; and women’s time poverty as they sought to balance earning a living and looking after the family. There was a remarkable continuity in the crisis-​coping responses reported in the earlier and later waves of the literature. There were common references to income-​generating responses: intensifying work effort, diversifying income sources, migration, mobilising the earning capacity of all members of the family, including those previously inactive, moving into more hazardous and exploitative forms of work, such as sex work, illicit activities, drug dealing, and theft.There were also references to attempts to cut back on expenditure (fewer and cheaper meals; taking children out of school), to sale of assets, going into debt, drawing on common property resources, and turning to community networks. At the same time, the fact that studies of policy-​induced shocks compared a wide range of countries brought additional insights. First of all, it allowed them to highlight variations in the options available in different countries. For instance, formal government assistance was available to a greater extent in the former socialist countries that were hit by the financial crisis while reliance on common property resources for food and fuel was largely confined to low-​income countries. It also drew attention to the role of labour-​market segmentation in differentiating the impact of crises on men and women: which sectors, and hence which groups of men and women, suffered earliest or most intensely as a result of the job losses attendant on crisis. Studies of policy-​induced shocks also distinguished between the first-​and second-​ order effects of shocks. In many countries, the first-​order effect of structural adjustment policies was loss of male jobs because the public sector entrenchments central to these policies hit a sector in which men predominated. The first-​order effects of financial crisis, on the other hand, varied considerably for countries because they depended on which sectors were first hit and who predominated in them. Women often suffered first because they predominated in globalised industries like tourism which were affected in the early phase. Regardless of first-​order effects, women’s time emerged as ‘a crucial variable of adjustment’ in second-​order effects. Women’s unpaid work responsibilities for health and welfare within the family increased to offset cutbacks in public expenditure and rising prices of essentials. At the same time, women also increased their participation in the labour market to offset declining levels of male employment and earnings, giving rise to an ‘added worker’ effect in times of crisis. They were often able to find jobs when men were not, because they were willing to work for lower wages and to take up jobs wherever they could find them in order that the basic needs of the family could be met. Second-​order effects affected children. Entry into school was deferred for younger children, while older ones, particularly girls, were withdrawn in order to contribute to household livelihoods. Some wound up far away in cities where they could be easily exploited as domestic servants, factory labour, or street vendors.Those who became street children searching

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202  Naila Kabeer for food and money had little protection and became prey to pimps, policemen and gangs, who incorporated them in their criminal activities (Knowles, Pernia, & Racelis, 1999: 44). Second-​order effects also impacted on social relations within family and community. A study of the impact of SAPs in urban Ecuador found that women who were dependent on their husbands to make ends meet were more likely to report a rise in domestic violence than those who had a reliable income of their own. In urban Zimbabwe as well, a study reported higher levels of domestic conflict in households struggling to meet household needs with very little support from husbands. Analysis of the impacts of the financial crises also reported that reduced incomes, rising male unemployment, and increased alcohol in certain sites had led to a rise in domestic violence—​by men against women and also by women against children. In addition, there was a rise in female-​headed households as men migrated in search of jobs without necessarily sending remittances home or simply abandoning their families. While the second wave of studies did not refer explicitly to the sequencing pattern identified in the earlier literature, they did note that some coping mechanisms had longer-​ lasting—​and less reversible—​effects than others. As examples, they mentioned the impact of reduced food consumption in the context of chronic malnutrition, the sale of productive assets, the forgone education and healthcare and the rise in anti-​social behaviours which were likely to reverberate for a long time to come. These studies made it clear that responses that were possible in the face of idiosyncratic or localised crises, for instance, drawing on common property resources or seeking help from family and neighbours, were likely to dry up in situations when large numbers of people were simultaneously resorting to these measures. At the same time, the fact that large numbers of people were engaging in the other strategies meant that they influenced changes at the macro-​level. For instance, the ‘added worker’ effect showed up at the national level. Bhalotra and Umana-​Aponte (2010) used national survey data from 63 developing countries for the period 1986–​2006 to study the impact of fluctuations in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on women’s employment status at the time of the survey. They found a strong counter-​cyclical pattern in Asia and Latin America, with less educated women dominating the ‘added worker’ effect, suggesting the effect was strongest among poorer households. In SSA, on the other hand, where many more women were already in paid work, women, particularly those from better-​off households and presumably in formal sector jobs, lost their jobs along with men in times of recession. The spread of informal work was one of the longer-​term macro-​level changes that both accompanied and resulted from economic liberalisation. Workers laid off as part of public sector retrenchment or in times of crisis generally turned to the informal economy for ‘last-​resort’ survival activities. The fact that men and women fared very differently in their search for informal work was evident in that fact that, in most developing-​ country contexts, women were more likely than men to be in what the International Labour Organization (ILO) terms ‘vulnerable employment’, viz., own-​account work and unpaid family labour. And of men and women in vulnerable employment, women were more likely than men to be in unpaid family labour and hence without an income of their own. Recommended reading: Heltberg et al. (2012); Kabeer (2015).

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Poverty analysis through a gender lens  203 Dealing with pandemics This chapter is being revised at a time when the world is going through a very different kind of crisis to those discussed so far: a global pandemic on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented consequences whose second-​order effects are still unknown. What began as a virus in a province in China has now spread to the rest of the world, resulting in over 2.4 million deaths by mid-​February 2021, bringing the world economy to a halt and reversing the progress that was being made on poverty reduction in much of the developing world. The growth of feminist scholarship means that has been more ‘real-​ time’ analysis of the gender implications of the current pandemic than of any other previous crisis. Let me summarise those who speak to some of the insights of the literature on gender and poverty discussed in this chapter (Kabeer et al., 2020). The fault lines in labour markets have been illuminated as never before by COVID-​19, with certain fault lines assuming greater significance than others. One critical fault line has been between essential and non-​essential jobs. Essential workers—​those responsible for life, health, and the basics of everyday existence—​are expected to keep on working. At greatest risk of infection of this group are front-​line health workers, 70 per cent of whom worldwide are women. Others who carry out essential services which require face-​to face contact with the public are also at high risk. Where data exist, they suggest that these workers are disproportionately drawn from disadvantaged groups—​men and women from ethnic minorities or migrant workers. Among non-​essential workers, the divide is between those, most often professional workers, who can continue working from home, often using electronic technology, and those who lose their jobs. It has been poorer men and women in the least-​skilled jobs who make up the latter category. In countries like India, where working women are largely self-​employed, and often overlooked in the statistics, most job losses were reported by men. However, among those in wage employment, women reported disproportionately larger losses than men—​as did members of lower castes.Where women are likely to be in wage employment, as in South Africa, job losses were larger for poorer households, for African households, and for the least educated. Within each category, losses were larger for women. The global data also show that the increase in unpaid care work within the home as a result of the lockdown—​with more family members at home all day and some of them affected by the disease—​has fallen disproportionately on women. The unpaid work of these women remains invisible.They are not included in the category of essential workers. Finally, the evidence points to what is being called a ‘shadow pandemic’, the rise in domestic violence recorded around the world since the start of the pandemic. Explanations have pointed to financial insecurity, anxieties about the future, the seemingly endless confinement at home, and the closing off of escape from abusive men. Class is likely to exacerbate such violence given the greater insecurity of the future faced by those in precarious jobs and the greater stress of confinement in cramped homes. Recommended reading: Kabeer et al. (2020).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that men and women experience the state of poverty differently and unequally, with women and girls more likely to report basic needs deficits than men

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204  Naila Kabeer and boys in most contexts. It also argues that men and women fare differently in times of crisis because of gender inequalities in assets, opportunities, and decision-​making power. These arguments have a clear lesson for policymakers. If they fail to acknowledge and counter these inequalities in the design of policies and programmes, they will not only fail to address the gender dimensions of poverty; they will end up as part of the process by which these inequalities are maintained and exacerbated.

References Agarwal, B. (1990). “Social Security and the Family in Rural India Coping with Seasonality and Calamity.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 17(3): 341–​412. Bhalotra, S., & Umana-​Aponte, M. (2010). The Dynamics of Women’s Labor Supply in Developing Countries, IZA Discussion Paper No. 4879. Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labour. Chant, S. (2003). New Contributions to the Analysis of Poverty: Methodological and Conceptual Challenges to Understanding Poverty from a Gender Perspective. Santiago:Women and Development Unit, CEPA. Heltberg, R., Hossain, N., Reva, A., & Turk, C. (2012). “Anatomy of Coping. Evidence from People Living Through the Crises of 2008–​2011.” Policy Research Working Paper 5951. Washington. DC: World Bank. Kabeer, N. (1991). “Gender Dimensions of Rural Poverty: Analysis from Bangladesh.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 18(2): 241–​262. Kabeer, N. (2003a). “Approaches in Poverty Analysis and its Gender Dimensions,” in Kabeer, N. (ed.), Mainstreaming Gender and Poverty Eradication in the Millennium Development Goals, pp. 79–​ 104. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Kabeer, N. (2003b). “Gender Inequality and Poverty Eradication: Promoting Household Livelihoods,” in Kabeer, N. (ed.), Mainstreaming Gender and Poverty Eradication in the Millennium Development Goals, pp. 107–​145. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Kabeer, N. (2015). “Gender, Poverty, and Inequality: A Brief History of Feminist Contributions in the Field of International Development.” Gender & Development, 22(2): 189–​205. Kabeer, N., Rodgers,Y., & Razavi, S. (2020). “Feminist Economic Perspectives on the COVID-​19 Pandemic.” Feminist Economics, 27(1/​2):1–​28. Knowles, J., Pernia, E., & Racelis, M. (1999). Social Consequences of the Financial Crisis in Asia. Economic Staff Paper No. 60. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Narayan, D., Chambers, R., Shah, M., & Petesch, P. (2000). Voices of the Poor: Crying Out for Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. True, J. (2012). “What has Poverty got to do with it? Feminist Frameworks for Analysing Violence Against Women.” in The Political Economy of Violence against Women (Chapter 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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24  Women, work, and gender inequalities With illustrations from Cambodia and China Fiona MacPhail

Economic development and globalisation are associated with increased paid work opportunities for many women; however, gender inequalities in work persist and have been accentuated in some locations.Thus, Elson and Pearson’s (1981: 16) conclusion, that ‘there are inherent limits to the extent to which the provision of wage work for women through capitalist accumulation can dissolve the subordination of women as a gender’, remains relevant today. Economic development is taken here to involve structural change, the shift of production (and labour) away from the primary sector, toward the secondary and tertiary sectors. Further, economic development is viewed in terms of improved capabilities, meeting basic needs, and human development reflected in increased education, life expectancy, and decent standard of living, among other indicators. Globalisation, and particularly increased trade furthered by national governments’ export-​oriented, neoliberal development strategies, has led to the deepening of markets and increased employment in the manufacturing sector, as well as increased commercial agriculture and rise of subcontracting and precarious work. Drawing on feminist economics literature and illustrated with examples from Cambodia and China, five specific issues are explored: meanings of gender equality in paid work and women’s economic empowerment; explanations of gender inequality in work; gender inequality in unpaid work; gender inequality in paid work; and women, work, and migration. Recommended reading: Benería et al. (2016); Elson and Pearson (1981).

Gender inequality in work and women’s economic empowerment Gender refers to socially constructed values, norms, attitudes, and expectations associated with being female or male and which give rise to gendered roles and behaviours, as well as set of gendered structures. Gender structures are hierarchical systems which confer greater resources, privileges, and power to people with a male identity. Being socially constructed and influenced by economic and political developments, gender varies across locations and is dynamic. Gender also interacts with other social categories and markers, including race, ethnicity, class, caste, and sexuality, and thus, feminist analysis of work requires an intersectional analysis. From a human rights perspective, gender equality in work requires both equality of opportunity in participation and equality of treatment or benefit. Based on the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-29

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206  Fiona MacPhail International Labour Organisation Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111), [e]‌quality of opportunity means having an equal chance to apply for a job, to attend education or training, to be eligible to attain certain qualifications and to be considered as a worker or for a promotion in all occupations or positions, including those dominated by one sex or the other …. Equal treatment refers to equal entitlements in pay, working conditions, security of employment, reconciliation between work and family life, and social protection (ILO, 2008: 20). A total of 175 countries have ratified C111 and 189 countries are signatories to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and, thus, are legally obligated to uphold gender equality and progressively move toward achieving gender equality in work. Gender equality in work, and more generally in access to productive resources, may contribute to women’s economic empowerment. While definitions of women’s economic empowerment vary, a useful starting point is provided by Eyben et al. (2008: 9–​10): Economic empowerment is the capacity of poor women and men to participate in, contribute to and benefit from growth processes on terms which recognize the value of their contributions, respect their dignity and make it possible for them to negotiate a fairer distribution of the benefits of growth. Economic empowerment means people thinking beyond immediate survival needs and thus able to recognize and exercise agency and choice. Thus, gender equality in paid work in terms of equality of opportunity and treatment is intrinsically linked to empowerment through the benefits from paid work and the opportunities provided for agency. Agency—​‘individual power within’ and ‘collective power with others’—​enables women to negotiate resource allocation not only at the household level but to work collectively to transform economies and lives of marginalised people at community, national, and international levels. Paid work, however, does not necessarily translate into economic empowerment. Gender equality is widely recognised as a policy goal at the international level (e.g., UN Sustainable Development Goal 5) and at national levels, as expressed in development plans, legislation, policies, and government machinery. Some agencies value gender equality as a human right (e.g., UN Women), whereas other agencies focus primarily on its instrumental role contributing toward efficiency (e.g., World Bank) and inclusive growth (e.g., Asian Development Bank). Despite commitments and actions, gaps remain between the expressed goal of gender equality and the outcomes in practice, substantive equality, which requires actions at all levels, including changing the economic system (see UN Women, 2015). While the emphasis has been on gender inequalities in paid work, feminist analysis emphasises the importance of examining gender inequalities in both paid and unpaid work. Recommended reading: Eyben et al. (2008); UN Women (2015).

Explanations of gender inequality in work Work is generally divided into paid work and unpaid domestic and care work. Paid work refers to activities performed to produce goods or services for monetary or in-​kind

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Women, work, and gender inequalities  207 payment. Going beyond formal wage employment and work associated with a registered business, since the 1960s, definitions of paid work have broadened to include work related to subsistence production, informal employment which includes self-​employment, work as an unpaid contributing household member in a household business, and wage labour on a casual or precarious basis. Unpaid work refers to activities undertaken to produce goods or services for use by others or oneself and, since the 1990s, an important distinction has been made between unpaid physical work tasks such as cooking, washing up, cleaning, and washing clothes within the household, and caring and emotional tasks such as teaching, and the care of children, the sick, disabled, and elderly people, as well as care for able adults (see Folbre, 1995). The gender division of labour in which women are assigned greater responsibility for unpaid work has persisted despite increased participation in paid work. Feminist research drew attention to the role of unpaid work in capitalist accumulation and reproduction of the labourforce (Benería & Sen, 1981) and the role of men in sustaining a sex-​segregated labour market which preserves their status and privilege in the market, as well as their ability to extract unpaid labour from women, and the overall dependence of women on men (Hartmann, 1981). Such explanations contrast strikingly from those of neoclassical human capital and new household economics approaches which attribute the gendered division of labour as a rational household choice given men’s relatively higher earnings. A breakthrough in feminist economics was to shift conceptualization of the household away from the assumption of a unitary household toward examination of both gender conflicts as well as cooperation within the household. Feminist analyses of work from the 1990s onwards have emphasised the role of institutions, both formal institutions and informal norms, in creating and maintaining gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work. Kabeer (2012), for example, distinguishes between ‘intrinsic gender-​specific constraints’ and ‘imposed structures of constraints’ and argues that each constraint, along with the feedback loop between the two, underpins women’s work disadvantages. Intrinsic gender-​specific structures are norms and beliefs that define masculinity and femininity at the level of the family and value masculine characteristics more highly, with norms varying over the life cycle. Such valuation is starkly indicated by the magnitude of missing girls and women and gender-​based violence. In China, the preference for sons results in abortion of female fetuses and female infanticide, as evident in the greater number of boys to girls among children aged 0–​ 4 years: 114 boys to 100 girls, in 2018 (PRC, 2019: Tables 2–​9).Violence against women is widespread, with one in five women reporting physical and/​or sexual intimate-​partner violence in Cambodia (UN Women, 2016) and one-​quarter of married women having experienced domestic violence in China (PRC, 2014a: 115). Norms regarding the acceptability of women participating in paid work outside of the home vary among countries, with survey data indicating the generally higher percentage of men disagreeing with statements that it is acceptable for women to work outside the home (ILO, 2018: Table 1.3). Imposed gender constraints in the public domain, including the market, as well as laws, rules, policies, and discriminatory attitudes and stereotypes of actors, operate to the disadvantage of women. Gender biases exist in laws, such as prohibited jobs and services, in thresholds on loans, and fiscal expansionary policies which are more likely to positively affect male employment. Recommended reading: Folbre (1995); Kabeer (2012).

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Gender inequalities in unpaid work Feminist research has raised the visibility of unpaid work and its enormous contribution to human well-​being. Globally, women provide a greater amount of unpaid work time compared to men, as documented through the use of large-​scale time use surveys. In the Asia-​Pacific region as a whole, women provide four times the amount of unpaid care time as men (262 compared to 64 minutes per day, resulting in a gender gap in unpaid work time of over 3 hours per day) and in China, the gender gap in unpaid work time is 2.4 hours per day, indicative of the variation in the gender gap in unpaid work across countries (ILO, n.d.).Variation in the amount of unpaid work time and the gender unpaid work time gap across countries arises from gendered norms, as well as levels of public infrastructure, and availability and accessibility of public and market substitutes (see Razavi, 2007, on institutional care arrangements). Within countries, the gender unpaid work time gap also varies among women as some groups have been able to reduce their unpaid work time more easily than others depending upon access to alternatives. While some unpaid work is rewarding, many tasks impose considerable psychological and economic costs which are most often borne by women. Unpaid work time and responsibilities can be time consuming and monotonous, create stress from trying to balance unpaid responsibilities with income generation ones, and typically result in less leisure or time poverty for women. Women’s greater burden of unpaid work also accentuates gender inequalities in paid work, reducing women’s ability to participate in paid work or constraining the types of jobs and hours. Girls and women’s normative and actual responsibility for unpaid work result in girls being taken out of school to help with household chores and income generation, thereby contributing to lifelong disadvantages in paid work. In the Asia-​Pacific region, for example, 50 per cent of women but only 7 per cent of men reported unpaid care work as the reason for not being in the labourforce, with figures being 36 and 14 per cent for women and men in China, and 19 and 5 per cent in Cambodia (ILO, n.d.). Women with children are less likely to be employed than women without children and if engaged in paid work they tend to work fewer hours, giving rise to the ‘motherhood penalty’. With the rising percentage of elderly people in the population, the elder care penalty is likely to increase. The amount of unpaid work time provided by women and the composition of that time respond to changes in public policy. Women’s unpaid work time increased as a result of state withdrawal of health services associated with structural adjustment policies in the 1980s (Elson, 1991), austerity policies after the global financial crisis, and due to requirements of conditional cash transfer payments (Molyneux & Thomson, 2011). The coronavirus disease that emerged in late 2019 is increasing demands on women’s unpaid work time as a result of increased need to care for the sick, the reduced availability of childcare, and increased education of children due to school closure. The gender gap endures over the business cycle, and even when men become unemployed, there is little evidence that men increase their unpaid work time. Recommended reading: ILO (n.d.); Razavi (2007).

Gender inequalities in paid work Structural change and globalisation have generally been associated with increased women’s labourforce participation rates (LFPR) and increased wage employment, which could be

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Women, work, and gender inequalities  209 taken as indicative of movement toward equality of opportunity. Part of the increase in paid work among women arises from underestimates of women’s engagement in productive work in earlier years due to the failure to capture productive work in subsistence agriculture, as well as norms regarding appropriate gender work roles which led to women being under-​counted. Further, women’s LFPRs have plateaued since around 2000 and, in some countries, defeminisation of the labourforce is occurring. Defeminisation has been attributed to technological upgrading and stereotyping of these new jobs as male jobs, rising discrimination against women, and women’s unpaid care work burden (for China, see for example, Cook & Dong, 2011). In the Asia-​Pacific region, for example, LFPRs of women and men declined over the period 2000–​2017 and the gender LFPR gap increased slightly from 29.8 to 31.2 percentage points (ILO, 2018: Table 1.2). The gender LFPR gap varies from a relatively low 11.3 and 9.7 percentage points in Cambodia and China to over 44 percentage points in Bangladesh (ILO, 2018: Tables A2-​2 and 3). While structural change has been associated with increased participation of women in paid work in some countries, nonetheless, substantial industrial and occupation segregation by gender exists, with implications for wages, benefits, and agency. For example, in Cambodia, women comprise 68 per cent of total employment in manufacturing, a sector in which the average wage is 88 per cent of the average wage across the entire economy, and women earn only 71 per cent of men’s earnings in this sector (see ADB, 2015). In China, women are disproportionately employed in subsectors of manufacturing such as textiles, and in retail trade, and hotels and catering, where average wages in these sectors are, respectively, 73, 73, and 66 per cent of the average national wage (PRC, 2014b). An important aspect of this gender segregation is that men often have greater opportunities for voice and agency through work in the civil service, business associations, and unions. In Cambodia, women comprise only 15 per cent of employees in the civil service and one-​third of union officers, and are typically located at lower levels in the hierarchies (see ADB, 2015). In business, there are substantially fewer women leaders. In China, among boards of listed companies, women comprise less than 10 per cent of board members (World Economic Forum, 2020). Despite increasing or high levels of participation in paid work, women experience less benefit from their paid work, indicative of inequality of treatment in the labour market. Among people with wage employment, in the Asia-​Pacific region, men earn 20 percentage points more than women (ILO, n.d.). Further, gender wage discrimination has actually increased in many countries, indicating that despite rising education levels among women, structural change and globalisation have not reduced gender inequalities in treatment. Beyond wage employment, in agriculture, for example, women not only have less access to land through intrinsic gender constraints such as inheritance norms, but also through laws, land titling systems, and their inability to purchase land and register it in their own name. In Cambodia, despite gender-​aware land laws, women have difficulty registering land, which is attributed to lack of information, documents, and literacy, as well as social norms which discourage them from owning land individually (see ADB, 2015). In China, land tenure reforms designed to increase agricultural productivity have reduced women’s access land. Women comprise 70 per cent of the landless and 44 per cent of women report losing land due to marriage, typically as a result of moving from their natal village to their husband’s village, and also after divorce (data from All China Women’s Federation, cited in Song & Dong, 2017). The lack and loss of land property rights exacerbate gender equality in work and are also associated with domestic violence against women in rural China (Song & Dong, 2017).

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210  Fiona MacPhail While paid work for women can contribute to economic empowerment through increased decision making and agency regarding marriage, children, and self-​esteem, such effects are not automatic or universal. In rural China, for example, wage employment opportunities were found to contribute to women’s greater influence over decision making in the household, but had no impact on total work burden (MacPhail & Dong, 2007). In Cambodia, young women from rural areas obtain paid work in urban areas but then are discriminated against by their families on their return. Recommended reading: Benería et al. (2016, Chapters 3–​4); ILO (2018).

Women, work, and migration The number of people migrating internally within their country and internationally (both South–​South and South–​North) has increased substantially and, in many locations, the share of women among migrants has increased.The number of international migrants increased from 221 million to 272 million between 2010 and 2019 (DESA, 2019) and the combined internal country flows of people are even larger. For China alone, there are over 290 million rural–​urban migrants, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total population; and one-​third of migrants are women and about half of young migrants are women (Chiang et al., 2015; China Labour Bulletin, 2020). Gendered analyses of migration go beyond an analysis of individual choice based upon assessment of the expected wage differential to examine how migration decisions and outcomes are influenced by normative responsibilities of daughters and mothers. In China, for example, women are more likely to explain their motivation to migrate in terms of altruistic/​family reasons, whereas men refer to personal development and individual income gain (Chiang et al., 2015). Just as family reasons, such as the responsibility to pay for their brothers’ tuition fees or family health services, lead to girls and women’s migration, family responsibilities such as care for children and family members contribute to women migrants returning home. Despite lower earnings, women migrants often remit a greater proportion of their earnings to their families compared to men (for Cambodia, see RGC, 2012). Structural change, globalisation, neoliberal development strategies, and now climate change underpin migration patterns and trends. Export-​oriented manufacturing development strategies are associated with increased demand for women’s labour, often met by women migrants from rural areas. Although providing paid work for migrants, these opportunities are often limited to a narrow range of occupations or industries such as garments for women and construction for men. Women’s high concentration in the garment sector also means that their employment is highly vulnerable to economic shocks and a drop in global demand results in women being pushed into even more precarious forms of employment. Beyond the factory, women are increasingly migrating within countries and internationally for paid domestic and care work in private households as cleaners and caregivers (Yeates, 2011). Turning to equality of treatment, women migrants generally fare worse than men migrants, as well as non-​migrants across a wide range of dimensions. In China, women migrants earn less than half their urban counterparts and women migrants are more likely to have informal employment than men, and hence fewer opportunities for decent work offering access to social security provisions and voice (Dong et al., 2016). Women migrants often work exceptionally long hours. Even in Cambodian factories involved in third-​party monitoring of labour standards, less than 20 per cent of the

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Women, work, and gender inequalities  211 factories are found to comply with working-​hour labour standards (ILO and IFC, 2013). In the case of China, as Pun (2007) argues, due to the residential permit system which constrains living in urban areas, people are willing to work overtime since the window for working in the city is short, and this makes them more vulnerable to exploitation. Further, she argues, tying paid work of women in factories to dormitory accommodation facilitates long working hours and close monitoring and control over their labour. Here the patriarchal control of women’s labour remains in place but is now exercised by factory managers rather than by fathers and brothers in the countryside. Women international migrants work long hours, often compounded by living with their employers, and suffer from further exploitation and abuse, including physical and sexual abuse, withholding of travel documents, withholding and underpayment of wages. These outcomes again illustrate the changing form and/​or increased gender equality of treatment. The impacts of migration on the left-​behind population are also gendered. Migrant women and men may need to leave their children behind in rural areas given the difficulty and cost of obtaining childcare and education in urban areas. About 20 per cent of migrants in Phnom Penh with children report that their children are not living in Phnom Penh and the majority live with their grandparents (RGC, 2012). One estimate for China indicates that there are about 70 million children living in rural areas without one or both parents (Tong et al., 2019) and, given intrinsic gender constraints, elderly women are typically faced with increased unpaid domestic and care work related to the care of grandchildren (Chang et al., 2011) and migrant mothers remain engaged with emotional care. Recommended reading: Benería, Deere, and Kabeer (2012);Yeates (2011).

Conclusion Despite widespread stated commitment to the goal of gender equality and women’s economic empowerment, gender inequalities in unpaid and paid work persist and are increasing for some groups of women. Achieving gender equality at work and more generally, improvements in the well-​being for women and marginalised groups requires the enforcement of human rights principles in paid work and a shift from market-​oriented growth strategies toward greater attention to unpaid work and the caring economy.

References ADB. (2015). Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment in Cambodia. Manila: ADB. Benería, L., Berik, G., & Floro, M.S. (2016). Gender, Development, and Globalization. Economics As If All People Mattered, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Benería, L., Deere, C.D., & Kabeer, N. (2012). “Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development and Governance.” Feminist Economics, 18(2): 1–​33. Benería, L., & Sen, G. (1981). “Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited,” Signs, 7(2): 279–​298. Chang, H., Dong, X.Y., & MacPhail, F. (2011). “Labor Migration and Time Use Patterns of the Left-​behind Children and Elderly in Rural China.” World Development, 39(12): 2199–​2210. Chiang, Y.L., Annum, E., & Kao, G. (2015). “It’s Not Just About the Money: Gender and Youth Migration from Rural China.” China Sociological Review, 47(2): 177–​201. China Labour Bulletin. (2020). “Migrant Workers and their Children.” https://​clb.org.hk/​content/​ migrant-​workers-​and-​their-​children. Cook, S., & Dong, X.Y. (2011). “Harsh Choices: Chinese Women’s Paid Work and Unpaid Care Responsibilities Under Economic Reform.” Development and Change, 42(4): 947–​965.

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212  Fiona MacPhail DESA. (2019). International Migrant Stock. www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​ population/​ migration/​data/​estimates2/​estimatesgraphs.asp?0g0. Dong, X.Y., Li, S., & Yang, S. (2016). “Trade Liberalization, Social Policy Development and Labour Market Outcomes of Chinese Women and Men in the Decade after China’s Accession to the World Trade Organization.” Discussion Paper No. 9, February. New York: UN Women. Elson, D. (1991). Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elson, D., & Pearson, R. (1981). “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers. An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing.” Feminist Review, 7(1): 87–​107. Eyben, R., Kabeer, N., & Cornwall, A. (2008). “Conceptualising Empowerment and the Implications for Pro-​Poor Growth.” A paper for the DAC Poverty Network. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Folbre, N. (1995). “‘Holding Hands at Midnight’:The Paradox of Caring Labor.” Feminist Economics, 1(1): 73–​92. Hartmann, H. (1981). “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” in Sargeant, L. (ed.), Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, pp. 1–​41. Boston, MA: South End Press. ILO. (2008). Work, Income and Gender Equality in East Asia: Action Guide. Bangkok: ILO. ILO. (2018). Asia-​Pacific Employment and Social Outlook 2018. Bangkok: ILO. ILO and IFC. (2013). Better Factories Cambodia: Thirtieth Synthesis Report on Working Conditions in Cambodia’s Garment Sector. Geneva: ILO. ILO. (n.d.) Maps and Charts. www.ilo.org/​global/​about-​the-​ilo/​multimedia/​maps-​and-​charts/​ enhanced/​WCMS_​721348/​lang-​-​en/​index.htm. Kabeer, N. (2012). “Women’s Economic Empowerment and Inclusive Growth: Labor Markets and Enterprise Development.” Social Innovation Generation Working Paper 2012/​1. IDRC and Department for International Development of the UK. www.idrc.ca/​sites/​default/​files/​sp/​ Documents%20EN/​NK-​WEE-​Concept-​Paper.pdf. MacPhail, F., & Dong, X.Y. (2007). “Women’s Market Work and Household Status in Rural China: Evidence from Jiangsu and Shandong in the Late 1990s.” Feminist Economics, 13(3–​ 4): 93–​124. Molyneux, M., & Thomson, M. (2011).“Cash Transfers, Gender Equity and Women’s Empowerment in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.” Gender and Development, 19(2): 195–​212. Pun, N. (2007). “Gendering the Dormitory Labor System: Production, Reproduction, and Migrant Labor in South China.” Feminist Economics, 13(3–​4): 239–​258. PRC. (2014a). Women and Men in China-​Facts and Figures 2012. Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics. PRC. (2014b). China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2014. Beijing: PRC. PRC. (2019). China Statistical Yearbook 2019. Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China. www. stats.gov.cn/​tjsj/​ndsj/​2019/​indexeh.htm. Razavi, S. (2007). The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context.” Gender and Develoment Programme Paper. Swizterland: UNRISD. RGC. (2012). Migration in Cambodia: Report of the Cambodian Rural Urban Migration Project (CRUMP). Phnom Penh: RGC. Song, Y., & Dong, X.Y. (2017). “Domestic Violence and Women’s Land Rights in Rural China: Findings from a National Survey in 2010.” Journal of Development Studies, 53(9): 1471–​1485. Tong, L.,Yan, Q., & Kawachi, I. (2019). “The Factors Associated with Being Left-​behind Children in China: Multilevel Analysis with Nationally Representative Data.” PLoS ONE, 14(11). UN Women. (2015). Progress on the World Women 2015–​2016. Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights. New York: UN. UN Women. (2016). Global Database on Violence against Women. https://​evaw-​global-​database. unwomen.org/​fr/​countries/​asia/​cambodia. World Economic Forum. (2020). Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Geneva: WEF. Yeates, N. (2011). “Going Global: The Transnationalization of Care.” Development and Change, 42(4): 1109–​1130.

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25  Health inequalities and development in a global context Ted Schrecker

Imagine a series of disasters that killed more than 800 people every day, year after year: the equivalent of three or four daily crashes of crowded airliners—​or, stated another way, the equivalent of the death toll from the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon every five days. This is the casualty count from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, which kill an estimated 303,000 women per year—​poor women, in poor countries. In Canada, a woman’s lifetime risk of dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth is estimated at 1 in 6100; for a woman in sub-​Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, it is 1 in 37 (WHO et al., 2019). These deaths are not unavoidable: ways of keeping women alive throughout pregnancy and childbirth are well known and widely practised in high-​income countries, except among isolated, severely deprived populations. Like death in pregnancy and childbirth, malaria and tuberculosis are among the communicable diseases that have been vanquished in the high-​income world except in pockets of extreme deprivation, but they continue to kill an estimated 435,000 and 1.6 million people a year elsewhere, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The most basic drivers of such contrasts are economic. For example, based on a contentious measure used by the World Bank, on the most recent data at this writing 736 million people worldwide were living in extreme poverty in 2015 (World Bank, 2018); more than twice that number ‘experienced hunger or did not have regular access to nutritious and sufficient food in 2019’ (FAO et al., 2020: viii). As an indication of what the World Bank’s threshold for extreme poverty means in practice, The Economist reckons: ‘In Zambia, for example’, where, according to WHO, healthy life expectancy at birth is just 54 years as compared with 73 years in Canada, a person on the poverty line can afford a daily diet of two–​three plates of nshima (a maize staple known as mealie meal), a sweet potato, a few spoonfuls of oil, a couple of teaspoons of sugar, a handful of peanuts and twice a week, a banana or mango and a small serving of meat. Such a person would have just 28 per cent of his budget left over for other things (Economist, 2016). Poverty also has implications at the community or national level, notably in terms of (lack of) access to healthcare. For example, according to the World Bank in 2017, across the whole of sub-​Saharan Africa, domestic general government expenditure for health (adjusted for purchasing power) averaged US$69, as against US$3600 in Canada. Not much quality care can be had for that amount, as dramatised (for example) by anthropologist Julie Livingston’s (2013) description of cancer care in Botswana, by no means sub-​Saharan Africa’s worst-​off country in this regard. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-30

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Top

180

4th

3rd

2nd

Bottom

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Nigeria (2018)

India (2016)

Indonesia (2017)

Senegal (2017)

Peru (2012)

Zambia (2014)

Figure 25.1 Gradient in under-​5 mortality rate (U5MR), by income quintile, selected low-​and middle-​income countries. Source: Data from World Bank Health Nutrition and Population statistics, http://databank. worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=health-nutrition-and-population-statistics-by-wealthquintile.

An important concept in the study of health inequalities is the socio-​economic gradient, which is found for most conditions and in most countries. Figure 25.1 shows such gradients in the number of children per 1000 who die before the age of 5 (under-​5 mortality rate, or U5MR) in a number of dissimilar low-​and middle-​income countries (LMICs). By comparison, U5MR for the Canadian population as a whole is 5 per 1000. Although both the slope of the gradient and the absolute values vary, reflecting differences in national context, the pattern is consistent. It is also important to note, as explained later in the chapter, that ‘world-​scale’ health inequalities can exist within small areas of the high-​income world, representing an important theoretical challenge for how we think about development. Such gradients are influenced not only by differences in access to healthcare, but also—​and often more powerfully—​by economic and social conditions generically referred to as social determinants of health (Marmot, Friel, Bell, Houweling, & Taylor, 2008). Recommended reading: Livingston (2013); Marmot, Friel, Bell, Houweling, and Taylor (2008).

Health on the global policy agenda: proliferating institutions, shifts of power Concern for some aspects of global health has a long history, but in the age of empire a primary motivation was protecting the health of colonists. The WHO was established in 1948 as the United Nations (UN) system agency with lead responsibility for health, and ‘international health’ began to expand its reach in the era of decolonisation and increased interest in development in general (Birn, Pillay, & Holtz, 2017: chapters 1–2).

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Global health inequality and development  215 More recent developments have seen a proliferation of institutions and a shift of power and influence away from the financially strained WHO to the World Bank, philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (now one of the largest contributors to the WHO budget), and multiple special-​purpose agencies and disease-​specific interest groups. The HIV/​AIDS pandemic marked a turning point; one historian notes that ‘without this epidemic there would be no global health movement as we know it today’ (Brandt, 2013: 2152). Among other impacts, the epidemic contributed to a quintupling of the inflation-​adjusted value of development assistance for health between 1990 and 2017 (Micah et al., 2019), although the annual value began to fluctuate after the financial crisis and many observers were apprehensive about the future even before the pandemic. Increased attention is being paid to the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in global health. Initial attention was concentrated on the tobacco industry, and its supporters like the US Chamber of Commerce. The focus is now broadening to the alcohol, supermarket, fast food, and ultra-​processed food industries, in which the leading firms have a global reach and marketing budgets that dwarf the resources of national health ministries and in some cases, the WHO (Allen, Hatefi, & Feigl, 2019). These corporations are implicated in rapid increases in the incidence of non-​communicable diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes in much of the world, which in addition to their human toll create formidable challenges for those LMICs that are seriously trying to expand health coverage in line with the Sustainable Development Goal commitment to universal health coverage. Some observers describe the proliferation of actors in global health—​most inventories find literally hundreds—​in terms of a shift from a Westphalian to a far more complex post-​Westphalian model of policymaking, in which national governments and intergovernmental organisations like the WHO no longer control agendas and processes (Hein & Kickbusch, 2012). While there is clearly some merit to this analysis, other observers continue to place national governments at the centre of the processes that have come to be described as global health governance (e.g., Frenk & Moon, 2013). The strength of this position was demonstrated by the central role of governments in financing vaccine research and procurement in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic. On the other hand, the transnational corporate influence on health continues to operate largely without serious regulatory responses, and the reorganisation of production and finance across multiple national borders limits the ability of even governments with the inclination to pursue redistributive policies that address social determinants of health with the necessary vigour. The remarkable Uruguayan-​born essayist Eduardo Galeano (2000: 175) observed: ‘Countries tremble at the thought that money will not come or that it will flee. … If you don’t behave yourselves, say the companies, we’re going to the Philippines or Thailand or Indonesia or China or Mars’ (Mars is not yet an option, although Elon Musk is working on it). Finally, some of the institutions with the most substantial impact on health do not appear in many inventories of the global health governance landscape (Chapter 4 in Birn et al., 2017, is a notable exception). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is one such institution. Recommended reading: Birn, Pillay, and Holtz (2017); Frenk and Moon (2013).

Globalisation, neoliberalism, and health In 2001, British health scientist Richard Feachem (2001) argued that ‘globalisation is good for your health, mostly’ because of the stimulus it was believed to provide for economic growth, and therefore opportunities for reducing poverty and increasing investment in

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216  Ted Schrecker health services. He defined globalisation primarily in terms of increased trade volumes, but subsequent analyses called into question the World Bank research on which he based his argument (Banerjee, Deaton, Lustig, Rogoff, & Hsu, 2006). At least on the World Bank’s measures, extreme poverty had indeed been reduced worldwide pre-pandemic. However, until around 2008 this was accounted for almost entirely by poverty reduction in China. Outside China, during a period (1981–​2008) when the value of the world’s economic product more than tripled, for everyone outside China who escaped extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank, someone else fell into it. This is hardly a strong recommendation for the global economic order within which these trends occurred. The distinctive neoliberal form of globalisation that unfolded after (roughly) the late 1970s did not just happen. It was promoted by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF by way of a set of policy nostrums on which the US influence, especially after the Reagan administration came to power, was so strong that they were and are widely known as the Washington Consensus. Key elements of the Consensus were privatisation, labour market deregulation, shrinking health and social protection budgets, and increased openness to trade and foreign direct investment. After a succession of LMIC debt crises starting in 1982, these were promoted through structural adjustment conditionalities attached to IMF and World Bank loans to (eventually) more than 100 countries designed in the first instance to protect the ability of borrowing countries to repay their creditors, including many of the largest banks in New York and London. The relevance to health was noted as early as 1987 in a landmark ten-​country UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) study, and a number of more recent multi-​country longitudinal analyses have clearly demonstrated negative impacts of structural adjustment on health, health services, and social determinants of health (summarised in Schrecker, 2020). It is possible to envision a version of globalisation that would have lived up to the promise envisioned by Feachem, but with infrequent country-​specific exceptions that is not what happened. Although the World Bank and IMF have both abandoned the vocabulary of structural adjustment, this is more than ancient history. In 2014, the then-​Managing Director (i.e., CEO) of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said that structural adjustment ‘was before [her] time. I have no idea what it is. We don’t do that any more’ (Agence France-​Presse, 2014). However, an analysis of all IMF loan agreements between 1985 and 2014 (Kentikelenis, Stubbs, & King, 2016) found that IMF ‘programmes re-​incorporated many of the reforms that it claimed to no longer advocate’, and that in some cases conditionalities had become more intrusive in terms of their effects on national economic and social policy space. In general, the Bank and IMF continue to act as ‘agents of neoliberalism’ (Babb & Kentikelenis, 2018). Changes in the global trade policy regime have had their own distinctive impacts on health. One (partial) success story involves the ability of a multinational coalition of civil society organisations and LMIC governments to roll back intellectual property (IP) provisions in the Agreement of Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that came into force in 1995. Limitations on IP rights accepted in the resulting Doha Declaration (2001) and subsequent interpretations made possible dramatic reductions in the price of antiretroviral therapies (ART).These in turn enabled a more than 20-​fold increase between 2000 and 2017, largely financed by development assistance, in the number of HIV-​positive people receiving ART. At the same time, an important report by a UN Secretary-​General’s High-​Level Panel on Access to Medicines (2016) warned that governments are not making full use of these ‘flexibilities’ and pointed to a more basic

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Global health inequality and development  217 problem that global health researchers have flagged for decades: urgently needed investment from the private sector will not flow to research on diseases that primarily affect the poor, because they do not constitute an attractive commercial market.This problem is especially acute with regard to neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) (Molyneux, Savioli, & Engels, 2017). Although a list of such conditions is now formally recognised by the WHO, little has changed since it was observed that: Apparently it is more profitable to develop and market Viagra than to research a new drug to treat patients with visceral leishmaniasis, a fatal disease if left untreated. Such a drug is more likely to be developed through veterinary research if it has economic potential on the pet market (Veeken & Pécoul, 2000: 309). This shortcoming of a market-​based model for financing medical research and innovation became painfully evident in the COVID-​19 pandemic. Recommended reading: Babb & Kentikelenis (2018); Schrecker (2020).

New cartographies of health and development The concept of an epidemiologic transition, in which communicable diseases are vanquished and replaced by non-​communicable diseases that affect people later in life as economies grow, is entrenched in population health research and teaching. Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton has described this as a pattern in which ‘diseases move out of the bowels and chests of infants into the arteries of the elderly’ (Deaton, 2013: 31). As long ago as 1989, Mexican researcher Julio Frenk, later his country’s health minister and subsequently dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, challenged the relevance of this model, pointing out that his country was simultaneously experiencing continued incidence of communicable diseases and a rapid increase in non-​communicable diseases that had been stereotypically, if inaccurately, characterised as diseases of affluence (Frenk, Bobadilla, Sepúlveda, & López Certantes, 1989; cf. Frenk, Gómez-​Dantés, & Moon, 2014). In fact, they are not. For example, a major contributor to the changing burden of disease in many LMICs is what has been called the nutrition transition to commercially marketed and ultra-​processed diets (Global Panel, 2016: 37). This transition has often happened much more rapidly than in high-​income countries, facilitated by economic policies (including structural adjustment conditionalities) that undermined the viability of domestic agriculture and opened borders to food imports and foreign investment in fast-​food ventures and supermarkets (on Mexico, see Gálvez, 2018). Diabetes—​which is closely linked to ultra-​processed diets—​is now the largest single cause of death in Mexico. Even as communicable diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, and NTDs almost exclusively afflict poor people in poor countries, non-​communicable diseases now threaten to widen health inequalities in every region of the world—​hence, frequent references to double or multiple burdens of disease (cf. Frenk et al., 2014). Further, the health status of some deprived populations in rich countries now looks ‘Third World’ on many indicators. The difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest districts in Chicago—​a difference that also maps closely on to racial segregation—​is now 30 years (Economist, 2019; Field Foundation, 2015), comparable to the difference in national average life expectancy between the United States and the Central African Republic. In the small local authority where I lived for many years in the UK, devastated first by deindustrialisation and then by a decade of domestic austerity

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218  Ted Schrecker policies modelled on structural adjustment, the 17-​year difference in male life expectancy between most-​and least-​deprived wards was larger than the difference in national average male life expectancy between England and Tanzania. These observations are congruent with an emerging theme in development studies: the need to think in terms of social rather than territorial cartographies (Robinson, 2002). Prospects for a healthy life may depend on the terms on which one is connected to, or disconnected from, global economic flows. Anticipating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and before the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime came into force, Walter Russell Mead (1992, p. 42) predicted that The First and Third worlds will not so much disappear as mingle.There will be more people in Mexico and India who live like Americans of the upper-​middle class; on the other hand, there will be more—​many more—​people in the United States who live like the slum dwellers of Mexico City and Calcutta. At the time, this sounded hyperbolic; a quarter-​century later, it sounds almost routine, as (for example) South African-​style water and electricity cutoffs come to Detroit and more than 750,000 US dollar millionaires in India co-​exist with several hundred million people with no access to indoor toilets. Future global health trends will play out in this context of magnified inequality, on multiple scales. Recommended reading: Frenk, Gómez-​Dantés, and Moon (2014).

How COVID-​19 changes everything The coronavirus pandemic that swept across the world in 2020 first of all revealed the homicidal dimensions of austerity in the form of fatal under-​investment in basic public health infrastructure across a wide range of countries—​a danger that leading global health journalist Laurie Garrett had warned about for 25 years (Garrett, 1994). It further revealed the failings of what one leading researcher called ‘a broken ecosystem for making vaccines’, because the returns on private sector investment in the necessary basic science and clinical trials are too problematic (Subramanian, 2020). Even after a massive increase in spending on vaccine development and pre-​purchase, The Economist was calling for that amount to increase several-​fold (Economist, 2020). The economic costs of the lockdowns that were a widespread response to the pandemic were many orders of magnitude higher than the costs of maintaining public health infrastructure would have been. The result will be a development and health disaster, undoing many years, if not decades, of (modest) progress in reducing poverty and undernutrition and expanding access to healthcare. Within national borders, health inequalities have already been magnified as social distancing and self-​isolation were not options for people (and regions) with precarious incomes and high population densities. The best model available for understanding the health impacts is probably the implosion of Russia’s economy after the Soviet Union collapsed: gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by as much as 50 per cent, poverty soared, and many social protection mechanisms collapsed (Field, Kotz, & Bukhman, 2000); life expectancy fell by several years in the last decade of the century and in the first few years afterward. More importantly, despite an economic recovery accompanied by sharp increases in inequality, 25 years later Russian life expectancy remained several years below what the country’s GDP per capita would predict (Shkolnikov, Andreev, Tursun-​zade, & Leon, 2019).

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Global health inequality and development  219 The pandemic could therefore lead to a lost decade, or generation, of progress in reducing health inequalities, across and within national borders. No shortage exists of blueprints for ‘building back better’, in the words of the Organisation for Economic Co-​ operation and Development (OECD) (2020) and others. Whether such blueprints, and the necessary levels of public investment, are feasible in the context of government debt levels unprecedented in peacetime and a disturbing decline in democratic accountabilities remains to be seen. As in earlier decades, the role of the World Bank and the IMF will be critical; scepticism has already been expressed about the appropriateness and adequacy of their early responses (Kentikelenis et al., 2020). Recommended reading: Kentikelenis et al. (2020); OECD (2020).

Useful websites International Health Policies, IHP News, http://​e.itg.be/​ihp/​archives/​category/​ ihpnewsletter/​. Sign up for regular updates at http://​e.itg.be/​ihp/​newsletter-​sign/​. Produced by the Health Policy Unit of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium. Health Policy Watch: Independent Global Health Reporting, www.healthpolicy-​ watch.org. Sign up for regular updates at www.healthpolicy-​watch.org/​#sign-​up. These are the two most important civil society websites on global health policy and politics, and together provide a comprehensive look into this sometimes Byzantine world. The World Bank’s Health, Nutrition and Population Data Portal, http://​datatopics. worldbank.org/​health/​home, is a relatively user-​friendly source of comparative country data on a variety of economic, social, and health indicators. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, www.healthdata.org.The Institute, backed by US$300 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has supplanted the WHO as a source for data on many aspects of the global burden of disease (GBD). It has, however, been criticised for the lack of transparency in its methods (see Tichenor & Sridhar, 2018). Our World in Data, https://​ourworldindata.org/​. Based at the University of Oxford, it is a valuable collection of data and visualisations, noteworthy for almost always providing primary sources (unlike many such sites).

References Agence France-​Presse. (2014). “IMF no Longer Forces ‘Structural Adjustment’—​Chief.” Business Inquirer [Online]. https://​business.inquirer.net/​168309/​imf-​no-​longer-​forces-​structural-​ adjustment-​chief. Allen, L.N., Hatefi, A., & Feigl, A.B. (2019). “Corporate Profits Versus Spending on Non-​ communicable Disease Prevention: An Unhealthy Balance.” The Lancet Global Health, 7: e1482–​e1483. Babb, S.L., & Kentikelenis, A.E. (2018). “International Financial Institutions as Agents of Neoliberalism,” in Cahill, D., Cooper, M., & Konings, M. (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Banerjee, A., Deaton, A., Lustig, N., Rogoff, K., & Hsu, E. (2006). An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998–​2005. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://​siteresources.worldbank.org/​DEC/​ Resources/​84797-​1109362238001/​726454-​1164121166494/​RESEARCH-​EVALUATION-​ 2006-​Main-​Report.pdf. Birn, A.-​E., Pillay, Y., & Holtz, T. (2017). Textbook of Global Health (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

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220  Ted Schrecker Brandt, A. (2013). “How AIDS Invented Global Health.” New England Journal of Medicine, 368(23): 2149–​2152. Deaton, A. (2013). The Great Escape: Health,Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Economist. (2016). “How the Other Tenth Lives.” Economist, 6 October. Economist. (2019). “Chicago Neighbourhoods: Down the Tracks.” Economist, 12 October. Economist. (2020). “Vaccine Economics: A Bigger Dose.” The Economist, 9–​10, 8 August. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, World Food Programme, & World Health Organization. (2020). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World:Transforming Food Systems for Affordable Healthy Diets. Rome: FAO. https://​doi.org/​10.4060/​ca9692en. Feachem, R.G.A. (2001). “Globalisation is Good for your Health, Mostly.” British Medical Journal, 323: 504–​506. Field Foundation. (2015). Chicago Heat Maps. Chicago: Field Foundation. https://​fieldfoundation. org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2019/​03/​Field-​Foundation-​Heat-​Maps-​THazel-​Edits.pdf. Field, M.G., Kotz, D.M., & Bukhman, G. (2000). “Neoliberal Economic Policy, ‘State Desertion,’ and the Russian Health Crisis,” in Kim, J.Y. et al. (eds.), Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor, pp. 155–​173. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Frenk, J., Bobadilla, J.L., Sepúlveda, J., & López Certantes, M. (1989). “Health Transition in Middle-​ income Countries: New Challenges for Health Care.” Health Policy and Planning, 4: 29–​39. Frenk, J., Gómez-​Dantés, O., & Moon, S. (2014). “From Sovereignty to Solidarity: A Renewed Concept of Global Health for an Era of Complex Interdependence.” The Lancet, 383: 94–​97. Frenk, J., & Moon, S. (2013). “Governance Challenges in Global Health.” New England Journal of Medicine, 368: 936–​942. Galeano, E. (2000). Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking Glass World. New York: Picador. Gálvez,A. (2018). Eating NAFTA:Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garrett, L. (1994). The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Penguin Books. Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition. (2016). Food Systems and Diets: Facing the challenges of the 21st century. London: Global Panel. www.glopan.org/​sites/​default/​files/​ ForesightReport.pdf. Hein, W., & Kickbusch, I. (2012). “Global Health Governance and the Intersection of Health and Foreign Policy,” in Schrecker, T. (ed.), Ashgate Research Companion to the Globalization of Health, pp. 205–​228. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Kentikelenis, A., Gabor, D., Ortiz, I., Stubbs, T., McKee, M., & Stuckler, D. (2020). “Softening the Blow of the Pandemic: Will the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Make Things Worse?” The Lancet Global Health, 8: e758–e759. Kentikelenis, A.E., Stubbs,T.H., & King, L.P. (2016). “IMF Conditionality and Development Policy Space, 1985–​2014.” Review of International Political Economy, 23: 543–​582. Livingston, J. (2013). “Revealed in the Wound.” Journal of Clinical Oncology, 31: 3719–​3720. Marmot, M., Friel, S., Bell, R., Houweling, T.A., & Taylor, S. (2008). “Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health.” The Lancet, 372: 1661–​1669. Mead, W.R. (1992). “Bushism, Found: A Second-​term Agenda Hidden in Trade Agreements.” Harper’s, September: 37–​45. Micah, A.E., Dieleman, J.L., Case, M.K., Chapin, A., Chen, C.S., Cowling, K., et al. (2019). Financing Global Health 2018: Countries and Programs in Transition. Seattle: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. www.healthdata.org/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​policy_​report/​FGH/​2019/​FGH_​ 2018_​full-​report.pdf. Molyneux, D.H., Savioli, L., & Engels, D. (2017). “Neglected Tropical Diseases: Progress Towards Addressing the Chronic Pandemic.” The Lancet, 389: 312–​325.

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Global health inequality and development  221 OECD. (2020). Building Back Better: A Sustainable, Resilient Recovery after COVID-​ 19. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development. https://​read.oecd-​ilibrary.org/​ view/​?ref=133_​133639-​s08q2ridhf&title=Building-​back-​better-​_​A-​sustainable-​resilient-​ recovery-​after-​Covid-​19. Robinson, W.I. (2002). “Remapping Development in Light of Globalisation: From a Territorial to a Social Cartography.” Third World Quarterly, 23: 1047–​1071. Schrecker, T. (2020). “Globalization and Health: Political Grand Challenges.” Review of International Political Economy, 27: 26–​47. Shkolnikov,V.M.,Andreev, E.M.,Tursun-​zade, R., & Leon, D.A. (2019).“Patterns in the Relationship Between Life Expectancy and Gross Domestic Product in Russia in 2005–​15: A Cross-​sectional Analysis.” The Lancet Public Health, 4: e181–​e188. Subramanian, S. (2020). “‘It’s a Razor’s Edge we’re Walking’: Inside the Race to Develop a CoronavirusVaccine.” Guardian, March 27. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2020/​mar/​27/​inside​the-​race-​to-​develop-​a-​coronavirus-​vaccine-​covid-​19. Tichenor, M., & Sridhar, D. (2018). “Global Health Disruptors: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.” The BMJ Opinion [Online]. https://​blogs.bmj.com/​bmj/​2018/​11/​28/​global-​ health-​disruptors-​the-​bill-​and-​melinda-​gates-​foundation/​. United Nations Secretary-​ General’s High-​ Level Panel on Access to Medicines. (2016). Report: Promoting Innovation and Access to Health Technologies. New York: United Nations. www. politico.eu/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​09/​HLP-​Report-​FINAL-​Sept-​2016.pdf. Veeken, H., & Pécoul, B. (2000). “Drugs for ‘Neglected Diseases’: A Bitter Pill.” Tropical Medicine and International Health, 5: 309–​311. World Bank. (2018). Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle.Washington, DC: World Bank Group. https://​openknowledge.worldbank.org/​bitstream/​handle/​10986/​ 30418/​9781464813306.pdf. WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group, and United Nations Population Division. (2019). Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000 to 2017. Geneva: WHO. www.unfpa.org/​sites/​default/​files/​ pub-​pdf/​Maternal_​mortality_​report.pdf.

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Part VII

Capital, labour and the state

It is a distinguishing feature of critical development studies that it analyses development and the development project in the context of the system within which they are operating. That is, development must be analysed within the context of the capitalist system. Attempting to do otherwise is to hide from view the forces that shape and determine the outcomes of the development process; this is what mainstream development studies does. Analysis of development within the context of capitalism is possible at many levels. In Chapters 9 and 10, for example, focus was placed on the global level in explorations of the relationships between capitalism, imperialism, globalization, and development. In this part, the focus is more on the national level although not, of course, to the exclusion of the global forces which are also evident at the national level. This part examines the relationships between three of the fundamental analytical units of capitalism: capital (the class of owners of the means of production); labour (broadly defined to include those who sell their labour, provide unpaid care, work in the informal economy in a condition of rural semi-​proletarianisation; and the state (the complex set of institutions governing society and that structures and mediates relations between capital and labour). How these relations play out in practice varies greatly over time and place and needs to be subjected to close analytical and empirical scrutiny. This is provided by the chapters in this part. Benjamin Selywn, in Chapter 26, asks what labour-​driven and labour-​led development would look like. That is, he conceptualises how development might occur if the premise was not endless accumulation, the demand of capital, but rather the provision of benefits for workers. He provides several examples of where the demands and actions of workers themselves have instituted these changes. Edgar Záyago Lau, in Chapter 27, focuses on how science and technology are produced, used, and adapted in capitalist societies. Rather than seeing technology as socially neutral and problem solving, he argues that technology must be viewed within the context of it responding to capitalism’s need for profit rather than meeting society’s needs. The next three chapters move to country and regional case studies in which the historic evolution of capital, labour, and state relations is examined. Pun Ngai, in Chapter 28, argues that a new working class is being formed in China in response to that country’s transition to capitalism. She shows how the making of this working class was heavily influenced by the state, especially with respect to the migrant labourforce, and how it is now radicalised to identify and advance its own interests. Susan Spronk’s chapter on Latin America (Chapter 29) charts how work has become more precarious with the onset of neoliberal globalisation, how unions have been weakened as a result, and surveys the debates that have occurred about how best to understand and move forward in conditions DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-31

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224  Capital, labour and the state where the ‘working class’ has become more fragmented and its relevance questioned. She concludes the chapter with examples of how women trade unionists have won important gains. Adam Hanieh, in Chapter 30, examines class and state formation in the Gulf Arab states. He provides a new reading of the relations between capital and states in the region as well as focusing on the role of international labour migration; it is the foreign migrant workers who bear the brunt of downturns in these oil-​based economies.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is the difference between pro-​labour, labour-​driven, and labour-​led development? What is the role of the state in each? 2. What are the possibilities for and limits of seeking ‘technological solutions’ to development challenges? 3. What similarities and differences can you find in the processes of class formation in China, Latin America, and the Gulf Arab states?

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26  Labour and development Benjamin Selwyn

Mainstream development thinking is inherently elitist. States and markets are privileged as primary developmental actors while workers are considered to be, at best, secondary developmental actors. Such an elitist comprehension of social change simultaneously legitimates elite repression of workers, whilst hiding their contribution to real human development. In this chapter I address the following issues: (i) the elitism of mainstream development studies; (ii) how to theoretically comprehend development from the perspective of labouring classes; and (iii) empirical examples of where and how labouring classes have generated significant developmental gains (Selwyn, 2014, 2017).

The elitism of mainstream development studies Mainstream development theory represents an ‘intent to develop through the exercise of trusteeship over society … expressed, by one source of agency, to develop the capacities of another’ (Cowen & Shenton, 1996: ix–​x; italics in original). This particular form of trusteeship entails an ‘exercise of power in which the capacity to state the purpose of development is not accompanied by accountability’ (Cowen & Shenton, 1996: 454, emphasis added). Put simply, elite actors—​state bureaucracies, transnational corporations, international institutions—​decide upon what constitutes development and how to pursue it, and the rest of society is expected (or forced) to follow. The essence of such a worldview boils down to four axioms: 1 Capital accumulation is identified as the basis for the development of the poor. 2 Elites (in particular corporations and states) are identified as drivers of capital accumulation. 3 Myriad actions, movements, and struggles by the poor are considered as hindrances to development. 4 As a consequence of point 3, elite repression and exploitation of the poor politically and economically are legitimised, especially when the latter contest elite-​led development. Neoliberalism (still) represents the dominant conception of social progress within much of the development community of state leaders, international organisations, and transnational corporations. It holds to a conception of self-​regulating markets, which, freed of political interference, can allocate resources more efficiently than any centralised actor, thereby generating optimal development outcomes. One of those resources is labour, which is portrayed as a factor of production. The allocation of labour by the market DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-32

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226  Benjamin Selwyn requires freeing markets from political interference by states and trade unions. Such political interference creates labour market inflexibilities which in turn generate sub-​optimal developmental outcomes such as unemployment. As Robert Solow noted: A labour market is inflexible if the level of unemployment–​insurance benefits is too high or their duration is too long, or if there are too many restrictions on the freedom of employers to fire and to hire, or if the permissible hours of work are too tightly regulated, or if excessively generous compensation for overtime work is mandated, or if trade unions have too much power to protect incumbent workers against competition and to control the flow of work at the site of production, or perhaps if statutory health and safety regulations are too stringent (Solow, 1988: 1). From the above perspective, ensuring labour market flexibility, and opposing any form of workers’ influence over capital accumulation and/​or resource allocation, represents a baseline for successful economic development. These assumptions—​about the inherent superiority of market-​based resource allocation—​justified long-​term processes of economic liberalisation (such as structural adjustment programmes) from the 1980s onwards, based upon reducing labour union political and economic influence. But reducing labour to a factor of production to be directed by capitalist investors is not the unique property of neoliberal theory. At present, the main alternative to neoliberal theory is statist political economy, which posits that states, rather than markets, represent the most likely actor able to direct resources in order to facilitate economic growth and structural change. Authors within this tradition propose that infant industry protection, rather than liberalisation of markets, is the best way of securing developmental transformations (e.g., Gallagher, 2005). Cases of such development include post-​Second World War Japan, the so-​called ‘Asian Tigers’ of South Korea and Taiwan, and contemporary China. The states presiding over these economic ‘miracles’ eschewed neoliberal, free-​market ideology, and established state bureaucracies to direct resources to achieve rapid economic growth and structural change. However, a core resource in all of these cases was labour. Its direction by the state was often brutal. Alice Amsden, a key statist political economist, noted that alongside effective investments, ‘cheap labour’ and ‘labour repression is the basis of late industrialisation everywhere’. In the case of South Korea she showed how ‘high profits in [its] mass-​production industries have been derived not merely from investments in machinery and modern work methods … but also from the world’s longest working week’. Amsden observes the impacts of the gender division of labour on women workers: The average wages of women workers … have lagged far behind those of men, enabling employers in the labour-​intensive industries to remain internationally competitive alongside the growth of a mass-​production sector. Wage discrimination against women in Korea and Japan is the worst in the world (Amsden, 1990: 18, 13–​14, 30). Mainstream development theory—​whether market or state-​oriented—​is ideologically committed to endless capital accumulation. This entails, centrally, the subordination of labour to a productive input, to be directed by firms and/​or states. To conceive of how development can occur from the bottom up, achieved by labouring classes themselves, requires turning to a different body of theory. Recommended reading: Amsden (1990); Solow (1988).

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A labour-​centred development perspective Marx is perhaps best known for his landmark study Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. His endeavour, in Capital and throughout his life’s work, was twofold: first, to over-​turn elite conceptions of social change prevalent during his day (in particular the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo). And second, to construct theoretical and political tools with which to build a different, class-​less society (socialism/​communism). Marx was instrumental in establishing the International Workingmen’s association (more commonly known as the First International) in the mid-​1860s. In his inaugural address to the organisation, Marx provided two examples of what he labelled the political economy of the working class—​a fundamentally different political economy to that espoused by Smith, Ricardo, and other advocates of capitalist expansion.The first example, the Ten-​Hours Act (introduced in England in 1847, this legally reduced the working day to a maximum of 10 hours), was the first time that ‘in broad daylight the political economy of the [capitalist] class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’. The second example was the creation of worker-​run cooperative factories. The latter were significant because ‘[b]‌y deed instead of by argument … [such organisations] … have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands’ (Marx, 1864). The significance of Marx’s conceptual discovery of the political economy of the working class is twofold. Capital’s quest for endless accumulation is predicated upon thwarting attempts by labour to realise elements of their own political economy (such as shorter working hours and control over industry). This overt anti-​working-​class bias at the heart of pro-​capitalist political economy is revealed by Marx, just as it was obscured by the classical political economists themselves, who sought to naturalise capitalist social relations. This bias explains the repressive elements of mainstream development theory outlined in the previous section. The potential existence of a rival political economy is significant in a second way. Workers’ gains at the expense of capital are won through mass collective actions which directly contradict what we are often told are the ‘objective rules’ of ‘the market’. Such collective actions, elite responses to them, and the institutional formations that occur subsequently often engender the more progressive features under capitalist development, such as workers’ rights, welfare provision, and various forms of democracy. From a political economy working-​class perspective, the core concerns for workers and are not those of capital (how to enhance accumulation), but those of labouring classes themselves. These may include: provision of resources to secure and ease the social reproduction of labour (for example, the provision of child and crèche care, education, free or cheap food, for children at school, and beyond) and gender and ethnic/​racial equality (to reduce differential rates of exploitation). They may also include the attainment of higher wages and better conditions in work, more free time through shorter working hours, and more decision-​making ability within the workplace to reduce the burden of work. They extend to striving for having sufficient time and space to secure the basic necessities of life and to be able to get to and from work safely, access to the means of production (e.g., land, factories, workplaces) and survival (e.g., water and electricity), adequate housing and nutrition, and the ability to engage in culturally enhancing activities such as education, socialising, and leisure. So far, our discussion has been theoretical. The next section outlines the practical implications of these concepts. Recommended reading: Marx (1864).

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From labour-​centred to labour-​led development A labour-​ centred approach requires viewing development from the perspective of labouring classes. The term ‘labouring classes’ refers to ‘the growing numbers … who now depend—​directly and indirectly—​on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction’ (Panitch & Leys, 2001: 1x, added emphasis). The International Labour Organization estimates that the global labourforce numbered over three billion by the mid-​2000s (Kapsos, 2007). The global labouring class is expanding rapidly, is diverse, and is highly fragmented. It includes unpaid women workers largely responsible for social reproduction in the household, urban/​industrial employed workers (‘the working class’ in traditional Marxian terminology), urban and rural unemployed workers, ‘informal’ workers who populate the ever-​expanding urban slumlands, and many members of the peasantry. While the global labouring class takes myriad forms, it shares a common condition—​its subordination to and exploitation by capital. In this way it constitutes a ‘unity of the diverse’ (Marx, 1973: 101). This structural diversity generates, in turn, diverse forms of struggle and diverse ameliorative demands. It also generates various responses from states, which in turn mediate and impact back upon struggles from below. The concept of labour-​centred development can be deployed to identify three sub-​ processes. These are: 1. Pro-​labour development: where state actors design policies and enact policies that benefit workers 2. Labour-​driven development: where workers’ collective actions push states and capital to make concessions to labour 3. Labour-​led development: where workers’ collective actions aim to and generate tangible gains for them and their communities. An example of pro-​labour development feeding into labour-​driven development is the recent Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. This act pledges 100 days’ paid employment to every rural household as a state-​led strategy for overcoming rural destitution (pro-​labour development).The act, as Jon Pattenden (2016) shows, has in turn given confidence to rural labourers to bargain for better conditions (labour-​driven development) and to begin to combat the widespread existence of servitude in the Indian countryside. The establishment of the European and North American welfare states represents a high-​point of labour-​driven development.The human development gains of the European working classes after the Second World War were due not to the generosity of capitalists and states, but to the threat of mass unrest from below. As Quintin Hogg, a leading light in the Tory party, told the British parliament in 1943, ‘If you don’t give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution’ (cited in Cliff & Gluckstein, 1996: 211). The core argument of this chapter, however, is that labouring-​class movements and struggles against capitalist exploitation can be, and are, developmental in and of themselves. Labouring classes can do more than wait for pro-​labour policy or try and influence it. Labour-​led development (LLD) refers to processes where labouring-​class collective actions directly generate meaningful improvements to their and their communities’ livelihoods. The following provides some examples of labour-​driven and labour-​led development.

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Shackdweller’s movements in South Africa Contemporary South Africa is characterised by extreme wealth and mass poverty. Approximately 47 per cent of the population live under the national poverty line (US$43 per month in 2013), of which over 90 per cent are black. The numbers living on under US$1 a day doubled—​from approximately two to four million—​between 1994 and 2006 (Klein, 2008: Chapter 10). In a context of limited job opportunities, mass poverty, and limited state provision of basic human necessities, shackdwellers’ movements have emerged across the country’s shantytowns. Through collective actions they have pressured local government for resources to meet basic human necessities—​in particular housing and sanitation—​and they have self-​generated ‘human resources’ to provide services to their members and wider shantytown communities. Founded in 2005, by 2013 Abahlali Basemjondolo (also known as AbM) had more than 12,000 members across more than 60 shack settlements. The movement emerged from the Kennedy road settlement in Durban where, in 2005, 8000 people shared only five drinking water standpipes. Abahlali combines mass street protests with land occupations to pressure local municipalities and city councils to provide basic services. For example, in 2009, Durban city council agreed to provide drinking water, electrification, and regularly cleaned latrines for 14 settlements, and to provide formal housing for occupants of three settlements (Buccus, 2009). Abahlali operates through direct democracy—​where, for example, negotiators with city councillors and leaders are directly electable and de-​selectable, and are subject to scrutiny in regular mass meetings. The movement’s high level of participation has also generated new human resources—​members volunteering to provide services to others and the wider shack settlement communities. These include provision of crèches, monthly food parcels cooked and delivered to the destitute, care provision for child-​headed households and people with AIDS, and security and fire patrols at night (Pithouse, 2006). S’bu Zikode, one of Abahlali’s founder-​members, describes how we cannot wait in the mud, shit and fire of shack life for ever. Voting did not work for us.The political parties did not work for us. Civil society did not work for us. No political party, civil society organisation or trade union is inviting us into the cities or into what remains of democracy in South Africa. We have no choice but to take our own place in the cities and in the political life of the country (Zikode, 2013).

Movements for urban reform in Brazil Since the late 1990s, an urban movement has emerged in Brazil seeking to ameliorate the livelihoods of its members and their communities. In a population of over 200 million, around 50 million people live in inadequate conditions (entailing limited access to water, garbage collection services, and connection to sewerage). Over 100,000 people live on the streets.1 Homeless workers have attempted to address this situation by establishing their own movements. The best known of these organisations is the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Homeless Workers Movement—​MTST). The MTST follows in the footsteps of the favela movement, which resisted shantytown evictions during the 1970s. In the urban sphere it works in collaboration with other social movements such as the União Nacional

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230  Benjamin Selwyn de Moradia Popular (National Low-​income Housing Union). Between 1997 and 2005, for example, homeless workers’ organisations in São Paulo mobilised approximately 10,000 people to occupy and live in empty buildings. The MTST organises unemployed and informal-​sector workers in urban areas to occupy and live in vacant buildings, hence establishing the basic essentials of a livelihood. In the early 2000s the MTST also began establishing ‘rurban’ (rural–​urban) settlements on the peripheries of cities on which its participants could combine agricultural activities (rearing animals and planting crops) with the search for urban-​based work (Levy, 2011).

Mass strikes in Indonesia Indonesia has experienced rapid immiserating growth since its embrace of neoliberal principles of openness, deregulation, and low wages from the late 1990s onwards. Rapidly expanding palm oil and manufacturing sectors have generated large labouring classes that subsist on poverty wages. Workers’ struggles have pushed up the minimum wage. In October 2012, over a million workers struck across the country, and over 500,000 workers took to the streets to celebrate May Day in 2013. Their actions increased the minimum wage by 20 per cent between 2011 and 2012 and by 44 per cent between 2012 and 2013. These increases raised the minimum wage to a level that local government considered adequate for meeting ‘decent living needs’ (Hauf, 2016: 139). Recommended reading: Selywn (2017: Chapters 5 and 6).

Conclusions Mass struggles from below have been and are drivers of world-​historical change and human development. These struggles range from the fight against Atlantic slavery and for better working conditions in European industries in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the European and American inter-​war strike-​waves and revolutionary movements that pushed ruling classes to introduce welfare states, to the mass strikes during the 1980s against dictatorships and apartheid in Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa respectively. More recently, workers’ struggles from below—​across Asia, sub-​Saharan Africa, and Latin America—​have continued to yield human developmental gains for these movements. That the global labouring class is diverse in its form and composition means that ameliorative movements will take diverse forms and will struggle for different objectives. A labour-​centred development approach enables us to see simultaneously the diversity and unity of such movements—​diversity in their forms, united by resisting the establishment of a world in capital’s image. That labouring-​class struggles can generate improvements for workers and their communities is a truism for much critical and socialist thinking. That such a basic insight is absent within much mainstream development thinking illuminates the latter’s elitism, rooted in the way it sees the world from the vantage point of capital accumulation. Mainstream development thinking represents different branches of pro-​capitalist theory, based fundamentally on the conceptual denial of labouring-​class agency. This denial justifies capital’s treatment of labour as an input into production, to be directed by elite actors.

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Labour and development   231 The essence of the labour-​centred development perspective is to see development from the perspective of labouring classes. Most of the time, this means revealing how elite actors use ideologies of progress to legitimate the oppression and exploitation of workers. However, given that capitalism is a system based upon class antagonisms, it is to be expected that occasionally workers will be able to act collectively against forces of capitalist expansion to generate their own ameliorative movements.The labour-​centred development perspective helps us see these movements and helps us identify how they generate tangible gains for workers and their communities.The sub-​set of concepts associated with this perspective—​pro-​labour, labour-​driven, and labour-​led development—​helps identify further the dynamics, organisations and institutions, and processes that generate such ameliorative outcomes. The objective of labour-​centred development theory is to contribute, ideologically and practically, to labouring-​class movements’ attempts to better their conditions. It represents an anti-​elite theory, rooted in labouring-​class collective action. It identifies a different political economy (the political economy of the working class) as the basis upon which to construct a more equal and egalitarian world.

Note 1 www.habitat.org/​where-​we-​build/​brazil.

References Amsden, A. (1990). “Third World Industrialization: Global Fordism or a New Model?” New Left Review, I(182): 5–​31. Buccus, I. (2009). “Durban Breaks New Ground in Participatory Democracy.” Mail and Guardian, 12 March. http://​thoughtleader.co.za/​imraanbuccus /​2009/​03/​12/​durban-​breaks-​new-​ ground-​in-​participatory-​democracy/​. Cliff, T., & Gluckstein, D. (1996). The Labour Party: A Marxist History. London: Bookmarks. Cowen, M., & Shenton, R.W. (1996). Doctrines of Development. London: Taylor & Francis. Gallagher, K. (ed.) (2005). Putting Development First: The Importance of Policy Space in the WTO and IFIs. London. Zed Books. Hauf, F. (2016). Beyond Decent Work: The Cultural Political Economy of Labour Struggles in Indonesia. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Kapsos, S. (2007). World and Regional Trends in Labour Force Participation. Methodologies and Key Results. Geneva: ILO. Klein, N. (2008). The Shock Doctrine. New York: Picador. Levy, C. (2011). “Ocupando o centro da cidade: movimento dos cortiços e ação coletiva.” Otra Economia, 5(8): 73–​96. Marx, K. (1864). Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association. www.marxists. org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1864/​ 10/​27.htm. Marx, K. (1993 [1973]). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Panitch, L., & Leys, C. (2000). “Preface,” in Panich. L. & Leys, C. (eds.), The Socialist Register 2001. London: Merlin. Panitch, L., & Leys, C. (eds.) (2001). Socialist Register: Working Classes, Global Realities, vol. 37. London: Merlin. Pattenden, J. (2016). Labour, State and Society in Rural India:A Class-​RelationalApproach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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232  Benjamin Selwyn Pithouse, R. (2006). “Struggle is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers’Movement in Durban, South Africa.” Monthly Review, 57(9): 1–​12. Selwyn, B. (2014). The Global Development Crisis. Cambridge: Polity. Selwyn, B. (2017). The Struggle for Development. Cambridge: Polity. Solow, R. (1988). “What is Labour-​market Flexibility? What is it Good For?” Keynes Lecture. Proceedings of the British Academy, 97: 189–​211. Zikode, S. (2013). “Despite the State’s Violence, our Fight to Escape the Mud and Fire of South Africa’s Slums will Continue.” The Guardian, 11 November. www.theguardian.com/​ commentisfree/​2013/​nov/​11/​south-​africa-​fight-​decent-​housing-​assassination.

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27  The triangle of underdevelopment Technology, patents, and monopoly Edgar Záyago Lau

This chapter advances key issues related to the analysis of science, knowledge, and technology in development from a critical perspective. On the one hand, we have what we might call the neutral or instrumental position that emphasises the use of technologically superior capacities for international development. This position can be described as determinist since it identifies technologies according to their potential to solve specific problems: e.g., the treatment of polluted water; capturing of energy; increasing agriculture production; and, in general, improving the living conditions of the poor.This view is often advanced without considering the social forces that shape the development of these technologies and without inquiring into the agendas and interests of those who control them. On the other hand, there is the critical development approach, which is to dissect the role of social relations in the advancement of science and technology within the capitalist mode of production. Here, the emphasis is on the social context in which technologies are researched and developed, produced, used, or adapted. From this standpoint, technologies are not simple and neutral instruments but social constructs, artifacts that materialise social relations, interests, political power, values, and other social factors. In other words, they are socially constructed and conditioned.

Science and technology in development Since the beginning of the last century, the accelerated social division of labour made possible the establishment of an ‘epistemological hegemony’ created to further capitalist accumulation. In this tradition, reality is studied without allusion to the historical and structural powers and interests that shape class formation and surplus value creation. It promotes analytical assessments based on the segmentation of the real world and the overestimation of individual agents’ rationality. This framework also undervalues the economic trends and social clashes that determine historical outcomes; theory and methods focus on solving specific problems derived from precise areas or disciplines—​business administration, industrial engineering, financial economics, marketing, human resources, international business, etc. Individual competitiveness is a sine qua non condition to join this hyper-​specialised, globalised, interconnected world. Consequently, higher education systems become training spaces for highly qualified technicians to join the process of capital accumulation and assist the dominant class. These cadres are of little or no relevance to becoming agents of transformation or social emancipation. In contrast, there is the objective analysis of social reality that focuses on the study of the historical, economic, and political contradictions of the productive modes at any given moment.This analytical framework leads us to understand how capitalism imposes DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-33

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234  Edgar Záyago Lau technical relations from the dominant social relations of production (Rubin, 2019). In this context, we understand that the ongoing competition inherent in the market economy and the voracious search for profits shape the development of science and technology. They become a tool that incubates competitive advantages for conquering markets, regardless of whether this logic brings contradictions in the system. Orthodox intellectuals who defend a subjective conception make reference to and use concepts that refer to technology’s role in the development process from a natural or evolutionary order. For them, the discussion about underdevelopment pertains to public policy adjustments, lack of competitiveness, technological insufficiency, or in the way agents interact to advance science and technology in the productive matrix (Freeman, 1994; Pérez, 2003). High or emerging technologies, be they called biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive sciences, robotics, or artificial intelligence, contribute to the advancement and consolidation of global capitalism practically via three mechanisms: (i) integration of markets worldwide (globalisation), which accelerates the presence of commodities in diverse geographies; (ii) patents, which generally guarantee the ownership of the new technology or technological process under monopoly conditions, supported by an array of international institutions (such as the World International Property Organization, WIPO) and financial capital; and (iii) the subordination of social interests to the generation of extraordinary profit. Recommended reading: Freeman (1994); Rubin (2019).

Technology and capitalism Development in principle encompasses many factors related to historical-​structural trajectories, the impact of which is evident in the quality of life of most people. Poverty, inequality, job insecurity, migration, malnutrition, exploitation, and on many occasions, diseases are problems that arise from within a production system that favours the capture of economic surplus by a social minority, the capitalist class. In terms of achieving an increment in competitiveness and productivity of labour, technology becomes an essential instrument for capitalist accumulation. Every labour process generates use values. However, in the capitalist mode of production, its main function is the creation of exchange values (and surplus value) and it subordinates the existence of the productive forces to this objective. This structural condition institutes a historical and structural feature to how capital creates and advances technology. It is, indeed, groundbreaking, but we have to note how capital accumulation commands research and development (R&D) so that large industry never closes the cycle of invention. Marx discusses it in the following terms: ‘Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative’. He adds that, [b]‌y means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-​process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another (Marx, 1887: 318).

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Technology, patents, and monopoly  235 Another issue worth noting is that technology and science converge in the same space within the capitalist system—​the valorisation of capital. Little by little, universities and public research centres surrender access to capital through public–​private partnerships, co-​financing schemes and strategic partnerships for innovation (parks, clusters, knowledge cities). Basic science becomes a productive force at the service of accumulation,‘Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it’ (Marx, 1973: 704). Consequently, technology and science are integrated by overlooking other essential issues such as risks to health or the environment, labour displacement, pollution, exploitation, or monopoly. Today, academic hegemony portrays technology as a type of ‘silver bullet’ with the power to alleviate poverty, unemployment, and inequality and increase social well-​being. This, as an analytical matrix is wrong. Social relations are never neutral and technologies are artifacts that reflect social interest and the dominance of certain classes over others. However, the portrayal of technologies as neutral entities prevails in mainstream academia. There are countless examples of this way of thinking. For instance, in a controversial study published in 2005, the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto in Canada advocated using nanotechnology to meet several of the Millennium Development Goals (Salamanca-​Buentello et al., 2005). The argument is based on the technical potential of nanotechnologies without considering the socio-​economic forces behind their development. The same logic is explicit in a report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF), in which the authors revealed how the automation of manufacturing in various industries would generate a net surplus of millions of new jobs (Leopold, Ratcheva &, Zahidi, 2018). Along similar lines, Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, began working with wheat in Mexico in the 1950s and succeeded in producing disease-​ resistant and high-​yield varieties using genetic modification. Through genetic manipulation, Borlaug boasted of the benefits of genetically modified organisms to satisfy the need to provide food to the hungry of the world (Borlaug, 2000). Yet, hunger is still a generalised problem and millions of people suffer from it every year (FAO, 2020). An important setback in these analyses is that they equate technical relationships (commodities, technologies, R&D) with social relationships (between people), and they never assume the importance of such a distinction to study the impact of technologies on the labour process (Katz, 1996), or development for this matter. Parallelling technical solutions to social problems is fallacious. What determines how, when, and why a new machine is introduced into a productive system are the laws of accumulation (Marx, 1887), and not the political disposition or the good will of the owner of the means of production. Recommended reading: Katz (1996); Marx (1887, 1973, 1994).

Patents: the seizure of accumulated productive knowledge Science and technology do not unfold spontaneously; both embody the accumulation of knowledge over time and, under capitalism they must be objectified—​used in the production process to manufacture commodities. In other words, any given technology applied in the productive process is the bearer of a collection of knowledge and echoes centuries of accumulated scientific research. Capitalism takes command of the structure that generates knowledge and arranges a framework to encourage the appropriation of its power related to manufacturing. The issue with knowledge is that, under capitalism, it can be appropriated at any given time, provided that the necessary conditions are present.

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236  Edgar Záyago Lau The laws of physics can be grasped in a matter of days, although their development took centuries and a lot of determination. An army of lawyers has been the vehicle to facilitate their appropriation when applied in engines, airplanes, rockets, and other devices—​ through patents under the supervision of the WIPO. If we analyse the subject from a critical point of view, the labour time required to reproduce science (knowledge) has no relation to the labour time required for its original production. The accumulation of scientific and technological knowledge is subjected to private ownership to increase labour productivity, without a large investment. It is worth remembering that the purpose of capitalism is to produce exchange values and, accordingly, advancing the productive forces through the objectification of knowledge is essential. Marx did not make explicit the relevance of the accumulation of knowledge in Capital, but he coined the term ‘general intellect’ in the Grundrisse’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ to tackle this issue: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-​acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and have been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real-​life process (Marx, 1980 [1857–​1858]: 229–​230). The objectification of knowledge is not immediate, as is the case with labour; the process of innovation requires space, time, and a certain autonomy to thrive.The profit drive of capitalist development revolves around the need for renovation and organises infrastructure, policy, education, and investment accordingly. Depending on the economic sector, the necessary assets provided vary in terms of quantity and quality; however, in general terms, they come from public sources to facilitate private gains. Following this logic, the centres of capital have created several paths to foster the creation and appropriation of knowledge beyond geography: high-​skilled migration programmes, the fragmentation of R&D in several countries—​with cheap labour and flexible environmental regulations—​outsourcing and subcontracting activities related to innovation and organising masses of intellectual workers around the world to benefit the so-​called centres of capital (Delgado Wise & Chávez, 2016). The capture of knowledge generated by these actions requires the mediation of patents and, in terms of development, this translates into an increase in social inequalities and an extraordinary transfer of surplus to the leading economies. The dominance of patents—​vis-​à-​vis accumulated knowledge—​plays a role in the capitalist class’s power over how technology is inserted into the development process. In consequence, technological development cannot be studied in itself, as an isolated sphere of social relations. There is a class interest in pushing for science and technology that patents mediate before moving on to objectification; that is, to the manufacture of commodities. Castells (1997) argues that knowledge is replacing the classic factors of production, since the production of value and wealth is now measured based on the knowledge

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Technology, patents, and monopoly  237 acquired, and not on the generation of material goods or on the accumulation of work in a materialised object. This parallells what Foladori (2016) calls fictitious science, by configuring a process of capital valorisation against intangible assets (such as patents) that are not objectified in the production process. In his own words, It is very difficult to estimate the relationship between registered patents and their exploitation or effective use of patents. Many patents are not marketed and, therefore, it is not known whether they are applied or not, others are privately traded, some appear as traded when they are not, because the companies that buy them merge by changing their name. In addition, the fact that a patent is traded does not mean that it will be employed … the fact is that many corporations buy patents with the sole purpose of avoiding competition. The result is that probably a very high number of knowledge crystallised in patents is never transferred into products, with which that knowledge does not become part of the global social product of society and ends up being superfluous (author’s translation from Spanish; Foladori, 2016: 60). In other words, we are witnessing the unfolding of a new era where the traditional factors of production and generation of surplus value will continue to be present, but are driven by scientific knowledge at the service of capital. Patents are one vehicle, if not the most important, to secure the appropriation of knowledge by the capitalist class. Recommended reading: Castells (1997); Foladori (2016); Marx (1980).

Monopoly capital and the hyper-​concentration of technical innovation In modern times, the owners of the means of production are continually searching for technological upgrades to secure the monopolistic market conditions that patents can grant. The patent reserves the right to exclusively exploit the ‘invention’ for a certain number of years (usually 20). Hence, new products are typically expensive, as patent-​ protected production ensures that other companies on the market cannot access privatised knowledge. Consequently, the latter paves the way to secure monopolistic prices in the sectors in which that knowledge is objectified. In addition, monopolies or oligopolies guarantee a high rate of profit, mostly when several firms associate to minimise price competition and as an essential feature of modern-​world capitalism (Wallerstein, 2006). The technological patent crowns the cycle of innovation in favour of capital.The contradiction is that the cycle also leads to the concentration of accumulation from competition. This is an endless structural feature (see Marx, 1887: 438). Today, the high degree of technological specialisation of the means of production contributes to the acceleration of the process of destruction and accumulation of capital. The relationship between technology, profit, and accumulation is dialectical and explains much of the development or progression of the forces of production. Joseph A. Schumpeter, probably unintentionally and in line with Marxist analysis, highlighted the direct relationship between technological change and profits which runs within capitalism’s veins: […] in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-​ scale unit of control for instance)—​competition which commands a decisive cost or

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238  Edgar Záyago Lau quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives (Schumpeter, 2013 [1943]: 84). Development is a dialectical process. Thus, as with any mode of production there are countertendencies in the capitalist development of the forces of production. Mandel in his book Late Capitalism (1972) elucidated the way in which the advancement of technology affected the capture of surplus value and the fall in the average rate of profit: The decline of the average rate of profit in turn becomes the greatest impediment to the next technological revolution. The increasing difficulties of valorisation in the second phase of the introduction of any new basic technology lead to growing under-​investment and increasing creation of idle capital. Only if a combination of specific conditions generates a sudden rise in the average rate of profit will this idle capital, which has slowly gathered over several decades, be drawn on a massive scale into the new spheres of production capable of developing the new basic technology (Mandel, 1972: 120). The impact that all this has on the dominant social relations of production and the associated development dynamics is often ignored, even by capitalism’s organic intellectuals. Patents represent a spearhead where the most productive forces of capitalist development converge; and on many occasions they also constitute a repository of idle capital. Usually when development specialists and practitioners refer to science and technology, they advocate the use of patents as a means of increasing the competitiveness of underdeveloped countries. In the best case, we have here an innocent presumption of human capital or scientific knowledge as neutral when used to advance the forces of development. However, this presumption ignores the impact of the prevailing social relations of production and power at a particular historical moment that dictate a fundamental concern for increasing profits in the interest of capital accumulation. Lenin was explicit about this in his seminal work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1999 [1917]), where he elaborated on the economic fundamentals of capitalist development in its highest phase, and the correlation of this development with the incessant drive to accumulate in the search for profits and the hunt for cheaper sources of raw materials and labour. The central feature of capitalism at this stage is not competition or free markets; on the contrary, it is the drive to achieve monopoly control over both markets and productive resources, including scientific knowledge and technical innovation. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important (Lenin 1999 [1917]: 91–​92). Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the most advanced phase of capitalism is a useful tool for understanding the advance of monopoly capital—​the advance and economic power of the multinational corporations that were formed in a fusion of financial and industrial capital—​in the development process. As Veltmeyer and Petras (2015) argue, and Delgado Wise in Chapter 12 in this volume elaborates in the Latin American context, imperialism is primarily a question of monopoly capital and the use of state power to advance the

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Technology, patents, and monopoly  239 development of the forces of production. However, the financialisation of development and the rapid advance of monopoly capital in the neoliberal era have ensured the monopoly control over what Marx considered to be the most powerful and revolutionary force of capitalist development, which can be used to open up a revolutionary pathway of economic development, namely: technological innovation based on R&D, or scientific knowledge harnessed in the service of capital. In this connection, the wealthiest governments in the world that are located at the centre of the world capitalist system allocate and strategically invest large sums of money in the accumulation of human capital (a workforce of highly qualified labour in terms of scientific knowledge and technical skills) and in the development of knowledge around strategic technologies. Within this configuration, underdeveloped and developing countries on the periphery of the world system are destined to lag in technology while the advanced capitalist states and the rich countries capture surplus value and ensure superprofits through a monopoly over patents. The social consequences of this scheme for underdeveloped and developing countries are lethal to their socio-​economic structure and are often irreversible. They include a brain drain, which deprives developing countries of their most valuable forces of production—​a well-​educated and highly qualified labourforce (the loss of the most highly qualified members of the country’s labourforce). Other consequences include the endless appropriation of intangible assets and monopoly control over R&D activities conducted in scientific maquila (export zones). The development recipes (through the use of science and technology) established by international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) promote an ideal scenario for both underdevelopment and empire to flourish. Recommended reading: Lenin (1999 [1917]); Mandel (1972); Marx (1887);Veltmeyer and Petras (2015).

References Borlaug, N.E. (2000). “Ending World Hunger. The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry.” Plant Physiology, 124(2): 487–​490. https://​doi.org/​10.1104/​pp.124.2.487. Castells, M. (1997). La era de la información: economía, sociedad y cultura. La sociedad red, vol. 1. Madrid: Alianza. Delgado Wise, R., & Chávez, M. (2016). “¡Patentad, patentad!: apuntes sobre la apropiación del trabajo científico por las grandes corporaciones multinacionales.” Observatorio del Desarrollo, 4(15): 22–​30. FAO—​Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2020). www.fao.org/​food-​ security-​and-​nutrition-​for-​all/​en/​. Foladori, G. (2016). “Ciencia ficticia.” Estudios Críticos del Desarrollo, iv: 41–​66. Freeman, C. (1994). “The Economics of Technical Change.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 18(5): 463–​514. Katz, C. (1996). “La concepción marxista del cambio tecnológico.” Revista Buenos Aires, Pensamiento Económico, 1: 155–​180. Lenin, I.V. (1999 [1917]). Imperialism:The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Sydney: Resistance Books. Leopold, T.A., Ratcheva, V., & Zahidi, S. (2018). The Future of Jobs Report 2018. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Mandel, E. (1972). Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books. Marx, K. (1887). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,Vol. I, Book 1:The Process of Production of Capital. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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240  Edgar Záyago Lau Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse, trans. Nicolaus, M. New York:V. Marx, K. (1980 [1857–​1858]). Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política 1857–​1858 (Grundrisse),Vol. II. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Marx, K. (1994). “Results of the Direct Production Process,” in Collected Works, vol. 34, by Marx, K. & Engels, F.. New York: International Publishers. Pérez, C. (2003).“Revoluciones tecnológicas, cambios de paradigma y de marco socioinstitucional,” in Aboites, J. & Dutrénit, G. (eds.), Innovación, aprendizaje y creación de capacidades tecnológicas, pp. 13–​46 . Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrúa. Rubin, I.I. (2019). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Indo European Publishing. Salamanca-​Buentello,F.,Persad,D.L.,Martin,D.K.,Daar,A.S.,& Singer,P.A.(2005).“Nanotechnology and the Developing World.” PLoS Med, 2(5): e97. Schumpeter, J.A. (2013 [1942]). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2015). “Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship.” International Critical Thought, 5(2): 164–​182. Wallerstein, I. (2006). Análisis de sistemas-​mundo. Una introducción. Mexico: Siglo XXI.

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28  The making of the new Chinese working class Pun Ngai

The new Chinese working class has rapidly produced and reproduced itself along the line of the rise of Chinese capitalism. In the early 1980s, socialist China began its transformation into a market economy, as a wave of industrial relocation moved means of production and private capital from advanced industrial economies to the countries of the Global South. At the neoliberal turn, the Chinese state took a lead in introducing pro-​market initiatives that attracted transnational corporations (TNCs) from all over the world, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the US, and Western Europe, and rapidly shattered the socialist production relations of Chinese society. The global development strategy of capital concentration or monopoly was achieved by penetrating non-​capitalist economies via an expansion of global production networks. Global capitalism declared an end-​of-​century victory over the socialist regimes that had emerged from the two world wars. In the intervening 40 years of postsocialist transformation, China has become the ‘workshop of the world’ with a working class that now comprises more than 280 million peasant workers, 90 million laid-​off state enterprise workers, and millions of university graduates who now join the ranks of new labouring subjects. ‘Workshop of the world’ describes not only the huge capacity of China for global production but also the tendency of global capitalism, through extended reproduction, to subsume the social life of non-​capitalist nations within the dynamics of globalisation. China’s embeddedness in the global capitalism of the 21st century has meant simultaneous production and reproduction of a new working class, whose struggles as a class in itself and for itself are reshaping the future of class relations not only in China, but throughout the world (Pun, 2016). Such relations are manifest in a contemporary context, where an enterprising and authoritarian Chinese state is forcefully re-​imagining the role of labour and class, for its epochal project of realising the ‘China Dream’—​a national renaissance of strength and wealth to replace the ideal of communism and human equality. This dream is sustained most recently, as China shifts its vision from ‘made in China’ to ‘innovation in China’, through a development of infrastructural capitalism which is signalled by the unimaginable scale of construction of special economic zones, highways, high-​speed railways, and e-​commerce and digital platforms. This vision of capitalist development, though novel, is still built nonetheless on the prerogatives of capital accumulation and the exploitation of workers. Embodied in the capitalistic transformation that has taken place over the course of four decades, however, is a paradox of China’s Revolution, that once had strived to end imperialism and capitalism. Recommended reading: Pun (2016). DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-34

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From ‘made in China’ to ‘innovation in China’ and the visible hand of the state While vast quantities of foreign capital began to pour into the country in the last quarter of the 20th century, massive changes also occurred in the domestic ownership structure of Chinese enterprises, with the state vigorously supporting the development of the non-​ public or private sector economy. After the lay-​off and letting go of a large number of workers from state-​owned enterprises, individual businesses and private enterprises have become the main source of employment. These private sector opportunities are largely offered to rural migrant workers and account for 37.7 per cent of total employment and more than 90 per cent of newly created job opportunities.1 There has been a clear increase in the fundamental role of market mechanisms with the price of the vast majority of commodities and services now set by the market. After years of negotiation and political-​economic concessions to Western nations, China finally achieved its goal of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The link-​up with the global capitalist system was finally complete. Since this time, the commodification of Chinese society has increased significantly with structural reforms commodifying land, natural resources, labour, and public services. It is clear that every step of the transformation from a centrally planned to a market economy was the result of intervention by the very visible hand of the state, which consciously invited foreign capital investment, managed the construction of special economic zones and industrial towns for technological development, provided high-​quality infrastructure, and last but not least, ensured the supply of huge numbers of low-​paid, but skilled and educated workers who were driven into the cities by agrarian reforms. These reforms generated a population of more than 280 million migrant labourers, about 150 million of whom were drawn from inland rural China to work in coastal industrial areas in the early 2020s. After decades of such market reforms, the Chinese state is encouraging the further advancement of capital and industry through both labour-​intensive manufacturing and scientific innovation for future sustainable economic growth. In 2015, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) issued the action plan of implementing a development strategy called Made in China 2025 (State Council –​the People’s Republic of China, 2015). The objectives of this strategy were clearly outlined by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang as being ‘to seek innovation-​driven development, apply smart technologies, strengthen foundations, pursue green development and redouble our efforts to upgrade China from a manufacturer of quantity to one of quality’.2 Skilled professionals thus are the fundamental precondition for upgrading the ‘made in China’ industrial chain. The concept of craftsmanship has been put forward under the development plan; and vocational schools are regarded as crucial sites for cultivating a new generation of Chinese workers (Pun & Koo, 2019). This upgrading of the Chinese economy and of technology created direct competition with the US and threatened its imperial hegemony and the world order perpetuated after the Cold War. This is the background of the Sino-​American trade war. The deepening of the Sino-​American trade war could not be settled by presidential talks because the trade war is an indispensable part of global capitalist competition and crisis due to the logic of capital accumulation and the resultant competition for control over global resources and markets. What the mass media conveyed to us is a picture of a trade war between two nation-​states, and even worse, the media pitted Chinese workers against US workers

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The new Chinese working class  243 due to job competition. The impact of Chinese capitalist development on the Chinese working class is entirely neglected and not assessed. The trade war has created a trap in which the interests of the Chinese working class stand opposite to those of the Chinese peasantry. When the Trump regime adopted a hard line by increasing tariffs on Chinese industrial products, this hurt Chinese workers. Ironically, if the US government makes compromises it induces the Chinese state to further open its door for American agricultural products, which hurts Chinese farmers. The US–​China trade war is now entrapped in a vicious circle, continuously causing harm to the new Chinese working class whose major component is the peasantry. Recommended reading: Pun and Koo (2019).

Generations of the working class The first generation of factory workers formed in the early 1990s tended to direct the experience of their alienation in the workplace inward. Yan, a typical woman worker whom I met during fieldwork, recounted to me how she suffered from uncertainty, anxiety, and bodily pain, and was compelled to scream, deploying her own body as a weapon to cry out against exploitation and injustice at a time of China becoming the world’s workshop (Pun, 2005). Since the 2000s, in contrast, the new generation of peasant workers tend to take more outward-​oriented actions and launch collective struggles. Certain generalised and crude distinctions may be drawn between the first and second generation of Chinese workers, in terms of life expectations, dispositions, meanings of work, and labour actions. For the second generation of workers who have grown up during the reform period and entered the labour market in the early 2000s, the way of life has often been characterised by more individualistic dispositions, increased proclivity to urban consumer culture, less economic burden, and more personal pursuit of development and freedom. Accompanying this is higher job turnover, less loyalty to their work, and paradoxically more spontaneous collective actions in the workplace (Pun & Lu, 2010). The second generation of the Chinese new working class was also relatively better educated and materially well off and had a more cosmopolitan outlook. Yet with the rapid economic growth in the reform era, the second generation experienced a deeper rural–​urban chasm, greater income inequality, and increased social exclusion, despite constant improvement in their working and living conditions.The huge divide between their expectations of becoming urban worker-​citizens and their actual daily work experiences was contained in the dormitory labour regime. This regime excluded them from fully participating in city life, precipitating anger, frustration, and resentment which fuelled the emergence of the workers’ consciousness of their shared class position. In the world history of labour, the formation and maturity of the working class often took root in its second and third generation of workers in industrial cities which was made up of rural migrants as well as urban dwellers. The suffering, hardships, and grievances of working lives often reached their peak not in the first generation of workers but in the subsequent ones (Thompson, 1963). This is the process of proletarianisation, which turns agricultural labourers into industrial workers, either voluntarily or involuntarily, that runs through the history of world capitalism. When China transformed itself into the world’s factory and became a contemporary industrialised society, these dynamics that were features of the global history of capitalism were re-​enacted in China. What is arguably special about China is the peculiarity of its process of proletarianisation. In order to incorporate the Chinese socialist system into the global economy, rural workers

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244  Pun Ngai are called upon to work in the city but not to stay in the city. For China’s new working class, industrialisation and urbanisation are still two highly disconnected processes as the peasant workers were deprived of their right to live where they work. In brief, the process of proletarianisation of Chinese peasant workers was shaped by a spatial separation of production in urban areas and reproduction in the countryside.This separation of spheres, however, was over-​turned by the rise of a dormitory labour regime, which offered a new combination of work and ‘home’, and resembled early capitalist work and residence arrangements (Pun & Smith, 2007). Recommended reading: Pun and Lu (2010)

Radicalisation and collective action of the new Chinese working class The unfulfilled expectations and the incessant frustration of moving back and forth between the city and the country, as experienced by the second generation, inevitably creates anger and grievances. A vicious circle has been created: the economic reforms and the rural–​urban dichotomy motivate a desire to leave the countryside; escape leads only to the hardship of factory life; the frustration of factory life induces the desire to return; however, there is no place for returning migrants—​going out to dagong (work for a boss) is considered the only means of survival and advancement. This vicious circle contributes to a series of brutally truncated life experiences, resulting, inevitably, in a politics of resentment which often fuels different forms of collective action (Pun & Lu, 2010). This new working class, then, is fighting for its own class formation through a variety of actions that include defiance, and resistance in their daily lives in both their working and living spaces. Recent years have seen an increase in the frequency of collective actions taken by migrant workers to pursue delayed wages, demand compensation for injury or death, or to pressure enterprises to increase wages and living allowances. Sit-​ins and strikes have become common. In Southern China, for example, spontaneous strikes by migrant workers have been multiplying since the mid-​1990s (see Chan, 2001; Chan & Hui, 2017; Friedman, 2014). Official statistics revealed that between 1993 and 2005, the number of mass protests had risen nationwide from about 10,000 to 87,000 cases—​a nearly 20 per cent annual increase on average. Also, the number of participants in these protests had increased from 730,000 to more than three million, and 75 per cent of these protests were initiated by workers and peasants (Leung & Pun, 2009). It is observed that these protests have increased not only in number, but also in average size, social scope, and degree of organisation. The upward trend continued from the first ten years of the 2000s, reflecting widespread incidents of rights violations as the private sector expanded. Indeed, in recent years, labour cases have skyrocketed to 693,465, involving more than 1.2 million labourers nationwide (Pun, 2016). Migrant workers are becoming more proactive in defending their rights, and not only use established institutional or legal means to advance their interests but they also mobilise actions of various forms, which include both individual and collective action, especially direct action. The collective actions pursued by migrant workers’—​the strikes, street actions, and demonstrations—​are evidence that a process of ‘radicalisation’ is taking place. These collective actions, though mostly interest-​based, are often accompanied by a strong anti-​foreign capital sentiment. For example, Japanese capital-​owned factories such as electronics or automobile plants would be easily targeted. Workers are taking action to confront both foreign and domestic capital at the point of production and in the workplace while also challenging power at societal levels in the courtroom, on the street, or

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The new Chinese working class  245 in front of government buildings. In many cases, they are not only organised on the basis of locality, ethnicity, gender, and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also attempt to nurture workers’ solidarity in the broader sense of moving beyond exclusive networks and strong ties. In recent years, Left intellectuals and students have also actively participated in supporting the struggles of the new generation of the working class, especially in times of extreme suffering, particularly during waves of worker suicides, for example, at Foxconn (Pun, Tse, & Ng, 2019). Students have also joined workers to protest violence used by the local police against workers attempting to set up a trade union. This support was present in the struggle launched by workers to form a union at Jasic Technology in Shenzhen in 2018. Recommended reading: Chan and Hui (2017).

The Jasic workers struggle to start a union Jasic Technology is a publicly traded company, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, that is mainly engaged in manufacturing welding equipment. The company’s CEO, Pan Lei, is an incumbent of the Shenzhen Pingshan District People’s Congress. The company, having a workforce of roughly 1000 workers, operated without a union. The Jasic workers’ social media channel ‘Regular Workers’Voice’ describes the working conditions and management situation of the factory as follows. Workers had to work 12 hours a day, with no days off all month, and no leisure time except for eating and sleeping. Workers have experienced surveillance by security guards while going to the toilet. Management applies the ‘Jasic 18 Rules’, whose fine and wage deduction policies seriously violated labour regulations.The factory also forced workers to participate in hikes during their rest time at the end of every month, and then to continue working after the hikes. Jasic’s failure to respect workers’ health or to abide by labour laws around working hours and overtime led to workers mobilising to build a legal union. In mid-​May 2018, a few active workers reported their situation to the Pingshan District Federation of Trade Unions (FTU). In June, the factory management demanded an Assembly of Employee Representatives to substitute for the workers’ self-​constructed union. In mid-​July, under the guidance of the District FTU, active workers circulated a form to collect signatures expressing ‘willingness to join the Jasic union’ within the factory. As many as 89 workers signed to support the establishment of a trade union. But leading workers soon became the target of a campaign of slander and efforts to discredit them by management, and were met with threats, insults, and job re-​assignments. On 20 July 2018, when two prominent worker leaders went to work, they were stopped by factory security, after which they were beaten and illegally detained by the local police. More than 20 workers went to the Police Station to demand their release and were unexpectedly all detained by the police. This triggered more demands for justice from workers and the university students who supported them. Thus began the workers–​students coalition. The coalition fought for the release of the detained workers and the right to set up a trade union. On the morning of 24 August 2018, heavily armed police violently burst into the Jasic Support Group’s accommodations and detained all of them.3 More than 50 students from top universities, including Peking University, Renmin University, and Nanjing University, and workers from nearby communities were arrested. On the evening of 24 August 2018, official media Xinhua News released the report ‘Behind the Shenzhen Jasic Corporation Worker “Rights Defense” Incident,’ providing the official narrative of the case and labelling the Jasic workers’ rights struggle as ‘creating disorderly behaviour’, a result of foreign

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246  Pun Ngai forces’ agitation and organising. The struggles ended with the local government crushing the entire effort. Despite the tragic outcome of their struggles, the Jasic workers’ demand to form their own union is of great historical importance. It signifies that there is a new era of Chinese workers’ political awakening. For a long time, China’s workers have been excluded from the union even though the union system is entirely under the control of the party-​state. At the base level, the union not only became a part of the local administration, but also increasingly came under the control of capital, in reality degenerating into a tool of capital, working hand in hand with the company’s Human Resources department to construct ‘company culture’ and expressing the company’s care for employees. With the awakening of workers’ class consciousness, more and more workers have begun to struggle for the right to organise. Other instances of labour–​capital conflict include the 2010 Guangzhou Honda strike, the 2012 Ohms Electronics strike, and the 2014 Yue Yuen strike. A new generation of workers has consistently raised the reasonable and legal democratic demand of forming their own organisations to represent their own interests. The Honda strike catalysed the Guangzhou auto industry’s trade union reform, giving Guangzhou’s auto industry trade union movement a whole new face. More importantly, a unity between workers and students on the Left has been formed. Today, after Chinese society’s experience of rapid economic development, economic stagnation and a growing wealth gap have appeared. Public discourse often portrays China’s younger generation as a beaten generation due to its dim future.Yet in the Jasic struggle, a trend of progressive youth actively joining the workers’ movement emerged. Core Jasic Support Group members are students of the 1990s generation. They have left-​wing political ideals and decisively gave up the privileges awarded by their elite schooling to enter factories and become assembly line workers. During their summer breaks, these students came to the industrial districts to support the Jasic workers’ struggle. Their actions recall the early Chinese Communist radical leftist movement tradition of student–​worker solidarity. This is the Chinese younger generation’s active exploration of which way China should go, and which involves a call to challenge neoliberal capitalist society and rebuild a truly socialist society. Recommended reading: Pun (2019).

Conclusion Today, the struggle of the global proletariat is facing an even more complicated world in which capital and the state have monopolised information technology, automation, and artificial intelligence for their own use, resulting in further colonisation of human lives and surveillance of political actions. With the assault on labour rights due to a rapid slide towards rightist populism and authoritarianism worldwide, there is widespread pessimism about labour organising and doubt regarding its importance as a means to challenge political regimes compared to new forms of social forces and alliances. Despite protracted calls for social movement unionism (Chun & Agarwala, 2016; Grote & Wagemann, 2018), a severely competitive global capitalism often predicates an end to working-​class solidarity. At a time when the labour movement is on the defensive worldwide in an era of populism with socio-​economic crisis, an increasing number of spontaneous protests and direct actions by workers have taken place in China. These struggles foretell the formation of a new Chinese working class in the age of global capitalism.

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The new Chinese working class  247 The Jasic struggle of 2018–​2019 signals a turning point in labour struggles in China during the reform period, and it explicitly demonstrates a movement towards Left politics, departing from a civil society framework which does not generally seek to highlight ideology and politics, and is thus usually unable to challenge class inequality or create multi-​site forms of organising. The Jasic struggle’s key characteristic of student–​worker unity reveals the significance of Marxism and Maoism for today’s emancipatory politics and the labour movement.

Notes 1 Xinhua News Agency, 8 June 2014. Accessed at http://​news.xinhuanet.com/​politics/​2014-​06/​ 08/​c_​1111035497.htm (in Chinese). 2 “China Focus: China’s Vocational Institutions Train 130 Mln.” Xinhuanet, 29 June 2015. www. xinhuanet.com/​english/​2015-​06/​29/​c_​134366384.htm. “China Learns to Love Vocational Education.” People’s Daily, 1 July 2015. http://​en.people. cn/​n/​2015/​0701/​c90000-​8913746.html. “Premier Li Stresses Vocational Education to Boost ‘Made in China’ Brand.” Ecns.cn, 10 September 2017. www.ecns.cn/​2017/​09-​10/​272916.shtml. 3 www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​china-​labour-​protests/​student-​activists-​disappear-​in-​southern-​ china-​after-​police-​raid-​idUSKCN1L90YL.

References Chan, A. (2001). China’s Workers under Assault: The Exploitation of Labour in a Globalizing Economy. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Chan, C.K.C., & Hui, E.S.I. (2017). “Bringing Class Struggles Back: A Marxian Analysis of the State and Class Relations in China.” Globalizations, 14(2): 232–​244. Chun, J.J., & Agarwala, R. (2016). “Global Labour Politics in Informal and Precarious Jobs,” in Edgell, S., Gottfried, H., & Granter, E. (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment. Los Angeles: Sage. Friedman, E. (2014). Insurgency Trap: Labour Politics in Postsocialist China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grote, J.R., & Wagemann, C. (2018). Social Movements and Organized Labour: Passions and Interests. London: Routledge. Leung, P.N., & Pun, N. (2009). “The Radicalisation of the New Chinese Working Class: A Case Study of Collective Action in the Gemstone Industry.” Third World Quarterly, 30(3): 551–​565. Pun, N. (2005). Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press. Pun, N. (2016). Migrant Labor in China: Post-​Socialist Transformations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Pun, N. (2019). “The New Chinese Working Class in Struggle.” Dialectical Anthropology. https://​doi. org/​10.1007/​s10624-​019-​09559-​0. Pun, N., & Koo, A. (2019).“Double Contradiction of Schooling: Class Reproduction and Working-​ class Agency at Vocational Schools in China.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40(1): 50–​64. Pun, N., & Lu, H.L. (2010). “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger and Class Action of the Second Generation of Peasant-​Workers in Reform China.” Modern China, 36(5): 493–​519. Pun, N., & Smith, C. (2007). “Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: The Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-​socialist China.”Work, Employment and Society, 21 (1): 27–​45. State Council –​the People’s Republic of China. (2015). Made in China 2025. Archived 29 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine. CSIS, 1 June 2015. Thompson, E.P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. UK:Vintage Books.

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29  Labour and development in Latin America Susan Spronk

The class struggle for development For critical development theorists from various schools of thought on the Left, class struggle is at the root of the development process. Class struggle is a broad concept, but at its base describes the conflict between opposing groups in a community resulting from different social or economic positions and reflecting different interests. One of the eminent founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, was more concerned with how control over productive assets shaped life chances rather than with how they ‘structure patterns of exploitation and domination’. For Marx, however, class conflict is the driver of history. In the pamphlet that he co-​wrote with Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx pays particular attention to the role that industrial workers play in overthrowing capitalism, calling upon all working peoples of the world (he refers only to men as Marx was not yet a feminist) to ‘throw off our chains’ and join the international labour movement to advocate for socialist revolution. As a result of high rates of worker militancy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, workers’ unions (or trade unions) have been given pride of place in analysis of historical processes of development for most of the modern era. As industrial forms of capitalism spread from Europe to other places in the world, workers formed trade unions to protect themselves from the worst excesses of exploitation by their employers. And as Silver and Arrighi (2001) argue in their analysis of workers in the context of neoliberal globalisation, the relocation of industrial activities from richer to poorer countries has often led to the emergence of strong new labour movements in the low-​wage sites of investment, rather than an unambiguous race to the bottom. Although corporations were initially attracted to particular sites in the developing world because they appeared to offer cheap and docile workers (e.g., Brazil, South Africa, South Korea), the subsequent expansion of capital-​intensive mass production industries created new and militant working classes with significant disruptive power. These labour movements not only succeeded in raising wages, improving working conditions, and strengthening workers’ rights, but they also often played a leading role in democracy movements and resisting privatisation. Yet, with the neoliberal turn in contemporary studies of ‘development’ at the end of the 1990s, trade unions fell out of view. Today, they are only rarely thought to be important actors in the development process; most development studies textbooks make little mention of trade unions. Following the financial crisis of 2007–​2008 that rocked the core centre of capitalism, however, trade unions have been depicted in a more positive light. For example, in July 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-35

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Labour and development in Latin America  249 a study entitled Inequality and Labour Market Institutions that argued that the decline in unionisation and erosion of minimum wages are related to rising social inequality, which is the first positive mention of trade unions in many years (see Jaumotte & Osorio Buiton, 2015). Pope Francis declared in 2017 that trade unions are ‘prophets’ that play an essential role in society by defending the dignity of work and the rights of workers. Latin America is a particularly suitable region in which to study the role of unions and class struggle in the development process due to its relatively early and high rate of industrialisation (compared to, for example, sub-​Saharan Africa). Despite a long history of union and revolutionary history, Latin America has been no exception to the above-​noted trends. As James Petras (1990) has argued, there was a notable ‘retreat of the intellectuals’ in the wake of neoliberal restructuring that devastated working-​class movements throughout the continent, and research on trade unions and development in the less-​developed Latin American countries (e.g., Bolivia and Ecuador) can be hard to find. The situation of labour in Latin America during the neoliberal era parallels that of developed countries, which also experienced declining union density, a drop in interest in joining labour unions, and loss of labour’s political influence.The roots of labour’s decline in these regions can be attributed to both economic and political factors, from the increase in flexible and part-​time labour and a shift from manufacturing to service sector employment to the deregulation and anti-​union policies that are characteristic of neoliberalism. Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ that followed the elections of Chávez in Venezuela (1999) and Lula in Brazil (2002) reactivated some scholarly interest in working-​class movements and the labour movement more particularly, although most scholars have focused on ‘new’ social movements such as the indigenous and women’s movements that have gained institutional recognition throughout the continent over the course of the neoliberal period. Recommended reading: Petras and Veltmeyer (2017).

Trade unions and development The reasons for the absence of trade unions from development studies are complex. For neoclassical and neoliberal economists, trade unions are viewed as a kind of job cartel organised by workers who conspire to raise the cost of labour through collective bargaining. For such thinkers, unions create lazy workers who are a drag on productivity since they provide too many protections for workers and exaggerate the segmentation of the labour market. Neoliberals argue that declining union density is a good thing, and that remaining unions should drop their demands for higher salaries and benefits, because then employers will have more money to hire even more workers, thus supposedly helping to solve the problems of unemployment. Public sector workers are often singled out for attack since they are seen as part of the problem of the ‘rent-​seeking state’, protecting lazy bureaucrats who make it difficult for governments to adjust their budgets due to rigidities created by collective agreements (see, for example, the World Bank’s (2013) World Development Report: Jobs). This pessimistic view of the role of trade unions, however, is not unique to neoclassical and neoliberal economists, but also pervades Marxian-​inspired analyses of the dependency and world systems variety, as evidenced by Emmanuel’s and Amin’s theories on unequal exchange. For Emmanuel, the problem of unequal exchange is rooted in different wage rates between developed and underdeveloped countries, and is at the base of the supposed transfer of surplus value from economically backward to developed countries; the implication is that high rates of unionisation in the North are part of the problem.

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250  Susan Spronk He further surmises that antagonism between classes in Europe has been progressively displaced by antagonism between rich and poor nations, which explains the lack of revolutionary consciousness among the masses in the former. While Amin dismisses Emmanuel’s suggestion that different wage levels are the ‘independent variable’ that explains why some countries are rich and others are poor, he embraces the view that unequal exchange occurs when wage differentials are bigger than the differentials in productivity, which are due to higher levels of technological development in the core compared to the periphery. Again, trade unions are partly to blame for such wage differentials between North and South (see Larrain, 1989). By contrast, Marxist historians such as Robert Brenner criticise theorists of unequal exchange for locating their analysis of the uneven dynamics in the sphere of circulation rather than production, and as a result come to the mistaken conclusion that the development of capitalism has fundamentally different dynamics in the periphery than in the core. An alternative view, rooted in an analysis of the combined and uneven development of capitalism, understands the processes of capitalist development in both North and South as sharing the same fundamental dynamics (with considerable room for variation), but that ‘underdevelopment’ reflects a lack of capitalist development rather than its over-​ exposure to it. More recently, Selwyn’s (2016) call (see also Chapter 26 by Selwyn in this volume) for ‘labour-​centred development’ theory has advanced this view, calling upon researchers in development studies to embrace a class-​relational political economy that understands the ‘development process’ as one that subjects labouring classes to particular forms of (exploitative) work relations based upon Marx’s labour theory of value (see also Chapter 26 by Selwyn in this volume). In this labour-​centred development paradigm, trade unions again take pride of place in the analysis of development and underdevelopment. Despite the decline of labour union strength and influence, such scholars argue that unionisation remains important in guaranteeing workers good wages and benefits, a voice in their workplace, and protection from arbitrary and unfair management decisions. Returning unions to the centre of the analysis is also justified by empirical evidence that high levels of union density have been shown to contribute to stronger economic indicators across the board. More research is needed, however, to understand the variety of experiences of trade unions in the developing world, such as their role in resisting neoliberalism in Latin America. Recommended reading: Larrain (1989); Selwyn (2016).

Trade unions: ‘old’ versus ‘new’ social movements Dramatic changes in the world economy in the past quarter-​century have posed major challenges to trade unions in Latin America. Labour markets throughout the region have been made more flexible, and patterns of production and employment in Latin America have also been transformed by economic integration, a process known as neoliberal globalisation. Most notably, there has been a shift away from standard full-​time regular employment (the traditional trade union base) to part-​time, contract and unprotected, informal types of work. The labourforce has become increasingly scattered and fragmented, rendering collective organisation at the workplace more and more difficult. More women have also joined the paid workforce in order to try to bolster the family wage and due to changing patterns of employment. In the private sector, workers’ organisations have been weakened with the threat of relocation to new zones of capital accumulation, such as the move of some factories from

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Labour and development in Latin America  251 the Mexican maquiladoras to even lower-​wage zones in China or Honduras. In the public sector, trade union strength has declined significantly due to privatisation, which includes the dual processes of the selling of state-​owned firms and subcontracting service provision to private suppliers. Given the significant erosion of trade union strength over the past 30 years, there is wide agreement among scholars and activists that innovative strategies are needed to revive the labour movement (e.g., union revitalisation and the inclusion of women and minorities, as noted above), but disagreement on what this means for working-​class movements. For scholars who embrace ‘new social movement’ analysis, the New Left in Latin America differs from the Old Left in several respects, including the prevalence of coalition building among different social sectors and the predominance of civil society over the working class.While trade unions and socialist political parties still participate in these broad coalitions, such scholars observe, they are no longer the leaders of these initiatives, as was often the case during the middle decades of the 20th century. The most radical position in this debate was articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (2001), who argued that ‘socialism’ should be abandoned for a more fluid conception of ‘radical democracy’. Other scholars such as Holloway (2002) argued that old socialist strategies of trying to elect revolutionary parties to office ought to be abandoned; since the capitalist state cannot be reformed, it is better to work outside of the state based upon strategies pursued by armed revolutionary and indigenous struggles such as the Zapatistas. While the debates initiated by these scholarly interventions generated more heat than light, it is useful to recall that in many ways, their emphasis on the importance of more horizontal forms of decision making to build popular power resembles the tactics embraced by the anarcho-​syndicalist movements of the turn of the 20th century, which emphasised the centrality of building workplace democracy. While the anarcho-​ syndicalist movements were eventually defeated with the growing corporatisation and institutionalisation of the labour movement in the early 20th century, it is important to remember that there are some cyclical elements in social movement dynamics. More recently, the emphasis on internal democracy has been promoted by scholars working on ‘social movement unionism’ and ‘union revitalisation’ (see Brickner, 2013). Neoliberalisation is a deeply contradictory process that has produced imperatives but also opportunities for creative resistance strategies. Continental integration under trade and investment deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Mercosur Agreement and the increasing globalisation of capital have also increased transnational ties along global commodity chains. In the wake of economic crisis in countries in which the ‘pink tide’ governments came to office, such as Venezuela and Argentina, workers have recovered abandoned factories and experimented with more horizontal forms of work organisation such as cooperatives.There have also been signs of labour revitalisation at the national level with new union centrals emerging in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico as the leaders of the old (often corrupt) unions found it more difficult to control their members as clientelist ties break down between these unions, political parties, and state officials. Public sector workers have employed creative strategies to defend against the privatisation of essential services, defending these services as human rights in contexts such as Central America and Colombia. Rather than making a strict division between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, a more accurate and historically informed narrative observes that the rise and fall of workers’ organisations follows the rhythms of capital accumulation, such that it may be erroneous to make a strict divide between ‘old’ and ‘new’ (Spronk, 2012). When capital

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252  Susan Spronk accumulation is expanding, workers have more of what Eric Olin Wright (2000) calls ‘structural power’—​which refers to the position of workers in the production process and their ability to disrupt it—​and are better able to win gains for their members and for the working class as a whole. When capital accumulation declines, workers’ organisations such as trade unions also enter into crisis since their members depend on the salaries paid by employers. As noted in the examples above, however, sometimes workers in zones of declining capital can still exercise their ‘associational power’—​referring to workers’ collective organisation—​ by forming new workers’ centrals and recuperated factory movements. In short, some workers manage to collectively organise in new ways to turn crisis into opportunity. As Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) thesis of the double movement suggests, working-​class peoples will find ways to resist when capital’s attempts to ‘disembed the market’ go too far. Recommended reading: Brickner (2013); Spronk (2012); Wright (2000).

Trade unions and political and economic development in Latin America Given its early industrialisation and relatively high rates of union density, Latin American development studies has had a rich history of research on trade unions and their role in political and economic development. One of the central questions that has been debated by scholars of class struggle and resistance in Latin America is the important role that trade unions play in shaping class consciousness, and how they have influenced and interacted with political parties and social movements more generally. One of the challenges in social formations such as those found in Latin America is the dominance of the informal sector. Industrial workers have always been a smaller minority of the economically active population in Latin American countries than in the advanced capitalist countries of the North. The relative size of the informal sector has also shaped class consciousness. Parodi’s (2000) masterful study of industrial workers in Peru in the context of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s shows how workers desperate to support themselves and their families were increasingly forced to seek opportunities outside the industrial sector. In the process, he shows how they began to question their very identities as workers. In the context of the Cold War (1947–​1991), the labour movement was a fundamental part of the ‘multi-​class’ coalitions that brought these revolutionary governments in Bolivia (1952), Cuba (1959), and Nicaragua (1979) to office, but trade unions did not play the major role as expected by orthodox Marxist theory, challenging the common (mis)conception within Marxist thought and practice at the time: industrial workers are the privileged subject of history and therefore should play a ‘vanguard’ role in revolutionary struggles. Nonetheless, there are many points in history in which revolutionary industrial unions have played a leading role in working-​ class struggles across Latin America. Scholars such as Nash (1979) and Klubock (1998) have observed that unions that represent workers in particularly dangerous workplaces, such as mines in Bolivia and Chile, have tended to be more revolutionary than other workers’ unions, because of the way that they can construct militant identities on the basis of a hyper-​masculinity, often privileging their class identities over other forms of identity such as indigenous identity. In his study of workers in Chile’s largest cotton textile mill, Winn (1986) provides a ‘history from below’, documenting the crucial role that these workers played in the movement that brought socialist president Salvador Allende to office in 1970 and in constructing his

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Labour and development in Latin America  253 vision of socialism. Seidman (1994) similarly demonstrates how movements led by industrial workers in the contexts of apartheid in South Africa and non-​constitutional rule in Brazil in the 1970s to the 1990s enjoyed broad public support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration in the context of rapid industrialisation sponsored by authoritarian states. One of the most innovative studies of the role of trade unions in ‘shaping the political arena’ in Latin America is Collier and Collier’s (1991) classic comparative study of the way that trade unions and political parties shaped the political and economic institutions that emerged in the context of rapid (state-​sponsored) industrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s. They find that the process by which the political arena has been shaped provides the best clues as to why democracy collapsed in Argentina and Brazil, and later Chile and Uruguay, and gave way to military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, while other cases such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico did not experience similar patterns of regime change.The main thesis is that the ‘type of incorporation’ of labour in the formal sector, whereby the state engages in its first sustained attempt to provide a legitimate and institutionalised role for the labour movement, has an important long-​term impact in determining the shape of the political arena, signifying nothing less than a ‘critical juncture’ in a country’s historical development, which crucially affects future regime dynamics and the prospects of political stability. More recently, Silva and Rossi (2018) used this framework to analyse a ‘second wave of incorporation’ of political parties, trade unions, and social movements under ‘pink tide’ governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Recommended reading: Collier and Collier (1991); Nash (1979); Winn (1986).

Women and trade unions in Latin America Women in Latin American trade unions have experienced misogyny not only by their employers, but also within their own unions. As the chair of the Women’s Committee of the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas reported in a recent interview for IPS Press, ‘the participation of Latin American women workers in trade union leadership posts is not in line with the percentage of women who are in the labourforce’ (cited in Gutiérrez, 2013).There have been few exceptions to this rule. Some unions have pursued strategies to democratise their internal structures as a response to neoliberal restructuring and to respond to pressures facing workers in an increasingly competitive world market in a process described as ‘union revitalisation’. In her study of trade unions in Mexico, Brickner (2013) observes that civil society associations (such as labour-​focused non-​governmental organisations (NGOs)) have played an important role in raising awareness among women workers as their fundamental rights by creating spaces within which union women engage in dialogue, training, and education about women workers’ rights and gender equity and how these can be promoted by their unions. She argues that the greater participation of women in unions has opened up the possibility of building stronger links within civil society—​among women of different unions, and between those women and various civil society groups. Her work provides a contrast to Bickam Mendez’s (2005) work on women workers in the maquiladoras in Nicaragua, in which she explains that women have found the leadership of trade union centrals to be so patriarchal and impenetrable that they opted to form an NGO named the Maria Elena Cuadra Organization, which the organisers define as an ‘alternative’ to a trade union.

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254  Susan Spronk Frank’s (2005) book on the transformation of banana workers’ unions in Central America highlights how women’s rising participation was an unintended consequence of other democratic reforms. In 1975, a left-​affiliated male leadership overthrew the conservative leadership that was affiliated with the Cold War American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-​CIO), and the new leadership changed the union’s internal structure. They established two rank-​and-​file committees—​one for the male-​dominated agricultural division, and one for the female-​dominated packing house. Although empowering women was not necessarily the intention of these men at the time, as Frank argues, the establishment of two rank-​and-​file committees ‘finally opened the door for women to fully enter the union’ (p. 24). Women’s union organising blossomed from there. Selwyn’s (2012) study of unionised women workers in the grape export sector in northeastern Brazil has similarly pointed to the vital role in pushing for maternity leave and childcare facilities. In keeping with other scholars, he emphasises that women’s participation in production has advantages and disadvantages for female workers. While it leads to greater self-​esteem and more opportunities for women to play an active role in decision making, a rigid gendered division of labour within the home creates a ‘double burden’: women’s home workload does not decrease despite their work outside the home. This is not a surprising revelation to many feminist thinkers, but Selwyn’s contribution lies in providing insights into the process of how women workers can win gender-​ specific concessions from employers by increasing their participation in their unions and orienting it towards their needs, a strategy that may prove useful to the cause of rural women workers in other countries. Recommended reading: Frank (2005); Selwyn (2012).

References Bickam Mendez, J. (2005). From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brickner, R. (2013). “Gender Conscientization, Social Movement Unionism, and Labour Revitalization: A Perspective from Mexico.” Labour History, 54(1): 21–​41. Collier, R.B., & Collier, D. (1991). Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labour Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Frank, D. (2005). Bananeras: Women Transforming Banana Unions in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Gutiérrez, E. (2013). Women Forge a Space for Themselves in Latin American Labour Movement. Inter Press Service News Agency, 30 April. Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press. Jaumotte, F., & Osorio Buiton, C. (2015). “Inequality and Labour Market Institutions.” IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/​15/​14, July. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Klubock, T. (1998). Contested Communities: Class, Gender and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–​1951. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Laclau, E., & Moufe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn. London:Verso. Larrain, J. (1989). Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. www.marxists. org/​archive/​marx/​ works/​download/​pdf/​Manifesto.pdf. Nash, J. (1979). We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Labour and development in Latin America  255 Parodi, J. (2000). To Be a Worker: Identity and Politics in Peru. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Petras, J. (1990). “Retreat of the Intellectuals” Economic and Political Weekly, 25(38): 2143–​2156. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2017). The Class Struggle in Latin America. London: Routledge. Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]). The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Seidman, G. (1994). Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movement in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–​ 1985. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Selwyn, B. (2012). Workers, State and Development in Brazil: Powers of Labour, Chains of Value. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Selwyn, B. (2016). “Theory and Practice of Labour-​ Centred Development.” Third World Quarterly, 37(6). Silver, B., & Arrighi, G. (2001). “Workers North and South,” in Panitch, L. & Leys, C. (eds.), The Socialist Register 2001, pp. 53–​76. New York: Monthly Review Press. Silva, E., & Rossi, F.M. (eds.) (2018). Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press. Spronk, S. (2012). “Neoliberal Class Formation(s): The Informal Proletariat and ‘New’ Workers’ Organizations in Latin America,” in Webber, J.R. & Carr, B. (eds.), The Resurgence of Latin American Radicalism: Between Cracks in the Empire and an Izquierda Permitida, pp. 75–​93. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Winn, P. (1986). Weavers of the Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press. World Bank. (2013). World Development Report: Jobs. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wright, E.O. (2000). “Working-​class Power, Capitalist-​class Interests, and Class Compromise.” American Journal of Sociology, 105(4): 957–​1002.

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30  Class and state formation in the Gulf Arab states Adam Hanieh

Following the end of British colonialism and the emergence of the US as the dominant global hegemon through the latter half of the 20th century, the Gulf region of the Middle East became a key strategic focus of US foreign policy. As part of this, a very close relationship developed between successive US administrations and the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman. These countries share a number of common characteristics distinguishing them from other states in the Middle East. First, all of them are monarchies in which powerful ruling families dominate the political apparatus and much of the economic wealth. Second, the GCC’s large reserves of oil and natural gas mean they play a central role in the global supply of energy, as well as the production of downstream petrochemicals.The wealth derived from these hydrocarbons has underpinned a rapid and dramatic transformation of the Gulf ’s urban environment, and also enabled diversification into non-​oil sectors such as telecommunications, transportation and logistics, agribusiness, and manufacturing. Nonetheless, despite its huge financial wealth and substantial hydrocarbon reserves, the GCC remains marked by extremely high levels of inequality and rampant labour exploitation—​most markedly seen in the conditions faced by the large body of temporary migrant workers who make up more than half of the labourforce in each of the Gulf states. In recent years, research and writing on the Gulf have developed in new and exciting directions. Critical interdisciplinary work has begun to challenge standard methodological approaches to the Gulf, in particular a dominant paradigm known as rentier state theory (RST). Scholars are also revisiting how the history of the Gulf is studied, bringing attention to the enduring legacies of British colonialism and the continuities that exist between the ‘pre’ and ‘post’ oil eras. Much of this literature has insisted upon foregrounding categories such as class and capitalism in understanding the Gulf, moving away from essentialist and culturalist frameworks that have prevailed in the study of the region for many years. An important aspect to this has been an attempt to more fully situate the Gulf in regional and global processes, and to explore aspects of the Gulf ’s development beyond simply the question of oil (e.g., infrastructure and logistics, ports, banking, and finance). This chapter surveys some of the key insights from these debates. I begin with a brief overview of the Gulf ’s location in global capitalism, including the question of oil and the international recirculation of the Gulf ’s financial surpluses. I then turn to how we can understand processes of state and class formation in the Gulf, engaging with both RST and the critical issue of migration to the Gulf. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-36

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Class and state in the Gulf Arab States  257

Global capitalism, oil, and the Gulf Beginning in the early decades of the 20th century, oil began to supplant coal as the principal energy source for global transport, manufacturing, and industrial production. Oil’s greater energy efficiency and portability made it an ideal fuel for road vehicles, airplanes, and shipping—​essential to not simply the development of new modes of civilian transport but also the war-​making abilities of states. Oil products also formed the basic feedstock in the production of new commodities such as plastics, synthetic fibres, detergents, and fertilisers, all of which were to become a ubiquitous part of daily life from the mid 20th century onwards. And for Western governments worried about the militancy of coal unions in the USS and Europe, oil was considered ‘politically more reliable’. This shift to an oil-​centred global capitalism had enormous implications for the Middle East. By the mid-​1960s, it was evident that the Gulf possessed huge supplies of relatively cheap and accessible oil (and gas), and the region would be central to meeting the fast-​growing international demand for these resources. In the face of deep-​rooted anti-​ colonial and revolutionary movements across other parts of the Middle East, including oil-​r ich states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Algeria, the Gulf states emerged as a critical pillar of US power in the region from the mid 20th century onwards.This was a relationship built on a simple understanding: the Gulf monarchies would guarantee overarching support to US foreign-​policy ambitions in the Middle East, including ensuring the steady flow of oil to the world market—​in return, the US would provide full political and military backing to the Gulf ’s ruling families.The essential features of this relationship remain in place until today. The last decade has seen considerable change in world oil markets, most notably the rapid growth in North American oil production due to the development of non-​ conventional oil fields in the US and Canada (these are reserves that are difficult and significantly more expensive to extract than conventional fossil fuels). As a result of this, the US became a net exporter of oil in early 2011 and overtook Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer in 2013—​a position it has maintained until this day. Nonetheless, the Gulf still holds a central place in the world’s hydrocarbon markets because of its lower average cost of production relative to other countries. In 2019, the GCC’s market share of global hydrocarbons stood at just under one-​quarter of the world’s total. Saudi Arabia’s oil supplies are particularly important to highlight—​as a ‘swing producer’ of oil, the Kingdom is able to bring new supply on to the market cheaply and quickly, and thus holds significant sway over world oil prices. But the Gulf ’s place in the global political economy is not simply reducible to its exports of oil. Equally important has been what it does with the financial surpluses it accumulates through the sale of oil on the world market—​so-​called ‘petrodollar recycling’. Through the latter part of the 20th century, flows of Gulf petrodollars were closely bound up with the development of global financial markets. One early illustration of this was the emergence of the Euromarkets—​financial markets that developed in Europe through the late 1950s and 1960s, which lay outside the jurisdiction of national regulatory systems and were largely exempt from taxation and other domestic financial restrictions. Following the nationalisation of Gulf oil companies in the 1970s and the large increase in oil prices that ensued, petrodollar deposits in North American and European banks operating in Euromarkets reached very high levels. These financial surpluses greatly increased the capacity of international banks to lend to multinational firms, governments, and

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258  Adam Hanieh other borrowers—​they were also pivotal to how the ‘Third World’ debt crisis unfolded through the 1980s, with cash-​strapped countries in the South forced to borrow recycled petrodollars through Euromarkets. Today, the power of the City of London in the global financial system is a direct legacy of these Euromarkets, and the connections with the Gulf remain highly significant. Gulf petrodollars are also recycled into international markets through other more indirect means. This includes the Gulf ’s purchase of foreign goods and services—​ particularly important here are those connected to the development of urban infrastructure such as machinery and transport equipment, high-​end engineering and construction services. Another major route of petrodollar recycling is the Gulf ’s purchase of military hardware and services from countries such as the US, the UK, and France. Between 2015 and 2019, the six Gulf states bought more than one-​fifth of arms sold globally, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar ranking as the world’s first, eighth, and tenth largest arms importers. Saudi Arabia alone purchased one-​quarter of total US arms exports during that period, up from 7.4 per cent in 2010–​2014. Recommended reading: Al-​Rasheed (2010); Mitchell (2011); Spiro (1999);Vitalis (2007); Zahlan (1998).

Capital and the state in the Gulf Hydrocarbon exports and petrodollar surpluses are also essential to understanding patterns of internal development in the Gulf. Academic work has typically approached this through RST, a theoretical framework that was first employed in the 1970s to explain social, economic, and political characteristics in the resource-​rich states of the Middle East and has since been generalised to other countries around the world. There are many different variations of RST, but their common starting point is the argument that access to large and consistent ‘rents’ from the sale of oil gives ruling families in the Gulf (and hence the Gulf state) a very pronounced autonomy and power over other parts of society. Rulers do not need to rely on taxation or democratic compromises because of their guaranteed access to oil rents. The availability of these oil rents has been used to explain a variety of social phenomena in the Gulf—​authoritarianism and lack of democracy, weak civil societies, a reliance on patronage networks, rentier ‘mentalities’, and patterns of economic development. There have been numerous critiques made of RST. These include a questioning of its empirical predictions around political quiescence and the presence of oil rents; claims that the theory excludes political agency and does not convincingly explain socio-​political variation across different countries; and a critique that RST downplays the political economy of imperialism in the Middle East. Most of these critiques, however, have tended to accept the basic dichotomy between state and class that typifies RST, and which is ultimately derived from Weberian sociological approaches: a ‘strong state’ (supported by oil revenues) that is separate from, and completely dominates, a ‘weak’ business class. More fundamental critiques of RST reject this dichotomy between state and capital and point to the significant weight of large business conglomerates in the Gulf ’s political economy. These conglomerates are typically organised in holding groups and are active across a variety of sectors, including construction and real-​estate development, industrial processes (particularly steel, aluminium, and concrete), retail (especially the import trade and the ownership of shopping centres and malls), and finance. The owners of these conglomerates often come from merchant families that were prominent in early periods

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Class and state in the Gulf Arab States  259 of state formation. In many cases, however, these large, diversified business conglomerates are privately controlled by members of the ruling monarchy. In this sense, ruling families in the Gulf need to be seen as part of the private capitalist class (as well as a core part of how state power is exercised). Viewing ruling family members as capitalists and not simply authoritarian leaders recasts how we think of capital and the state in Gulf. Approached from this perspective, the state is conceived as an institutional expression of class power in the Gulf, with capital accumulation highly dependent upon the mediation of the state. This is precisely how capitalist states operate everywhere, and the Gulf is not an anomaly in this respect. Indeed, examples of the Gulf state’s support to private capital accumulation (including that of ruling families) are plentiful and well documented—​subsidised land and other grants, lucrative state contracts for various projects, joint investments between private capital and the state, and the political and financial support of state institutions for overseas investments by private conglomerates. The Gulf state is, as in all capitalist societies, a class-​state, not a neutral or parasitic institution suspended above society. Supported through such relationships with the state, the largest of the Gulf ’s business conglomerates have expanded their international reach notably over recent years. Historically, Gulf international investments have traditionally focused on North America and Europe. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, there was a significant increase in the volume of capital flows from the Gulf into neighbouring Arab countries. These regional capital flows occurred through a variety of mechanisms, including mergers and acquisitions, minority portfolio investments in other Arab stock markets, the establishment of cross-​ border subsidiaries, and control over licensing and agency rights.Through these and other means, the internationalisation of Gulf capital increasingly shapes patterns of development across numerous key economic sectors in the Middle East—​real estate and construction, infrastructure and logistics, banking and finance, media and telecommunications, retail and trade, agribusiness. As a result, the political economy of various Arab countries has become closely attuned to the dynamics of capital accumulation in the Gulf itself. Recommended reading: Beblawi and Giacomo (1987); Field (1984); Hanieh (2018); Hertog (2010); Kanna (2011).

Migration, citizenship, and labour in the Gulf The other critical aspect to class formation in the Gulf is the role of migrant labour and the related question of citizenship. Non-​citizens make up 56–​82% of the labourforce in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and around 95% in Qatar and the UAE. These striking figures are fundamental to understanding the Gulf ’s class structure. Through the infamous kafala system, migrant workers are tied to an individual employer and are prevented from seeking alternative employment or even leaving the country without permission. The vast majority of these migrants (90 per cent) are employed in the private sector—​across sectors such as construction, domestic work, and retail—​and are often poorly paid and subject to highly exploitative and dangerous working conditions. In this sense, the exploitation of migrant labour is an essential part of the accumulation of the Gulf ’s large business conglomerates. A large body of literature has compared the conditions of migrant labour in the Gulf to notions of bonded or ‘unfree’ labour. As noted, migrants are prevented from entering or leaving the country without the permission of their employer and are not able to change jobs at will. Frequently, workers have their passports taken from them, and are

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260  Adam Hanieh forced to pay exorbitant recruitment fees that leave them trapped in debt for long periods of time. Unions are banned, and any kind of industrial action or protest is quickly met (legally) with deportation. All of these conditions of work are reinforced through the spatial segregation of low-​paid migrant workers in labour camps, and the tight control over movement to and from work. One of the consequences of this heavy reliance on migrant workers is that literally millions of families across South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and elsewhere depend upon remittances sent home by workers in the Gulf. There are more migrant workers in the Gulf than any other region of the Global South, and Saudi Arabia alone ranks as the second largest source of remittances in the world (after the US). In Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, for example, remittance inflows make up more than 5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) (according to 2016 figures), and the vast majority of overseas workers from these countries—​approaching 90 per cent in some cases—​are located in the Gulf.The dependence on remittances from the Gulf can be even more pronounced at a subnational level. In the Indian state of Kerala, for instance, remittances are estimated to make up more than 36 per cent of the net state domestic product and are a vital component of consumption for many households. These cross-​border flows of migrant workers highlight that class is not simply an abstract category describing a certain relationship to capital and the production of surplus value within national spaces. Concretely, classes come into being through the interlinking of geographical spaces and are continually forged through the flows (and displacement) of human beings across borders. This has important implications for understanding what happens at moments of economic downturn in the Gulf. At these times, migrant workers in the Gulf are often deported, frequently without receiving overdue wages or compensation. This was evident in the wake of the 2008 global crisis, particularly in Dubai, and can also be seen in Saudi Arabia since the decline of global oil prices that began in mid-​ 2014. In the latter case, Saudi government campaigns have led to the expulsion of several million migrant workers. These kinds of mass deportation take place with little concern for the welfare of migrants or their families and typically cause a very sharp drop in cross-​ border remittance flows. The ‘disposable’ nature of migrant work in the Gulf points to the ways in which migration and remittance corridors can act as transmission belts for economic crisis, spatially displacing the effects of economic downturn on to poorer communities located in countries that send labour to the Gulf. The large number of migrant workers in the Gulf has not precluded significant levels of poverty and social exclusion among citizen populations. In some countries—​particularly Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain—​there are very high rates of youth unemployment and visible economic marginalisation among citizens. Gulf governments have sought to address this through pushing a larger proportion of citizens into private sector workforces. While various labour market ‘Gulfization’ schemes have been in place for decades, there has been little significant change in the overwhelming preponderance of migrants in Gulf private sector workforces. One of the major reasons for the failure of such schemes is that most citizens are unwilling to accept the significantly poorer wages and conditions that migrants face. At a broader level, migration plays a fundamental role in structuring the nature of Gulf citizenship. Because the sale of work permits can be a highly profitable endeavour, citizens compete for access to these rights. Migrants are portrayed in the public sphere in a highly racialised and gendered manner, with government spokespeople and media stressing the

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Class and state in the Gulf Arab States  261 ‘threat’ that migration poses to citizenship in the cultural, linguistic, demographic, sexual, and economic senses. The heavily securitised nature of migration discourse in the Gulf has been accompanied by a downward displacement of everyday migration control to the level of private employers and individual citizens. In this manner, migration shapes the identity of citizens and their positioning vis-​à-​vis the state and ruling families. Recommended reading: Khalaf, AlShehabi and Hanieh (2014); Gardner (2010); Longva (1997).

Future trajectories of the Gulf In the wake of the popular uprisings that began in Tunisia in 2010 and rapidly swept across the Middle East, the Gulf states were to take a pivotal position. In Syria, Libya, and Yemen, this has included direct involvement in violent conflict and wars through the arming of different political factions and movements. In other countries—​notably Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan—​various Gulf states have sought to sponsor political leaders and parties that were viewed as amenable to their ongoing interests in the region. This projection of Gulf power has involved large levels of financial support to the new governments that emerged in the years following the 2010–​2011 uprisings. Gulf funding to these governments has been closely tied to the maintenance of standard neoliberal development models in the Middle East, including the continued role of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in determining economic and social priorities. At the political level, the Gulf has resolutely supported a renewed authoritarianism aimed at heading off any fundamental change to the social and economic structures of the region. Throughout all of this, it is important to remember that there are both shared interests and intense rivalries between different Gulf countries. While the formation of the GCC provided a limited degree of economic and political unity in the Gulf—​most particularly in relation to US hegemony in the region—​the institution remains marked by sharp competition between different Gulf states. Most notable here is the deep schism between Qatar on one side, and Saudi Arabia/​UAE on the other, which broke out in a very public manner from 2017. The origins of this dispute pre-​date the current conflict and are closely connected to the competing attempts by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to assert their regional dominance. Another key regional rivalry is the long-​standing conflict between Iran and the Saudi Arabia. This rivalry has been present since the 1979 Iranian revolution, which overthrew a Western-​backed monarchy and upset the long-​standing security arrangements in the oil-​r ich Gulf. Indeed, the war between Iraq and Iran that followed this revolution was a key driver behind the original formation of the GCC in 1981. But with the ascendancy of King Salman to the Saudi throne in 2015, and his appointment of Mohammed Bin Salman as Minister of Defence and Crown Prince in 2017, the ‘cold war’ with Iran has taken on a particularly sharp character. This has involved an attempt by Saudi Arabia—​ backed by the UAE as its key Gulf ally—​to draw other global powers into the fray, notably the US, as well as deepening political and economic relations between the Gulf states and Israel. The effects of the conflict with Iran have spread across all areas of the Middle East, most especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The war in Yemen is particularly important to highlight here. Launched by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in late 2015, this war pits the wealthiest states in the Middle East against the

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262  Adam Hanieh poorest country in the region. The war has caused the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 24 million people—​80 per cent of the country’s population—​in need of humanitarian assistance. But as with all wars, there is a broader geopolitical context that drives the Saudi/​UAE intervention in Yemen. In particular, Yemen is located at the centre of a wider geographic arc connecting the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, the Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. The US, China, India, and various European countries are intensely engaged in this region, and control over the shipping routes, military bases, towns, and ports that tie together this geographical space will be an important determinant of global power in the coming years. Through their intervention in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are attempting to claim part of this strategic prize. The onset of the 2020 COVID-​19 pandemic has added a new dimension to many of the trends discussed in this chapter. Most significant here is a very large drop in oil prices that occurred in early 2020 as a result of the unprecedented contraction in global economic activity. The crash in oil prices has placed pressure on government spending in the Gulf, particularly given the likelihood that prices will remain low for a considerable period of time. However, compared to other oil-​producing countries in and outside the Middle East, the Gulf states have relatively low levels of existing debt and have been able to borrow fairly cheaply on international markets. Moreover, the particular class structure of the Gulf noted above—​an overwhelming reliance on non-​citizen migrant labour—​ means that these economic pressures can be partially displaced through sending migrant workers home. Indeed, one of the perverse outcomes of the COVID-​19 crisis may actually be the strengthening of the Gulf states’ position in world oil markets, especially if assets in other countries become more cheaply available in a post-​viral world. The trends surveyed above highlight the importance of approaching the Gulf ’s development through a lens that goes beyond narrow frameworks based on rentierism and hydrocarbon exports. Critical approaches to development in the Gulf can reveal much about how to theorise patterns of state and class formation in other parts of the world—​as well as provide important insights into contemporary issues surrounding global finance, migration, and conflict.

References Al-​Rasheed, M. (2010). A History of Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beblawi, H., & Giacomo, L. (eds.) (1987). The Rentier State: Nation, State and the Integration of the Arab World. London: Croom Helm. Field, M. (1984). The Merchants: The Big Business Families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Gardner,A. (2010). City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community of Bahrain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hanieh, A. (2018). Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hertog, S. (2010). Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. New York: Cornell University Press. Kanna, A. (2011). Dubai:The City as Corporation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Khalaf, A., AlShehabi, O., & Hanieh, A. (eds.) (2014). Transit States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf. London: Pluto Press. Longva, A.N. (1997). Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Class and state in the Gulf Arab States  263 Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London:Verso. Spiro, D. (1999). The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vitalis, R. (2007). America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zahlan, R. (1998). The Making of the Modern Gulf States. London: Ithaca Press.

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Part VIII

Dynamics of agrarian change and urban development

The evolution of capitalism and the process of capitalist development are predicated on the transformation of an economy and society of small-​scale independent producers, or peasants—​an agrarian society based on pre-​capitalist relations of production and a traditional communalist culture—​into a modern industrial capitalist system based on the capital–​labour relation and a culture of possessive and competitive individualism. The driving force of this ‘development’—​a process of productive and social transformation—​ is a process of capital accumulation based on the separation of the direct agricultural producers, the peasantry, from the land and their means of production, forcing them to abandon agriculture and migrate to the cities and urban centres in search of paid work. The resulting process of urban and rural development can be traced out in diverse historical and regional contexts. Cristóbal Kay, in Chapter 31, examines the contemporary dynamics of this development process, with a central focus on Latin America. As Kay reconstructs this process it was the installation, in the 1980s, of a new world order based on neoliberal globalisation that unleashed the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development that characterise the situation of many societies on the periphery of the system today. This includes the destruction of forces of production built up over decades in the agricultural and industrial sectors, increasing inequalities in the access to productive resources and the commons, the impoverishment of the rural dispossessed and the generation of new forms of rural and urban poverty, and new forms of dependency and underdevelopment based on the operations of ‘extractive’ capital. A. Haroon Akram-​Lodhi, in Chapter 32, explores the dynamics of the global food regime. As he sees the process of agrarian change—​the agrarian question—​in this context he notes that the global food economy ‘is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work’, namely, ‘it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society’. The chapter analyses the complex development dynamics associated with this process to conclude that the global food regime formed under these conditions requires ‘both capitalism’s capacity to work through nature and nature’s capacity to work through capitalism, as new agricultural frontiers … are enclosed and as the unpaid work of nature provides the energy upon which capitalist world food systems operate’. Charmain Levy and Alice Moura in Chapter 33 analyse the dynamics of urban development in the Global South.They remind us that urbanisation is still central to the development process and that historically urban development requires major public investments, particularly as it relates to the need to incorporate generations of rural migrants into the DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-37

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266  Dynamics of agrarian change and urban development modern economy and the labour market. However, they note that despite the importance of urbanisation to modernisation practically no state-​supported infrastructure has been provided to migrant populations in the urban centres of the Global South and analyse the consequences of this failure. In Chapter 34, Leandro Vergara-​Camus shifts the focus to the rural development process in the Global South based on the activism of the peasant social movement both in the resistance to the advance of capitalism in agriculture (the peasant struggle for land) and in the search for an alternative to neoliberal capitalist development. As he sees it, the peasantry represents the most dynamic force of transformative change and the most promising agency in the global struggle for a new world.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is the eco-​agricultural revolution and what are the prospects for bringing it about in the context of the neoliberal policy agenda and a system geared to the accumulation of capital? 2. What are the defining characteristics of the global food regime and could this regime be accommodated to meet the demands of the global peasant movement for a sustainable form of agriculture? 3. The capitalist development of agriculture has resulted in an exodus of a rural population of impoverished peasants and a distorted form of urban development on the periphery of the world system characterised by the formation of a ‘planet of slums’. What kind of policy regime might possibly create a more sustainable and inclusive form of urban development? 4. What is the alternative to neoliberalism and capitalism proposed by peasant movements?

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31  Contemporary dynamics of agrarian change Cristóbal Kay

The contemporary dynamics of agrarian change are being shaped by the neoliberal corporate global food regime dominated by the agro-​industrial capital. It has accelerated processes of concentration of land and capital as well as configuring a new political economy of agrarian change driven by the ‘golden age’ of neoliberal globalisation which may be at a turning point due to the global pandemic of the virus COVID-​19. I focus on the following interlinked processes of agrarian change: land grabbing, agriculture’s financialisation, crisis of the peasant economy, and emergence of a precariat. Related issues such as the global food regime, its ecological impact, its contestation by peasant movements, and the search for labour-​ empowering alternatives to neoliberalism are discussed in other chapters of this book.

Land concentration, land grabbing, and agro-​industrial capital During the 1980s, many developing countries, as well as several developed countries, liberalised their economies. In the countries of the South, the trigger for this shift was the debt crisis, which forced governments to request financial support from the World Bank and other financial institutions.These institutions demanded the implementation of a series of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ that focused on liberalising the economy and opening it to world markets so as to encourage exports and thereby facilitate debt repayments. So as to facilitate the development of a land market, the World Bank and other international aid and government donor agencies encouraged governments to launch a land registration programme as many farmers, especially peasant farmers, either had no land titles or these were doubtful, by providing financial and technical support. With the spectacular rise of China the world demand for agricultural commodities rose significantly. Furthermore, the food crisis of 2006–​2008 led various governments to find ways to improve their food security as well as making agriculture profitable for private investors. Governments such as China and the Gulf states started to negotiate large-​ scale land deals with mainly African governments that gave the investing country the right to cultivate the acquired land and export the harvests back to their country. Those in favour of these types of land deals argued that they provide much-​needed investment in agriculture, incorporate new lands to cultivation, increase production and productivity, create jobs, provide an income to the local government, and generally modernise agriculture (Deininger & Byerlee, 2011). In some cases, conflicts erupted as the lands that the government had provided were either not vacant lands and led to evictions, or these large-​scale land deals began to affect negatively some peasant communities. As protest mounted against this ‘fever for land’ and ‘foreignisation’, interest by researchers and DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-38

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268  Cristóbal Kay activists in these large-​scale land deals led to a growing literature on ‘land grabbing’, as critics labelled these land deals. The critics argued that in several cases these land deals led to the displacement of the local population who had been obtaining their livelihoods on those lands for decades or even generations, although they may not have had legal titles to it. Also many of the promises of foreign investors, such as providing decent and abundant employment opportunities, did not materialise. But with the shift to a wider and more critical analysis of land transactions, it was discovered that capitalists had progressively gained more and more control over natural resources, whether through outright purchase of land, mining concessions, or various kind of rental agreements. A useful ‘work-​in-​progress’ definition of land grabbing is provided by Borras et al. (2012: 851): (L)and grabbing is the capturing of control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms and forms that involve large-​scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperative, and demands of resources from newer hubs of global capital. Using this expanded view about land deals, it was discovered that land grabbing was a far more common phenomenon than initially assumed, involving almost all developing regions of the world, as well as Eastern Europe (Borras et al., 2013; Franco & Borras, 2013). This definition indicates the various factors that led to land grabbing, such as the food crisis of 2006–​2008, the energy crisis, and the financial crisis of 2008–​2009. It also refers to control and not necessarily ownership over resources, which could include, besides agricultural land, minerals, forest plantations, water, and natural reserves.This control could be used for a variety of purposes, but often for a production process of an extractive character, such as monocrop cultivation of ‘flex crops’ for either exports or the domestic market. Flex crops refers to crops such as soy, sugarcane, palm oil, and maize, which can be put to various final uses according to what is most profitable at the time of the harvest. For example, soy, sugarcane, and maize can be used for food, animal feed, or biofuels, and as the price varies for each of these final uses to varying degrees, so does their profitability. This flexibility makes these crops particularly attractive to financial investors and speculators seeking to maximise profits. The term ‘extractivism’ is usually used for characterising an economic system based on the extraction of minerals, oil, and gas, which generates a rent income to those who own the resource but sooner or later depletes it. While agriculture is usually considered a renewable resource-​based activity, the term ‘agro-​extractivism’ is now also being used to refer to those agricultural activities which have extractivist characteristics (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2016). For example, the dramatic expansion of soy cultivation by agribusiness capital in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay has led to deforestation, loss of biodiversity, depletion of water sources, and ‘green deserts’ due to mono-​cropping, with damaging consequences for the environment. As for ‘green grabbing’, this refers to land deals with an environmental purpose, such as bio-​carbon sequestration, setting up natural reserves, biodiversity conservation, and so on. These land deals might restrict the customary access that local communities used to have to these ecosystems, thereby having a negative impact on their livelihoods, for which

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Contemporary dynamics of agrarian change  269 they are not always compensated, thus leading to conflicts. In some instances, a market is developing for these environmental services, such as carbon credits, thereby attracting private capital to finance these land deals, furthering the commodification of nature through ‘green commodities’ (Fairhead et al., 2012). While land grabbing tended to further land concentration, it was not the main driver, as it was the shift to neoliberal globalisation that spurred the development of agro-​ industrial farming that took advantage of the rapid growth in agro-​exports. The power of industrial capitalist agriculture was further strengthened by their increasing linkages with agro-​input transnational corporations (TNCs) providing fertilisers, seeds, pesticides, and animal pharmaceuticals, and agro-​food TNCs undertaking processing, logistics, and marketing. A further boost to the hegemonic power of agribusiness farming was given with the financialisation of agriculture, particularly since the world food crisis of 2006–​2008. In some countries, with a relatively advanced capitalist farming sector, some large farmers established companies to scale up and diversify their operations so as to capture economies of scale not just in farming but also by gaining control over the commodity chain. By accessing the financial markets they purchased more land but also rented land or established partnerships with landowners. These contracts were flexible so that the company could cancel them when economic circumstances changed. In Latin America, some of these companies developed into mega-​farms controlling over 100,000 hectares, often for soy cultivation or livestock farming, and some forestry companies managed over one million hectares. These lands were located in different regions of the country, and increasingly even in neighbouring countries, thereby reducing risks. Hence the term ‘translatino’ capital, or companies, was coined to characterise this new phenomenon (Borras et al., 2012). These companies extended their control over the value chain by investing in processing plants and establishing their own distribution networks so as to capture a larger share of the value generated by the commodity chain and enhancing its market power. These ‘network companies’ create and integrate the productive, financial, and commercial activities by establishing a new business model. These network companies deploy ‘multi-​ scale strategies of capital accumulation … where firms allocate capital and seek profits in multiple nodes … that enable reinforced concentration through flexible ways of resource control’ (Sosa & Gras, 2020: 11). The extent of penetration of agribusiness capital varies between countries depending on the degree of liberalisation of the country concerned and the profitability and potential of its agriculture, among others. Industrial agriculture has been much criticised for their ecological damage. So as to counter-​act those critiques and legitimise their activities they have introduced new technologies such as precision agriculture (PA) and climate smart agriculture (CSA). The aim of PA is to minimise and optimise the use of fertilisers, chemicals, and other environment-​ damaging inputs, while the aim of CSA is to shift to agricultural practices which are less damaging for the climate and are better adapted to climate change. This is to be achieved while at the same time promoting efficiency and food security. But, as Gras and Cáceres (2010: 2) conclude: ‘PA and CSA … approaches have a productivist focus that fails to address the social-​environmental contradictions which have characterized the last 50 years of agricultural intensification, and to alleviate poverty and inequality’. The greater the dominance of agribusiness capital within a country, the more difficult it becomes for social movements to succeed in their campaigns for land reform and food sovereignty. Some of these agro-​industrial corporations have become too powerful, and

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270  Cristóbal Kay some countries have become too dependent on the foreign exchange and rent income they generate for governments to go against their main interests, although they may be able to regulate and control some of their more harmful and contentious practices. In sum, the neoliberal turn has led not only to increasing land concentration, but more significantly to a major concentration of capital and power in the agrarian sector and beyond, creating a new global food regime in which the state is subordinate to corporate capital, contrary to the previous food regimes in which the state played a key role in shaping it. This is what McMichael (2013) has conceptualised as the ‘corporate food regime’. Recommended reading: Borras et al. (2012); Gras and Cáceres (2020); Petras and Veltmeyer (2016).

The financialisation of agriculture and food The food crisis of 2006–​2008 drew attention to the influence of finance on the agri-​ food sector that had hitherto been neglected. Some authors charged the financial sector for being a major contributory factor to the food price spikes during those years, when prices of key staples doubled. They also blamed it for the increasing volatility of food prices. Financial deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s gave a significant boost to the entry of new financial players, such as hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and investment banks, into the agricultural commodity exchanges to trade commodity futures contracts and other agriculture-​related financial products.The financial sector had increasingly become involved in the agricultural sector through the creation of derivatives and other financial instruments such as agricultural commodity index funds.The financial system had also increasingly facilitated the purchase of farmland and food companies and the financing of parts of the agricultural commodity chain. A debate ensued trying to ascertain to what extent financial markets had contributed to the food crisis and what their specific impact had been (Clapp, 2012). For some authors, trade in agricultural derivatives insures buyers and sellers against price volatility; other authors argued that they promoted speculative activity, resulting in higher price volatility, thus undermining the purported aim of stability. While in the past, producers and consumers used the highly regulated financial markets for hedging purposes, thereby stabilising farm incomes, under the neoliberal regime financial firms increasingly entered the market for speculative purposes by trying to profit from food price volatility, thereby exacerbating volatility (Ghosh, 2010). Financialisation has also fostered land grabbing by facilitating large-​scale land deals and helping to finance the rapid expansion of flex crops (Fairbairn, 2020). In the period of high fuel prices flex crops were increasingly destined for biofuels instead of food. Land became gradually more attractive as an investment and became a financial asset through farmland securitisation that enhanced land liquidity. According to Isakson (2014: 749), ‘financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-​food system’. He also points out the deleterious consequences of financialisation as it ‘has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions’. Furthermore, he argues that small-​scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets,

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Contemporary dynamics of agrarian change  271 they have become weaker vis-​à-​vis other actors in the agro-​food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. It is difficult for those negatively affected by financialisation to organise and demand greater regulation by governments and protective measures due to the complexity and opaqueness of the financial world. It is often challenging to trace a direct link between a particular financial instrument and the actual physical agricultural commodity, especially in some speculative activities. Hence, Clapp (2012) argues that financialisation, by fostering what she terms ‘distancing’ in the food system, obfuscates the resistance and struggle against the growing power of those institutions responsible for the damaging impacts of financialisation. Governments may also be reluctant to intervene and mediate between finance and agriculture as they set up the basic building blocks of this new financial system by withdrawing the various regulatory and protective measures so as to make it attractive to private capital. Furthermore, the increasing mobility, flexibility, and power of finance capital make it today also more difficult to regulate and control (Visser et al., 2015). Recommended reading: Clapp (2012); Clapp and Isakson (2018);Visser et al. (2015).

The peasant economy, de-​agrarianisation, feminisation, and precarianisation of labour Neoliberal globalisation has intensified the crisis of the peasant economy or agricultural petty commodity producers (i.e., small-​scale family household farmers producing agricultural goods for subsistence as well as for the market). Agribusiness capitalist farmers are increasingly appropriating resources through a variety of means that further strengthen it while weakening the peasant farmers. Land grabbing is just one of those ways.Various governments have privatised state farms, collectives, and several state enterprises and public utilities that it sold at often below market value to private capitalists. These state enterprises often provided services such as technical assistance, credit, agro-​processing, and marketing facilities to peasant farmers at subsidised rates. With privatisation, peasant farmers either lost access to these resources or were unable to pay the high charges now demanded by their new capitalist owners. Through the neoliberal land-​titling projects, some governments also introduced legislation which allowed the dissolution of indigenous communities and the granting of individual property rights. Only in a few countries were communal property rights strengthened as a consequence of mobilisation by indigenous peoples. Peasants who managed to secure land titles and beneficiaries of land parcels from agrarian reforms, as well as existing peasant farmers, struggled to compete in the market for agricultural commodities, being exposed to the full force of the neoliberal ‘market compulsion’. They no longer had the protection of the developmentalist state (Borras et al., 2008). This wave of privatisation of natural resources as well as state enterprises, the enclosure of the commons, the depletion of the ‘global environmental commons’, bio-​piracy, and the various forms of land grabbing are referred to by Harvey (2003) as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, arguing that some of these phenomena are new forms of appropriations by capital, which, on the one hand, were not included in Marx’s concept of ‘original’ or ‘primitive’ capital accumulation, and, on the other hand, are still ongoing processes, and hence the need for using a new concept. This accumulation by dispossession already robbed peasants of some of their livelihood means. As a consequence of the dwindling

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272  Cristóbal Kay access to resources, and the increasing pressures and vulnerabilities facing peasant farming, their members are forced to engage in a greater variety of activities so as to be able to sustain their livelihood (Scoones, 2015). A process of ‘de-​agrarianisation’ takes hold whereby the members of peasant farm households need to find other income opportunities beyond farming through engaging in ‘pluriactivity’ (Bryceson, 2000). These other activities and income opportunities are largely confined to seeking different forms of wage employment such as agricultural wage workers in capitalist farms in the locality, as non-​agricultural wage workers in nearby rural or urban areas maintaining their residence in the peasant household, or in wage employment of different kinds that require seasonal or longer-​term migration beyond the household, within the country, or internationally (Oya and Pontara, 2015). In areas where fruit, flower, and vegetable production is intensive in the use of labour, producers sometimes need to draw labour beyond the rural area, from nearby urban areas, or even from abroad. In some countries, there has been an export boom of these commodities that was much facilitated by drawing women into the wage labour market, at times with some resistance from men. Fruit (including berries) cultivation generally only offers seasonal employment for the harvest and in the processing plants, while flower and vegetable cultivation, if undertaken in greenhouses, can offer longer-​term employment. However, most jobs tend to be of a precarious, casual, and temporary nature as it allows employers to avoid issuing contracts or only issue contracts that allow them to bypass social security payments and other benefits to their workers. This has been characterised by some authors as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ flexibilisation.While in the past few wage employment opportunities existed for women in the countryside, these have become common in labour-​intensive non-​traditional agricultural activities, leading to the feminisation of rural wage workers, albeit often with worse employment conditions than men. This trend to precarious, casual, and flexible wage employment is reflected in the changing income composition of the rural household. While in the past income derived from off-​farm activities constituted only a minor part of the rural household income, it has increased substantially with the crisis of the peasant economy reaching in some instances over one-​half of their income. Peasant labour by being driven to seek wage employment has kept down wages, thereby providing a cheap source of labour for capitalists. In some countries, remittances from migrant workers accounted for a substantial proportion of the family household income. Remittances also became a major source of foreign-​exchange income for some countries and prevented further rises in poverty. Many countries have weak labour legislations that give few rights to workers, such as minimum wages, and do not offer much protection against unfair dismissal or abusive labour conditions. Increasingly, capitalist farmers and agribusiness are using the services of labour contractors so as to minimise their obligations to workers. These labour contractors take advantage of the vulnerabilities of workers, especially if they can draw on a large pool of unemployment workers, due to their gender, ethnicity, or dubious legal status in case of migrant workers. Instead of receiving a daily wage, workers are often paid by piece work (i.e., by result), leading to a working day beyond eight hours, as well as an intensification of the work rhythm so as to maximise their daily wage income (Kay, 2015). The increasing proportion of this type of workers, in rural and urban areas, has led to the formation of a precariat. Araghi (2009) argues that the process of neoliberal globalisation is creating ‘the great global enclosures of our times’ and an ‘enclosure food regime’, whereby corporate

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Contemporary dynamics of agrarian change  273 agro-​food capital intensifies ‘depeasantisation via displacement’. As a consequence, a massive global reserve army of labour is formed, which, by migrating nationally and internationally, is readily available for capital to employ as wage labour whenever it is required in urban and rural areas. During the harvest season, workers living in the urban peripheries also engage in agricultural wage work, sometimes commuting on a daily basis with transport provided by labour contractors. Rural labour has become footloose on a massive scale, migrating to wherever they are able to find employment, allowing capitalists to increase their exploitation of wage workers, thereby achieving higher profits, and sustaining the process of capital accumulation on a global scale. This surplus labour has put a downward pressure on wages and led to ever more degrading employment conditions.The greater mobility of labour is also eroding the rural–​urban divide, with the peripheral areas in cities and towns forming a transmission belt between them, leading to expressions such as ‘cities of peasants’, ‘the countryside in the city’, ‘the urbanisation of the countryside’, and ‘rurbanisation’. These processes of de-​agrarianisation, depeasantisation, proletarianisation, fragmentation, and precariousness lead Bernstein (2010) to prefer to use the term ‘classes of labour’ as the term peasant no longer captures contemporary reality dominated by neoliberal globalisation. Hence, the key agrarian question of our times is the problematic of labour as it faces a crisis of reproduction. Although in crisis, the peasant family farm household is still holding its own, particularly in the interstices of capitalism, generally marginal areas of poor-​quality soils, and with limited infrastructure making it unattractive for capital. In some areas it is the fierce resistance of social movements, such as those of indigenous peoples, that has limited, if not necessarily stopped, the onward march of capitalist relations. In some cases even processes of peasantisation and repeasantisation have been occurring. Hence, the debate between ‘peasantists’ or ‘neopopulists’ (inspired by Chayanov) and ‘depeasantists’ or ‘proletarianist’ (inspired by Marx and Lenin) regarding the future of peasant farming continues (Van der Ploeg, 2013). Recommended reading: Bernstein (2010; Bryceson (2000);Van der Ploeg (2013).

Conclusions To understand the contemporary dynamics of agrarian change we have focused on the dominant power of global capital, in the shape of the agro-​industrial corporate food complex, and the concomitant rise of a global rural precariat that enables capital to intensify its exploitation of labour. The capitalisation of agriculture has significantly increased labour productivity in capitalist farms. However, the increased economic surplus produced by labour has largely, if not completely, been captured by capital, enhancing profits and capital accumulation. Technological developments have been largely labour displacing, thereby increasing the pool of cheap labour. Some new technologies (including farm management systems) tend to be knowledge-​intensive, requiring highly skilled labour, out of reach for most rural labour. In sum, the contemporary dynamics of agrarian change further marginalises peasant farming as well as furthering the process of precarianisation of rural labour.This neoliberal resource-​seeking and extractivist food regime has been, and is being, contested by those national and transnational social movements that seek an alternative food system, as analysed in other chapters of this book. In particular, Tilzey (2020) undertakes an acute critical analysis of the different proposals for such a post-​neoliberal food and farming system.

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References Araghi, F. (2009). “The Invisible Hand and the Visible Foot: Peasants, Dispossession and Globalization,” in Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. & Kay, C. (eds.), Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question, pp. 111–​147. London: Routledge. Bernstein, H. (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax: Fernwood. Borras Jr., S.M., Kay, C., & Lahiff, E. (eds.) (2008). Market-​led Agrarian Reform: Trajectories and Contestations. London: Routledge. Borras Jr., S.M., Franco, J.C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., & Spoor, M. (2012). “Land Grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–​4): 845–​872. Bryceson, D. (2000). “Peasant Theories and Smallholder Policies: Past and Present,” in Bryceson, D., Kay, C. & Mooij, J. (eds.), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, pp. 1–​36. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing. Clapp, J. (2012). Food. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clapp, J., & Isakson, S.R. (2018). Speculative Harvests: Financialization, Food, and Agriculture. Halifax: Fernwood. Deininger, K., & Byerlee, D. (2011). Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? Washington, DC: World Bank. Fairbairn, M. (2020). Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fairhead, J., Leach. M., & Scoones, I. (2012). “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2): 237–​261. Franco, J.C., & Borras Jr., S.M. (eds.) (2013). Land Concentration, Land Grabbing and People’s Struggles in Europe. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Ghosh, J. (2010). “The Unnatural Coupling: Food and Global Finance.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(1): 72–​86. Gras, C., & Cáceres, D.M. (2020). “Technology, Nature’s Appropriation and Capital Accumulation in Modern Agriculture.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 45: 1–​9. http://​doi.org/​ 10.1016/​j.cosust.2020.04.001. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isakson, S.R. (2014). “Food and Finance: The Financial Transformation of Agro-​Food Supply Chains.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(5): 749–​775. Kay, C. (2015).“The Agrarian Question and the Neoliberal Rural Transformation in Latin America.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 100: 73–​83. McMichael, P. (2013). Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions. Halifax: Fernwood. Oya, C., & Pontara, N. (eds.) (2015). Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries. London: Routledge. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2016). Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. London: Haymarket. Scoones, I. (2015). Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development. Halifax: Fernwood. Sosa, A.P., & Gras, C. (2020). “Network Companies, Land Grabbing, and Financialization in South America.” Globalizations, 18(3): 482–497. DOI: org/​10.1080/​14747731.2020.1794208. Tilzey, M. (2020). “From Neoliberalism to National Developmentalism? Contested Agrarian Imaginaries of a Postneoliberal Future for Food and Farming.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 21(1): 180-201. DOI: org/​10.1111/​joac.12379. Van der Ploeg, J.D. (2013). Peasants and the Art of Farming:A Chayanovian Manifesto. Halifax: Fernwood. Visser, O., Clapp, J., & Isakson, S.R. (2015). “Introduction to a Symposium on Global Finance and the Agri-​food Sector.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 15(4): 541–​548.

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32  Food regimes and agrarian questions A. Haroon Akram-​Lodhi

Capitalism is predicated upon the generalised commodification of labour and its exploitation. It requires ‘massive contributions of unpaid work, outside the commodity system but necessary to its generalization’ (Moore, 2015: 16–​17). Two forms of unpaid work are central here: reproductive labour carried out primarily but not exclusively within household structures and performed principally by women; and ‘the unpaid work of extra-​ human natures’ (Moore, 2015: 17), when work is defined as the capturing and expending of energy, as understood in physics. Unpaid work is embodied within both labour power and its products. Finally, capitalism requires the continual presence of frontiers that can be enclosed and commodified, with frontiers being spaces of social life that are ‘relatively uncolonized by capitalist relations of production’ and enclosure being the dismantling of ‘institutions that protect society from the market’ (De Angelis, 2004: 69). Eric Holt-​Giménez (2019: 89) reminds us that the global food economy ‘is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society’. Since the first emergence of a capitalist world food system in the latter quarter of the 19th century it has been and remains integral to the logic of capitalism because cheap food lowers the cost of reproducing labour, increases the rate of exploitation, and in so doing increases the rate of surplus value (Akram-​Lodhi, 2012). Yet for the capitalist world food system to operate requires massive quantities of unpaid care and domestic reproductive work, 75 per cent of which is performed by women (ILO, 2018). It also requires both capitalism’s capacity to work through nature and nature’s capacity to work through capitalism, as new agricultural frontiers, in terms of space, in terms of nature, in terms of labour, and in terms of commodification, are enclosed and as the unpaid work of nature provides the energy upon which capitalist world food systems operate. Nonetheless, since the late 1970s capitalism has been reconfiguring farming systems around the world in order to increase the production of ever cheaper food that moderates the need for real wage increases and facilitates the redistribution of income from wages to profits, generating inequality (Piketty, 2020).These processes have resulted in increases in the scale of on-​farm production because of the need to meet market imperatives. Market imperatives are defined as the requirement, in commodity economies, that output must be sold at competitive market prices if it is to sell, and that this requires continually lowering costs of production by investing in efficiency-​enhancing techniques and technologies (Wood, 2009); this process increases in the scale of farm production because it increases the capital intensity of farming systems. The livelihood outcomes of this process are, for many in the countryside of the developing world, extraordinarily negative, DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-39

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276  A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi as market imperatives and profitability requirements undermine the capacities of many small-​ scale petty commodity-​ producing peasant farmers to compete on domestic markets, and hence survive as viable farm operations, resulting in the sale of land and other assets. As a result, an increase in the capital intensity of farming systems is consistent with increases in land holdings; indeed, capturing scale economies from farm equipment and machinery may require larger farms (World Bank, 2007). Increases in the scale and scope of farming can thus come about as an outcome of the market imperatives that drive accumulation. It can also be the result of politically driven forced displacement: the ‘so-​called primitive accumulation’ of enclosures. In this way, market imperatives and enclosures are a routine and predictable part of the process of capitalist development in the countryside (Akram-​Lodhi, 2007). So ongoing rural restructuring in the 21st century is wholly consistent with the problematic of the ‘agrarian question’: whether, and, if so, how, capital is transforming farm production systems and the agricultural sector in the developing world. Capital transforms farming by enforcing market imperatives on farmers and in so doing deepens the role of capitalist social-​property relations of production, in which the means of production are under the control of a socially dominant hegemonic class, labour is ‘free’ from significant shares of the means of production and free to sell its capacity to work, and the purpose of commodity production is the seeking of profit (Akram-​Lodhi & Kay, 2016). However, for much of the 21st century the capitalist world food system has been in crisis, if crisis is understood as an interruption in the process of capital accumulation. With global food prices still some 35 per cent higher than they were in 2006, the 2007 food price crisis had not been resolved by the time the COVID-​19 pandemic erupted. Indeed, it can be argued that in the wake of this crisis global capital has sought to accelerate resolutions to context-​and place-​specific agrarian questions by intensifying the establishment of larger-​scale larger-​sized farms organised under increasingly capitalist relations of production. That being said, as capital transcends state boundaries the terms and conditions by which it transforms farming systems and the agricultural sector are subject to highly uneven and contingent variation. This variation can be witnessed in terms of the social-​property relations in the countryside within which capital does or does not insinuate itself, the upstream and downstream agricultural activities over which capital is hegemonic, the breadth and depth of the financialisation of farming and agriculture, the spatial landscapes over which capital operates, and the temporal frame in which processes of agrarian change are played out. As a consequence, it is necessary to situate agrarian questions within the world-​historical context of the food regime. A food regime can be defined as the international arrangements governing class-​ differentiated food production, trade, and consumption, which are underpinned by a political-​economic structure that projects hegemonic power over the global food system in order to facilitate forms of accumulation on a world scale (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989; McMichael, 2013). Food regime analysis uses two key concepts. The first is the agro-​food complex, which consists of the products, activities, and industries associated with changing diets and food production globally. Products are the foods that are being consumed. Activities bring together farm-​to-​fork social relationships constructed around food between farmers, various forms of food-​based capital, and consumers. Industries are those sectors involved in the production and consumption of food: agriculture, agro-​ commodity traders, food processors and manufacturers, food distributors, and food retailers. The second concept is the organisation of the agro-​food complex. It comprises how activities within industries are physically, spatially, and temporally organised to produce

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Food regimes and agrarian questions  277 food products. Two ways of organising the agro-​food complex have been identified. The first is ‘extensive’ because the agro-​food complex is organised to increase the production of mass-​produced food that is available within and beyond borders. Increased supplies of mass-​produced food result in the relatively lower prices that contribute to the accumulation of capital. The second is ‘intensive’ because the agro-​food complex is organised to meet the food consumption patterns of the key sources of demand for higher-​value food both within and beyond borders. This will increase the total value of the food that is produced, and in so doing contributes to accumulation by boosting profitability if the costs of food production can be tightly controlled. Recommended reading: Bernstein (2016); Friedmann and McMichael (1989); Holt-​ Giménez (2019).

The corporate food regime The current food regime is widely labelled as ‘corporate’ (Bernstein, 2016; Holt-​Giménez & Shattuck, 2011), although some prefer to use ‘neoliberal’ (Otero 2018), and others refer to an ‘enclosure’ food regime (Araghi, 2009). These reflect differing assessments of the comparative roles played by capital and the state in the food regime. In what follows ‘corporate’ is adopted simply because it is the most widely used descriptor. Many portray the corporate food regime as a ‘capitalist miracle’ that ‘should be left free to work its magic’ (Editorial briefing, The Economist, 9 May 2020). The US$8 trillion dollar global food economy accounts for 10 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and employs possibly as many as 1.5 billion people—​from farmers to meat packers to truck drivers to bartenders to lawyers to financial market traders, the food system is the largest single source of employment in the world (Akram-​Lodhi, 2015). It is immensely productive: the global supply of food has tripled since 1970 and per capita calorie availability has increased by 30 per cent. It has also become much more trade-​intensive as almost a quarter of the world’s food crosses borders and some four-​fifths of the world’s population relies in part upon food imports to meet some of its dietary needs. As it is trade-​intensive, the corporate food regime is dominated by global agro-​food transnational capital, which is driven by world market prices and the financial imperatives of short-​ run profitability. It is characterised by the relentless food commodification processes that underpin broadening and deepening ‘supermarketisation’ as well as the increasing oligopolisation of agro-​ chemicals, food trading, and food processing and manufacturing (Clapp, 2020). Agro-​food transnational capital sources, stores, ships, and sells food on a global scale, off-​loading risk and other costs and reaping economies of scale that produce profitability despite the narrow margins that have driven the concentration and centralisation of agro-​food transnational capital during the 21st century. Concentration and centralisation are witnessed in the extensive mergers and acquisitions within the global food system in the 21st century. Clapp and Isakson (2018) stress the role of asset management companies’ interlocking cross-​holding of shares across key companies within the food system as not only a marker of the role of finance capital in structuring the global food system but also as a marker of the fusion of finance and productive capital in the corporate food regime. At the point of production, the dominant producer model of the corporate food regime is the fossil fuel-​driven, large-​scale, capital-​intensive industrial agriculture mega-​ farm, which in turn requires, through enclosures and market imperatives, deepening the simple reproduction squeeze facing small-​scale peasant petty commodity producers

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278  A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi around the developing world as world market prices for farm products fail to cover the actual costs of production (Akram-​Lodhi & Kay, 2010). This regime forges global animal protein commodity chains while at the same time spreading transgenic organisms, which together broaden and deepen the temperate ‘industrial grain–​oilseed–​livestock’ agro-​food complex (Weis, 2013). A core market for agro-​food transnational corporations is relatively affluent global consumers in the North and South, whose food preferences in the last quarter-​century have been shifted toward ‘healthier’, ‘organic’, and ‘green’ products that have large profit margins. At the same time, though, for the global middle class the corporate food regime sustains the mass production of very durable highly processed food manufactures that are heavily reliant on soya, high-​fructose corn syrup, and sodium and whose lower profit margins mean that significantly higher volumes of product must be shifted. Thus, the corporate food regime simultaneously fosters the ongoing diffusion of industrial agriculture—​ Fordist food such as McDonalds—​ as well as standardised differentiation—​post-​Fordist food such as sushi (Akram-​Lodhi, 2013). For both segments, the corporate food regime fosters ‘meatification’: ‘the increasing and highly uneven global consumption of meat’ that is ‘highly skewed toward wealthier consumers’ (Weis, 2013: 4). The food system is thus predicated upon the global human inequality that it helps create, and which is witnessed in the prevalence of low-​paid, often informal, often highly insecure, and frequently unsafe work within the corporate food regime. The corporate food regime is sustained by capitalist states, and most notably the huge farm subsidies allocated by the United States and the European Union to industrial agriculture (Clapp, 2020), by the international financial and development institutions that govern the global economy in their support of supermarketisation (World Bank, 2007), and by the big philanthropy that finances research that deepens the capital-​intensity of the system (Fridell & Konings, 2013). Recommended reading: Clapp (2020); McMichael (2013).

The structural contradictions of the corporate food regime The corporate food regime is awash with contradictions. Worldwide, there are more than 570 million farms, most of which are small and family-​operated. Small farms of two hectares or less operate about 12 per cent of the world’s agricultural land, and family farms more generally operate about 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land (Lowder, Skoet, & Raney, 2016). According to the World Bank (2020), some 3.4 billion people around the world live in rural areas and rely on farming, livestock, aquaculture, and other agricultural work to produce a significant proportion of their livelihood. More than 75 per cent of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and almost 65 per cent of the world’s poor work primarily in agriculture (Castaneda et al., 2016). Thus, the epicentre of world poverty lies in the countryside. The rural poor are diverse: farmers, fisherfolk and pastoralists, landless waged labourers, indigenous peoples and female-​headed households, and displaced people. Most of the rural poor are driven by their poverty into diverse and precarious livelihoods, of which farming is a very significant component, and although they grow a significant proportion of their food requirements they have narrow diets and must supplement their own production with purchases on food markets, for which money is required, which for most is scarce. Uniting the rural poor around the world is a lack of access to the single most important agrarian asset: land. Table 32.1 presents comparative estimates of land Gini coefficients for

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Food regimes and agrarian questions  279 Table 32.1 Land Gini coefficients for selected countries for various years in the 21st century Country Asia Bangladesh China India Pakistan Vietnam Latin America Argentina Bolivia Colombia Ecuador Guatemala Venezuela Africa Ethiopia Gambia Kenya Madagascar Malawi Niger Nigeria Tanzania Uganda

Land Gini coefficient 0.84 0.64 0.82 0.8 0.68 0.86 0.77 0.83 0.82 0.88 0.92 0.83 0.73 0.71 0.79 0.72 0.75 0.71 0.77 0.56

Source: Bauluz et al. (2020: 23); World Bank (2009: 104).

a number of countries between 2000 and 2016. It is clear from Table 32.1 that land-​based inequality is remarkably high. Moreover, estimates by the International Monetary Fund indicate that, based upon a restricted sample of developing countries, land Gini coefficients globally rose by 7 per cent between 1960 and 1990 (Erikson & Vollrath, 2004: Table 2), prior to the most recent period of globalisation, which is strongly correlated around the world with rising inequality. There is clear evidence of an inverse relationship between land Gini coefficients and agricultural productivity, indicating that the more unequal the land distribution, the lower the level of agricultural productivity, which has clear implications for rural livelihoods, incomes, and welfare (Vollrath, 2007) because low productivity depresses agricultural growth and GDP growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture (World Bank, 2007: 6). Moreover, this is strongly gendered, as women’s land holdings are systematically lesser than men’s, and less productive (Rogers & Akram-​Lodhi, 2019; World Bank, 2011). At the same time, a lack of land drives other sources of disadvantage: a lack of non-​land assets such as tools, equipment, and livestock; a lack of access to education and healthcare; a lack of access to adequate, remunerative, safe, and secure waged work; oligopolistic or monopolistic product and services markets; and a lack of access to social protection. The result is a cumulative reinforcement of disadvantage that is particularly borne by women. In this light, it seems clear that while addressing rural poverty requires improving agrarian productivity in ways that are gender-​responsive and pro-​poor, the lack of attention paid

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280  A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi to understanding specifically agrarian inequalities might compromise efforts at tackling rural hunger and poverty. Officially, the numbers of rural undernourished was 690 million in 2020 (Food and Agriculture Organisation—​FAO, 2020), before the onset of COVID-​19. However, this figure uses a benchmark caloric intake that meets ‘minimum dietary energy requirements … [for ] … a sedentary lifestyle’ (FAO, 2012: 55) or around 1800 calories per day. If the caloric intake is based upon that needed for ‘normal’ activity the numbers of hungry nearly double, and if the caloric intake is based upon that needed for ‘intense’ activity the numbers of hungry people triple (FAO, 2012: 55).1 Overlapping with this figure, it is estimated that two billion people suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies (FAO, 2013). Finally, a consequence of the consumption pattern of the corporate food regime has been the emergence of a global obesity crisis among the global middle class (Akram-​Lodhi, 2013); in 2016 1.9 billion adults and 380 million children were overweight or obese (WHO, 2020).The capitalist world food system creates a planet of ‘stuffed and starved’ (Patel, 2007), in which at least 60 per cent of the global population is in some way malnourished. To the impact on people must be added the climate consequences of the corporate food regime (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). Agricultural production, transport, processing, retailing, and consumption release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Indeed, emissions from agriculture and deforestation are equal to all industrial emissions. Farming releases significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, two powerful greenhouse gases. Methane is produced by livestock during digestion, and can be a consequence of rice production, as well as escape from stored manure and organic waste in landfills. Nitrous oxide emissions are an indirect product of organic and mineral nitrogen fertilisers, as well as the burning of crop lands. Deforestation to increase crop land directly releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Cumulatively, world agriculture contributes just under one-​quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, the vast bulk of which originates from land use changes and forestry, the draining and burning of peat, and enteric fermentation. As a result, the corporate food regime serves to undermine the biophysical foundations of global farming, the activity upon which it is built. The corporate food regime has also laid the structural foundations to facilitate the expanded spread of zoonotics—​human bacterial and viral infections like the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-​coranvirus (CoV)-​2 virus, which originate in animals and which cross the species barrier (Akram-​Lodhi, 2020). As industrial agriculture has grown across the developing countries its expanded control and operation of better farming land have forced small-​scale farmers to rear and commodify animals that were previously hunted in the wild, opening new pathways for zoonotic transmission. At the same time, industrial agriculture has created fertile breeding grounds for new infections as industrial livestock production increases. Industrial livestock breeds its own diseases, like swine flu and avian flu, in concentrated animal-​feeding operations and on factory farms. These ‘modern’ industrial farming methods significantly enhance the virulence of those viruses that do emerge before they cross from animal to human. This is because modern animal farming significantly weakens the resistance of animals to pathogens even as the massive application of antibiotics to combat pathogens contributes to antibiotic resistance, cumulatively exacerbating the problem of new pathogens. As Rob Wallace (2016) cogently puts it, ‘big farms make big flu’. Recommended reading: Akram-​Lodhi (2013, 2020); Patel (2007).

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The character of an alternative This contribution has situated contemporary agrarian questions within the corporate food regime, which is not concerned with the production of food per se. Rather, it is concerned with the production of commodities whose value can be realised through market sales that generate profits for capital. Any alternative needs to be predicated upon a decentralised agriculture, where production, processing, distribution, and consumption are controlled by communities. In order to do this, it is necessary to challenge the class power that is expressed in and through the corporate food regime by constructing a broad democratic alliance of peasants, smallholders, fishers, indigenous peoples, urban workers, and underserved food communities that are prepared to confront the power of capital in the food system by fostering alternative modes of organising production and consumption in ways that contain elements of de-​commodification and the re-​regulation of markets on the basis of public need. This would thus resolve the agrarian question through a transition to a new food regime.

Note 1 Thus, in 2012, 852 million were hungry at a calorie intake needed for a sedentary life, 1.52 billion were hungry at a calorie intake needed for a normal life, and 2.57 billion were hungry at a calorie intake needed for an intense life (FAO, 2012: 55).

References Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. (2007). “Land, Markets and Neoliberal Enclosure: An Agrarian Political Economy Perspective.” Third World Quarterly, 28(8): 1437–​1456. Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. (2012). “Contextualising Land Grabbing: Contemporary Land Deals, the Global Subsistence Crisis and the World Food System.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 33(2): 119–​142. Akram-​Lodhi, A.H. (2013). Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. (2015). “Accelerating Towards Food Sovereignty.” Third World Quarterly, 36(3): 563–​583. Akram-​Lodhi, A.H. (2020). “Contemporary Pathogens and the Capitalist World Food System.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies. DOI: 10.1080/​02255189.2020.1834361. Akram-​Lodhi, A.H., & Kay, C. (2010). “Surveying the Agrarian Question (Part 2): Current Debates and Beyond.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(2): 255–​284. Akram-​Lodhi, A.H., & Kay, C. (2016). “Back to the Future? Marx, Modes of Production and the Agrarian Question,” in Mohanty, B.B. (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition: India in the Global Debate, pp. 43–​66. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Araghi, F. (2009). “The Invisible Hand and the Visible Foot: Peasants, Dispossession and Globalization”. In Akram-​Lodhi, A.H. & Kay, C. (eds.), Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question, , pp. 111–​147. London: Routledge. Bauluz, L., Govind,Y., & Novokmet, F. (2020). “Global Land Inequality,”World Inequality Database Working Paper no 2020/​ 10. https://​wid.world/​document/​global-​land-​inequality-​world-​ inequality-​lab-​wp-​2020-​10/​. Bernstein, H. (2016). “Agrarian Political Economy and Modern World Capitalism: The Contributions of Food Regime Analysis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3): 611–​647. Castaneda, A., Doan, D., Newhouse, D., Nguyen, M.C., Uematsu, H., & Azevedo, J.P. (2016). “Who are the Poor in the Developing World?” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 7844. https://​openknowledge.worldbank.org/​handle/​10986/​25161.

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282  A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Clapp, J. (2020). Food, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clapp, J., & Isakson, S.R. (2018). Speculative Harvests: Finalization, Food and Agriculture. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. De Angelis, M. (2004). “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures.” Historical Materialism, 12(2): 57–​87. Editorial briefing. (2020). ”The World’s Food System has so far Weathered the Challenge of Covid-​19.” The Economist. www.economist.com/​briefing/​2020/​05/​09/​the-​worlds-​food-​ system-​has-​so-​far-​weathered-​the-​challenge-​of-​covid-​19. Erikson, L., & Vollrath, D. (2004). “Dimensions of Land Inequality and Economic Development.” International Monetary Fund Working Paper WP/​04/​158. www.imf.org/​external/​pubs/​ft/​wp/​ 2004/​wp04158.pdf. FAO—​Food and Agriculture Organisation. (2012). The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation. www.fao.org/​3/​i3027e/​i3027e.pdf. FAO. (2013). The State of Food and Agriculture 2013. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation. www.fao.org/​3/​i3300e/​i3300e.pdf. FAO. (2020). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation. www.fao.org/​publications/​sofi/​2020/​en/​. Fridell, G., & Konings, M. (eds.) (2013). Age of Icons: Exploring Philanthrocapitalism in the Contemporary World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Friedmann, H., & McMichael, P. (1989). “Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Fall of National Agricultures 1870 to the Present.” Sociologia Ruralis, 29(2): 93–​117. Holt-​Giménez, E. (2019). Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Holt-​Giménez, E., & Shattuck, A. (2011). “Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements: Rumblings of Reform or Tides of Transformation?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1): 109–​144. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2014). Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. www.ipcc.ch/​report/​ar5/​wg3/​. ILO—​International Labour Organization. (2018). Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva: ILO. www.ilo.org/​global/​publications/​books/​WCMS_​633135/​lang-​-​en/​index. htm. Lowder, S.K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). “The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide,” World Development 87: 16–​29. McMichael, P. (2013). Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London:Verso. Otero, G. (2018). The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Patel, R. (2007). Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System. London: Portobello Books. Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Rogers, Y., & Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. (2019). “The Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity in Sub-​ Saharan Africa: Causes, Costs and Solutions.” UN Women Policy Brief, No. 11. www. unwomen.org/​en/​digital-​library/​publications/​2019/​04/​the-​gender-​gap-​in-​agricultural-​ productivity-​in-​sub-​saharan-​africa. Vollrath, D. (2007). “Land Distribution and International Agricultural Productivity.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 89(1): 202–​216. Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flu. New York: Monthly Review Press. Weis,T. (2013). The Ecological Hoofprint:The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock. London: Zed Books. Wood, E.M. (2009). “Peasants and the Market Imperative: The Origins of Capitalism,” in Akram-​ Lodhi, A.H. & Kay, C. (eds.), Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question. pp. 37–​56. London: Routledge. World Bank. (2007). World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Food regimes and agrarian questions  283 World Bank. (2009). Kenya Poverty and Inequality Assessment, Vol. I: Synthesis Report, Africa Region Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit Report No 44190-​KE. https://​documents. worldbank.org/​en/​publication/​documents-​reports/​documentdetail/​425611468089394594/​ kenya-​poverty-​and-​inequality-​assessment-​executive-​summary-​and-​synthesis-​report. World Bank. (2011). World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Washington, DC: The World Bank. World Bank. (2020). “World Development Indicators.” https://​databank.worldbank.org/​source/​ world-​development-​indicators. World Health Organization. (2020). “Obesity and Overweight.” www.who.int/​news-​room/​fact-​ sheets/​detail/​obesity-​and-​overweight.

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33  Urban development in the Global South Charmain Levy and Alice Moura

In post-​ World War II classic modernisation development theory, urbanisation was considered a critical feature of the transition from traditional agrarian to modern industrial society. Capitalist development in the countryside pushed the peasant population off the land into the cities where labour was required for urban industrial complexes. Rapid urbanisation took place in most of the Global South, especially Latin America and Asia, where a significant part of the rural population migrated to the cities from 1960 to the 1980s. Urbanisation in Africa took place at different rates in the postcolonial period and since the 1990s has accelerated.1 Like development, urbanisation took place at a more rapid and intense rate in the South compared to most Western countries, even though it was meant to follow in Western footsteps. It took New York approximately 150 years to grow to eight million people, while Mexico and São Paulo generated the same interval of population growth in less than 15 years. Urbanisation is still considered central to the development process and, historically, urban development requires major public investment. Despite the importance of urbanisation to modernisation, practically no state-​supported infrastructure was provided to migrant populations in urban centres in the South. Where they were, public services were often skewed towards upper-​and middle-​class neighbourhoods. To make things worse, salaries for the large majority of the urban population were insufficient to cover the cost of city living. As the low-​income population were left to their own devices to survive in the city, in many countries and regions we find a collective ‘self-​help’ reaction to problems around the lack of urban infrastructure (transportation, housing, sanitation, electricity, streets, waste removal, schools, daycare, health services, etc.) and tenure regulation of the state. Neighbourhood and community associations became the basis of urban social movements and non-​governmental associations; a burgeoning civil society in some cases formed to contest the urban space and demand political action as well as public services from local governments. In many metropolises, one way for the working classes to survive has been to illegally squat on land, either individually or collectively. This led to the formation of slums and shantytowns, which have become an integral and permanent part of the urban landscape in the Global South. This modern urban phenomenon is in fact a solution for the state as well as a reason not to provide low-​income housing on a universal scale. Structural adjustment programmes, neoliberal macroeconomic policies, and the integration of national markets into the global economy since the mid-​1980s have exacerbated the spread and expansion of shantytowns and led to what geographers term ‘spatial segregation’. However, if the golden years of economic industrial development meant stable DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-40

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Urban development in the Global South  285 jobs for semi-​skilled workers, from the 1980s on, we have witnessed what can be called urbanisation without industrialisation and in many cases urbanisation without development. New generations of workers and migrants now feed the (legal and illegal) informal economy, much of which takes place in large shantytowns (Davis, 2006). In order to understand the dynamics of diverse urbanisation processes in the South, we must first place and study them in the context of the global economy based on a new international division of labour and new forms of governance. We also need to take into account the diverse but relevant development and critical theories, the macroeconomic and social policies implemented by successive governments, the political regimes and changing forms of the state in terms of how open they are to urban popular movements and their claims.We must also understand the dynamics of a growing civil society of non-​ governmental organisations (NGOs), an uncivil society, and the role played by multilateral agencies and their policies aimed at the urban poor. Finally, following the insights of critical theories, we must take into account how the urban poor struggle over, contest, and claim urban citizenship through ordinary and everyday acts of belonging in cities (Das, 2011; Holston & Appadurai, 2003). The readings in this chapter intend to deepen the reflection of students on the historical, economic, social, and political factors that condition the different forms and patterns of urbanisation in the South. Special attention is given to three key issues: (i) urban production in terms of capital and labour; (ii) urban development in terms of the dynamics involved in reproducing the workforce and the social conditions of these dynamics—​ coloniality, social exclusion, inequality, and poverty; and (iii) forms of urban governance, politics, and agency. Studying these issues entails identifying in different periods of contemporary history social and political structures, social actors, their interaction, and the results of their relations in terms of social and political continuity and change.This requires analysing how different levels of government as well as international organisations (World Bank, UN Habitat) deal with issues of unequal urban development and urban management in terms of maintaining order through social reform and the selective inclusion of civil society actors in governance and through the repression of what is designated as uncivil society. Attention is also given to social movements, political contention, and collective action around urban issues such as access to land, public goods, and services as well as to decisions involving urban governance. Recommended reading: Das (2011).

Neoliberal globalisation and urbanisation: theoretical perspectives on the city and urban development Urban development in the Global South over the past three decades has taken place in the context of what can be viewed as epoch-​defining changes in social and economic organisation and a process of globalisation impelled by neoliberalism, a programme of ‘structural reforms’ in macroeconomic policy that includes the privatisation of public enterprises, financial and trade liberalisation, deregulation of markets, and the decentralisation of government administration (Harvey, 2005). The retrenchment of national welfare state regimes and national intergovernmental systems imposed powerful new fiscal constraints upon cities, leading to major budgetary cuts during periods of intense local social problems and conflicts in conjunction with rapid economic restructuring (Brenner & Theodore, 2002).2

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286  Charmain Levy and Alice Moura The concept of global cities emerged encouraging competition among urban centres to attract capital, markets, multinational offices, and direct foreign investment (Sassen, 2001, 2006) in order to become ‘hubs of knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurship’. With this goal in mind, the local state invests large sums of public funds in infrastructure for the wealthy and enterprises. It also adapts local zoning and municipal laws in order to accommodate markets and the private sector. The city is conceived as the ‘agglomeration economy’, driver of economic growth, and its purpose is to transform urban spaces to be as attractive as possible to financial investors. This often involves the expansion of downtown areas into attractive upscale service centres, the implementation of large-​scale projects to attract big expositions, conventions, and ‘mega-​events’ like the Olympics or World Cup, and the makeover of city centres to befit them as ‘world-​class’ conference and hospitality destinations (Mayer, 2007). Within the context of this development, theoretical perspectives and policy action prescriptions diverge. Salient among these are permutations of ‘structural Marxism’ (Davis, 2006; Harvey, 2005), structural and poststructural forms of urban sociology (Castells, 1983), international political economy and urban development economics, a largely untheorised approach shared by economists at the World Bank and related organisations in the United Nations (UN) system. For example, Glaeser and Joshi Ghani (2015) point to the ‘urban fallacy’: the notion that the problem is with the city itself and not with the social relations that govern society (Angotti, 2013). Others within the UN system highlight cities as the drivers of global environmental change. These mainstream approaches are supportive rather than critical of the neoliberal policy and institutional framework elaborated on the basis of the post-​Washington Consensus. Recommended reading: Davis (2006).

The urban revolution, the informal sector, and the urban labour market This theme raises the questions of how economic factors are tied to production conditions in the cities and how changes in the world economy impact the social-​spatial organisation of cities. Cities offer higher income levels than the average in the countryside. They are the sites of capitalist production, accumulation, and consumption. They concentrate capital, manufacturing, distribution, labour, and customer markets. A major aspect of capitalist development is the process of productive and social transformation in which a traditional, pre-​capitalist, and agrarian society is transformed into a modern industrial capitalist society. Typically, in the periphery of the world capitalist system under conditions that prevailed from the 1950s to the 1970s, this process of structural change and urbanisation took a different form than it did in countries at the centre of the system. The most notable feature of peripheral capitalist development regarding rural–​urban migration, urbanisation, and the growth of cities is the emergence of a dual-​sector economy, each with its own labour market: a formal sector in which economic activities are ‘structured’ and the capital–​labour relation is regulated by the state; and an unstructured ‘informal sector’, in which economic activities revolve around self-​employment and family-​based microenterprises rather than the traditional capital–​labour relation. In the Global South, the social transformation from peasant to wage worker and productive transformation from agriculture to industry did not completely replicate the historical labour integration into the formal urban economy of Global North cities. For example, growth of urban manufacturing actually increases the demand for less-​skilled

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Urban development in the Global South  287 workers. Urban and suburban industrial enclaves in ‘free-​trade’ zones and maquiladoras have become giant labour reserves for both global and local capital (Angotti, 2013).Today most of the jobs accessible to semi-​skilled and non-​skilled workers are in the manufacturing and service sectors and involve outsourced work. Most working arrangements can be described as temporary, short-​term, and/​or part-​time. This situation has created what can be call an urban ‘precariat’ class3 (Standing, 2011) and in many cases has weakened unions.This context is the result of the new international division of labour where industries of all types outsource different parts of the productive chain to the South in order to increase production and consumption in the West. This process accelerated during the 2000s in countries such as Bangladesh, Mexico, India, and Cambodia, contributing to rapid urbanisation. Recommended reading: Angotti (2013).

Urban poverty and class dynamics of income distribution In all of the cities of the Global South, despite the diversity of the workforce, ethnic and racial differences, what the working class has in common are the living conditions of social exclusion and socio-​spatial segregation. According to UN-​Habitat (2016), 30 per cent of the urban population in the Global South in 2015 lived in slums. The proportion of urban population living in slums was highest in sub-​Saharan Africa (59 per cent), followed by Asia and the Pacific (28 per cent), and Latin America and the Caribbean (21 per cent). Urban costs of reproduction, such as housing, transportation, childcare, and food, fall upon the workers whose wages most often fall short of covering these costs. ‘Poverty’ in most cities is conditioned by low wages and a relative lack of access to collective goods and services. The distribution and concentration of these goods and services affect the level of urban inequality and poverty as well as individual and collective behaviour and attitudes towards urban development. Subsequently, an important number of urban dwellers in the Global South suffer to a greater or lesser extent from severe environmental health problems associated with insufficient access to clean drinking water, inadequate sewerage facilities, polluted air, and insufficient solid waste disposal (Cohen, 2006). In most cities in the South, the new economic model of pro-​growth neoliberal policies, even when modified by pro-​poor programmes in the 1990s and 2000s, resulted in increased inequalities in the distribution of income, socio-​economic conditions, and access to essential services.The social inequalities have led to extreme wealth at one social pole and the growth of poverty on the other. In times of economic crises, we witness a downward social mobility of the middle class, as seen in the cases of Argentina, Tunisia, and Egypt. The result is what some sociologists term a ‘new dualism’ and others (Moser, Herbert, & Makonnen, 1993) ‘urban poverty in a context of structural adjustment’. An understanding of inequality also requires consideration of the implications for low-​ income groups of a growing, wealthier urban elite—​for example, how their demands and influences restructure cities and city planning to serve their own interests. In many metropolises, urban development projects aim at separating them from ‘the poor’ through gated communities and highways that connect their homes, workplaces, and spaces for leisure, thus reproducing urban segregation. Recommended reading: Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013).

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Social and spatial dynamics of exclusion, segregation, and urban inequality Despite the increase in the number of democratically elected regimes and the strengthening of civil society in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the urban masses have not experienced better material living conditions. In fact, in many countries the opposite is true. The overall result of neoliberal pro-​g rowth policies promoted by international organisations has led to increasing social inequalities and associated socio-​economic conditions. While some groups among the poor as well as the middle class benefit from these pro-​g rowth policies, a larger number have borne the brunt of the social costs—​ urban poverty and exclusion are evidently on the increase in many development contexts. In addition, populations that do not fit the Western norm (black people, Latinos, etc.) are permanently excluded as they do not adhere to the capitalist notion of private property (Mitchell, 2003). Conditions of this poverty include inadequate and sub-​par housing, precarious low-​ wage employment, informal labour markets, high levels of unemployment, violence, crime, and insecurity, affecting the middle class as well as the urban under-​class and the working poor. Most sociological studies into these conditions point to the need for more socially inclusive policies as well as specific policies designed to protect the most vulnerable groups from the competitive environment of pro-​g rowth government policies (Lopez, 2004). This is especially true in the case of gender urban policy to address the needs of women head of households that in some metropolises represent up to 40 per cent of all households (Levy, Latendresse, & Carle-​Marsan, 2016). According to Chant (2011), urban poverty has a distinctive gendered dimension. Although women make a crucial contribution to the prosperity of cities through their paid and unpaid labour, they remain at a disadvantage in terms of equitable access to work and living conditions, health and education, assets, and representation in formal institutions and urban governance. Studies suggest that the vast majority of the urban poor rely on self-​help for housing and access to food and water. They do not have ‘decent jobs’ with adequate working conditions and suffer from a high incidence of social exclusion. In many of the megalopolises, especially in Latin America and South Asia, they engage in poorly remunerated economic activities in the informal sector (Portes, 1989) and live in what Davis (2006) terms a ‘planet of slums’. In a recent study, Sultana (2020) takes into account how the lived experiences of this population’s access to social reproduction goods and services are conditioned by interfaces between intersectional socio-​spatial differences (e.g., gender, class, and migrant status) and materiality (e.g., the specificities of goods and services, materiality, spatiality, temporality, and types of infrastructure). Angotti (2013) recognises the development of enclave urbanism as the design and development of fragmented cities and metropolitan regions which contribute to the fragmentation of urban space into exclusive, elite residential enclaves and ghettos, malls, and business districts. Harvey (2006) points out that there is separation between social classes both in spatial contexts and in vertical segregations. Important features of the ongoing process of segregated urbanisation include: the expansion and consolidation of gated and exclusive residential areas; a weakening of public space;4 public insecurity mainly linked to police brutality, systemic racism, crime, and drug trafficking in major urban centres; and growth of peripheries or peri-​urban territories. Recommended reading: Levy et al. (2016); Sultana (2020).

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Forms of urban governance, development policy, and politics in the South In the last 30 years, economic growth has led to economic and social inequalities as well as urban violence affecting the middle and working classes. In most countries, the reaction of the state to this problem is to strengthen law enforcement and/​or to offer palliative social programmes aimed at certain areas of the cities. The urban poor experience the state through both its abjection (e.g., inattention to the precarity of their lives) and presence (e.g., violence) (Das, 2011).The readings in this theme discuss how urban policy is constructed in practice as well as strategies designed to alleviate and reduce the incidence of urban poverty—​to bring about a development process in the urban areas of the Global South. From the 1990s on, multilateral institutions have introduced local governance as a central element of political modernisation in the South where the local could better serve the global. This was the World Bank’s answer to the collapse of public services that characterised the condition of urban centres from the mid-​1980s in many Global South cities. With this goal, governance limits the role of government to a facilitator among market and civil society actors and the state becomes another actor among many. Governance thus encourages citizen participation, but it simultaneously allows for powerful corporations and real-​estate interests to engage in these same public spaces and to compete with the organised poor in shaping urban initiatives (Holston, 2008). Under the free-​market development paradigm, basic needs like clean water, sanitation, healthcare, and education are not considered a human right, but a privilege of the fee-​ paying user even in the poorest low-​income communities. The role of the state is not to be directly responsible for addressing society’s needs and problems, but to facilitate and regulate the business sector in undertaking social functions and economic development. In the process of privatisation, public goods are effectively transferred into private hands, and the government acts on behalf of corporations in operating (or building new and large-​scale) infrastructures and realising their profit potential. There is a prominent place given to public–​private partnerships (PPPs) as a mode of governance, as in the case of Bolivian water management in the late 1990s. In most cities, local governance has been a top-​down process, although in some places like Brazil, it was seen by civil society as bringing the state and political decision making closer to citizens. For example, experiences in participatory budgeting in Brazil and other Latin American cities have led not only to better citizenship participation and substantive democracy, but also to a better quality of life of the working classes thanks to targeted investments in public infrastructure and social spending in poorer neighbourhoods (Abers, 2000). Recommended reading: Holston (2008), Mitchell (2003).

Urban social movements: grassroots, civil society, and popular responses Until the 1980s, the most important social movements were based on organised labour in urban centres or the struggle for land waged in the countryside. However, since the 1980s urban centres in Latin America and Southeast Asia were the staging ground of a new type of urban social movement, which gave rise to a debate about ‘new social movements’ that

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290  Charmain Levy and Alice Moura were not class-​based and that were more heterogeneous in their protests and claims—​ including, for example, issues such as environmental degradation, gender inequality, the violation of human rights, and social exclusions of all sorts. In the 2000s and 2010s new waves of urban protest emerged around the privatisation of public goods and services (Bolivia), massive displacements (Kenya and South Africa), and state-​promoted removals of low-​income populations from city centres in the name of urban renewal. What is specific to many urban social movements is their practice of squatting, land occupation, and street blockades. If we understand territory to embody not only physical space but a set of social relations—​between individuals, classes, social groups, and the state—​the struggles for urban land are fundamentally community and class struggles (Angotti, 2013). Urban citizenship is considered as membership and belonging to an urban community where one’s rights and access to the resources necessary to pursue urban living are guaranteed (Lund, 2011). Within the context of urban citizenship, cities of the Global South are developing at the intersection of two major forces. One is the imposition of dominant projects articulated both globally and locally by recognised agents of development, such as state governments, world organisations, NGOs, and national and multinational corporations. The other comprises the insurgent practices of the urban poor through which these development projects are lived and, typically, transformed, derailed, and/​or reconstituted. Insurgent citizenship describes a process that is an acting counter, a counter-​politics, that destabilises the present and renders it fragile. It disrupts established formulas of rule, conceptions of right, and domination and deference (Holston, 2008). At a local level, not only are these social movements resisting displacement and neoliberal urban management, they are also proposing and promoting a city that reflects their culture, networks, needs, and rights. This happens through both protest and alliances with political society actors leading to innovative urban policy. At the international level, social movements and progressive urban NGOs in major Southern nations led by Brazil and other Latin American nations present the claim to ‘the right to the city’ at national levels within the UN system (Parnell 2016) in order to guarantee it as a universal socio-​ economic human right. Recommended reading: Harvey (2012); Angotti (2013); Parnell (2016).

Notes 1 At the beginning of the independence period in 1957, 15 per cent of Africa’s inhabitants were urban and in 2018 it had risen to 42.5 per cent (United Nations, 2018). 2 ‘Structural’ market-​friendly ‘reforms’ designed and then applied during the 1980s and 1990s include: (i) a set of policies to ‘rebalance’ state and market; (ii) a social policy protective of the most vulnerable groups of the poor; (iii) a decentralised form of local governance and development; and (iv) an overarching comprehensive development framework, and within it a poverty reduction strategy. 3 This is a Marxist conception of class that defines an individual’s relation to production in which the concept of social class can be distinguished from a structural functionalist concept of class as defining an individual’s relationship to work, used to identify occupational groupings. It is also distinguished from a Weberian concept that uses social class to define an individual’s ‘life chances’, determined by an individual’s relationship to the market (capacity to consume) rather than production. 4 Understood as spaces of meeting and exchange between the different groups and of the exercise of urban sociability.

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References Abers, R.N. (2000). Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Amis, P., & Rakodi, C. (1994).“Urban Poverty: Issues for Research and Policy.” Journal of International Development, 6(5): 627–​634. Angotti, T. (2013). The New Century of the Metropolis: Urban Enclaves and Orientalism. London: Routledge. Brenner, N., & Nik, T. (2002). “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Antipode, 34(3): 349–​379. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chant, S. (2011). “Introduction.” UN-​ HABITAT State of Women in Cities 2012/​ 13. Nairobi: UNHABITAT. Cohen, B. (2006). “Urbanization in Developing Countries: Current Trends, Future Projections, and Key Challenges for Sustainability.” Technology in Society, 28: 63–​80. Das,V. (2011). “State, Citizenship and the Urban Poor.” Citizenship Studies, 15: 319–​333. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of Slums. New York:Verso. Glaeser, E., & Abha, J.G. (eds.) (2015). The Urban Imperative:Towards Competitive Cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2006).“Neo-​liberalism as Creative Destruction.” Geografiska.Annaler, 88B(2): 145–​158. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London:Verso. Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Holston, J.,Appadurai,A. (2003).“Cities and Citizenship.” State/​Space . Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Levy, C., Latendresse, A., & Carle-​Marsan, C. (2016). “Gendering the Urban Social Movement and Public Housing Policy in São Paulo.” Latin America Perspectives, 44 (3): 9–​27. López, H. (2004). Pro-​Growth, Pro-​Poor: Is There a Trade-​Off? Washington, DC: The World Bank. Lund, C. (2011). “Property and Citizenship: Conceptually Connecting Land Rights and Belonging in Africa.” Africa Spectrum, 46: 71–​75. Mayer, M. (2007). “Contesting the Neoliberalization of Urban Governance,” in Leitner, H. et al. (eds.), Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, pp. 92–​94. New York: Guilford Press. Mitchell, D. (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press. Mitlin, D., & Satterthwaite, D. (2013). Urban Poverty in the Global South, Scale and Nature. London: Routledge. Moser, C., Herbert, A., & Makonnen, R. (1993). Urban Poverty in the Context of Structural Adjustment: Recent Evidence and Policy Response. Discussion Paper. Washington, DC: World Bank. Parnell, S. (2016).“Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda.” World Development, 78: 529–​540. Portes, A. (ed.) (1989). The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London,Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2006). A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat:The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sultana, F. (2020). “Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship: Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(5): 1407–​1424. United Nations. (2018). Percentage of Population at Mid-​ Year Residing in Urban Areas by Region, Subregion and Country, 1950–​2050. New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Dynamics. UN-​Habitat. (2016). Slum Almanac 2015–​2016: Tracking Improvement in the Lives of Slum Dwellers. Nairobi: UNON.

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34  Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism Leandro Vergara-​Camus

It is rarely acknowledged, but the history of the idea and process of development has always been haunted by the spectre of the peasantry. Indeed, during the Cold War peasant-​ based armed guerrilla movements more than working-​class organisations were the main adversaries of Western-​supported regimes in the Third World. With the defeat or exhaustion of most guerrilla struggles and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the great majority of studies switched their focus to the process of restructuring that neoliberalism was triggering in the countryside of the Global South. But the resurgence of peasant struggles for land across the developing world in the 1990s brought back discussions on the nature and potential of peasant-​led rural movements. With the rise of the alter-​globalisation movement and the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, in which rural movements through La Via Campesina have always played a crucial role, scholars and activists moved from talking about ‘resistance to neoliberalism’ to ‘alternatives to neoliberalism’. Those of us who consider ourselves critical scholars use the term alternative a lot. By this term we want to signal that capitalism or neoliberalism is not inevitable or the only form of organising our societies. But considering the diversity and fragmented nature of subaltern classes we should recognise that there are all kinds of ‘alternatives’ to neoliberalism.They can be nationalist, populist, anti-​neoliberal, anti-​capitalist, anti-​modernist, or modernist and developmentalist, or a complicated mix of all of that. While acknowledging this diversity, the main objective of peasant alternatives is to defend and promote the interests of a particular peasantry and establish the conditions for the survival, reproduction, and (ideally) prosperity of poor rural households as peasants.

What kind of class is the peasantry? The first theme to address when attempting to study, understand, and assess peasant alternatives to neoliberalism is obviously the characteristics of the peasantry as a class. Within agrarian studies there has been a long debate about the nature of the peasantry and its prospects within the development of capitalist societies, which had one of its defining moments in the debate between Alexander Chayanov and Vladimir Ilych Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century (Bernstein, 2009). Chayanov argued that the peasant household functioned under a distinctive logic because it was organised around the need to balance out production and the use of family labour with the demographic cycles of the household. For him, food production of the peasant households was dictated more by the subsistence needs of the family unit than by the possibility of making profits on DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-41

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Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism   293 the market. In contrast, Lenin looked at the peasantry as a class that was made of three strata: rich, middle, and poor peasants. He argued that internal class differentiation would turn the upper stratum into an agrarian capitalist class, while the lower strata would either become rural proletarians or migrate to the city. In sum, the peasantry was doomed to disappear.The 20th century saw numerous replays of this debate probably for most countries of the Third World. Surprisingly, some of the assumptions accepted by the opposed camps of this debate seem to be making a comeback within agrarian studies (Bernstein, 2014; Boltvinik, 2016; McMichael, 2015). Peasants are indeed an anachronistic social category for modernist social scientists because the category does not comply with the images that they have of the individuals or collective subjects, and their persistence does not comply either with the general paths that societies are supposed to take. For liberal political economists in particular, peasants do not seem to follow individualistic profit-​maximising rationality when they take decisions about agricultural production. For Marxist political economists, because peasants still control their means of production (land, agricultural tools, and inputs) they are not proletarians. However, because peasants traditionally tend not to control enough land (or have access to it through patron–​client relationships with landlords), use their own family labour instead of wage labour, do not produce solely for the market, and are subjected to exploitation from dominant classes, they are not fully capitalists either. Furthermore, for Marxists who believed in the need of a proletarian socialist revolution, peasants were an ambiguous class because, being in some sense ‘two classes at the same time’, they could join the working class in favour of a socialist revolution or the landed oligarchy against it (Akram-​Lodhi & Kay, 2010). On the basis of Lenin’s ‘three classes in one’ typology, many have preferred to use the term peasants to refer to the poorest sectors of the peasantry, which reproduced themselves partly through non-​capitalist relations, and the term farmers for those who reproduced themselves mainly through capitalist relations irrespective of the size of their plot (Boltvinik, 2016: 18–​19). The authors who continue to use term peasants today tend to follow these distinctions and see them as part of a class: 1. that has (or fights to reclaim its) access to land, but does not control enough land to accumulate wealth in order to turn it into capital 2. whose control of land allows it to secure part of its subsistence by producing food for self-​consumption and to partly avoid the market for its social reproduction 3. is able to mobilise unpaid family labour from the household and rely on socio-​ cultural practices of solidarity, reciprocity, and redistribution from its kinship network or community (Halperin & Dow, 1977) 4. reproduces a collective identity, based on a particular experience of class, racial, ethnic, or national difference associated with a given territory. Some of these practices are non-​capitalist social relations because they are not mediated by money or commodities. Hence, these practices provide some level of peasant autonomy from the market, not that they exist outside of capitalism.The discussion on the existence or disappearance of the peasantry is in essence a debate about whether these practices still persist and provide some degree of autonomy (Ploeg, 2010) or if these practices have been subsumed by capitalism, making rural subjects completely market-​dependent (Bernstein, 2001). Those who see class as being determined essentially by economic relations tend to reject the idea of the persistence of the peasantry (Bernstein, 2001), while those who see

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294  Leandro Vergara-Camus it fundamentally as a political process (McMichael, 2015) or as a process that combines economic, cultural, and political dimensions (Otero, 1999) tend to emphasise its modern reinvention. Although some of the discussion may seem an exercise in nitpicking, understanding the class nature of peasants is important because it allows us to identify what are the institutions and socio-​cultural practices that they tap into when they build their alternatives. Recommended reading: Akram-​Lodhi and Kay (2010); Bernstein (2009, 2001); Boltvinik and Mann (2016); Halperin and Dow (1977); Otero (1999).

The effects of capitalist development in agriculture and the international food regime on peasants Capitalist expansion triggers processes of de-​peasantisation and proletarianisation, but the incomplete proletarianisation that is typical of the Global South often leads a sector of the peasantry to struggle for re-​peasantisation by getting involved in struggles to regain access to land (Moyo & Yeros, 2005). Hence, although not strictly about peasant alternatives, the research carried out on the global restructuring of agriculture (see Kay, Chapter 31) and the international food regime (Akram-​Lodhi, Chapter 32) constitutes an essential part of any study of peasant alternatives. The changes that have been triggered since the rise of neoliberalism—​particularly market deregulation and the privatisation of state agencies involved in supporting small-​ scale producers through guaranteed prices, subsidised inputs, commercialisation, and technical support in the Global South—​have completely transformed the social, economic, and political conditions upon which peasants managed to get by. What stands out in these new developments is the growing control of agriculture by private corporate firms upstream—​sale of agricultural seeds, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, and machinery and downstream—​purchase, sale, and processing of grains and food (see Weis, 2007). Another element that stands out is that the restructuring of the state has been crucial in facilitating the increased control of capital over agriculture. Recent studies are also showing that climate change mitigation policies are affecting peasant agriculture through the creation of ecological reserves or the development of agrofuel projects (Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012). There is an important debate about the ability of some small-​scale producers to find a space within this new international food regime and about how to turn the tide toward a more socially just outcome. Some authors believe that peasant producers, assisted by new forms of state support, could be linked to agribusiness-​led commodity chains through contract farming, while others believe that this is not a viable option. Recommended readings Akram-​Lodhi and Kay (2009); Fairhead et al. (2012); Moore (2010); Weis (2007).

Control of land, labour, nature, and territory Because they control their means of production, peasants are in a position to choose what, when, and how to produce. Compared to other labourers, they are more in control of their labour power and the labour process. But peasants cannot remain peasants without access to land and without some kind of control over a certain territory and its natural resources. Collective struggles for land hence have always been one of the central struggles of peasant movements, redistribution of land (or agrarian reforms) often being the way of translating this demand into state policy. The expansion of certain industries such as

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Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism   295 mining, oil extraction, forestry, tourism, or plantation agriculture (sugarcane, banana, oil palm, etc.) constantly poses a threat for peasant communities. Collective struggles for land have often also been about continued access and control of natural resources (forest, water, fauna, etc.) that access to land and control of a territory imply. When their territories are not encroached on by industrial developments, demographic pressure on land is one of the most important problems that peasant families have to face. Getting access to land can take on different forms and involves many actors, institutions, and social relationships. At the centre of all this is the power of those who are able to control the mechanisms that determine access through the state or the community. As mentioned, some of the cultural practices within peasant communities are based on practices of solidarity, reciprocity, and redistribution, but many of them are also patriarchal and exploitative, socially enforcing what men and women can or cannot do. No study of peasant alternatives can be complete without exploring the power relations that exist within households and analysing the racial, ethnic, and gender relations within and among rural communities, as well as the ecological foundations upon which a particular type of peasant agriculture is carried out in a particular region of the Global South. Disentangling the foundations of these practices and their consequences for the different members of peasant households and communities can allow us to assess if peasant alternatives to neoliberalism are indeed ‘alternative’ or the extent to which they tackle the issues that reproduce inequality and exploitation not only of peasant communities and within peasant communities, but also within peasant households. The issue here is about assessing how ‘democratic’ a peasant alternative is by examining how all forms of inequalities are tackled, how social mobilisation is organised, and how political consciousness is acquired through the political practices that the peasant organisation reproduces on the inside. Codified in what is often called ‘traditional knowledge’, generation after generation, peasants reproduced and modified their methods of farming and of using and conserving natural resources. Considering their precarious dependence on nature, the main objective of this traditional knowledge is to maintain a balance between the exploitation and conservation of nature.This agricultural knowledge is however not static and is subject to trial and error of new methods, as well as the use of modern science and technology.The agro-​ ecology movement has emerged recently with the conscious objective of drawing from, supporting, and enhancing the accumulated peasant agricultural knowledge in order to build an alternative to the fossil fuel-​dependent technologies used by industrial and green revolution agriculture (Altieri & Toledo, 2011; Holt-​Gimenez, 2006). An assessment of peasant alternatives to neoliberalism would have to also determine how environmentally sustainable and economically feasible this alternative is. Recommended reading: Akram-​Lodhi, Borras, & Kay (2008); Altieri and Toledo (2011); Fernandes (2005); Holt-​Gimenez (2006);Vergara-​Camus (2014); Wolford (2010); Zibechi (2012).

Alternative to what? Avoid, integrate, or create markets? In their attempts to carve out a space for themselves within the process of capitalist development that is controlled by large capitalist farmers and corporate oligopolies, peasants have often sought to find ways to deal with market forces that would be more beneficial to them.These coping strategies can be classified in three types: market avoidance, market integration, and market creation (see Ploeg (2010) for a different though complementary approach).

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296  Leandro Vergara-Camus These strategies are not mutually exclusive and can be combined and intertwined in complex ways. Strategies of market avoidance are those that imply a conscious decision of retreating from market relations into subsistence production by concentrating efforts on food crops for self-​consumption (rice, maize, beans, potatoes, yam, cassava, etc.), replacing agricultural inputs that have to be bought by those produced ‘for free’ by nature and humans (what Ploeg calls self-​provisioning and co-​production), or by tapping into collective socio-​cultural practices of solidarity, reciprocity, or redistribution that do not involve monetary exchange. Strategies of market integration are those that imply a deeper involvement with the market, whether as seller of agricultural products, as wage worker in agriculture or other industries, or as member of a larger producer organisation that will allow the peasant household to yield better negotiating power vis-​à-​vis market intermediaries. Those who have sufficient and adequate access to land and natural resources can do the former as a household by switching from food crops to cash crops (coffee, cacao, bananas) or cattle. The option of selling their labour power in exchange for a wage is something that peasant households tend to do periodically, but cannot be considered a collective response.The option of joining forces in order to benefit from what economists call ‘economies of scale’ at the level of production, or simply economic leverage in terms of purchasing power for inputs, or for setting the price of a given commodity, continues to be at the heart of countless experiences of producers’ associations and cooperatives. Finally, the creation of new markets for their products has recently become an important coping strategy for a minority of organised peasant producers since the 1980s. These new markets take the form of fairtrade networks, organic production, local farmers’ markets, alternative labelling and certification schemes, and so forth. Many of these initiatives have sought to provide an alternative to the capitalist market by guaranteeing a just price for producers, linking producers and consumers in more ethical ways, and supporting local development. However, a great deal of discussion has been triggered by the market-​ friendly approach adopted in particular by the ‘fairtrade’ movement, its problematic certification mechanisms, and its mainstreaming into (or co-​optation by) the global food industry (see Fridell, 2015; Raynolds et al., 2007). To understand the nature of peasant alternatives to neoliberalism, students of development would have to assess the ways in which households and collective strategies are intertwined and reinforce each other. But it is crucial to determine if the particular combination that has been found by a peasant movement or initiative can provide a decent livelihood for them, by protecting their control of land and natural resources and contributing to democratise peasant household and communities. Recommended reading: Bernstein (2014); Fridell (2015); McMichael (2015); Otero (1999, 2004); Ploeg (2010); Raynolds et al. (2007);Vergara-​Camus (2014).

Peasant movements and politics today: outside, within, or through the state As mentioned earlier, peasants have been key social subjects of radical politics. They have also been the social basis of quite a few reactionary and right-​wing movements. But 2007 marked the moment in which the majority of the world’s population was no longer rural. Considering the complexity of the rural areas of the Global South, peasants are probably the majority in only a few less developed countries and there are many countries in which they are actually not even the majority of the rural population. It posed the question of the power that peasant movements can mobilise on their own, but also and more

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Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism   297 importantly of the kind of peasant demands and proposals that can coincide with those of other subaltern groups of society. How can peasant movements convince other groups to join forces with them to either build alternatives to neoliberalism outside of the state or to pressure the state to implement certain alternative policies? A third pathway is to occupy the state in order to carry out an anti-​neoliberal project, while a fourth approach is to build transnational networks in order to build a common view and coordinate campaigns (Borras, Edelman, & Kay, 2008). To my limited knowledge, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas is probably the only peasant movement that has taken the first path, although to a great extent on its own.The second path is taken by most peasant movements across the Global South, including Brazil’s powerful Landless Workers’ Movement (the MST). The third path is taken by peasant movements that are strong enough to yield some political influence or have links to political parties. The fourth path is what the rural transnational movement La Via Campesina has been about for more than three decades. Out of all the discussion and alternative proposals that have emerged in the last three decades of resistance to neoliberalism, none have had more visibility than those of La Via Campesina. Its global campaign for agrarian reform contributed to putting redistributive agrarian reform back on the international agenda. Its idea of food sovereignty, which challenges the current corporate-​driven global food system, has established itself as a competing paradigm and is generating heated discussions on the Left. One of the least-​ explored issues is the role of the state in food sovereignty. Indeed many principles of food sovereignty require strong state or societal control over private corporations, but the food sovereignty movement does not seem to have a clear conception of what the capitalist state is and how it can be transformed or controlled to put its principles in action. Some of the ideas behind the food sovereignty movement have been put to the test of policy recently in Latin America. In Bolivia and Ecuador, peasant and indigenous movements played a key role, first in bringing down neoliberal governments, then in electing a left-​ of-​ centre nationalist government, and finally inserting pro-​ peasant principles (like food sovereignty, the social function of land, or communitarian forms of production and exchange) into the Constitution of these two countries. However, the results have not been impressive (Zibechi, 2012). In none of the countries governed by leftist governments in Latin America was there an extensive redistributive agrarian reform. In all cases, their policies have continued to promote agribusiness, only funnelling comparatively very few financial resources to small-​scale producers. Only in Brazil did the state promote family agriculture through its programme of buying food for school meals from agrarian reform settlers. However, this pales in comparison to all the resources and policies that were mobilised in the promotion of agribusiness. In almost all the cases, the needs of rural workers were ignored (Kay & Vergara-​Camus, 2017). Hence, any study of peasant alternatives to neoliberalism would have to venture into a complex critical analysis of the power of peasant movements and their strategies towards the state and other sectors of their civil society to see which sector of the peasantry they have benefited in the last instance. Not in a fortuitous way, this last discussion brings us back to the question of what kind of class the peasantry is.This underscores the need to examine the peasantry in all its complexity and—​as much as is possible—​free from pre-​conceived assumptions.The peasantry is not by essence anti-​capitalist, although it reproduces itself partly through non-​capitalist socio-​cultural practices. Consequently, the orientation of a particular peasant alternative will depend on the contradictory political struggles that peasant movements are involved in. Peasant alternatives will not simply be determined by the ‘economic class positions’ of

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298  Leandro Vergara-Camus the peasants involved (smallholders or semiproletarians), but also by their attempt to politically transcend these, find basis for unity, and reach out to other sectors. Recommended reading: Akram-​Lodhi, Borras, and Kay (2007); Boras, Edelman, and Kay (2008); Deere and Royce (2009); Kay and Vergara-​Camus (2017); Petras and Veltmeyer (2001); Zibechi (2012).

References Akram-​Lodhi, H., Borras Jr., S.M., & Kay, C. (eds.) (2007). Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization. London: Routledge. Akram-​Lodhi, H., & Kay, C. (eds.) (2009). Peasants and Globalization. Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question. London: Routledge. Akram-​Lodhi, H., & Kay, C. (2010). “Surveying the Agrarian Question (Part 1): Unearthing Foundations, Exploring Diversity.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(1): 177–​202. Altieri, M., & Toledo, V.M. (2011). “The Agroecological Revolution in Latin America: Rescuing Nature, Ensuring Food Sovereignty and Empowering Peasants.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(3): 587–​612. Bernstein, H. (2001). “The ‘Peasantry’ pp. 25–​51 in Global Capitalism: Who, Where and Why?” in Panitch, L. & Leys, C. (eds.), Socialist Register 2001: Working Classes, Global Realities. London: Merlin Press. Bernstein, H. (2009). “V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: Looking Back, Looking Forward.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1): 55–​81. Bernstein, H. (2014). “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’: A Sceptical View.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6): 1031–​1063. Boltvinik, J., & Mann, S.A. (eds.) (2016). Peasant Poverty and Persistence in the 21st Century. Theories, Debates, Realities and Policies. London: Zed Books. Borras Jr., S.M., Edelman, M., & Kay, C. (eds.) (2008). Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization. London: Wiley-​Blackwell. Deere, C., & Royce, F.S. (eds.) (2009). Rural Social Movements in Latin America. Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Fairhead, J., Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (2012). “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2): 237–​261. Fernandes Mancano, B. (2005).“The Occupation as a Form of Access to Land in Brazil:A Theoretical and Methodological Contribution” in Moyo, S. & Yeros, P. (eds.), Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, pp. 311–​40. London: Zed Books. Fridell, G. (2015). Alternative Trade. Legacies for the Future. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Halperin, R., & Dow, J. (1977). Peasant Livelihood. Studies in Economic Anthropology and Cultural Ecology. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Holt-​Gimenez, E. (2006). Campesino a Campesino: Voices from the Farmer-​to-​farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in Latin America. Oakland: Food First. Kay, C., & Vergara-​Camus, L. (eds.) (2017). “The Agrarian and Agricultural Policies of Left-​Wing Governments in Latin America.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 17(2) (special issue). McMichael, P. (2015).“A Comment on Henry Bernstein’s Way with Peasants, and Food Sovereignty.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(1): 193–​204. Moore, J. (2010). “The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-​Ecology, 1450–​2010.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3): 389–​413. Moyo, S., & Yeros, P. (eds.) (2005). Reclaiming the Land. The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: Zed Book. Otero, G. (ed.) (2004). Mexico in Transition. Neoliberal Globalism, the State and Civil Society. London: Zed Books. Otero, G. (1999). Farewell to the Peasantry. Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico , Boulder: Westview Press.

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Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism   299 Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2001). “Are Latin American Peasant Movements Still a Force for Change: Some New Paradigm Revisited?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 28(2): 83–​118. Ploeg van der, J.D. (2010). “The Peasantries of the Twenty-​First Century: The Commoditisation Debate Revisited.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(1):1–​30. Raynolds, L., Murray, D., & Wilkinson, J. (2007). Fair Trade.The Challenge of Transforming Globalization. London: Routledge. Vergara-​Camus, L. (2014). Land and Freedom. The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism. London: Zed Book. Weis, T. (2007). The Global Food Economy.The Battle for the Future of Farming. London: Zed Books. Wolford, W. (2010). This Land is Our Land. Social Mobilization and the Meaning of Land in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. Zibechi, R. (2012). Territories in Resistance. A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. Oakland: AK Press.

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Part IX

Development, climate change, and the environment

The planetary crisis, witnessed at multiple levels from the place-​based environmental degradation and destruction associated with extractive capitalism to global crises such as climate change, raises critical questions for development studies. Put simply, how can we best confront and address these challenges in ways which simultaneously address the need for a transition to a just world? Critical development studies can provide some answers. Firstly, it must be understood that the environmental crisis is one form of capitalist crisis (See Chapter 8). This is examined in detail in Chapter 35 by Darcy Tetreault in a chapter which analyses human–​nature relations, including the ‘rifts’ between humans and nature, drawing on the work of eco-​Marxist writers. His chapter reviews how the analysis of capitalism, as a system, sheds light on how and why the planet’s environment has reached its current crisis point. From this starting point, particular aspects of the environmental crisis are examined in the other three chapters in this part. Marcus Taylor, in Chapter 36, examines climate change. He highlights that climate change impacts are likely to be most severely felt by the countries of, and populations in, the Global South. Central to his discussions of mitigation, green development, adaptation, and resilience, therefore, are issues of power and who is gaining the benefit from, and bearing the costs of, policies. He also raises the important question of what ‘development’ means in a carbon-​constrained world. The transition away from a carbon-​dominated energy system towards renewables and ‘clean’ energy systems is the subject of Chapter 37 by Leandro Vergara-​Camus. He argues that the focus should not just be on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions but on the extractive processes that are associated with energy transition; if it is not then we run the risk of the transition to new energy sources reinforcing old patterns of global inequality. An example of the problems—​social, economic, and environmental—​of extractivism is provided by Hamza Hamouchene in his case study of North Africa in Chapter 38. He documents the ways in which social conflicts have been exacerbated in this process and how new forms of social mobilisation have occurred and he proposes ways in which the region could move towards a more sustainable future.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. 2. 3. 4.

Is capitalism compatible with environmental sustainability? How can climate change be addressed in a globally socially just way? Discuss the relationship between extractivism and environmental justice. What does ‘development’ mean in a carbon-​constrained world? DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-42

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35  Eco-​Marxist lenses for viewing human–​nature relations Darcy Tetreault

This chapter seeks to provide a brief guide to four critical issues regarding human–​nature relations from an eco-​Marxist perspective. The first section outlines Marx’s view of how capitalism develops through human–​nature relations. The second theorises processes of capital accumulation driving the enclosure of the commons, as well as struggles to defend and recreate common goods linked to collective practices. The third analyses capitalism’s contradictions to nature; and the fourth examines the concept of metabolic rift in the age of Capitalocene. With reference to key texts in an abundant and rapidly growing body of ecological Marxist literature, this guide seeks to point readers to landmark contributions and to ongoing debates that can provide the basis for theorising human–​nature relations from a critical perspective, and for engaging in the collective praxis of building sustainable alternatives from below.

The development of capitalism through human–​nature relations We begin with the ontological premise that human beings are part of nature. Marx (1961: 74) wrote that Nature is man’s inorganic body … with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature (italics in original). Further, he stressed that human beings’ material exchanges with nature are mediated by labour, which he considered to be both a natural and social force. According to Marx (1977: 283), labour is ‘a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature’. The central concept here is that of metabolism (Stoffwechsel), implying material exchange. This labour-​mediated material exchange is, in Marx’s view, ‘the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-​imposed condition of human existence’ (Marx, 1977: 290). As such, it is also the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between woman and nature, which is distinct from that of man under capitalism, not only because of differences in body organs but also because of the unpaid domestic and subsistence labour imposed on women by the historical interplay of class forces and patriarchy in order to make capital accumulation possible (Dordoy & Mellor, 2000; Salleh, 1994). DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-43

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304  Darcy Tetreault While throughout history and in all societies human labour shapes materials to produce use values, in the capitalist mode of production, labour is mobilised and exploited to shape materials into commodities, which have both exchange value (monetary) and use value (or nobody would buy them), ultimately to accumulate capital. To be sure, use values are derived from ‘the usefulness of a thing’ to satisfy a specific human need; ‘they constitute the material content of wealth’ (Marx, 1977: 126). Both labour and nature contribute to the production of use values or wealth. In dialectical relation, exchange value is a social relation that represents the necessary wage–​labour time objectified in a commodity (Marx, 1977: 125–​163). Exchange value, in a capitalist system of production under conditions of competitive monetary accumulation, regulates the growth and development of human production (Burkett, 2014: 63–​64). From a Marxist perspective, this qualitative difference—​between modes of production geared primarily toward creating use values and capitalist production oriented in the first place to realising exchange value—​is at the basis of a continuous drive for the capitalist system to grow and expand. Capitalism is a mode of production that is intrinsically geared toward endless capital accumulation; it must grow in order to survive. Moreover, the political stability of the capitalist state rests on its ability to foment economic growth. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’, as (Marx, 1977: 742) famously stated as regards to the capitalist system’s built-​in orientation to expand. An economy that stagnates is by definition in crisis; and those who suffer the most in times of economic crisis are members of the working class and marginalised segments of society. ‘Under dictate from the accumulation process, capitalism as a mode of production must expand continuously if it is to survive’, Smith (2008: 71) affirms, adding that to (re) produce surplus value capital stalks the earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects, and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process. In this way, a process of uneven and combined development unfolds, whereby extractive activities and cheap labour in the Global South provide low-​cost materials to the industrial production of goods for consumption in the Global North, with reflections of both tendencies in regions of opposite hemispheres. As the social relations of capitalism unfold along these lines, nature is ‘produced’ in the image of capital (Smith, 2008), reflecting its multiple contradictions. Smith’s production-​of-​nature thesis rests on the premise that nature and society are inseparable, or put differently, that the accumulation of capital and evolving environmental conditions are joined in dialectical unity. Jason Moore sums up this idea by proposing that, ‘capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through nature–​society relations’ (Moore, 2011: 1). Recommended reading: Burkett (2014); Moore (2011); Smith (2008).

Capital accumulation and the enclosure of the commons The growth and geographical expansion of the capitalist system have historically been achieved, not only through the reproduction of capitalist relations of commodity production based on the extraction of surplus value from labour, but also via a continuous process of enclosing the commons. Marx referred to this latter process as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’

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Eco-Marxist views of humanity and nature  305 accumulation, whereby peasants (direct producers) were violently separated from the land that sustained their productive activities. In Volume I of Capital, Marx (1977) illustrates this process by examining the ‘classic case’ of England, where ‘the commons’ (communal land, natural resources, and usufruct rights) were ‘enclosed’ (that is, in today’s parlance, ‘privatised’) between the 15th and 18th centuries to produce wool and other materials for nascent industries. In this explicative model, the enclosures separate direct producers from their means of production, thereby driving a process of proletarianisation, whereby people ‘freed’ from the land are also ‘free’ to sell their labour to the owners of industry in an effort to meet their basic needs. Parenti (2015: 838–​839) points to how this process was bound to state formation, such that by the 18th century, state officials acting on behalf of the interest of the capitalist class imposed the ‘Enclosure Acts’ to consolidate the process of enclosing open fields and common land. Absent in Marx’s account of primitive accumulation is any mention of the ‘Great Witch-​Hunt’ of the 16th and 17th centuries, even though ‘this state-​sponsored terror campaign was central to the defeat of the European peasantry, facilitating its expulsion from the lands it once held in common’ (Federici, 2009: 30). As Federici (2009: 11) explains, the witch-​hunt sought to destroy the control that women had exercised over their reproductive function, turning them into ‘machine[s]‌for the production of new workers’. Luxemburg (2003, originally published in 1913) argued that processes of primitive accumulation can be observed not only during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, but throughout the history of capitalism as an integral part of the system’s expansion around the globe via colonialism and imperialism. In this account, capitalism requires non-​capitalist surroundings in order to survive and thrive. As Luxemburg puts it: ‘capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-​capitalist strata and social organisations existing side by side with it. It is not merely a question of a market for the additional product’ (Luxemburg, 2003: 345).These non-​capitalist surroundings are essentially ‘the commons’, which is a concept that can be extended beyond land, natural resources, and human-​made infrastructure (material goods) to include symbolic goods and forms of collective action intrinsically linked to the former. As a historical process, capitalist accumulation exhibits two dynamics that are organically and dialectically related: expanded reproduction, based on the exploitation of labour; and dispossession, entailing the establishment of private ownership of assets hitherto under public or communal domain. The first ‘concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced—​the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate … Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail’. The second ‘concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-​capitalist modes of production … [where] (f) orce, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed’ (Luxemburg, 2003: 432). Indeed, as Marx observed, the history of enclosing the commons, ‘is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’ (Marx, 1977: 875); and this continues to be the case today where people who organise to resist extractive activities are subject to multiple forms of repression, including murder. Along these lines, Harvey’s (2003) notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ builds on Marx’s and Luxemburg’s work by providing a critical frame for analysing the contemporary dynamics of dispossession or enclosure of the commons. According to Harvey, in the context of an overproduction crisis that first manifested itself in the 1970s, neoliberal structural adjustments were promoted during the 1980s and onward by Washington, in the interest of the capitalist class, to give impetus to a new round of capital accumulation

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306  Darcy Tetreault through the dispossession of diverse public and common goods. In this way, dispossession gained momentum as a means of capital accumulation in the neoliberal era. It bears mentioning that this explicative model has been particularly fecund among critical scholars to explain the rise in the number of social environmental conflicts around mining activities in Latin America and Africa since the turn of the century (Sacher, 2015). To be sure, Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession is very broad and somewhat ambiguous. In effect, it encompasses not just the dispossession of common goods and the privatisation of public goods, but also the projection of state power to privilege the interests of nationally based capital (i.e., imperialism), the transfer of claims to assets from one section of capital to another, and higher levels of working-​class exploitation. Along these lines, Brenner (2006: 98) argues that the concept is blurred by the inclusion of ‘processes and state policies quite normally associated with capital accumulation where capitalist social-​property relations already hold sway’. Even putting common and public goods in the same bag is problematic for some historians and theoreticians of the commons, since the state’s appropriation of the commons is considered to be in itself a form of enclosure and an act of dispossession (Laval & Dardot, 2015; Linebaugh, 2008). From this critical perspective, the commons are a relation exhibiting a twofold character: common goods that have use value to a plurality (that is, to a group of people); and organised collective action on the part of that plurality to claim and sustain ownership of common goods (De Angelis, 2017: 29–​30). The latter characteristic is what Linebaugh (2008: 279) refers to as ‘commoning’ to emphasise that elements of the natural environment (like air or water) are not common goods because of their intrinsic properties; they are only so to the extent that social struggles are successful in keeping them out of reach of market forces that seek to commodify them or to degrade them by externalising production costs. Laval and Dardot (2015) make the same point by warning against the reification of the commons and by advocating for conceptualising ‘what is common’ (lo común) as a form of praxis aimed at establishing a bundle of rights within a system of rules for the collective use of both material and non-​material goods. Recommended reading: De Angelis (2017); Federici (2009); Marx (1977: 873–​940).

Capitalism’s contradictions to nature In what has now become a classic text for ecological Marxism, O’Connor (1998) proposed that capitalist development has two basic contradictions that make it prone to crisis.The first, analysed by Marx, is between capital and labour, tending towards overproduction crises, otherwise known as realisation crises. This occurs when individual capitals ‘attempt to defend or restore profits by increasing labour productivity, speeding up work, cutting wages, and using other time-​honored ways of getting more production from fewer workers’ (O’Connor, 1998: 240).The unintended consequence is a lack of effective demand to realise the surplus value objectified in commodities. The second contradiction has to do with capital’s relation to the ‘conditions of production’, including: (i) the natural environment, or what Marx referred to as ‘external physical conditions’; (ii) the reproduction of labour power, called the “personal conditions of production’; and (iii) ‘the communal conditions of social production’, with reference to human-​made infrastructure, particularly for communication and transport. Undermining these conditions leads to rising production costs in two ways: ‘when individual capitals defend or restore profits by strategies that degrade or fail to maintain over time the material conditions of their own production’ and ‘when social movements demand that

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Eco-Marxist views of humanity and nature  307 capital better provide for the maintenance and restoration for these conditions of life’ (O’Connor, 1998: 242). The possibility of capital internalising environmental costs and reconstructing the conditions of production through state regulation in order to restore or increase its productivity in the long run is remote, from O’Connor’s perspective (1998: 246), since this would require coordinating enormous investments and renouncing profits in the short run, something that is contrary to the self-​expanding and anti-​ environmental logic of capital. O’Connor’s theoretical explanation provides a logically coherent argument that links ecological scarcity and economic crisis to the growth of new social movements, particularly the environmental movement. In O’Connor’s scheme, labour movements stem from the first contradiction and new social movements from the second. However, this analytical separation has been criticised by Burkett (2014: 1993–​1997), who argues that it digresses from Marx’s approach, which treats both social and ecological conditions of production as part and parcel of capital’s exploitation of labour. Moreover, Burkett suggests that O’Connor’s second contradiction constructs ‘false divisions’ between the labour movement and environmental struggles, whose objective long-​term interests coincide (Burkett, 2014: 197). From an eco-​feminist perspective, O’Connor’s second contradiction undertheorises women’s reproductive work by subsuming it under the category of ‘personal’ or ‘communal’ conditions of production (Dordoy & Mellor, 2000: 49). In Salleh’s (1994: 133) early formulation: ‘In addition to being a natural resource, women using hands and brain in caring labour become subsumed under capitalist patriarchy as conditions of existence’ (italics in original). This is part of the nature–​woman–​labour nexus that she and other eco-​feminists point to as a fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Another criticism that has been levelled against O’Connor’s two-​ contradictions scheme has to do with its tendency toward economic reductionism. Along these lines, Foster (2002a: 10) observes: The whole thrust of the ‘second contradiction’ conception is that once ecological damage is translated into an economic crisis for capitalism a feedback mechanism is set into play, both directly through capital’s attempt to hold down the growing costs of production associated with the undermining of its conditions of production, and indirectly through attempts by social movements to force the system to internalize the externalities. His contention is that there are no such feedback mechanisms for capitalism as a whole and that we should not underestimate capitalism’s capacity to accumulate in the midst of widespread ecological destruction. Burkett concurs, noting that, ‘capital can in principle continue to accumulate under any natural conditions, however degraded, so long as there is not a complete extinction of human life’ (Burkett, 2014: 196). In Harvey’s (2014) formulation, capital’s relation to nature is just one of 17 contradictions and one of three he considers to be dangerous to both capital and humanity, the other two being endless compound growth and universal alienation. Like Foster and Burkett, Harvey (2014: 249) believes that, ‘it may be perfectly possible for capital to continue to circulate and accumulate in the midst of environmental catastrophes’. Further, in his opinion, environmental justice movements, which include community-​based struggles against extractive activities, ‘do not, as of now, constitute any mayor threat to the survival of capital’ (Harvey, 2014: 250). While this does not preclude hope in the possibility of a

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308  Darcy Tetreault collective political subjectivity coalescing around struggles to overcome capital’s tendency to alienate workers (from the product of their labour, from each other, and from the natural environment), it does imply that Polanyian double movements in response to ecological destruction and threats are not automatic, nor necessarily effective. To be sure, Polanyi (1944) famously theorised the double movement as a dialectical process between the expansion of self-​regulating market forces and social struggles aimed at limiting the destructive consequences of these forces, particularly as regards the commodification of labour and land. This theory was meant to explain historical processes unfolding during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. It has been criticised for being functionalist and for reifying society. Nevertheless, it has provided a source of inspiration for theorising social movements in the neoliberal era, including with respect to struggles around extractivism. Along these lines, Castree (2008) observes in a growing body of critical literature on ‘the neoliberalization of nature’ a tendency to draw on and combine the theoretical insights of Marx, O’Connor, and Polanyi. From this view, private and governmental agencies that seek to enclose the commons are confronted with the conformation of collective agencies of resistance that struggle to defend or (re)create the commons. These struggles do not emerge as a mechanical response to dispossession and environmental deterioration, but rather as a process of collective agency formation in specific local and regional contexts. Recommended reading: Castree (2008); Harvey (2014); O’Connor (1998).

Metabolic rifts In the capitalist system of production, which treats labour, land, and natural resources as ‘fictitious commodities’ (Polanyi, 1944), workers are estranged not just from their labour activity but also from their active role in transforming nature (Foster, 2000: 73). With a view to this disconnection, Foster (2000: 158) suggests that, ‘the concept of metabolism provided Marx with a concrete way of expressing the notion of the alienation of nature (and its relation to the alienation of labour)’. Marx theorised that capitalism produces a metabolic rift in human–​nature relations, which he analysed in relation to soil exhaustion, drawing on the work of German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig. His conclusions in this regard are neatly summed up in the following passage: If they [large-​scale industry and industrially pursued large-​scale agriculture] are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-​ power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the latter course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade or their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil (Marx, 1981: 950). This aspect of Marx’s work has been carefully studied by Foster (1999, 2000, 2002b), Burkett (2014), and others, who ‘insist that Marx developed a systematic approach to nature and to environmental degradation (particularly in relation to the fertility of the soil) that was intricately bound to the rest of his thought and raised the question of ecological sustainability’ (Foster, 1999: 372). Accordingly, Foster (2002b: 155–​170) has sought to extend Marx’s analysis of metabolic rifts by proposing that modern-​day industrial agricultural

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Eco-Marxist views of humanity and nature  309 production, whose value chains are dominated by large transnational corporations, have further separated livestock raising from the cultivation of crops, thereby converting animal excrement into an environmental hazard, whereas before it served as fertiliser. In a more recent book with Clark and York, Foster makes reference to nine planetary boundaries or ‘rifts’ analysed by a group of researchers led by Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre: climate change, biodiversity loss, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater use, change in land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution (Foster, Clark, & York, 2010: 13–​19). According to this group of scientists, the first three boundaries are at their tipping points and the other six signify the onset of irreversible environmental degradation. Foster, Clark, and York (2010) link their analysis of contemporary metabolic rifts to the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, introduced by Paul Crutzen to refer to a new epoch in the climatic and geological evolution of the planet, one in which anthropogenic activity determines the course of dramatic alterations. Crutzen and Stoermer (2011: 17) emphasise ‘the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing the use of the term “Anthropocene” for the current geological epoch’. Aside from using gender-​biased terminology, this lumping together of all of humanity into one collective culprit is something that Moore (2017: 596) criticises, proposing instead the concept of ‘capitalocene’ to represent ‘the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital’. In this alternative proposal, the time frame for detecting metabolic rifts widens, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century, which is the typical starting point for the Anthropocene, to 500 years ago when capitalist relations of production began to develop in Europe and to spread outward to the rest of the world. In the Latin American context, this implies rooting historical analysis of environmental change in the colonisation of nature that began after the Conquest and continues to this day (Alimonda, 2011). Recommended reading: Foster (2000); Moore (2017).

References Alimonda, H. (2011). “La colonialidad de la naturaleza: una aproximación a la ecología política latinoamericana,” in Alimonda, H. (ed.), La naturaleza colonizada: ecología política y minería en América Latina, pp. 21–​58. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Brenner, R. (2006). “What is and what is not Imperialism.” Historical Materialism, 14(4): 79–​105. Burkett, P. (2014). Marx and Nature. A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Castree, N. (2008). “Neoliberalising Nature: The Logics of Deregulation and Reregulation.” Environmental Planning A: Economy and Space, 40(1): 131–​152. Crutzen, P.J., & Stoermer, E.F. (2000). “The ‘Anthropocene,’” in McKibben, B. (ed.), The Global Warming Reader, pp. 69–​79. London: Penguin Books. Crutzen, P.J. & Stoermer, E.F. (2000). ”The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” Global Change Newsletter, 41: 17–​18. De Angelis, M. (2017). Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Zed Books. Dordoy, A., & Mellor, M. (2000). “Ecosocialism and Feminism: Deep Materialism and the Contradictions of Capitalism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 11(3): 41–​61. Federici, S. (2009). Caliban and the Witch (3rd ed). Brooklyn: Atonomedia. Foster, J.B. (1999). “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Joournal of Sociology, 105(2): 366–​405. Foster, J.B. (2000). Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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310  Darcy Tetreault Foster, J.B. (2002a). “II. Capitalism and Ecology.The Nature of the Contradiction.” Monthly Review, 54(4): 6–​16. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.14452/​MR-​054-​04-​2002-​08_​2. Foster, J.B. (2002b). Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J.B., Clark, B., & York, R. (2010). The Ecological Rift. Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laval, C., & Dardot, P. (2015). Común. Ensayo sobre la revolución en el siglo XXI. Barcelona: Gedisa. Linebaugh, P. (2008). Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press. Luxemburg, R. (2003). The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1961). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. (1977). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy,Vol. I. New York:Vintage Books. Marx, K. (1981). Capital,Vol. III. London: Penguin Classics. Moore, J. (2017). “The Capitalocene, Part I: on the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3): 594–​630. Moore, J.W. (2011). “Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-​ Ecology.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1): 1–​46. O’Connor, J. (1998). Natural Causes. Essays in Ecological Marxism. London: Guilford Press. Parenti, C. (2015). “The Environment Making State: Territory, Nature, and Value.” Antipode, 47(4): 829–​848. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Sacher, W. (2015). “Megaminería y desposesión en el Sur: un análisis comparativo.” Íconos, 51, 19(1): 99–​116. Salleh,A. (1994).“Nature,Woman, Labour, Capital,” in O’Connor, M. (ed.), Is Capitalism Sustainable? pp. 106–​124. New York: Guilford. Smith, N. (2008). Uneven Development. Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, 3rd ed. Athens:The University of Georgia Press.

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36  Climate change and development Marcus Taylor

Climate change has become the defining development issue of the 21st century. The World Bank in its 2019 Action Plan, for example, claims that failure to recognise and act upon climate change threatens the achievement of all key development objectives, including the Sustainable Development Goals, thereby imperilling the very idea of global development (World Bank, 2019). These troubling impacts are envisaged to result from a series of shocks and stresses that impact upon livelihoods and human well-​being. Climate shocks refer to the potential for increased incidences of extreme weather, specifically a growing occurrence and intensity of storms, floods, heat waves, and other potential hazards that threaten lives and damage physical infrastructure. Climate stresses are the longer-​term impacts of rising temperatures and changing hydro-​climatic patterns upon ecosystems, with important ramifications for agriculture, water systems, and food security. Significantly, both types of impact are estimated to fall most severely on the developing world where they are amplified by a relative lack of resources, capacity, and infrastructure to effectively respond (UNDP, 2007). For critical development studies, climate change raises pressing analytical, ethical, and practical questions. By engaging with mainstream thinking, critical approaches have sought to shift climate change debates from a narrow focus on technical issues towards broader ethical questions around the interface of climate change and development. To do so, they often use the term ‘climate justice’ as a way to highlight the inequities surrounding who benefits most from carbon-​intensive development and who bears the brunt of climatic shifts. Two key questions emerge. First, given the universally acknowledged need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, critical scholars ask how the responsibility for cutting emissions should be distributed between countries and how equitable low-​carbon development pathways can be formed. Second, given that climate change impacts are projected to fall most severely on countries in the Global South, critical scholars have questioned who is most vulnerable to climate change and how public policies might prioritise these groups. In this chapter, we examine these questions through four interrelated sections on mitigation, green development, adaptation, and resilience, respectively.

Mitigation To limit future global warming to under the 2°C limit that scientists argue represents a pivotal threshold, most fossil fuels will need to stay buried under the ground. This, of course, raises pivotal questions regarding the future of development. Oil and coal are the mainstays of powering development: they provide the primary means of electricity generation for both industrial and consumption purposes. Equally, oil underscores DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-44

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312  Marcus Taylor contemporary transportation for both people and goods on local and global scales. As such, a sharp contradiction emerges between mitigation goals—​that is, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions—​and existing development strategies that are carbon-​intensive. At the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, for example, India caused considerable disquiet by insisting on the right to increase its consumption of coal for development purposes, including meeting its target of providing electricity to its entire citizenry. At the core of India’s argument was the notion of historical responsibility for climate change, in which already developed countries had developed in carbon-​ intensive manners and therefore should carry the brunt of mitigation efforts. In short, they argued that low-​income countries couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t sacrifice development on the altar of climate change mitigation (Dubash, 2019). This political question over responsibility has been in play since the first United Nations climate change summit in 1992. The tentative agreement reached at the most recent 2015 Paris Climate Summit does not fully resolve this issue. Instead, it sets out a principle of common but differentiated responsibility. Under this principle, countries set out mitigation targets known as intended nationally determined commitments (INDCs) that in theory balance their responsibility to reduce emissions with their ability to do so given their level of development. This, of course, is a loose compromise that leaves any firm mitigation commitments and financing pledges vague and unresolved. Developing countries have repeatedly sought to formalise the differentiated responsibility facet of the negotiations, but many Western countries have fiercely resisted. The United States in particular has steadfastly rejected any wording that implies the liability of past emitters for future damage to lives and livelihoods driven by climate change. As a result, both the specific mitigation commitments that countries will attempt to meet and the means of financing decarbonisation remain unclear despite a common agreement in principle to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-​industrial levels. Given that per capita emissions are still heavily uneven between developed and developing countries—​ those in the US are around 12–​13 times higher than those in India, for example—​the issue of responsibility for reducing emissions and providing financing for this transition remains intensely politicised and will remain a central point of conflict moving forward (Ervine, 2018).

Green development In terms of a practical process for promoting low-​carbon development, current international agreements remain linked to two key policy measures first introduced with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. First, carbon markets have been repeatedly asserted as a core mechanism for delivering mitigation goals. A carbon market is where the government sets an overall limit on carbon emissions from industry and requires companies to purchase the right to make emissions in the form of carbon credits that it produces and regulates. In theory, high-​polluting companies will buy extra credits from more environmentally efficient producers, creating a flexible and effective way of managing emissions. At the same time, overall economic and environmental efficiency will be incentivised because industries can minimise their credit requirement by upgrading towards clean production technologies. To be effective, however, carbon markets rely on their surrounding institutional infrastructures to establish and enforce a suitable cap to emissions. In the EU case, concerted industry pressures led to regulators providing a glut of carbon credits, causing their price to collapse. In conjunction with the 2008 economic slowdown, carbon credits

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Climate change and development  313 bottomed out at €3 per ton in 2013, before recovering to €6 in January of 2016. This remains a fraction of the €30 price that is a minimum threshold for effectiveness. As a result, within the EU the price of pollution is unimaginably low while its costs globally are frighteningly high. Regardless of the lack of proven success in facilitating a transition to a low-​carbon future, the World Bank and other key institutional actors continue to promote carbon markets as a primary means for reducing emissions in both developed and developing countries. They have recently sought to provide a framework to link such markets across borders, creating a more globalised market for carbon. This continued political support, however, is likely attributable primarily to the acceptance of carbon markets as a less intrusive form of regulation within the corporate sector. Without enforcing a more exacting price for carbon, it is difficult to see how carbon markets can be effective tools to leverage the degree of societal transformation necessary to meet mitigation targets. To do so, however, rests not upon fine-​tuning market mechanisms but upon overcoming vested political-​economic interests that keep the price of carbon artificially low at the expense of those most threatened by climate change impacts (Ervine, 2017; Lane & Newell, 2016). A second key tool advanced within existing development infrastructures is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Under the CDM, a development project in the developing world that actively reduces or sequesters greenhouse gases in a demonstrable and measurable way can be certified, turned into a commodity, and then traded on Western carbon markets. In theory, the CDM is an effective means of promoting green development because corporations in the West are able to offset their emissions by purchasing CDM-​generated credits by providing a source of financing for green development in the Global South. Critical development scholars, however, have drawn attention to several problematic elements of this process. First, local CDM projects have often been controversial in their own terms, involving conflicts between local communities and states and corporations over the use of lands, forests, and water resources (Leach & Scoones, 2015). Second, CDM projects are meant to represent entirely new reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, yet many CDM projects are argued to be existing projects that are given a green gloss, therein producing marginal or poor-​quality offsets. Third, and perhaps most significantly, financial flows for green development promoted under the CDM remain a fraction of the amount of investment flowing into carbon-​intensive sectors. Whereas some countries—​such as China—​have invested heavily in clean-​energy projects and have benefited greatly from the CDM, they have nonetheless continued to develop on a carbon-​intensive trajectory. China, for instance, is now the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gases, a rank that represents both its role as an industrial mass producer of export commodities as well as the dramatic transformation of its own society towards urbanisation and mass consumption. In this respect, many critical development scholars are less enamoured with the large-​ scale CDM-​type projects that are typically unresponsive to the needs of the poor who exert little influence over the institutional structures and political alliances that promote them. Instead, they tend to value the potential of smaller-​scale grassroots initiatives that might directly address issues of equitable access alongside sustainability questions. In much the same way that many farmers in South Asia now have cellphones without ever having had landlines, some authors project that new forms of low-​carbon technology might be rapidly introduced at a grassroots level by simply skipping the step of carbon-​ intensive energy forms. From solar-​based rural electrification to sustainable smallholder agriculture that sequesters carbon in the soil, there are a range of grassroots projects that

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314  Marcus Taylor have mitigation and development potential outside of the formal institutional process (Abramsky, 2010). Recommended reading: Ockwell and Byrne (2017); Schröder et al. (2019).

Adaptation With the recognition that present mitigation policies would not be sufficient to avoid a considerable degree of global warming, policy attention in the mid-​2000s increasingly shifted towards the idea of climate change adaptation. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is a process of transformation in social and environmental systems that can safeguard against present and future adverse impacts of climatic change while taking advantage of any new opportunities (IPCC, 2007; World Bank, 2010). Although the idea of adaptation appears to be a self-​evident good, there are a number of issues in its conceptualisation and implementation that are of central concern for critical development studies. First, much of the institutional and governmental literature on adaptation adopts a strongly technocratic and managerial approach. Here, climate threats are seen as external shocks requiring simple technological solutions to preserve the status quo. Whether it is building stronger flood defences, drilling deeper wells for water, or developing new drought-​resistant crops, these kinds of projects tend to be top-​down and seek to preserve the existing contours of society through defensive fixes to newly envisaged physical hazards. Rarely, however, do these perspectives consider how present social inequalities shape how different social groups are unequally exposed to climate threats while also making them unevenly positioned to take advantage of any benefits provided by adaptation processes (Eriksen et al., 2015). A key concern is that adaptation projects of this nature may come at the expense of marginalised groups, who may be ignored or displaced in the name of fighting climate change. Such an outcome represents a case of ‘maladaptation’ wherein, for marginalised groups, the ‘cure’ of adaptation may well prove to be worse than the curse of climate change exposure (Marino & Ribot, 2012). In response, a second branch of the adaptation literature has been far more attuned to social inequalities as the starting point for analysis. Often framed within a human security perspective, this literature emphasises that engrained social inequalities are the root cause of vulnerability to environmental change (Wisner et al., 2004). Once seen from this perspective, vulnerability to climate change is seen less in terms of the magnitude of potential climatic shocks, and more as a function of overlapping social inequalities and marginalisation. For example, in many contexts women can be systematically excluded from decision-​making processes, land ownership, reproductive healthcare education, and information networks. These exclusions can accentuate their vulnerability to climatic shocks, such as storms or floods, while also hampering their ability to recover from them. For human security perspectives, adaptation policies therefore require a close examination of unequal exposure to climate hazards and must build upon proactive social policies to tackle the root causes of these extant vulnerabilities (Eriksen et al., 2011). Human security perspectives have clearly moved the dial forward on progressive approaches to adaptation. That said, a more critical perspective takes this focus on inequality further by adopting an explicitly relational approach. These authors argue that very often the relative security of affluent social groups is often directly linked to the relative vulnerability of others (Mikulewicz, 2019; Taylor, 2013). This makes thinking about adaptation more complex because it points out that climate change recalibrates

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Climate change and development  315 the power relations between social groups. For example, if climate change impacts upon water availability in an agricultural region of rural India, then it consolidates the power to those who control wells, irrigation, and water flows. This typically advantages social elites, meaning that climate change opens up accumulation strategies predicated upon new forms of domination and exploitation within a changing environment (Taylor & Bhasme, 2020). For these perspectives, it is the power relations between social groups, not simply inequality, that must be placed at the heart of the discussion. Politically, a strong and deliberate emphasis on empowering marginalised groups alongside rethinking ways of redistributing assets arises as key components of successful adaptation. Recommended reading: Taylor (2015).

Resilience One term that has increasingly colonised the development literature on climate change is ‘resilience’. It is little exaggeration to say that a majority of institutional approaches to climate change pivot on this common yet ill-​defined concept. Consider, for example, the World Bank’s ambitious Africa Climate Business Plan (2015), which seeks to set an agenda for US$15 billion dollars of government, non-​governmental organisation (NGO), and private sector investment into a low-​carbon development future for the continent. Pertinently, the World Bank frames and justifies each item of its agenda in terms of building resilience. Specifically, it talks of three components of a climate-​adapted future for Africa that are composed of: (1) ‘strengthening resilience’ by improving infrastructure; (2) ‘powering resilience’, by investing in clean energy; and (3) ‘enabling resilience’ by sharing knowledge (World Bank, 2015). Problematically, however, the Bank never defines this core term despite it being the presumed lynchpin of the entire agenda. The idea of resilience is apparently too self-​evident to require close elaboration. In this type of literature, the idea of resilience is typically deployed to express the capacity for a social or ecological system to ‘bounce back’ from external shocks, therein recovering to its original state and functions. Frequently, resilience is used in this way as a positive quality that can be possessed by vastly different units of analysis. From a city to a community, a region to an economic sector, all can be discussed in terms of having or lacking ‘resilience’. Problematically, however, what it means for a city to be resilient would be very different from an economic sector or an ecosystem. Moreover, there may be sharply divided winners and losers within such resilience. It is because of this conceptual looseness that many authors have become sharply critical of the concept. Some call resilience an ‘empty signifier’, by which they mean it is a term that can be filled with almost any content according to the needs of the agency using it (Felli, 2016;Watts, 2014). For instance, in the above Africa Climate Business Plan, the World Bank (2015) projects a series of reforms to agricultural policies across the African continent that closely resemble its long-​standing agenda of market liberalisation accompanied by the incorporation of smallholders into global value chains and the entry of Western biotech corporations as primary suppliers of inputs and other technologies. Previously this very same agenda was advanced under the idea of market efficiency and poverty reduction (World Bank, 2007). Now the project is argued to be necessary as a means to build resilience to climate change (World Bank, 2015). That said, not all conceptualisations of resilience are quite so vacuous. Influenced by the literature on adaptive systems from ecological sciences, socioecological resilience theorists present more interesting ways of thinking about sustainability that can inform critical

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316  Marcus Taylor development studies (Brown, 2015; Córdoba et al., 2020). Socioecological resilience theorists argue that the incredible complexity of environmental change means that appropriate governance forms for ecosystem management must be decentralised, participatory, and adaptable. Contrary to standard ideas of resource development, these perspectives argue that we must value diversity of landscapes, knowledge forms, and human ways of living with nature and seek to foster those qualities (Biggs et al., 2015). Many of these norms can resonate with critical thinking within development studies because they share a deep suspicion of managerial, technocratic approaches to organising society–​nature relations. Whether such perspectives can adequately incorporate questions of power and inequality that animate critical development studies, however, is an open question. Recommended reading: Biggs et al. (2015); Brown (2015).

Development and growth Outside of engaging critically with official policies and practices, it is important to note that climate change creates a significant challenge for development thinking. For much of the 20th century, critical scholars and activists tended to accept the core development goals of increasing consumption as a means to improve human well-​being. Marx, for example, was enamoured with the way that capitalism developed society’s productive forces, creating the basis on which all human needs could be met through a surge in productivity (Marx & Engels, 1998). The problem, as he made very clear, was that capitalism would create and distribute this immense social wealth in a fundamentally unequal and polarising manner. Socialism, he retorted, could do modernity better in a fundamentally egalitarian and democratic fashion. Climate change, however, opens the possibility that the very idea of development—​whether capitalist or socialist—​is problematic. The rapid advances in our ability to produce ever-​greater quantities of consumption goods appear to choke on the polluting emissions their creation requires. This has led to significant questions being raised about whether development itself has a future and whether critical thinking must position itself as ‘anti-​development’. In the West, for example, there has been a growing interest in the concept of ‘degrowth’, which broadly refers to a planned shrinking of the economy. The idea here is not simply to do less with less but to transform the very fundamentals of how societies operate. Degrowth would require a profound localisation of work, production, and consumption, with a strong redistributionist component to ensure substantive equality in a less materially affluent future (D’Alisa et al., 2015). In the postcolonial world, similar ideas are frequently related to religious tenets or indigenous worldviews. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, famously argued that the pursuit of ‘Western civilisation’ would bring ruin to India and put forward an alternative path based on locally networked rural economies in which work had a spiritual, not simply material, purpose. Activist-​scholar Vandana Shiva has reworked such thinking, adding a critical feminist slant, and emphasised Gandhi’s ideas about egalitarian community self-​determination in opposition to a destructive and exploitative globalised economy (Shiva, 2010). In Latin America, the idea of buen vivir, or Sumak Kawsay in Quechua, has been mobilised to emphasise an alternative to development: rejecting materialism and economic growth and advocating for indigenous rights, community autonomy, and the rights of nature (Gudynas, 2011; Lalander, 2014).The latter is in stark contrast to the neodevelopmentalist tendencies of progressive governments that have staked their socialist projects of delivering development to the poor on further hydrocarbon resource extraction.

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Climate change and development  317 Critical modernist thinking, however, may not be entirely dead in the water. A different brand of authors argues that the scale of transformation required to deal with climate change requires the tools of modernity and development (Mazzucato, 2015). From this perspective, the role of the state will be pivotal to effectively address the demands of climate change adaptation and a clean energy revolution, yet it is only by democratising the state that such transformations can be effected (Parenti, 2015). Without socialising the means of production, the task of de-​carbonising the economy will fall foul of entrenched interests that seek to continue existing patterns of capital accumulation and expansive growth—​with global elites accounting for a major proportion of carbon emissions. The continued influence of oil companies over energy policy despite their activities to obscure the evidence of anthropogenic climate change and to frustrate adequate regulatory measures represents a prime example (Ashton, 2015). In facilitating a thorough democratisation of the state, the hope is that excess consumption particularly among elite classes can be curbed and financing delivered quickly, efficiently and in sufficient quantities to effect a thorough de-​carbonisation of the economy. Recommended Reading: D’Alisa et al. (2015); Sachs (2015).

References Abramsky, K. (ed.) (2010). Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-​Petrol World. Chico, CA: AK Press. Ashton, J. (2015). “Open Letter to Shell’s Ben Van Beurden from John Ashton,” The Guardian, 30 March. Biggs, R., Schluter, M., & Schoon, M. (2015). Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-​Ecological Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, K. (2015). Resilience, Development and Social Change. London: Routledge. Córdoba, C.,Triviño, C., & Toro Calderón, J. (2020).“Agroecosystem Resilience: A Conceptual and Methodological Framework for Evaluation.” PLoS ONE, 15(4): 1–​20. D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F., & Kallis, G. (2015). Degrowth:A Vocabulary for a New Era. London: Routledge. Dubash, N. (2019).“An Introduction to India’s Evolving Climate Change Debate: From Diplomatic Insulation to Policy Integration,” in Dubash, N. (ed.), India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, pp. 1–​30. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Eriksen, S., Aldunce, P., Bahinipati, C.S., D’Almeida Martins, R., Molefe, J.I., Nhemachena, C., O’Brien, K., Olorunfemi, F., Park, J., Sygna, L., & Ulsrud, K. (2011).“When Not Every Response to Climate Change Is a Good One: Identifying Principles for Sustainable Adaptation.” Climate and Development, 3(1): 7–​20. Eriksen, S., Nightingale, A., Eakin, H. (2015). “Reframing Adaptation: The Political Nature of Climate Change Adaptation.” Global Environmental Change, 35(3): 523–​533. Ervine, K. (2017). “How Low Can It Go? Analysing the Political Economy of Carbon, Market Design and Low Carbon Prices.” New Political Economy, 23(3): 1–​21. Ervine, K. (2018). Carbon. London: Polity Press. Felli, R. (2016). “The World Bank’s Neoliberal Language of Resilience,” in Soederberg, S. (ed.), Risking Capitalism (Research in Political Economy),Vol. 31, pp. 267–​291. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group. IPCC. (2007). Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC. Gudynas, E. (2011). “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow,” Development, 54(4): 441–​447. Lalander, R. (2014). “Rights of Nature and the Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador: A Straitjacket for Progressive Development Politics?” Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies, 3(2): 148–​173.

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318  Marcus Taylor Lane, R., & Newell, P. (2016). “The Political Economy of Carbon Markets,” in Van de Graaf, T., Sovacool, B., Ghosh, A., Kern, F., & Klare, M. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy, pp. 247–​267. London: Palgrave. Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (eds.) (2015). Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa. London: Routledge. Marino, E., & Ribot, J. (2012). “Adding Insult to Injury: Climate Change and the Inequities of Climate Intervention.” Global Environmental Change, 22(3): 323–​328. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998). The Communist Manifesto. New York: Monthly Review Press. Mazzucato, M. (2015). “The Green Entrepreneurial State,” in Scoones, I., Leach, M., & Newell, P. (eds.), The Politics of Green Transformations, pp. 113–​150. London: Routledge. Mikulewicz, M. (2019). “Thwarting Adaptation’s Potential? A Critique of Resilience and Climate-​ Resilient Development.” Geoforum, 104: 267–​282. Ockwell, D., & Byrne, R. (2017). Sustainable Energy for All: Innovation,Technology and Pro-​Poor Green Transformations. London: Routledge. Parenti, C. (2015). “Shadow Socialism in the Age of Environmental Crisis.” Green Social Thought, 66: 26–​29. Sachs, W. (2015). Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books. Schröder, P., Anantharaman, M., Anggraeni, K., & Foxon, T. (eds.) (2019). The Circular Economy and the Global South. London: Routledge. Shiva,V. (2010). Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. London: South End Press. Taylor, M. (2013). “Climate Change, Relational Vulnerability and Human Security: Rethinking Sustainable Adaptation in Agrarian Environments.” Climate and Development, 5(4): 318–​327. Taylor, M. (2015). The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation: Livelihoods, Agrarian Change and the Conflicts of Development. London: Routledge. Taylor, M., & Bhasme, S. (2020). “Between Deficit Rains and Surplus Populations: The Political Ecology of a Climate-​Resilient Village in South India.” Geoforum, January. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1016/​j.geoforum.2020.01.007. UNDP. (2007). Human Development Report 2007/​2008: Fighting Climate Change—​Human Solidarity in a Divided World. Geneva: United Nations. Watts, M. (2014). “Resilience as a Way of Life: Biopolitical Security, Catastrophism, and the Food-​ Climate Change Question,” in Chen, N. & Sharp, L. (eds.), Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability, pp. 145–​172. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., & Davis, I. (2004). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. London: Routledge. World Bank. (2007). World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Bank. (2010). World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (2015). Accelerating Climate-​Resilient and Low-​Carbon Development: The Africa Climate Business Plan. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (2019). Action Plan on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience: Managing Risks for a More Resilient Future. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

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37  The energy transition and the Global South1 Leandro Vergara-​Camus

The current global energy transition away from fossil fuels, which is intricately linked to the way we deal with climate change, is rightfully presented to us as one of the most crucial challenges of our era. The mainstream media however tends to frame it as a fundamentally technological change that will need to be accompanied by a relatively benign lifestyle change. In a nutshell, this transition will be successful if the right ‘green or clean’ energy is developed and provides enough power to feed our consumerist lifestyles that should remain unchanged. Think of the image of a flamboyant new electric car taking her owner at full speed at night through the streets of a deserted fully illuminated city centre; or a snapshot into the perfect spacious suburban home where renewable energy allows each member of the household to peacefully use their own electronic devices in their separate corner of the house. The associated lifestyle change is at best epitomised by an ethical consumer that chooses his/​her energy source, thinks about reducing his/​her energy consumption, and buys energy-​efficient products. The main, if not sometimes the sole, measuring stick for this energy transition is the extent to which the given renewable energy significantly reduces carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to tackle climate change, as if all the other socioenvironmental problems do not exist or must be subordinated to this more existential threat to our planet. All this is obviously not completely false, but this framing simplifies the enormity of the challenge we face in this energy transition. It contributes to creating conditions for powerful players to take advantage of this transitional moment at the expenses of local ecosystems and marginalised social groups. My underlying argument is that this dominant framing of the current energy transition is turning climate change into an accumulation strategy. Taking inspiration from Altvater and Mahnkopf (2018), who highlight some of the trade-​offs between economic purposes and ecological constraints, this chapter will raise some concerns about a common tendency of the mainstream literature to obscure the fact that the development of renewable energy often reproduces dynamics that are reminiscent of colonial and postcolonial extractivism.The chapter will underline the importance of turning our attention to the process of production of renewable energy, from the site of generation to the site of extraction of the minerals required as industrial inputs for the devises that harness renewable energy, often located in the Global South, as well as the sites of their engineering and design in the North.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-45

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320  Leandro Vergara-Camus

Peak oil, energy transition, and climate change as an accumulation strategy We are currently witnessing the convergence of two path-​setting socioenvironmental phenomena: energy transition and climate change. The former has been predicted for several decades already through discussion on peak oil—​the moment at which oil reserves will begin to diminish and oil will become too expensive to extract. The second one has only become a real preoccupation of world leaders in the last 20 years, albeit with varying degrees of acceptance and sense of urgency depending on the correlations of class forces in core capitalist countries. Fossil fuels, first coal and later petroleum oil and gas, because of their high energy return on energy invested (EROI) and their transportable qualities, have been fundamental for the development of industrial capitalism (Altvater, 2006; Huber, 2008; Malm, 2016) thanks to their ability to accelerate capital accumulation by compressing space and time. However, according to some estimates, our planet passed the peak oil moment between 2008 and 2011 (Campbell, 2008; Korpela, 2008), leaving us with less than 40 years of ‘affordable’ global oil reserves (Urry, 2013: 17–​18). But because burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions, fossil fuels have also been a no less fundamental contributor to climate change. There is now broad agreement that the greenhouse effect is the result of human industrial activities and that we must tackle it as fast as possible, particularly by reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Indeed, over the past two decades the world has moved from a global environmental debate that pitted environmental whistle-​blowers against corporate sceptics, to a broad planetary consensus (i.e., a new unstable hegemony) that recognises that climate change is a reality (Levy & Egan 2003; Newell & Patterson 1998, 2010). Therefore, the green-​energy sector is growing very rapidly. Donald Trump’s presidency (2016–​2020) was the last round in this battle for hegemony within the US and global capitalism and temporarily shifted power and influence back with fossil fuel industries. But the power of fossil fuels will not wind down because this unstable new hegemonic order and the insatiable need of capitalism for energy are allowing the parallel growth of both fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors in most countries of the world, including the US. Altvater and Mahnkopf (2018) believe this continued and increased reliance on fossil fuel is part of a counterrevolution. Most specialists doubt that we will find an energy source that matches the qualities of fossil fuels, but the race is still on to determine which energy source will take centre stage by the middle of this century and the different energy sectors are already placing their pieces on the global chessboard. Most countries across the world continue however to rely heavily on cheaper fossil fuels to support economic growth, with gas constantly increasing in importance and coal making a very strong come-​back recently, with numerous new plants in China and India. But the context of climate change has obliged all energy industries to present themselves as clean or green. In this conjuncture the main renewable sources of energy (wind, solar, thermal, agrofuels, hydro-​electricity) have successfully cast themselves in opposition to non-​renewable fossil fuel energy such as oil, gas (conventional and shale), and coal—​despite coal having made the ‘clean coal’ turn recently (Drake, 2009; Horbach et al., 2014).2 What is clear is that this shift in global environmental hegemony opens the door for the rise of new capitalist enterprises, which as in the case of any emerging industry need the support of the state to facilitate the process of capital accumulation. It also requires the mobilisation by the private sector of corporate marketing and branding strategies

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Energy transition and the Global South  321 in order to rally public support, or attract venture capital (Borras et al., 2016). For these companies, pretending to be a solution (or sometimes only a temporary solution) to climate change has become an accumulation strategy. To push this ‘unique selling point’, renewable energy industries, such as ethanol for instance, have created and mobilised around themselves a global assemblage (Hollander, 2010). These include ‘astroturf ’ social movements, university research centres, state institutions, and international organisations to mobilise science, articulate actors within a sector and across sectors, and secure political and public support. Similarly, the shale gas industry is presenting itself as a ‘transitional energy source’ between the coal/​oil era and the fully renewable era because it can solve the current problems of the intermittent nature of solar and wind energy and their lack of storage capacity (Haddagian & Shahidehpour, 2015). Because it can easily replace coal and oil until we find technological solutions, emits less CO2, and can function as a ‘support fuel’ in moments of reduced capacity, shale gas casts itself as the perfect ‘transitional energy source’. This, regardless of the many negative local environmental consequences—​that its extraction and consumption emit large quantities of methane, which is even more damaging for global warming than CO2, and that its overall greenhouse gas footprint is higher than those of oil and coal (Howarth, 2015). Recommended reading: Malm (2016); Newell & Patterson (2010); Urry (2013).

Neoliberalism, extractivism, appropriation of nature, and renewable energy Neoliberal globalisation has coincided with a dramatic acceleration of the exploitation of nature through large-​scale agriculture, fisheries, logging, mining, and oil/​gas extraction. The increased demand for food and manufactured goods, pushed by Chinese economic growth, has been an important factor in this commodity boom, but does not explain it completely. In fact, the recurrent problems of over-​accumulation in the global economy, made worse since the financial crisis of 2007–​2008, have turned natural resources into refuge investments for capital, which maintained the price of commodities at an all-​time high until the mid-​2010s. The general picture has been one of an important commodity boom that has accelerated oil and gas exploration and extraction, mining, and large-​scale plantation agriculture, notably sugarcane, soybean, and palm oil. No developing country has been able or willing to refuse to benefit economically from this growth of extractive industries. Despite the rhetoric about sustainable development, not many have been preoccupied with balancing out economic growth and environmental sustainability. Not many have respected the rights of local populations whose livelihood and cultures rely on nature. Moreover, not one developing country has been able to use this boom to significantly modify its position of raw resources provider within the global economy by adding value to their exported commodity and moving into processing and manufacturing. Finally, most of the technology used by extractive industries in agriculture, mining, oil, and gas extraction is designed, developed, and manufactured in core capitalist countries or China, reinforcing a very traditional international division of labour. The renewed importance of extractivism suggests that capitalism in its neoliberal phase appears to rely more and more on the appropriation of non-​human nature for the accumulation of capital and is also exacerbating the fundamental contradictions of capitalist development. Extractive industries are today capital-​intensive and labour saving, destroy the very nature that they rely on at an accelerated rate (Foster & York, 2010; O’Connor, 1988), and as they use (or contain) an enormous quantity of water in the process of

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322  Leandro Vergara-Camus extraction they are responsible for a global unequal exchange of virtual water (Martinez-​ Alier, 2009). Although the profits of extractive industries rely on conventional mechanisms, i.e., expanding production and increasing productivity, capturing rents is a fundamental tactic in the wealth accumulation strategy of several actors connected to this sector (Andreucci et al., 2017). Ground rent is the term use to refer to the rent industries must pay to the owner of the tract of land where extraction is carried out, be it a private landowner or a state. The most well-​known ground rents in the global economy are the royalties that oil and mining companies pay to countries in exchange for access to their natural resources. The term ‘rent’ is also used to refer to the surplus profit that accrues to companies that have a monopoly position in a given market, particularly when this monopoly is guaranteed by the state. Gaining access to the rent that the state extracts from extractive industries (royalties for oil, gas, mining extraction) is an obvious rentier wealth accumulation strategy of state officials in resource-​rich developing countries. But so are the constant efforts by private companies to gain access to (i.e., lobby) state officials that grant monopoly rights, regulate the economy, and provide subsidies. The current energy transition is inextricably linked to extractivism in a myriad of ways, and the development of renewable energy projects often mirrors the dynamics and processes characteristic of extractive industries. First, all these extractive industries require significant amounts of energy in their production and circulation cycle and thus require cheap and reliable energy for their development. In many oil-​producing developing countries, like Angola, Ecuador, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the Gulf states, this has meant that oil extraction has continued to increase despite the climate change emergency. In many less-​developed countries, especially when offshore oil reserves have been found, very few economic benefits have accrued to the local economy or population, because oil companies tend to create enclaves that are not linked to the region where they set up their activities (Ferguson, 2005). Secondly, renewable energy projects share many of the characteristics of extractive industries. Indeed, Dunlop and Jacobsen point to a clear nexus between conventional forms of extraction, such as mining and fossil fuels, and ‘green extraction’ such as extensive agriculture and renewable energy (Dunlop & Jacobsen 2020: Chapter 4). Because of the image that the mainstream media has been propagating about renewable energy, the activities and modus operandi of renewable energy industries are rarely scrutinised. But renewable energy industries are not as clean, green, or sustainable as one would think. Sugarcane, maize, or palm oil, from which the main agrofuels are made, require very large amounts of land, are grown with significant amounts of chemical inputs, are farmed on monocrop plantations, and use fossil fuel technology for planting, harvesting, cutting, and transport. Because of their reliance on fossil fuel technologies, the ecological footprints of the whole production and usage cycle of sugarcane and corn ethanol are substantial and do not outweigh their reduction of CO2 as a replacement fuel to petroleum oil (Oliveira, Vaughan, & Rykiel, 2005). Moreover, in many regions of the developing world agrofuels have been associated with land grabs, population displacements, poor working conditions, and marginalisation or adverse incorporation of small-​scale producers (Borras, McMichael, & Scoones, 2010). This makes them a very uneconomical, as well as socially and environmentally unjust, way of addressing climate change. In certain developing countries, some solar energy parks and wind farms have generated some of the same problematic outcomes. Technological innovations have been constant but mainly two types of technologies are used to produce solar energy: photovoltaic (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP).

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Energy transition and the Global South  323 The former mainly uses solar panels to capture sunlight and transform it into electricity, while the latter uses lenses, parabolic troughs and dishes, or mirrors to focus the light and heat a fluid that is in turn used to generate and store electricity. Small-​scale PV off-​ grid technology and initiatives, typically on house rooftops, have not been the ones that have been attracting investment in the Global South. Instead, solar energy initiatives have taken the form of large-​scale PV or CSP parks that require substantial tracts of land ranging from several hundred to a few thousand hectares. In some cases, like in India, just as agrofuel projects do, solar energy companies claim that the land where they set up their park is degraded or uninhabited, even though it is important for the livelihood of the local population (Yenneti, Day, & Golubchikov, 2016). Another fundamental similarity between renewable energy projects and extractive industries is the prevalence of rentier strategies of wealth accumulation in and around the sector. Since access to land is key for deploying renewable energy projects, often companies will have to lease public land or pay royalties to the state to gain this access, as private owners of solar parks or in-​land or offshore wind farms do. Large-​scale sugarcane, maize, or palm oil producers can also rent the land of large and medium-​size landowners instead of purchasing it. Renewable energy companies themselves can benefit from rents, as is the case of the agrofuels sector since the blending mandate3 and often the price of agrofuels is established by the state, and the industry is heavily dependent on state subsidies and credits (Vergara-​Camus, 2014). Thirdly, the energy transition towards renewables relies on extractive industries, especially mining, for very crucial components of the devices used to produce electricity. Solar PV panels and cells require copper, palladium, titanium dioxide, aluminium, sand or quartz, and zinc. Turbines require steel, iron, copper, aluminium, manganese, nickel, zinc, rare earth elements for magnets and batteries, and cobalt for magnets. Copper, rare earth elements, and cobalt, which are also crucial for digital technology, are required in large amounts for electric vehicles. This is already triggering geostrategic planning among core capitalist countries (Altvater & Mahnkopf, 2018: 90–​92). As is well known, mining extraction has dramatically increased under neoliberal globalisation. However, it has not contributed much to development in the Global South. As part of structural adjustment programmes, many developing countries had to reform their mining codes in the 1990s to create ‘competitive’ investment environments,4 reducing royalties and taxes, and easing environmental regulations. In addition, mining extraction is increasingly carried out in open-​pit sites with large-​scale machinery that requires less labour than in the past but also dramatically increases the environmental impact, such as tonnes of tailings, air pollution, and water contamination due to the use of hazardous chemicals like cyanide and mercury. Because of this direct connection, it could be said that the development of renewable energy is contributing to reinforcing the movement toward extractivism in developing countries, with all of its associated social, environmental, developmental, and political consequences. Recommended reading: Altvater (2018); Andreucci et al. (2017); Dunlop and Jacobsen (2020).

Conclusion: energy transition and new (old) unequal exchange The current climate change emergency is rapidly opening business opportunities for renewable energy across the globe, while neoliberal capitalist accumulation requires cheap energy that continues to be provided by fossil fuels. The prospects for fossil fuels are not

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324  Leandro Vergara-Camus all gloom in the foreseeable future, as state officials will most probably prioritise economic growth through cheap energy to tackle the post-​COVID-​19 economic depression. In fact, the energy sector and the states that support them have been banking on both fossil fuels and renewables simultaneously and, as this chapter showed, renewables tend to operate in very similar ways to extractive industries. Even from a rather conventional understanding of development, when we add the technological specialisation to the mix, the picture becomes even more striking. Chinese companies have a very strong hold on the solar PV modules market, although there are several competitors from the US, Korea, and Taiwan.The market in CSP power plants is currently dominated by companies from the US, European companies from Germany, Spain, and Italy, and companies from Israel and Saudi Arabia. There are more companies (from Denmark, Germany, the US, and China) sharing the wind turbine market, but two technological giants, the German Siemens and the US General Electric, are among the most important ones. The picture is slightly different in the case of agrofuels where Brazilian, Singaporean, Indonesian, and Malaysian companies share the market with US giants. Overall, however, the renewable energy sector is not much different than many other sectors of the global economy, as companies from core capitalist countries and a select few from the largest economies of the South control the technology and the know-​how, while developing countries provide the raw resources without being able to develop linkages with their local economy. Even when Global South companies and states are the ones investing in developing countries, the political and economic dynamics do not look substantially different from the past, and the development of renewable energy is not geared at changing the nature of the national economy (Power et al., 2016). Moreover, as climate change has become an accumulation strategy for the energy sector, some projects are more interested in exporting renewable energy to affluent markets than in providing energy to their local population.5 The convergence of climate change and energy transition is occurring in the context of a global crisis of legitimacy of neoliberalism because over its more than 40 years of existence this model of development has further marginalised the poor, increased the debt of the middle classes, and exacerbated inequalities across the world. Because during these four decades the Left reformed itself and adopted neoliberalism when it governed, this crisis is now being instrumentalised by right-​wing authoritarian populists. They blame the Left for the current situation and continue to profess the virtues of the market. This crisis of legitimacy is thus not yet a crisis of neoliberal hegemony, as bourgeois values, worldview, and class power are still dominant across the world. Unfortunately, despite increased mass mobilisation by the youth, in many places these populist leaders find in front of them very weak left-​wing forces that make a progressive resolution of this crisis very uncertain. The development of renewable energies should not be celebrated because they will allow us to continue maintaining a model of development that is unsustainable and unjust. We should not settle for the ways renewable energies are being deployed and the technology that is being used just because they are cleaner than fossil fuels. We have gone through this argument before. We must ask the same questions about renewable energy that we do about oil and mining. We must go beyond assessing the social and environmental sustainability of the energy transition on the single criterion of whether they reduce CO2 or not. We must link discussions about renewable energy to broader questions about our growth-​oriented and consumerist model of development. If we don’t, we will lose the opportunity that the climate change emergency and energy transition are presenting us with.

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Notes 1 I would like to express my gratitude to my former students at the SOAS University of London, who throughout the years have accompanied me in the exploration of these topics in my course on energy transition and extractive industries. Our discussions and their critical insights have greatly informed my views on these matters. 2 ‘Clean coal’ is the term used by the coal industry to refer to technologies that increase the energy efficiency of power plants, reduce the impurities released into the air when burning coal, or allow for the storage of carbon released by burning coal. Currently, the more readily available ‘clean coal’ technologies are the ‘super-​ultra-​critical’ power plants where coal is burned at higher temperatures, allowing a higher proportion of thermal energy contained in coal to be converted into electricity. The process still produces substantial amounts of greenhouse gas emissions but requires less coal per unit of electricity generated, which for the industry makes it ‘clean’. 3 Although there are motor vehicles powered by fuel that contains up to 85 per cent ethanol in developed countries, only Brazil has an automobile fleet that includes a substantial number of cars that are powered by 100 per cent ethanol or any given blend of petrol and ethanol. In most countries of the world, agro-​fuels have mainly been used as a blend with petrol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from petrol vehicles. The blending mandate is determined by each country, but has tended to vary between 5 and 15 per cent of the fuel mix (E-​5, E-​15), because engines of recent vehicles do not require any modifications to function with that quantity of ethanol. 4 Noticeable exemptions are Bolivia and Ecuador, which increased mining and oil royalties in the mid-​2000s. 5 The Desertec project for North Africa is a case in point. The project planned to build a network of CSP plants and wind farms in Northern Africa and connect them to the European grid through high-​voltage direct current overhead lines, underground and sea cables (De Souza & Lock, 2018).

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326  Leandro Vergara-Camus Haddagian, G., & Shahidehpour, M. (2015).”Ripple Effects of the Shale Gas Boom in the U.S.: Shift in the Balance of Energy Resources,Technology Deployment, Climate Policies, Energy Markets, Geopolitics and Policy Development.” The Electricity Journal, 28(2): 17–​38. Hollander, G. (2010). “Power Is Sweet: Sugarcane in the Global Ethanol Assemblage.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4): 661–​721. Horbach, J., Chen, Q., Rennings, K., & Vogele S. (2014). “Do Lead Markets for Clean Coal Technology Follow Market Demand? A Case Study for China, Germany, Japan and the US.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 10: 42–​58. Howarth, R. (2015).“A Bridge to Nowhere: Methane Emissions and the Greenhouse Gas Footprint of Natural Gas.” Energy Science & Engineering, 2( 2): 47–​60. Huber, M.T. (2008). “Energizing Historical Materialism: Fossil Fuels, Space and the Capitalist Mode of Production.” Geoforum, 40: 105–​115. Korpela, S.A. (2008). “Predicting of World Peak Oil Production,” in Newman, S. (ed.), The Final Energy Crisis, pp. 28–​47. London: Pluto Press. Levy, D., & Egan, D. (2003). “A Neo-​Gramscian Approach to Corporate Political Strategy: Conflict and Accommodation in the Climate Change Negotiations.” Journal of Management Studies, 40(4): 803–​802. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil Capitalism. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London:Verso. Martinez-​Alier, J. (2009). “Social Metabolism, Ecological Distribution Conflicts, and Languages of Valuation.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 20(1): 58–​87. Newell, P., & Patterson, M. (1998).“A Climate for Business: Global Warming, the State and Capital.” Review of International Political Economy, 5(4): 679–​703. Newell, P., & Patterson, M. (2010). Climate Capitalism. Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, J. (1988). “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction.”. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1(1): 11–​38. Oliveira, M.E.D. de, Burton, E.V., & Rykiel, E.J. (2005). “Ethanol as Fuel: Energy, Carbon Dioxide Balances, and Ecological Footprint.” BioScience, 55(7): 593. Power, M., Newell, P., Baker, L., Bulkeley, H., Kirshner, J., & Smith, A. (2016). “The Political Economy of Energy Transitions in Mozambique and South Africa: The Role of the Rising Powers.” Energy Research & Social Science, 17: 10–​19. Urry, J. (2013). Societies Beyond Oil. Oil Dregs and Social Futures. London: Zed Books. Vergara-​Camus, L. (2014.). “Sugarcane Ethanol:The Hen of the Golden Eggs? Agribusiness and the State in Lula’s Brazil,” in Webber, J.R. & Spronk, S. (eds.), Crisis and Contradiction, pp. 211–​235. Leiden: Brill. Vergara-​Camus, L., & Kay, C. (2017). “Agribusiness, Peasants, Left-​Wing Governments, and the State in Latin America: An Overview and Theoretical Reflections.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 17(2): 239–​257. Yenneti, K., Day, R., & Golubchikov, O. (2016). “Spatial Justice and the Land Politics of Renewables: Dispossessing Vulnerable Communities through Solar Energy Mega-​ Projects.” Geoforum, 76: 90–​99.

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38  The political ecology of extractivism in North Africa1 Hamza Hamouchene

Extractivism as a mode of accumulation and appropriation in North Africa2 was structured through colonialism in the 19th century to respond to the demands of metropolitan centres. This accumulation and appropriation pattern is based on commodification of nature and privatisation of land and natural resources, which resulted in serious environmental depredation. Accumulation by dispossession has reaffirmed the role of Northern African countries as exporters of nature and suppliers of natural resources—​such as oil and gas—​and primary commodities heavily dependent on water and land, such as agricultural commodities. This role entrenches North Africa’s subordinate insertion into the global capitalist economy, maintaining relations of imperialist domination and neo-​ colonial hierarchies (Amin, 1970). Extractivism is revealed in large-​scale oil and gas extraction in Algeria and Tunisia; phosphate mining in Tunisia and Morocco; precious ore mining—​silver, gold, and manganese—​in Morocco; and water-​intensive agribusiness farming paired with tourism in Morocco and Tunisia. This plays an important role in the ecological crisis in North Africa, which finds its clear expression in acute environmental degradation, land exhaustion and loss of soil fertility, water poverty, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution, and disease, as well as effects of global warming such as desertification, recurrent heat waves, droughts, and rising sea levels (El-​Zein et al., 2014; Lelieveld et al., 2016). Extractivism finds itself mired in serious tensions that generate protests and resistance. The rural working poor and the unemployed in North Africa are the most impacted by the multidimensional crisis. Small-​scale farmers, near-​landless rural workers, fisherfolks, and the unemployed are resisting the looting of their subsoil resources, the despoilation of their lands, pervasive environmental destruction, and the loss of livelihoods. Recommended reading: El-​Zein et al. (2014); Lelieveld et al. (2016).

Extractivism, primitive accumulation, and imperialism Extractivism refers to activities that overexploit natural resources destined particularly for export to world markets. As such, it is not limited to minerals and oil: it extends to productive activities which overexploit land, water, and biodiversity, such as agribusiness, intensive forestry, industrial fish farming, and mass tourism (Acosta, 2013; Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). As for the latter, the luxury golf courses in arid and semi-​arid regions in Morocco prove Fanon’s critique of tourism valid: this quintessentially neo-​ colonial industry turns the national elites into ‘the organisers of parties’ for their Western counterparts in the midst of overwhelming poverty (Fanon, 1967: 123). Acosta defines DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-46

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328  Hamza Hamouchene extractivism as ‘an activity whose social and environmental costs are not included in the prices of products. These are externalised and carried by a society without democratic rights in a transnational entrepreneurial world’ (Acosta, 2013). For example, In Salah in Algeria is one of the richest gas towns on the African continent but its infrastructure is very poor. Residents call the one hospital they have the ‘hospital of death’. The oasis of Gabès in Tunisia has been ravaged by a phosphate chemical factory that pollutes and pillages water (Bouhmouch & Hamouchene, 2017). These two examples expose the ‘paradox of abundance’: poverty, unemployment, toxic waste, flares, dumped poisons, and resource pillaging take place in areas rich in natural resources, which are appropriated and exploited through neo-​colonial and imperialist relations. Agricultural extractivism in North Africa is particularly damaging to water resources. Export-​ led water-​ intensive mono-​ crop agribusiness in arid regions like the Sahara depletes precious, non-​renewable groundwater and the conversion of arable land away from food production and into the production of energy (agrofuels), flowers, and produce destined for cosmetic use in Europe (Jojoba in Tunisia) constitutes virtual water exportation (Allan, 2003). For instance, Morocco’s 2008 Plan Maroc Vert (PMV: Green Morocco Plan), supported by the World Bank and setting out the country’s agricultural plan for the period between 2008 and 2020, aimed to quintuple the value of export-​oriented crops by shifting land use away from staple cereal crops, promoting private investment in agriculture, and removing restrictions that stand in the way of private property rights (Hanieh, 2014). Similarly, the traditional and small-​scale fishing sector has been facing an offensive by industrial fishing that threatens biodiversity and fish stocks. This is facilitated by neoliberal plans such as Halieutis and fishing agreements with the EU which allow European big boats to over-​fish Moroccan waters at the expense of small fishermen (ATTAC Morocco, 2016). Extractivism is largely incompatible with social justice due to its disastrous social and environmental consequences (Gudynas, 2013). It creates what Naomi Klein calls ‘sacrifice zones’, areas disproportionately ravaged by extraction and processing, inhabited by people whose bodies, health, land, and water are sacrificed in order to maintain the accumulation of capital (Klein, 2014). This goes hand in hand with the racial character of capitalism. Cases of extractivism in North Africa exemplify broader patterns of primitive accumulation (Marx, 1976) in the Global South, where accumulation by dispossession takes the brutal form of the extraction and pillage of natural resources, and the degradation of environments and ecosystems through the privatisation and commodification of land and water (Harvey, 2003). This has intensified in recent decades, following the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the infiltration of transnational capital, including the extractive type (Aziki, 2017; Chandoul, 2018; Hamouchene & Rouabah, 2016). ‘Accumulation by dispossession’ cannot be dissociated from the pivotal role of imperialism and colonialism in the process of capitalist development. In the regions discussed here, capitalist agriculture was introduced during the 19th century, as were the mining industries, such as in the Gafsa mining basin in Tunisia where phosphate was discovered in 1883 and oil operations in Algeria pioneered as early as 1894. The aim of imperialism is ‘access to loot (the extracted resources), land and labour and the mobilisation of capitalist development of these resources for the sake of private profit’ (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). Furthermore, the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ cannot obscure the centre–​periphery structure of imperialism (Amin, 1990). According to dependency theory, ongoing imperialist domination, superexploitation, and unequal trade relations

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Extractivism in North Africa  329 block industrial development in the South, trapping these countries in a state of permanent underdevelopment (Smith, 2016). Recommended reading: Hamouchene and Rouabah (2016);Veltmeyer and Petras (2014).

The political economy of extractivism in the Maghreb/​North Africa The Maghreb region plays a geostrategic role when it comes to the extractive sector, due to its proximity to Europe and the richness of its soil. Algeria is the third largest provider of gas to Europe, while Morocco3 and Tunisia are very important players in the production of phosphates, which are used as agricultural fertilisers, feeding global agrarian capitalism. Moreover, Tunisia and Morocco export considerable quantities of agricultural produce to Europe. This strategic importance is reflected in the North’s attempts to control these resources through political, military, and economic pressure.The latter is seen in the use of ‘free-​trade’ deals, such as the ongoing negotiations around the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements with Tunisia and Morocco.4 This (re)-​primarisation of the economies of Maghreb countries and the reinforcement of extractivism are hallmarks of the political economy of development in the region and in peripheries in general (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014: 222). Three decades of neoliberal reforms and structural adjustment programmes facilitated the transfer of public resources to the private sector through the dispossession of rural and marginal people, enabled by comprador ruling classes within the peripheral state. The incursion of transnational capital into the extractive sectors in the Maghreb is undeniable. Multinationals are present and heavily involved in all three countries (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), but there are some differences between them. While multinationals have an important presence in the Algerian hydrocarbon sector, the national oil and natural gas company Sonatrach dominates, owning roughly 80 per cent of all hydrocarbon production. The sector saw gradual liberalisation since the 1990s at a time of a war against civilians, which provided the opportunity to sign lucrative contracts with companies like BP and Total for 30 years (Hamouchene & Rouabah, 2016). Re-​primarisation of the Algerian economy has been taking place since the 1980s, with hydrocarbons currently constituting around 97 per cent of exports and more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). By law, Sonatrach is given majority ownership of all oil and natural gas projects in Algeria. However, several attempts have been made in the last two decades to open up the hydrocarbon sector and liberalise it further by undermining the 51–​49 per cent ownership rule that represents the absolute minimum of resource nationalism (Rebah, 2011). In contrast, in Tunisia, transnational companies can own up to 100 per cent of oil and gas concessions. Shell, the largest gas producer in the country (after it acquired British Gas in 2016), supplying approximately 60 per cent of Tunisia’s domestic gas production through the Miskar and Hasdrubal operations, holds 100 per cent interest in the Miskar gas field, the most productive in the country, and sells the gas to the State Electricity and Gas Company at international market values and in hard currency (Hammami, 2014). However, unlike in South America, transnational extractive capital plays a marginal role (if any) in the mining sector, where national capital (private and public) dominates. Some of the biggest players are: two public companies controlling the phosphate sector in Tunisia (CPG) and Morocco (OCP), and Managem (a subsidiary of the Royal Holding Company SNI that monopolises the mining sector in Morocco, extracting metals and minerals). Moroccan capital (including extractive) has expanded outside the national borders into

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330  Hamza Hamouchene other African markets. This process of internationalisation went through the phases of concentration and centralisation of wealth in the hands of big capitalist groups, as a result of neoliberal restructuring dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) following the debt crisis in the 1980s (Azanzar, 2014). Managem is developing mining projects in Sudan, Gabon, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Burkina Faso. In DRC, it entered into a partnership with Chinese group Wanbao Mining for the exploitation of Kalukundi, an important copper concession. Similarly, the Moroccan phosphate giant OCP is conquering the African continent by opening 14 subsidiaries (Aziki, 2017). In the agribusiness sector, some industrial groups such as the Algerian Cevital and the Moroccan Sefrioui have participated in land grabs in other African countries (GRAIN, 2018). Northern African countries have not been at the forefront of resistance against free market fundamentalism in the way, for example, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). The latter three countries represent a more statist form of ‘progressive extractivism’ (Gudynas, 2010), also understood as post-​neoliberal developmentalism. However, none of these regimes have been able to escape the development trap of the ‘new extractivism’, which is serious dependence on foreign direct investments (FDIs), penetration of foreign capital, and dealings with the agents of extractive capital. Algeria can be seen as a precursor in this respect as its progressive and inclusive development project in the 1970s was highly dependent on hydrocarbon exports, which facilitated its dismantling and brought its delinking project to a halt when oil prices crashed. In the age of neoliberal hegemony that followed, this paved the way for a predatory form of extractivism where various comprador fractions of the ruling class competed over oil and gas rents with a greater level of exploitation, social destruction, and environmental degradation (Bennoune, 1988). Northern African states facilitate the entry and operations of transnational extractive capital by passing laws favourable to extractive industries.They build neoliberal extractivist economies which are reliant on the export of primary commodities, including agricultural produce, for the benefit of private capital. All three countries opened the way to fracking and offshore drilling and offer enticing incentives for private investors. However, while Tunisia and Morocco, more akin to Mexico and Colombia, with relatively advanced integration in the global economy, are strictly neoliberal in their approach to extractive capital and national development, there is still an ambiguity about the Algerian case, which can be best described as ‘neoliberalism with state intervention’ on behalf of capital, to use the words of Jan Lust about Peru (Lust, 2014). In Algeria, the state is inclined to serve the interest of transnational extractive capital, through several concessions made to multinationals, but at the same time it undertakes large state spending on infrastructure and agriculture, albeit with endemic corruption. Recommended reading: Bennoune (1988); Hamouchene and Rouabah (2016).

The new manifestations of class struggle and their limitations Accumulation strategies bring with them resistance and contradictions between the interests of capital and those of communities, peasants, fishermen, workers, and unemployed people. The past decade has seen a rise in relatively new social mobilisations surrounding resource extraction in North Africa, connected to the global environmental justice movement.5 These represent the environmentalism of the poor which ‘grows out of distribution conflicts

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Extractivism in North Africa  331 over the use of ecological resources needed for livelihood’ (Martinez-​Alier, 1997). This environmentalism is not so much about the conservation of exotic species or pristine nature. It is rather a quest for environmental and social justice and a fight against the social exclusion, the violence, and authoritarianism of neoliberalism and its elites. While various anti-​extractive struggles feature a strong ecological element, this is always secondary to more pressing issues of socio-​economic rights such as jobs, development of urban and rural infrastructure, distribution of wealth, and democratisation of decision making. The anti-​extractivist (to a certain extent) social movements in North Africa are not only, and not predominantly, environmental movements, but are better understood as the latest development in the historical trajectory of class struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination. Riahi (2016) argues that we need another language to accurately describe the social contestations, conflicts, protests, and occupations that took place in the last 6–​7 years in Tunisia. Rather than describing them as social movements, she argues that we should be talking about social mobilisations instead, as these tend to be ephemeral, localised, lacking solid organisational structures, and without a strong popular base or a clear political horizon (Riahi, 2016). For example, radical demands made in 2017 by the unemployed youth in Tataouine (Tunisia) such as the nationalisation of oil and gas companies and the allocation of 20 per cent of oil and gas revenues for local development were dropped when negotiations started with the authorities. Similarly, the unemployed movement in oil-​and gas-​r ich southern Algeria withered away after some jobs were offered by the government, including in the police forces. Resource extraction is a capital-​intensive sector which employs a minimal number of technically skilled labourers, a situation that tends to be amplified with evolving technology. As a result, very few jobs are offered to local residents who are usually hired short-​ term and on low wages, while promised infrastructure and services never materialise. Demanding jobs in industries that externalise environmental and social costs, which are borne disproportionately by communities living near the extractive site, is a very thorny issue. The movements are divided around priorities, as employment generation and environmental issues are both pressing. Ghassen, an unemployed youth from the mining town Oum Laarayes in southern Tunisia, told a visiting solidarity caravan in April 2017: ‘for this region, the deepest and the bloodiest wound is unemployment. After the 2008 Intifada, which lasted six months of struggle against the Ben Ali regime, and with all the repression and broken bones, it was no time to talk about the environment’. Ultimately, this type of resistance is fundamentally anti-​ systemic and counter-​ hegemonic and can be explicitly anti-​imperialist in certain cases and at specific junctures (Unemployed Movement in Algeria in 2013, the mobilisations of youth in Tataouine in their initial demands for nationalisation in 2017). However, it is not anti-​capitalist as such. In any way, these social movements or mobilisations against the status quo, as Riahi (2016) argues, are ‘carving for themselves an independent space through which they can intervene … they have the ability to open new spaces of experimentation that could lead to the creation of alternatives’. These mobilisations bring the internal contradictions of extractivism and capitalism into the open, thus helping to forge the class consciousness necessary to overthrow capitalism and build a sustainable alternative in its place. Recommended reading: Hamouchene and Rouabah (2016); Riahi (2016).

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Conclusion/​alternatives The metabolic rift between capital and nature, or the compulsion to accumulate ever more capital, undermines the metabolic equilibrium that would allow a society to live sustainably and in harmony with its environment (Foster, 1999). This rift is threatening the entire planet as a place of habitation for humanity and other species. Small-​scale farmers, fishermen, the unemployed, and rural residents in Northern Africa’s frontiers of extraction resist the crushing weight and catastrophic convergence of despotism, neoliberal capitalism, and the ecological crisis, all entangled in imperial and neo-​colonial relations of domination (Parenti, 2011). While for more than three decades, successive governments in the Maghreb have banked on a neoliberal extractivist model of development, we argue that extractivism is not the route to take towards development, capitalist or otherwise. Without inward-​ looking economic policies, there will be no development (Acosta, 2013; Gudynas, 2013; Svampa, 2013). The upsurge in the forces of resistance in North Africa is accompanied by ‘the entrance of new actors onto the scene’ who demand that wealth be shared and distributed equitably. This resistance to extractive capital is led by the communities most directly affected by its destructive operations, as well as by the ‘new proletariat’ formed by the process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. However, the battles of social movements and rural communities can only be won if they are transformed into a fight against capitalism and imperialism and if they can go beyond the local and reach national and international levels. Any exploration of ‘alternative development’ must necessarily deal with extractivism. One direction that this can take is post-​extractivism, a perspective pioneered by South American committed intellectuals like Gudynas, Svampa, Accosta, Lang, and others. Post-​ extractivism can be reached through stages. The current form of ‘predatory extractivism’ can transition to a ‘reasonable extractivism’ that is seriously regulated, in which social and environmental norms are rigorously respected. This first step will hopefully put an end to the social and environmental ills caused by big extractive companies, will allow an important decrease in the dependence on exports, and will give the state a greater margin for regulation as well as for some fiscal reform (tax on multinationals). The second step consists of moving towards an ‘indispensable’ or ‘basic’ extractivism where only extractive projects necessary to satisfy national and regional needs are carried out (Gudynas, 2013). Reduction of the extractive sectors must be accompanied by diversification of the economy, focusing particularly on agriculture, farming, industry, and services at the national level; and by reorganisation at the regional level, to avoid economic strangling by the boycott of international buyers. In that respect, regional integration, in an autonomous way (not subordinated to globalisation) is necessary. In the Maghreb, this autonomous regionalism could take the form of a federation between the three countries, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, where economic and political cooperation, resource sharing, and important decisions on the future of the Maghreb are made together. This would need to confront the political systems in all three countries, where authoritarian, corrupt, and comprador elites are imposing their rule and are complicit in the organised looting of their nations. Such a systemic change can only result from a protracted struggle for radical participatory democracy, where elites will have the political will to engage with a paradigm of post-​extractivism and allow their people to organise and build strong social movements and trade unions that will strengthen the democratic base and allow for an

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Extractivism in North Africa  333 adequate social participation in decision making and in the fight around pressing issues such as food and energy sovereignty. The struggle for environmental and climate justice and for just transitions towards post-​extractivist development models will be therefore fundamentally democratic.

Notes 1 This chapter is an abridged version of a longer report published by the Transnational Institute under the title ‘Extractivism and Resistance in North Africa’ in November 2019. Available online at: www.tni.org/​en/​ExtractivismNorthAfrica. 2 ‘North Africa’ and ‘Maghreb’ are used interchangeably in this chapter and refer to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. 3 This includes the ongoing plunder of fishing/agricultural/phosphate/fossil fuel resources in the territories of Western Sahara that are occupied by the Moroccan monarchy. 4 Jouili, M. interviewed by Jonville, M. (2018) “En Tunisie, ‘L’ALECA c’est la reproduction du pacte colonial de 1881.’ ” Mediapart, 1 October. See also Daumas, L. and Aziki, O. (2018). “Relations euroméditerranéennes et accords de libre échange euro-​marocains: des politiques d’inspiration coloniale.” CADTM, 10 April. 5 For more details about these mobilisations, please consult: www.tni.org/​en/​Extractivism NorthAfrica.

References Acosta, A. (2013). “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” in Lang, M. & Mokrani, D. (eds.), Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Quito: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation & Transnational Institute. Allan, J.A. (2003). “Virtual water—​the water, food and trade nexus: useful concept or misleading metaphor?” Water International, 28: 4–​11. Amin, S. (1970). The Maghreb in the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Amin, S. (1990). Delinking:Towards a Polycentric World. London: Zed Books. ATTAC Morocco. (2016). “Etat de la justice climatique au Maroc.” Attac Morocco, August 28. https://​bit.ly/​2F4gYeo. Azanzar. (2014). “The Frontiers of Moroccan Capitalists’ Infiltration in Africa.” Al Mounadila, 5 March. https://​bit.ly/​2RvaVB1. Aziki, O. (2017). “Maroc: tremplin pour les conquêtes néocoloniales de l’Afrique.” CADTM, 19 November. www.cadtm.org/​Maroc-​tremplin-​pour-​les-​conquetes. Bellamy Foster, J. (1999). Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review. Bennoune, M. (1988). The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–​1987: Colonial Upheavals and Post-​ independence Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouhmouch, N., & Hamouchene, H. (2017). “Paradises of the Earth.” Web documentary. Available at: https://​vimeo.com/​paradisesoftheearth. Chandoul, J. (2018). “The IMF has Choked Tunisia. No Wonder the People are Protesting.” The Guardian, 17 January. Daumas, L., & Aziki, O. (2018). “Relations euroméditerranéennes et accords de libre échange euro-​marocains: des politiques d’inspiration coloniale.” CADTM, 10 April. www.cadtm.org/​ Relations-​euromediterraneennes-​et. El-​Zein, A., et al. (2014). ”Health and Ecological Sustainability in the Arab World: A Matter of Survival.” The Lancet, 383(9915): 458–​476. Fanon, F. (1967). The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books. Grain. (2018).“Failed Farmland Deals: A Growing Legacy of Disaster and Pain.” Grain, 6 June. www. grain.org/​article/​entries/​5958-​failed-​farmland-​deals-​a-​g rowing-​legacy-​of-​disaster-​and-​pain.

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334  Hamza Hamouchene Gudynas, E. (2010). “The New Extractivism in South America: Ten Urgent Theses About Extractivism in Relation to Current South American Progressivism.” America’s Program Report, 21 January. http://​postdevelopment.net/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​10/​NewExtractivism10T hesesGudynas10.pdf. Gudynas, E. (2013).“Transitions to Post-​extractivism: Directions, Options, Areas of Action,” in Lang, M. & Mokrani, D. (eds.), Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Quito: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Transnational Institute. Hammami, M.D. (2014). Essai d’immersion dans le sens profond de l’Article 13 de la Constitution tunisienne. Nawaat, 19 February. https://​nawaat.org/​portail/​2014/​02/​19/​essai-​dimmersion-​ dans-​le-​sens-​profond-​de-​larticle-​13-​de-​la-​constitution-​tunisienne/​. Hamouchene, H., & Rouabah, B. (2016).“The Political Economy of Regime Survival:Algeria in the Context of the African and Arab Uprisings.” Review of African Political Economy, 43(150): 668–​680. Hanieh, A. (2014). “Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the Post-​ 2011: IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt.” Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42(1): 119–​134. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kunkel, B. (2017). “The Capitalocene.” London Review of Books, 39(5): 22–​28. Lelieveld, J., et al. (2016). “Strongly Increasing Heat Extremes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 21st Century.” Climatic Change, 137(1–​2): 245–​260. Lust, J. (2014). “Peru: Mining Capital and Social Resistance,” in Veltmeyer, H. & Petras, J. (eds.), The New Extractivism: A Post-​Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-​First Century? London: Zed Books. Martinez-​Alier, J. (1997). “From Political Economy to Political Ecology,” in Guha, R. & Martinez-​ Alier, J. (eds.), Varieties of Environmentalism. London: Earthscan. Marx, K. (1976). Capital,Vol. 1. London: Penguin. Moustakbal, J. (2017). “Despotism, Neoliberalism and Climate Change: Morocco’s Catastrophic Convergence.” Middle East Eye, 21 July. www.middleeasteye.net/​essays/​catastrophic-​ convergence-​1321268571. Parenti, C. (2011). Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books. Rebah, A. (2011). Économie algérienne: le développement national contrarié. Algiers: INAS Editions. Riahi, L. (2016). The Quest for an Alternative Economy: Social Activism in Tunisia as a Case in Point. Beirut: Arab Forum for Alternatives–​Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Smith, J. (2016). Imperialism in the Twenty-​ First Century: Globalisation, Super-​ Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press. Svampa, M. (2013). “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development,” in Lang, M. & Mokrani, D. (eds.), Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Quito: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Transnational Institute. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism:A Model for Latin America? London: Zed Books.

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Part X

Resistances and alternatives

It is a truism and a matter of principle for Marxists that each phase in the capitalist development of the forces of production, each advance of capital in the development process, generates new forces of resistance (see Chapter 21). Given the post-​war history of three broad development cycles it is possible to trace out the corresponding changing forms of the resistance cycle by cycle. Thus, in the first cycle (the 1950s–​1970s) the resistance took the predominant form of a land struggle in the countryside and a class war between capital and labour in the cities. In the second development cycle, which unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s, the resistance predominantly took the form of opposition to the neoliberal policy agenda of many governments at the time. In the third development cycle (the 2000s) the resistance has taken diverse forms, including an active search for alternatives to capitalism, neoliberalism, and extractivism. The chapters in this part span the broad range of the different forces and forms of resistance that unfolded in the current context of capitalist development, which features the advance of what has been described as resource-​seeking ‘extractive capital’ (large-​scale foreign direct investments in the extraction of natural resources for exportation in primary form), predominantly in the peripheries of the world capitalist system but also in the Global North (in the Canadian North, for example, and Australia). Another feature of capitalist development in this context is the resurrection of neoliberalism in the form of right-​wing nationalist populism and authoritarianism, as described in the opening chapter (Chapter 39) by Walden Bello, who addresses the question as to what the political Left and the forces of progressive change can do about it—​what form the resistance might take. Subsequent chapters discuss the diverse dynamics of resistance on various peripheries of the world system. Dip Kapoor, in Chapter 40, addresses the issue of rural resistance mounted by small-​scale independent producers and peasants in Asia and Africa to the forces of capitalist development that have resulted in the dispossession of their means of production and rural livelihoods. Raúl Zibechi, in the following chapter turns to the forces of resistance that have accumulated on the extractive frontier in Latin America. His focus is on what he describes as ‘subterranean resistances’, which include what has been otherwise described as ‘everyday resistances’. In Chapter 42 Makere Stewart-​Harawira analyses the resilient response and dynamics of resistance to the advance of capitalism in territories across the Global South and North occupied by indigenous communities and aboriginal people. Dario Azzellini in Chapter 43 turns towards the resistance in Latin America that has taken the form of experimentation with the construction of a social and solidarity economy based on cooperativism, workers’ self-​management, and community-​ based development. In the final chapter in this part, David Barkin addresses the question as DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-47

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336  Resistances and alternatives to whether the forces of capitalist development have managed to generate forces of resistance capable of moving beyond capitalism. He argues that indeed the communities on the extractive frontier constitute a revolutionary force, a collective agency of transformative change and an alternative future.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is the main difference between the forces of resistance (the social movements and other forces of transformative or revolutionary change) that emerged in the first development–​resistance cycle and those that emerged in the subsequent neoliberal era? 2. In the current context what is the predominant form of the resistance to the advance of capitalism that has emerged on the periphery of the world system? What are the demands and what is the social base of this resistance? What strategy has the resistance employed and what actions have they taken? 3. Is another world possible? If so, what features of it can you see from analysing current resistance struggles?

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39  Understanding the rise of the Far Right, and what to do about it Walden Bello

Why I dumped ‘populism’ To be able to successfully confront Far Right-​wing movements one must first have the necessary theoretical tools to understand them. This is the reason I dropped the term ‘populism’. Populism is a word that is often used to describe Far Right-​wing movements. In my view, populism is largely a descriptive term. It is useful at some level, but it really does not explain these movements. For that you need to go beyond description to theory. A theory is a way of conceptually organising reality. A theory is also sometimes referred to as a ‘paradigm’. To better understand a social phenomenon, a theory filters in some aspects of reality while filtering out others to reduce ‘distracting noise’. Following Thomas Kuhn, I subscribe to the proposition that when confronted with data that do not quite fit or are dissonant, a theory is either adjusted so the new data can fit or be explained by the theory, or if that process becomes too unwieldy, the theory is dumped in favour of one that is more comprehensive and can better explain the new data. All this might seem quite elementary in the aftermath of the Kuhnian Revolution in the theory of scientific knowledge, but one will be surprised at how many social scientists forget these elementary epistemological principles. In any event, this was the conceptual process by which I dumped the descriptive term populism for the theoretical framework of counterrevolution. Populism for me lost what little explanatory capacity it had when its users began lumping together what they called ‘left-​wing populism’ with ‘right-​wing populism’, Hugo Chávez with Donald Trump.This was a case of mixing apples and oranges, and adding pears and plums into the bargain. The result was confusion.

Counterrevolution I am indebted to Arno Mayer, the influential social historian of Princeton University, for the alternative explanatory framework I have adopted: the paradigm of counterrevolution. Following are the key aspects of my theory of counterrevolution to explain social phenomena like Donald Trump and the Tea Party in the US, Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. Broadly defined, counterrevolution is a social reaction to a revolution.There are, in my view, two types of counterrevolution. The first is the counterrevolution that is a heated upper-​and middle-​class response to a lower-​class revolution. This is the classic counterrevolution that Mayer deconstructed so well in his studies of the political responses of DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-48

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338  Walden Bello threatened classes to the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 (Mayer, 2000). The other type of counterrevolution is that directed at a form of political rule that stems from a revolutionary process but one that has since been institutionalised; for instance, a movement against liberal democracy. The classic formulation of the mainsprings of this kind of counterrevolution was expressed by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda chief of Hitler’s Third Reich, when he said the fundamental aim of the Nazi movement was to ‘erase 1789 from history’. 1789 was Goebbels’ shorthand for the French Revolution, which is regarded as the paradigmatic democratic revolution that inspired the founding of liberal democracies throughout the world. Belonging to the first type of counterrevolution—​counterrevolution as an upper-​and middle-​class reaction—​are the Pinochet-​led counterrevolution that overthrew the Allende government in Chile in 1970–​1973 and the counterrevolution against the lower-​class-​ based popular movement of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand in 2001–​2014. Belonging to the second type—​the counterrevolution against institutionalised liberal democracy—​are Narendra Modi’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)–​BJP movement in India, the electoral insurgency behind Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Donald Trump and the Tea Party in the US, and Victor Orban and the Fidesz Party in Hungary. The Nazi movement and the fascist movement in Italy in the 1930s were counterrevolutions of both the first type and the second type. They were both responses to working-​class challenges from below and rebellions against liberal democracy.

Some key considerations Focusing on the causes and dynamics of the current counterrevolution against liberal democracy, I would like to emphasise five points: 1. A key factor, especially evident in India and the Philippines, is mass frustration at the failure of liberal democracy to deliver on its promises of genuine equality and popular empowerment. Pankaj Mishra calls this ‘ressentiment’ (Mishra, 2017). 2. The dynamics of capitalism in the neoliberal era is a key factor in all cases, but the processes or dynamics involved are not necessarily the same in all cases. For instance, neoliberal policies have played a key role in undercutting the promises of liberal democracy in the Philippines. On the other hand, neoliberalism has created an ‘aspirational middle class’ that is quite supportive of Modi and the BJP in India (Jaffrelot, 2016). Neoliberal policies eroded the social democratic welfare states in Europe and the liberal democratic state in the US and contributed to the desertion of significant sectors of the working class to the Far Right. 3. The creation of an ‘other’ or ‘others’ to which most of the problems of society are projected is a feature shared by all Far Right movements. In India, the ‘others’ are Muslims, Westernised intellectuals, and progressive forces; in the Philippines, drug users and Communists; in Europe and the US, racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants. 4. There are elements that are striking in some Far Right movements but are not universally shared. One is the presence of charismatic personalities that have a cross-​class appeal—​one that is very clear in the case of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte but is not present in some other movements. Another is a disciplined Far Right-​wing mass party, something that is a central feature of the Far Right in India in the form of the RSS but not in the Philippines and the US.

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Understanding the rise of the Far Right  339 5. While a counterrevolutionary personality may have cross-​class appeal, a major supportive role for the regime is provided by sectors of the middle class, who are active in providing ideological and political legitimation for him or her. One might say tentatively, borrowing loosely from Gramsci, that the middle sectors provide ‘active consensus’ in support of the regime, while the lower classes and marginalised sectors provide a ‘passive consensus’. What steps can be taken by the Left in both the Global South and the Global North to challenge, compete with, and, in the end, vanquish the Far Right? There are six initiatives that progressives must take if they are to remain in the political game. Firstly, they need to stop resorting to easy explanations about the rise of the Far Right, like the claim that it is trolls that are responsible for it, and acknowledge that Far Right personalities and movements have a critical mass of spontaneous popular support. Secondly, they need to find ways of stopping the extreme right from coming to power in the first place, like building broad united electoral fronts, even with non-​fascist groups they may have differences with. It is much harder to remove the Far Right once they are in power. Thirdly, they need to make sure they have at the leading edge of their resistance those movements which have a great deal of resonance among broad sectors of the population, including the middle classes, such as movements to stop climate change, promote gender equality, and advance racial justice. Fourthly, they must fiercely defend human rights and democratic values, even where—​or especially where—​they have become unpopular.This will involve aggressively championing people and groups that are currently persecuted, with majority opinion being whipped up against them, like Muslims in India and in the Philippines drug users, more than 27,000 of whom have reportedly been slain by Duterte’s police. The current generation may well be compromised by the acquiescence or support that many of them have given to Far Right figures, but our resistance and defence of these values will be an example to the coming generation and will play a role in turning things around. Fifthly, progressives must not fear to see what they can learn from the extreme right, especially when it comes to the politics of passion or the politics of charisma, and see how their values can be advanced or promoted in passionate and charismatic ways. They must unite reason to passion, and not see them as being in contradiction, though, of course, they must not violate their commitments to truth, justice, and fair play in the process. Sixthly, and perhaps most importantly, they need to have a transformative vision that can compete with that of the Far Right, one based on genuine equality and genuine democratic empowerment that goes beyond the now discredited liberal democracy. Some call this vision socialism. Others would prefer another term, but the important thing is its message of radical, real equality beyond class, gender, and race, against the faux socialist programme offered by the Far Right that tries to co-​opt advocacy of welfare state programmes originally offered by the Left, but only for people with the ‘right’ skin colour, the ‘right’ culture, the ‘right’ ethnolinguistic group.

Concluding notes Let me just end with a few thoughts on theory, the advancement of knowledge, and politics.

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340  Walden Bello First, to repeat, a theory or paradigm’s main virtue is that by organising reality conceptually, it helps us to understand it. Second, in the book Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right, I try not to provide a general theory of counterrevolution, but using the paradigm of counterrevolution to study a limited number of cases, one might come up with several significant propositions that can be applied to other cases in the pursuit of such a general theory (Bello, 2019). Third, in the process of validating a theory, when dissonant data or data that cannot fit into the paradigm emerge, the first response is to see whether the theory can be adjusted to fit the data; that is, one attempts to make the theory more comprehensive or it may be made a subordinate part of a more comprehensive theory. For instance, counterrevolutionary regimes might be placed in a broader context of types of political regimes, each of which has its own more or less internally coherent features. Counterrevolutionary regimes may then be distinguished from, say, revolutionary regimes, post-​revolutionary regimes, liberal democratic regimes, even ‘Islamist regimes’. Fourth, when such a process becomes too unwieldy or chaotic, then one is obliged to junk the theory and search for one that has more explanatory power. Indeed, it is the fate of every theory that it is either eventually radically revised or wholly superseded. When the paradigm of counterrevolution becomes a barrier rather than a tool for deeper understanding, I would be very happy to junk it and walk away from the scene of the crash. The point is, theory must serve to clarify, not obfuscate. Finally, a theory’s usefulness lies not only in its assisting us to understand reality but to transform it. In this regard, a good reminder lies in the words of a famous thinker whose theory changed the world: ‘Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it’. But a useful addendum is my own advice: ‘Let theory guide practice, but beware of being wedded too much to a theory that you forget that practice is the ultimate arbiter of its worth’.

References Bello, W. (2019). Counterrevolution:The Global Rise of the Far Right. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing. Jaffrelot, C. (2016). “What Gujarat Model?—​Growth without Development and with Socio-​ Political Polarization.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(4): 820–​838. Mayer, A. (2000). The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press Mishra, P. (2017). Age of Anger. London: Penguin Books.

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40  Rural dispossession and resistance in Asia and Africa Dip Kapoor

The acknowledgement of interpolations and current continuities between colonialism and development in development studies has been tenuous at best, if not muted. This is predictable perhaps given that Western developmentalism variously assumes colonisation as, in terms of Schumpeter’s euphemistic oxymoron, ‘creative destruction’. The colonial advantage in Asia and Africa whereby Western colonialists, together occupying less than 2 per cent of the earth’s surface, claimed possession (from the 19th century) to 50 per cent of Asia and 90 per cent of Africa, was secured in the post-​independence era by the colonial powers via the neo/​colonial development (or underdevelopment) project (Fanon, 1963; Rodney, 2018 [1972]). Developmentalism’s post/​colonial anti-​rural imperatives (Davis, 2002; Patel, 2013) wherein development pathways out of rural poverty, a condition produced by capitalist development in the first instance, are envisaged either as wage labour or migration, glosses over histories of rural resistance(s) by presuming an apolitical compliance and foregone acquiescence to development by rural habitants. Developmentalism thus continues to underplay if not obfuscate around its colonial pre-​suppositions and the structural persistence of pre-​existing existential realities and non-​capitalist collective-​ communal modes of peasant and indigenous production. There would also appear to be a presumption that anti-​colonialism and resistance in the post-​independence period have died along with the anti-​colonial nationalisms for independence, the latter being equated with a final rupture with colonialism itself. The relatively recent introduction of the concept of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) (Harvey, 2003), given its geographical preoccupation with land and space, un/​wittingly resuscitated the academic and political question of neo/​colonial structures of power and the anti/​colonial dialectic.The food/​financial crises of 2007–​2008 propelled attention to dispossession and, in Marx’s terms, land grabbing. First researched and politicised by GRAIN in its 2008 report, Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security and subsequently by other international non-​governmental organisations (NGOs) and social action organisations, including Oxfam, Food First, and The Oakland Institute (see Driving Dispossession, Oakland Institute, 2018), these activist interventions have since spawned a burgeoning academic scholarship on the global land grab in critical agrarian and peasant studies pertaining to South/​east Asia, Africa, and the Americas wherein Africa alone accounts for 70 per cent of grabs. On a relatively more subdued scale, with the exception of firsthand reporting from activist organisations (see farmlandgrab.org; miningwatch.org; pambuzuka.org; panap.net), this has also stimulated regionally focused academic research pertaining to anti/​dispossession struggles in Asia and Africa from about the early 2000s (Borras & Franco, 2013; Caouette & Turner, 2009; Hall et al., 2011; McMichael, 2010; DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-49

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342  Dip Kapoor Moyo & Yeros, 2005; Oliver-​Smith, 2010), a scholarship which continues to lag the ground realities of persistent and pervasive land conflicts (see landconflictwatch.org or ejatlas.org).

Dispossession David Harvey’s conceptualisation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003), while eschewed by some Marxists for misinterpreting Marx, resuscitates the relatively neglected question of land and land-​based politics in critical development studies. His conceptual and political innovation inadvertently augments the labour/​capital dialectic and the politics of class conflict with an anti/​colonial dialectic pertaining to land/​place and anti-​dispossession struggles. Seeking to address the lacunae in Marx’s account of primitive accumulation and his ‘failure to see the creative potential that resides in what some regard dismissively as “traditional” and non-​capitalistic social relations and systems of production’ (including ‘acknowledging the significance of multiple identifications based on class, gender, locality, culture etc.’), Harvey underscores the need to ‘assiduously cultivate the connectivity between struggles within expanded reproduction and against ABD’ (2003: 179). Unlike Marx’s prognosis of primitive accumulation as the prehistory of capital, Harvey suggests that ABD is a permanent characteristic of capitalism; a recurring process which purportedly has, under contemporary neoliberal and extractive capitalism, become ‘the dominant form of accumulation relative to expanded reproduction’ (Harvey, 2003: 153, 176). His definition of ABD is expansive in scope and includes, inter alia, land and labour power commodification, asset privatisation, suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of livelihood, and monetisation and exchange, including the use of the credit system (Harvey, 2003: 176). While some argue for more precision in definition, prompting Levien (2013) to define dispossession as the extra-​economic coercive acquisition of land and other resources by the state, overlooking the difficulty of sustaining the dichotomy between extra-​economic and economic coercive means of accumulation, Indigenous scholarship suggests that terms such as the ‘new imperialism’ or dispossession, development, globalisation, neoliberalism, displacement, land grabbing, foreignisation, or enclosures, without flattening distinctions between them, are indicative of a ‘deepening, hastening and stretching of an already existing empire’ (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005: 601). Indigenous scholars thereby underscore colonial continuities or what Massimo De Angelis would recognise as the common social character of what prima facie appears to be distinct socio-​economic processes. Similarly, compelling distinctions between the state-​led ‘developmentalist regime of dispossession’ in the post-​independence era in the South (postcolony) and the current ‘neoliberal regime of dispossession’ where the state is a more conspicuous ‘land broker’ for capital and expropriates land from small farmers for inter/​national corporations (Levien, 2013: 361) negates neo/​colonial continuities by seeking to place these ‘regimes’ outside colonial relations of power. These conceptions hastily assume that post/​colonial epochs signify a decisive and uncontaminated rupture in social relations, including between colonial and capitalist structures of power and politics. Under the regimes of dispossession (Levien, 2013) cartographies of power, capitalist (state) reproductions of social relations of production (wage-​capital structuration) is construed as all encompassing (imperialism), while neo/​colonial and internal colonial structures of power (race-​gendered anti/​dispossession structurations concerning land/​ place and deracination or removal/​ extinction) are eviscerated. The underlying logic

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Rural dispossession in Asia and Africa  343 of Indigenous and anti/​de-​colonial territorial and land struggles is distorted when it is presumed that what is singularly objectionable about dispossession is that it enables their exploitation as labour. As Glen Coulthard (Dene) puts it, Indigenous resistance and anti-​capitalism are ‘less about our emergent status as rightless proletarians’ as the ‘history of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure’ (Coulthard, 2014: 12–​13). In addition to the Marxist conception of primitive accumulation and related elaborations of ABD, an intra-​European account pertaining to the transition from feudalism to capitalism wherein for Marx, dispossession as primitive accumulation came to refer to the initial separation process that separated immediate producers from direct access to the means of production, thus forcing them into new labour conditions, now mediated by way of the wage, there are at least three other spatial-​temporal political locations of note for mobilising the protean concept and politics of dispossession. All are driven by the historical and contemporary reproduction of colonialism and capitalism as dispossession and regressive reorganisation in material (production) and cultural (representational) social relations. First, the settler-​colonial logic of dispossession wherein Anglo-​settlers engaged in one of the single largest land grabs in human history amounting to 6 per cent of the earth’s surface (9.89 million square miles of land) over the course of the 19th century alone (Nichols, 2020: 51); a process which Indigenous scholars allude to as the experience of colonialism as an ongoing structure of dispossession which targets indigenous peoples for elimination since indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it (Coulthard, 2014). Second, the black radical tradition underscores the dispossession of slaves from Africa, including the commodification of slaves as speculative property; ‘slavery as a critical foundation for capitalism’ (Robinson, 2000: 163) as 19 million Africans perished in the Atlantic crossing during the mercantile period of capitalism. Anti-​black racism and internal colonialism continue to define projects of deracination, while black feminists address bodily/​ reproductive dispossessions and dispossessed lives. A related and third tradition of interpretation and politics is dispossession in relation to capital accumulation via a world system of colonial exploitation, including Asia and Africa, or what Lenin referred to as the highest stage of capitalism, namely, imperialism. Colonial capital realises surplus value through every means, taking advantage of uneven development globally, including, as per Rosa Luxemburg’s observations, the exploitation of racialised labour in regions where the white race is not capable of working and where capital needs other races to exploit territories. Colonial capitalist dispossession of Africa and Asia prompted Fanon (1963: 76) to state that ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World … an opulence that has been fuelled by the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races’. As formal and informal colonies gained independence and joined the march of civilisation and development, some of these countries became colonisers themselves and in the case of those that were unable to control and exploit new regions, as the economist Amit Bhaduri notes, imperialism turns inwards as wars are now waged on their own citizens in the name of development. Neo/​colonial regimes of dispossession of marginal social groups and classes and non-​ capitalist modes of production persist through what are now referenced as ‘regimes of development dispossession’ and ‘regimes of neoliberal dispossession’ (Levien, 2013), including neo-​ colonial dispossession via structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed on rural populations in Asia and Africa in the 1980s–​1990s as market disciplining

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344  Dip Kapoor and withdrawal of social protections (Davis, 2006), Western development aid and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa (Langan, 2018) and a ‘new extractive capitalist scramble for African resources’ by an inter/​national capitalist class (Wengraf, 2018). The 19th-​century Euro-​colonial plantations of Southeast Asia continue to carve the landscape into industrial agriculture and tree plantation development zones as mega projects wherein the region is currently the source of 76, 86, and 59 per cent of the world’s palm oil, rubber, and coconuts respectively and Malaysia and Indonesia alone account for 16 million hectares of palm oil cultivation, while 1 million hectare of non-​ traditional cash crops like rubber has been planted in China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar (Lazar & Ishikawa, 2019). The 2007–​2008 financial and food crises, the latter sparked by a spike in commodity prices, triggered the agricultural land grab, mainly in sub-​Saharan Africa and Central/​ Southeast Asia in terms of the Asian-​African regions; a period evidenced by a ‘vast expansion of bourgeois rights … a global land grab unprecedented since colonial times … as speculative investors now regard “food as gold” and are acquitting millions of hectares in the global South’ (Araghi & Karides, cited in Kapoor, 2017: 5). Large-​scale land ‘acquisitions’, in the vicinity of anywhere between 46 and 225 million hectares (the size of western Europe), have since taken place in relation to oil/​mining, agribusiness (monoculture plantations), industry (e.g., special economic zones), conservation and biofuels, residential development (including remittance-​based purchases), tourism, and speculation on land. According to the World Bank, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Mozambique account for 23 per cent of global demand for large-​scale ‘acquisitions’, while sub-​Saharan African governments (where states have formal ownership of land) have fully accepted arguments about the development benefits of foreign direct investment FDI promoted by the Bank/​ international financial institutions (IFIs) which in turn have diluted customary tenure regimes at village, tribal, or clan level (Hall, 2013). According to the Oakland Institute, the same interventions by these actors are being reproduced in Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka (see report on Driving Di spossession (Mousseau et al., 2016) and the World Bank’s Enabling the Business of Agriculture report (Yacoub Hindiyeh, 2019)). Key actors involved in these deals include: (i) governments/​states (e.g., China, US, UK, Gulf states) on the investment side and recipient states seeking to attract FDI (e.g., Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Philippines, Tanzania, Vietnam); (ii) transnational corporations and international and domestic capital; (iii) IFIs; and (iv) groups trying to regulate/​resist the land grab (e.g., international non-​governmental organisations (INGOs), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)/​World Food Security, social movements). Recommended reading: www.farmlandgrab.org; www.viacampesina.org; www. pambazuka.org; www.panap.net; https://​ ejatlas.org; www.miningwatch.ca; tni.org; minesminerals&people.

Rural dispossession and resistance in Asia and Africa In colonial countries, only the peasantry is revolutionary … all that the colonized has seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity. … the land is the most meaningful … and it is land which must provide bread and natural dignity (Fanon, 1963: 9). Indigenous people, small/​landless peasants-​sharecroppers and indentured labour/​migrant workers, forest dwellers, pastoralists and nomads, fisherfolk and their extended social relations in the urban peripheries/​slums are the canaries in the neo/​colonial mine of

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Rural dispossession in Asia and Africa  345 capitalist accumulation. Given Harvey’s expansive definition of ABD, dispossession-​related resistance is as varied as the multiple means of dispossession, i.e., these are dialectical or mutually constitutive processes. Whatever the forms of resistance to dispossession or the weakness of the weapons, for those occupying the lower rungs of multiple hierarchies of power, few would willingly give up (historical) claims of domicile or embrace socio-​cultural and political-​economic dispossession. Those that do engage the terrain of commodification, then presumed to be (willing?) self-​interested rational instrumental actors in prevailing Northern agrarian accounts of rural social change, have typically been overtly coerced (extra-​economic and impinging economic coercion/​structures), bribed or deceived by state-​corporate actors (e.g., corporate social responsibilitiy palliatives) and/​ or by feudal/​tribal elites and middle/​big farmers at the interstices of feudal–​capital social relations in contexts of dispossession. Academic attention to resistance to dispossession in rural/​development studies has been muted for several reasons (Borras & Franco, 2013), including prevailing disciplinary onto-​epistemes which assume development neo/​colonisation and subsequently evade the question of (anticolonial) resistance(s). Asian and African examples of dispossession-​ related resistance from a recent collection edited by the author, henceforth referenced as ACRD (Kapoor, 2017), are utilised below for purposes of illustration and brevity. Resistance, to whatever degree or strength/​weakness of the weapons and forms of expression, entails active opposition to existing colonial capitalist power relations driving dispossession in trenches encompassing fields, subterranean locations, water bodies, and forests. Resistance is mostly overt of necessity given the oft irreversible colonising implications of dispossession for ways of life/​living. It is as conspicuous as acts of dispossession themselves (e.g., dams/​flooding) and collective (dis/​organised) given the numbers directly impacted at the point of enclosure (e.g., mine site) and beyond (ripple effects), if not simultaneously covert and quotidian, as in the case of workers employed by mines that they may be opposing. Resistance to dispossession can be sporadic or sustained over time in the case of organised collective action, which, when backed by dense social networks becomes a movement. It also encompasses various anticipatory, proactive, or ongoing (historical) parallel land-​based projects including: food sovereignty, (re)commoning (public space assertions) or Indigenous sovereignty/​territorial claims, as it does reactive activisms produced at flash points of dispossession. In Kenya, rural (elderly) women farmers are drawing together several thousand (intergenerational) peasant farmers in food sovereignty activities (ancient seed saving), networks and campaigns, and relinking commoner value chains as opposed to corporate (Big Ag: Monsanto, Syngenta, IFIs, Gates Foundation, US Agency for International Development) value chains (Brownhill, Kaara & Turner, ACRD). In Samoa, where 80 per cent of customary land is being targeted as collateral for business loans encouraged by the Asian Development Bank, chiefs (matai) have taken up indigenisation via the Fono council to assert the Samoan way (fa’aSamoa) (Gordon, ACRD). Keeping in mind the interests of dispossession struggles waged by those directly implicated at the point of enclosure, three key (imbricated) issues pertaining to dispossession-​related resistance are considered here. First, dispossession-​ related struggles and rural resistance usually involve multiple ontologies (valuations) of land and socio-​cultural and political-​economic interests across class, gender, ethnicities/​tribal affiliations, race, caste, religion, and so forth, given that rural dispossession variously and differentially implicates multiple social groupings and subsequently, the social composition of related resistance. The continuous challenge for

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346  Dip Kapoor social formations of resistance pertains to the construction and maintenance of cohesion, unified opposition, and organisation glued by/​to an intelligible political teleology across interests and valuations of land. As of January 2021, 200,000 mainly smallholders and farmers’ (kisan) unions camped around New Delhi, India, for over a month have been protesting three ‘anti-​farmer’ bills imposed by the neoliberal saffron (Hindu fundamentalist) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-​led government. Protest against an unprecedented corporate (e.g., Ambani/​Reliance petrol stations and cell phones are being boycotted by protestors) agricultural grab designed to replace the current state system of collective procurement (including price setting) and a public distribution system with private control and ownership has cohered across caste, religion, class, and gender (symbolised by women driving or learning to drive tractors to Delhi) given the broader political-​economic interests at stake for farmers and peasants (including rural women and Dalits/​outcastes) in/​from the bread-​basket Punjab region. Unlike migrant labour struggles, this is a rooted place-​based mobilisation at the epicentre, fast taking on national proportions (e.g., an estimated 250 million participated in a nationwide general strike on 26 November 2020). In attempting to address similar tensions around organising and on a smaller scale, the Niyamgiri Surakhya Samiti successfully organised the core constituency of Dongria, Jharnia, and Kutia Adivasi and Dalits in 112 villages in eastern India to protect Niyamgiri mountain over two decades from the Vedanta/​Sterlite (UK) bid to mine bauxite, by claiming it as a sacred site and as a source of livelihood. They also organised around an economic and physical geography of mountains, rivers, and streams with corresponding socioecological implications of hill-​top mining for these groups located at various points on this terrain (Kapoor, ACRD). Small/​landless peasant organising along with plantation labour and Saluan ethnic groups against coconut plantations in Bohotakong village in Sulawesi, Indonesia, on the other hand, has persisted but fluctuated over three decades due to competing claims and class-​ethnic interests and valuations of land/​labour (Masalam, ACRD). The common experience with apartheid in South Africa (which restricted 80 per cent of the black population to 13 per cent of the land), however, helped mobilise mainly black citrus and vegetable farm workers and small/​landless peasants against white farming capital in the Eastern Cape under Phakamani Siyephambili (Naidoo, Klerck, & Helliker, ACRD). Similarly, in Uganda, the stalling of Madhavani Group’s Amuru Sugar Works sugarcane cultivation seeking 40,000 hectares by all family farmers around the village of Lakang was possible because the overwhelming majority of small producers unequivocally rejected enclosure and refused incorporation as outgrower farmers or labourers; a lucid claim of land sovereignty and autonomy vis-​à-​vis capitalist markets and state (Martiniello, 2015). A second set of issues confronting dispossession-​ related resistance at the point of enclosure concerns cross-​scalar vertical alliances and assemblages of activism with national advocacy networks (NANs) and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) potentially involving: related movements (e.g., human rights, environmental, Indigenous, labour); I/​NGOs; activist/​research organisations; media; religious organisations; and increasingly, political parties and guerrilla movements (e.g., Maoists/​India and the New People’s Army/​Philippines). Horizontal alliances with different anti-​dispossession movements in the region also present opportunities and specific issues for what is essentially a coalitional politics of resistance to dispossession. Local movements at the point of enclosure, while locking on state-​corporate agents of dispossession. also contend with the politics of boundary spanning and its contradictory

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Rural dispossession in Asia and Africa  347 implications and prospects. In the African context, TANs have succeeded in affecting several cancellations, failures, stoppages, and suspensions on conversions from farmland, grazing, forests, mangroves, pastureland, wildlife corridors etc. to flex-​crop (sugar, ethanol, and palm oil), biofuel (oilseeds, jatropha), and tree plantations (eucalyptus, pine) involving anywhere from 15,000 to 1.3 million hectare foreign concessions in Kenya (Tana River Delta), Tanzania, Uganda, Niger, Ghana, Senegal, South Sudan, Madagascar, Mozambique (Limpopo), and South-​West Cameroon (see farm-​landgrab.org and EJatlas). Similarly, in the Southern Philippines, Lumad indigenous resistance in the mining zone in Mindanao has converged with left formations and the New People’s Army to address ongoing state-​ corporate incursions (Rodriguez, ACRD). In Bangladesh, however, the Rampal coal power plant land grab (with ecological implications for mangroves in the Sundarbans) and related small farmer and landless labour resistance have been hijacked by international green capitalist environmentalist non-​governmental organisations, shrimp farming capital, and feudal-​capitalist classes and steered towards commodification (Mookerjea & Misra, ACRD). NGO-​isation or professionalisation and de-​politicisation of anti-​mining and other anti-​dispossession movements can also prove problematic for the struggle at the point of enclosure in these assemblages, as some NGOs steer movement constituents towards the terrain of commodification or potentially derail movement objectives (Kapoor, ACRD), while others can help consolidate claims, as in the case of the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action (SNEHA), a social action NGO which magnified coastal fisher resistance to tsunami-​related disaster relief-​related dispossession and shrimp farming interests in Tamil Nadu, India (Swamy & Revathi, ACRD). Discourses of development/​resistance too, are influenced by trans/​national actors (e.g., human rights and environmental framing), amplifying or contradicting articulations of activism at the point of enclosure. Radio Ada has played an instrumental role in ensuring that the perspective and interests of local clans and artisanal salt mining cooperatives around the Ada salt lagoon front the resistance to Vacuum Salt Ltd. in Ghana (Langdon & Larweh, ACRD) at the national level, while, in the case of early germination of organised resistance by artisanal miners to Acacia Mining’s North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania, transnational media/​investigative journalism (with allied campaigns like Protest Barrick) has publicised these remote struggles (Moloo, ACRD). All cross-​scalar dis/​connections require movement vigilance and political boundary maintenance wherein local struggles selectively de/​legitimate these relations. Thirdly, anti-​dispossession resistance perennially contends with strategic and tactical issues, including consideration of the aforementioned assemblages and the in/​efficacy of an un/​necessary politics of scale/​networking. Strategic and tactical concerns are compelled by changes in the tactics of dispossession by state-​corporate agents which demand contingent responses, including when/​not to resort to: legal activism (e.g., to buy time); direct action (e.g., barricades, sabotage, blocking survey teams—​raising the risk rating of investments); open/​hidden resistance (e.g., storm refinery gates while symbolically wielding traditional weapons); and non/​violent action (as triggered by development violence); public/​popular mobilisation/​education (media expositions) (ACRD, 2017). State-​facilitated large-​scale land grabs in the Benishangul-​Gumuz region in Ethiopia for commercial crops and biofuels have been enabled by the Derg regime’s forced re-​ settlement programme, thereby prompting Gumuz to engage a range of tactics, including arson; re-​occupations (‘illegal’ cultivation); flight; and violence against migrant agricultural labour imported by the regime (Moreda, ACRD). Reliable and timely information is also indispensable for tactical purposes and trans/​national alliances can facilitate this, as

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348  Dip Kapoor in the case of Mukaya Payam (South Sudan) opposition to a Texas-​based company’s 49-​ year (extendable to 100) lease of 600,000 hectares for US$25,000 with the Mukaya Payam Cooperative (a fictitious entity) for the right to exploit timber without limit, to plant palm oil and jatropha, and to develop wood-​based industry. The oustees were not even aware of the deal until the Oakland Institute’s research and advocacy alerted them to this state-​corporate-​rural elite grab. Similarly, NANs and TANs can also augment local/​indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge capacity where needed (e.g., for challenges concerning environmental clearance for mining projects). Strategic directions typically converge around: (i) bargaining (for prices, jobs, and wages) within the terrain of commodification and expanded reproduction wherein associated tactics are more in keeping with forms of compliant defiance (e.g., legal tactics within the terms/​institutions of the architects of dispossession or colonial justice and capitalist incorporation); (ii) an anti-​colonial politics unequivocally against ABD utilising relatively more disruptive radical democratic tactics (e.g., anti-​colonial threat/​use of counter-​violence); and (iii) multiple positions given varied constituents in coalitions and networks, wherein tactics are multi-​pronged or even politically counter-​productive. To the extent that these forms of dispossession-​related rural struggles in the Asian and African contexts are sources of resistance to colonial capital (Anderson, 2010; Kohn & McBride, 2011), they would strive to adhere to the socio-​political interests of territorial and customary claims of the Indigenous/​tribal ethnicities, smallholders/​landless peasants, pastoralists, fishers, un/​waged rural plantation/​farm labour and paupers vis-​à-​vis the architects of dispossession, i.e., capitalist and consumer classes, feudal/​landed elites, and the neoliberal capitalist state. Alliances across modes of production and subaltern classes coalescing around anti/​colonial land-​based resistance and un/​waged rural labour, along with the struggles of the industrial working class, will continue to be the backbone of a postcapitalist revolutionary prospect. Recommended reading: Edelman et al. (2018); Kapoor (2017); Temper et al. (2020); Wengraf (2018).

References Alfred, T., & Corntassel, J. (2005). Being Indigenous: Resurgences Against Contemporary Colonialism. Oxford: Government and Opposition. Anderson, K. (2010). Marx at the Margins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borras, S.M., & Franco, J. (2013). “Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below.” Third World Quarterly, 34(9): 1723–​1747. Caouette, D., & Turner, S. (eds.) (2009). Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia. New York: Routledge. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin,White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MS: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, M. (2002). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London:Verso. Davis, M. (2006). The Planet of Slums. New York:Verso. Edelman, M., et al. (eds.) (2018). Global Land Grab: Political Reactions from Below. NewYork: Routledge. Fanon, F. (1963). Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, C. New York: Grove Press. GRAIN. (2008). Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security. www.grain.org/​go/​ landgrab. Hall, D. (2013). Land. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, D., et al. (2011). Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press.

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Rural dispossession in Asia and Africa  349 Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapoor, D. (ed.) (2017). Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa. London: Zed Books. Kohn, M., & McBride, K. (2011). Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations. New York: OUP. Langan, M. (2018). Neocolonialism and the Poverty of Development in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lazar, M.-​ K., & Ishikawa, N. (2019). “Mega-​ Plantations in Southeast Asia: Landscapes of Displacement.” Environment and Society Advances in Research, 10: 63–​82. Levien, M. (2013). “The Politics of Dispossession:Theorizing India’s Land Wars.” Politics and Society, 41(3): 351–​394. Martiniello, G. (2015). “Social Struggles in Uganda’s Acholiland: Understanding Responses and Resistance to Amuru Sugar Works.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(3–​4): 653–​669. McMichael, P. (2010). Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change. NewYork: Routledge. Mousseau, F., Currier, A., Fraser, E., & Green, J. (2016). Driving Dispoession. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute. Moyo, S., & Yeros, P. (2005). Reclaiming the Land:The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: Zed Books. Nichols, R. (2020). Theft is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Oakland Institute. (2018). Driving Dispossession. www.oaklandinstitute.org/​sites/​oaklandinstitute. org/​files/​driving-​dispossession.pdf. Oliver-​Smith, A. (2010). Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development. Austin, TX: University of Texas. Patel, R. (2013). “The Long Green Revolution.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1): 1–​63. Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism:The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rodney, W. (2018 [1972]). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London:Verso. Temper, L., et al. (2020). Movements Shaping Climate Futures: A Systematic Mapping of Protests against Fossil Fuel and Low-​carbon Energy Projects. Environmental Research Letters. DOI: 10.1088/​1748-​9326/​abc197. Wengraf, L. (2018). Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Yacoub Hindiyeh, M. (2019). Enabling the Business of Agriculture. Washington, DC:World Bank Group.

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41  Extractive capitalism and the resistance in Latin America Raúl Zibechi

Although global flows of capital over the past three decades of neoliberal globalisation have become increasingly speculative and disconnected from the production process it is revealing to trace out the changing pattern of capital flows, especially in regard to North–​South flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) and resource-​seeking ‘extractive’ capital, which have increased dramatically in recent years. A review of data on these flows shows that over the past decade, and especially since 2005, they have moved away from manufacturing and high-​tech information-​r ich services towards the extraction of natural resources, both renewable and non-​renewable, including fossil and biofuels for energy, precious metals and industrial minerals, as well as agrofood products and the ‘large-​scale acquisition of land’ (‘land grabbing’, in the lexicon of critical development studies; Borras et al., 2012) for the purpose of accessing these resources directly (as opposed to trading them)—​or, in regard to some of the governments involved in this global land grab, the food and energy security needs of some countries. A close look at these flows of resource-​seeking capital also points towards a major shift in their destination—​in the geoeconomics of their global distribution. Not only has Latin America, especially Brazil, been the recipient or destination for much of this capital but the changing pattern of capital flows reveals a major reconfiguration in the structure of global production, a structure modified by the continuous but changing flows of capital. The so-​called ’global financial crisis’ triggered by the 2007 sub-​prime débâacle in the US served as a sort of watershed in this regard but the process can be traced back to the turn of the new millennium and the ‘primary commodities boom’ provoked by the growing demand for precious metals and by China and other ‘emerging markets’ for energy, industrial minerals, and agro-​food products (Cypher, 2010). In 2010, for the first time since the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) kept records—​ i.e., since 1970—​ the developed countries in the Global North received less than half of global FDI flows (until the late 1980s they attracted 97 per cent of investments). In 2005, developing and emerging economies in the Global South attracted only 12 per cent of global flows of productive capital (FDI) but in 2010, towards the end of a primary commodities boom and against a background of a sharp decline in capital flows in the world, these economies in the aggregate overcame the 50 per cent barrier (ECLAC, 2010). UNCTAD’s 2019 report on global investment flows indicates that developing countries continue to absorb more than half of global FDI. After a dip in the share of these countries in global investment flows in 2012–​2014 associated with a downturn in the price of many primary commodities, the share of developing countries in global FDI flows rose from 46 per cent in 2017 to 54 per cent in 2019 (UNCTAD, 2019: 2). DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-50

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Extractive capitalism in Latin America  351 Looking more closely at the geopolitics of these capital flows, it is evident that South America was the destination of choice, because FDI was evidently attracted to the huge reserves of natural resources (metals and industrial minerals, hydrocarbons or fossil fuels, soy and other forms of biofuels, and agro-​food products) that the governments of the day were anxious to open up for exploitation by foreign investors in order to take maximum advantage of the economic opportunities provided in the form of additional fiscal revenues. Under these conditions Latin America changed from being a relatively marginal location for North–​South capital flows (about 5 per cent of the world total) into an important and dynamic destination. Between 2000 and 2005 Latin America received an annual average of US$66 billion that grew exponentially up to US$216 billion in 2011, which meant that it was able to attract 15 per cent of all global flows of productive capital over this period (ECLAC, 2010: 45). This surge in FDI was driven by the demand on capitalist markets for natural resources. In 2012, in conditions of a sharp drop in commodity prices on capitalist markets, which signalled the end of the primary commodities boom, FDI flows to Latin America and the Caribbean began a long slide that lasted until 2017, which saw a substantial recovery in the investment inflows. However, this momentum could not be maintained in conditions of a generalised contraction in worldwide FDI flows in 2019 (UNCTAD, 2019). According to UNCTAD (2019), global flows of FDI overall declined by 13 per cent (27 per cent in the case of developed countries, where investments fell to their lowest point since 2004) but were set to fall by 49 per cent in the first half of 2020; Latin America, however, was expected to hold its own as a recipient of these flows while investment flows to developing nations in Africa and Asia were expected to fall anywhere from 25 to 45 per cent in 2020 (UNCTAD, 2019). Evidently, despite the preference of big capital for productive investments in information technology and industry, the extractive economies of Latin America continue to attract the attention and the investments of big capital. Even so, FDI inflows in the region are still 27 per cent lower than during the peak of the commodities boom. The main datum here is the pattern of continued growth of investment flows to the region, which in the case of South America reached US$150 billion in 2011, 15 times greater in absolute figures than in the early 1990s. But not all countries participated equally in these flows, a function of geopolitics as much as geoeconomics. Indeed, it would seem that some countries—​Venezuela, Argentina, and Ecuador in particular, but also and less understandably, Mexico—​have been ‘punished’ by capital. In the case of Venezuela the explanation is very simple: Hugo Chávez’s nationalisation policy provoked a massive flight of capital that has not been offset by the relatively large investments originating in China and the much lower investments of Brazilian capital. As for Argentina capital changed from euphoria under the Menem regime in the 1990s to substantial caution in the wake of the Kirchner regime’s default in 2002 and its reluctance to heed the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regarding debt repayment and restructuring in the context of the worst crisis in the country’s history. At the beginning of a sharp turn towards neoliberalism in the early 1990s, Argentina received twice the investments that Brazil received and in the second half of the 1990s FDI inflows equalled those of Mexico, even though both economies are much larger than Argentina’s. After the 2001 crisis, foreign investors began to beat a retreat, although not to the same scale and speed as in Venezuela, and Brazilian capita—​and to a lesser degree Chinese and Canadian capital—​entered into the vacuum left by the retreating US and European investors.

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352  Raúl Zibechi The case of Mexico is curious in that the government is closely aligned with both the neoliberal policy agenda and the US—​and it has one of the most entreguista regimes in all Latin America, particularly as regards mining capital (no royalties, and an effective tax rate of 1.2 per cent: Bárcenas, 2012). At the time of the inception of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in January 1994 Mexico received up to 60 per cent of FDI destined for Latin America. The subsequent withdrawal of capital from Mexico, or the evident reluctance to invest in a highly liberalised economy vis-​à-​vis US capital, evidently relates to the changing pattern of investment capital—​for example, the dominance of ‘resource-​seeking’ rather than efficiency-​or market-​seeking capital—​as well as political instability in that the withdrawal of capital quickened as of 2008 when the state began its dirty war against drug trafficking. The Latin American countries that today are the most attractive to capital include Brazil, the biggest economy in the region and very much open to business as far as foreign investments go, particularly as regards what we term ‘agro-​extractivism’. Other countries favoured by extractive capital include Colombia, the lynchpin of US imperialism in the region and long a supporter of extractive capitalism, and Chile, which continued to toe the line of extractivism and neoliberalism when a number of other countries in the region turned towards inclusionary state activism and adopted a regulatory regime. Brazil illustrates the success of the government’s geopolitical project to convert the country into a global power (see Chapter 17), and the interest of foreign investors in an economy that has been able in just a decade to incorporate close to 40 million people into the market. Receiving only half of the investments that Mexico attracted two decades ago the volume of FDI inflows today is four times that of Mexico, even though the two economies are comparable in size. But what distinguishes the Brazilian case is not the growth of FDI as such, which currently positions it as the fourth largest destination point for FDI in the world after the US, China, Hong Kong, and the UK, but the increased interest of investors in the country’s supply of natural resources, particularly in the sector of oil and gas extraction, but also mining as well as hydro-​power and the conversion of land from food production to biofuel production. Even in 2019, when the interest of investors in these extractive sectors and industries had waned with the collapse of the commodities boom, Brazil’s extractive sector, supported by a renewed government programme of privatisations, fuelled an increase of 20 per cent in the level of foreign investments. Before the emergence of the primary commodities boom, capital inflows in the region went in three directions: industry, which absorbed around 40 per cent of total FDI inflows; services, which absorbed around a half; and mining and agriculture, which together accounted for less than 10 per cent of total FDI inflows (SOBEET, 2011). But several trends and ‘developments’ in recent years have dramatically changed this pattern in favour of resource-​seeking investments. The strong demand for primary commodities on the world market, the expansion of large-​scale foreign investments in land for the purpose of agro-​food extraction and the production of biofuels, and the rampant speculation in food and minerals as well as land have wrought a profound change in the structure of capital inflows. FDI in services declined from close to one-​half of total investments to 30 per cent in the years of the commodities boom; at the same time the share of industry in these investments fell to 35 per cent, while mining and agribusiness tripled their share of FDI inflows to 30 per cent (Zibechi, 2012a). In 2019, in conditions of a global decline in the flow of productive investment, FDI in Latin America still grew by 10 per cent—​driven by increased flows to

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Extractive capitalism in Latin America  353 Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, and the mining sector in these countries as well as Ecuador, Peru, and Panama. Recommended reading: Cypher (2010); ECLAC (2010); Zibechi (2012a).

Dynamics of extractivism and neoextractivism Speculation on commodity and capital markets is one way to advance capital accumulation and another is production based on the exploitation of labour (extracting some of the valued added to production in the labour process). Speculation is death, it is robbery, it is destruction, it is capital, it is capitalism, it is extractivism, it is mining, it is monoculture, it is commodity production, and poverty production—​and militarisation, genocide. Finally we are what we bet on life, the need to create our food every day, our survival strategies, but also our dreams and our hopes. We do it collectively in community and in minga (collective struggle). The first thing we need to address is: why do we have an extractivist model today? Why open-​pit mining? Why today the widespread land grabbing and pillage of natural resources, and the associated conditions of dispossession and exclusion, the poisoning and damage to the health of those living in close proximity to the sites of extraction, and the degradation of the environment and rural livelihoods based on a more balanced and nurturing relationship with nature? One answer to these questions can be found in the form taken by capitalism at this most advanced stage of its development—​neoliberal globalisation.We are now in a second period of neoliberalism based on the advance of extractive capital—​‘resource-​seeking’ foreign private investment—​and the multinational corporations seeking to accumulate capital by extracting natural resources from the land for which there is a strong demand and high prices on the world market. The first part of the neoliberal era was in the 1990s. It took the predominant form of privatisation, a neoliberal policy designed to undermine the collective or communal rights to the land enjoyed for millennia by the aboriginal and indigenous peoples and communities in the region, and to commodify both land and the natural wealth of ‘the commons’—​the land, water, and resources for subsistence provided by the land. This phase of neoliberal capitalist development was more or less completed by the year 2000, although in some countries (Ecuador, for example), the neoliberal policy agenda was halted in its tracks by the activism and several uprisings of the indigenous people in the region as well as the peasant social movements (see Chapter 34 by Vergara-​ Camus in this volume). The neoliberal agenda was unfinished because of the organised resistance of dozens of popular uprisings throughout Latin America, from Mexico to southern Patagonia. But in the new millennium (the 21st century) the forces pushing the advance of capital launched another assault in the class war against labour, the direct producers on the land, the indigenous rural communities, and nature. This second phase of the war has taken form as extractive capitalism, returning to a type of capitalism that predominated before the era of industrial capitalism, relying not so much on labour exploitation as on the exploitation of nature, pillaging its wealth of natural resources (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). For several centuries, and then again after an interregnum of some 50 years, the advances made by capital in the countryside were speculative ventures, seeking to accumulate capital by extracting precious metals (gold and silver) and industrial minerals, food products, and animal feed, and various forms of fossil fuel used to fuel the development

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354  Raúl Zibechi of industry and provide energy to millions of consumers in both the North and South. In this extraction process capital advanced step by step from commodity to commodity, squeezing from each as much profit it could, betting on and seeking to gain from the changing values attached by the market to these commodities. But nowadays the products that are most highly valued include precious minerals and metals—​and food, the object of intense, at times frenzied, speculation on future commodity markets, generating from time to time in the process a ‘food crisis’ (a condition in which people cannot afford the price attached by the market to food (Bello, 2008). The global food crisis, which is a fundamental assault on the natural right of all people to life and health, is only one of a number of major consequences of the relentless dynamics of extractive capital in its exploitation of people and nature. First, there is no extractivism, no mining, no soy complex, and no monoculture without the deployment by the state of its repressive apparatus to settle the inevitable conflicts over accessing the country’s most highly valued natural resources, and the social distribution of wealth and income generated by their extraction. Similarly, there is no open pit or mega-​ mining without militarism.You may not see it in the city you live in—​if you live in the city. But if you take a closer look in the subterranean spaces of the system you will see an increasingly militarised environment. And accompanying militarisation is a criminalisation of the protests—​even in countries like Ecuador with a ‘progressive’ post-​neoliberal regime, where not a few non-​governmental organisations and hundreds of people have been criminalised for defending their rights to the land and defending their community. Second, extractive capital inevitably leads to acute social and economic polarisation. This is in part because extractive capital tends to be highly concentrated, generating conditions under which most of the surplus (the value of the exported commodities) is exported, appropriated by different groups such as commodity traders and the capitalists that operate the corporations in the extractive sector, while the working class and people in the popular sector receive few of the benefits but all of the heavy social and environmental costs. Third, often the indigenous peoples over the years—​the peasants and the indigenous nationalities—​have been forced to live in the worst places, environmentally and geographically speaking, in the cities on the banks of polluted streams, in the countryside in the worst places of land, in the heights or in places where they can barely survive. Fourth, we have the project of capital, which is nothing less than a genocidal project, a project to exterminate those people who refuse to migrate and occupy land from which the extractive companies need and seek to extract vital natural resources for the purpose of capital accumulation but to which the indigenous and peasant communities claim territorial rights. The point is that these indigenous people and this population are an obstacle to the accumulation of wealth by the oligarchic classes and global capital. In an earlier time workers in the factories and mines, and peasants in the field and on the haciendas of the agrarian oligarchs, generated profits for the owners of the land and employers of labour by being forced to work many hours longer than necessary to cover the cost of subsistence and reproduction of the labour power of these workers and peasants. But nowadays this is no longer working, and the oligarchs and capitalists are not enriched by our sweat; they enrich themselves by speculating, and this journey made by capital, this strategic change, is what condemns us to death. So we have to assume that this is their project—​to eradicate or force the displacement of those they cannot exploit and stand in the way of their profits, their capital accumulation project. Recommended reading:Veltmeyer and Petras (2014).

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Extractive capital and the resistance Each advance of capital in its assault on labour and nature activates the impulse to resist, and, by the same token, each particular form of capitalism generates particular forms of resistance. Developments on the new frontier of extractive capital in Latin America lend support to this idea in that the economic and political developments over the past two decades undoubtedly generated new forms of resistance and struggle. Throughout the 20th century the resistance predominantly took the form of the land struggle and the labour movement. The first engaged the resistance of small-​scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers against forces that worked to separate them from the land and their means of production. The second engaged the working class in a struggle to resist the workings of a system based on the exploitation of their labour power. This resistance led to a protracted struggle for higher wages and improved working conditions, a struggle that resulted in an ultimate defeat in the 1980s under conditions that weakened and then destroyed the capacity of organised labour to confront capital and even to negotiate collective agreements. While the indigenous communities and the dispossessed peasantry would recover from the defeat that they suffered in their land struggle, the labour movement in the region was never able to recover its former power. The obstacles to their successful resistance were simply too great to overcome. On the other hand, the semiproletarianised peasants and rural landless workers—​the rural poor in the development discourse of the World Bank—​successfully mobilised powerful forces of resistance against the neoliberal agenda of those governments that were holding to the Washington Consensus. The 1990s saw the emergence of powerful indigenous uprisings and the formation of new social movements that managed to hold the neoliberal policy agenda at bay, resulting in a widespread discontent with and the rejection of neoliberalism—​creating conditions of a new progressive cycle in Latin American politics (Barrett, Chavez, & Rodriguez-​Garavito, 2008). In the new millennium, under conditions of extractive capitalism, the resistance has taken a number of new and different forms. The struggle for land or improved wages and working conditions was no longer the major form of struggle. The struggle now was to resist and oppose the policies and efforts designed to privatise and deny them access to water and other elements of the global commons, and to protest the negative impacts of extractive operations on the environment, their rural livelihoods and health. The social movements and localised resistances formed under these conditions included the struggles of those forced to abandon their livelihoods and rural communities because they were deprived of their customary use of land for agriculture, or their right of access to potable water and the commons had been violated, and the environment on which their livelihoods depended had been degraded.

Resistance and struggle on the new frontier of extractive capital Throughout Latin America, there are conflicts over the resistance to a model that is destructive of the environment and limits the possibility of communities to continue to cultivate the land, sustain their livelihoods, and live as they would wish. According to the Observatory of Mining Conflicts of Latin America (OCMAL), there were 284 active conflicts for the megaminería (mega-​mine sector) in the region in 2020. Topping the list is Mexico with 58 cases, followed by 49 in Chile, 46 in Peru, 28 in Argentina, and 26 in Brazil.1

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356  Raúl Zibechi Mega-​mining is affecting hundreds of communities across the region. In some countries like Peru, where 25 per cent of the territory has been ceded to multinational mining companies, the resistance and the resulting conflict led to the collapse of two Cabinets of Ollanta Humala’s government and the militarisation of several provinces. Between 2006 and 2011 socioenvironmental conflicts in this context led to the death of 195 activists. The destructive impact of mining on livelihoods, communities, and the environment is by no means the only source of resistance on the extractive frontier. We just need to look at the forces of popular resistance documented and analysed by Barkin (Chapter 44) in the Latin American context (see also Hamouchene in Chapter 38 for the Middle East and North Africa context). Although we might dispute Barkin’s conclusions as to the significance of the resistance mounted by the communities on the extractive frontier—​he argues that they constitute or have the makings of a collective revolutionary force with the capacity for or potential of pushing or pulling us towards a new world of social and environmental justice—​the indigenous and non-​indigenous communities on the extractive frontier, and the territories in resistance on the extractive frontier, undoubtedly provide a major obstacle and challenge to the advance of capital in the development process on the periphery of the world capitalist system. Nevertheless, the problem remains that the social movements in the region have been suffering, and continue to suffer, from a growing debilitation and a tendency to disorganisation, not to mention a failure to upscale and unify their localised struggles. This remains a major problem to be overcome in the long struggle ahead. Recommended reading: Barkin and Sanchez, (2020); Bebbington and Bury (2013); Zibechi (2012b).

Note 1 Data from https://​mapa.conflictosmineros.net/​ocmal_​db-​v2/​. Accessed 31 December 2020.

References Bárcenas, F.L. (2012). “Detener el saqueo minero en México,” La Jornada, 28 February: 31. Barkin, D., & Sanchez, A. (2020). “The Communitarian Revolutionary Subject: New Forms of Social Transformation.” Third World Quarterly, 41(8): 1421–​1441. Barrett, P., Chávez, D., & Rodríguez Garavito, C. (2008). The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn. London: Pluto Press. Bebbington, A., & Bury, J. (eds.) (2013). Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bello, W. (2008). “Globalization, Development and Democracy: A Reflection on the Global Food Crisis.” Keynote Address, Canadian Assolciation for the Study of International Development, University of British Colombia,Vancouver, 6 June. Borras, S. Jr., Franco, J., Gomez, S., Kay, C., & Spoor, M. (2012). “Land Grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39 (3–​4): 845–​872. Cypher, J. (2010). “South America’s Commodities Boom. Developmental Opportunity or Path Dependent Reversion?” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 30(3–​4): 635–​662. ECLAC. (2010). Foreign Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago: United Nations. OCMAL—​Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina. (2018). Mapa de conflictos mineros, proyectos y empresas mineras en América Latina. http://​mapa.conflictosmineros.net/​ ocmal_​db. Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2011). Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Extractive capitalism in Latin America  357 SOBEET. (2011). Boletim No. 77. Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Empresas Transnacionais e da Globalização Econômica, Sâo Paulo, 25 January. Stahler-​ Sholk, R., & Vanden, H.E. (2011). “A Second Look at Latin American Social Movements: Globalizing Resistance to the Neoliberal Paradigm.” Latin American Perspectives, 38(1). UNCTAD. (2019). World Investment Report. New York: UNCTAD. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Zibechi, R. (2012a). “La nueva geopolítica del capital.” ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento. Colombia: Le Monde Diplomatique. Zibechi, R. (2012b). Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

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42  Colonialism’s miasmas Indigenous resistance and resilience Makere Stewart-​Harawira

In this time of unprecedented ecosystem collapse and species loss, the relevance of Indigenous environmental knowledge has gained increasing recognition. Over at least the last two decades, there have been increasing efforts from international agencies such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and others to integrate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in mitigating and adapting to, the effects of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity. What is remarkable about this is the degree to which traditional environmental knowledge has survived the 500-​year onslaught on its relevance and veracity by the adherents of developmentalist ideologies and market capitalism. Ironically, however, this apparent good-​news story is countered by a legacy of dispossession of land, language, and cultural heritage that in the 21st century remains a critical site of struggle. At the heart of this struggle is the apparatus of settler colonialism on one hand, and Indigenous sovereignty, including recognised rights to cultural heritage, traditional lands, languages, and customs, on the other. Straddling these two positions is the politico/​economics of market capitalism and the commodification of the lifeworld in the name of ever-​expanding growth, innovation, and development. Alongside calls for transition from fossil fuel energy sources, renewed acts of resistance from Indigenous communities may be read as a response to the increase in damaging fossil fuel and hydro development, the last gasps, perhaps, of an industry in crisis. Although often seen as quite distinct, notions of resistance and deep resilience are connected (Brown, 2015). As Penehira et al. (2014), citing Cohen (2001: 147), remark, ‘the term resilience, when applied to indigenous peoples has a long history that draws on multiple cultural strands’. The Indigenous reality is one of resilience, refusal to disappear; it is a reflection of the strength and beauty of peoples who have lived here since humans existed on this land, and will continue to do so, and that, furthermore, is a testimony to the refusal of Indigenous peoples to accept assimilation or integration as an acceptable strategy for their ongoing survival. In this contribution, tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism contextualise Indigenous resilience in the face of systems collapse and colonialism’s constantly evolving strategies of capture and incorporation. The chapter begins with a discussion of two modes of colonialisation: imperialist and settler colonialism, twinning development and market capitalism with the ratification of states and the re-​casting of sovereign Indigenous nations as populations in the international world order. Of particular importance is the relationship between ideologies of development and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-51

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Indigenous resistance and resilience  359 violences of settler colonialism. This section is followed by an overview of Indigenous modes and strategies of resistance and resilience and the demands for recognition of Indigenous rights within international law. Here the focus is on the struggle for recognition of Indigenous rights, including the right to full, free, prior, and informed consent to any form of development on their traditional lands, and the shifting responses of settler states. As a strategy of extinguishment, settler colonialism’s impact is not only historical; its servitude to the imperatives of market capitalism and the engulfing of the lifeworld marks the present moment with a long footprint into the future. Indigenous peoples’ resilience in the face of shape-​shifting strategies by states (and industry) may be seen as a bulwark against a dimming future. The final section points towards possibilities for hope in the reframing of governance centred on Indigenous understandings of human-nonhuman interrelationships and the wellbeing of all species.

Indigenous sovereignty and the imperial project Indigenous sovereignty has been central to Indigenous communities’ acts of resistance against colonisation ever since the late 15th century. The 1493 ‘Inter Cetera Divini’ Bull which contained references to the ‘certain remote islands and also mainlands’ discovered by Columbus included the acknowledgement crucial to the recognition of sovereignty and, indeed, humanity that ‘these nations living in the said islands and lands believe that there is one God and one Creator in the heavens’ (Stewart-​Harawira, 2005: 59). Because Columbus reported the peoples occupying the newly ‘discovered’ lands as having a recognisable social order and worshipping a higher being, according to ‘natural-​law’ interpretations by legal scholars Grotius and Vitorio, they should therefore be regarded as sovereign peoples. This early recognition of Indigenous sovereignty based on natural law later gave rise to treaty making in parts of the Americas and in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, at stake for Spain and Portugal was not only the ownership and control of treasures and merchandise to be found in the discovered lands but the ongoing territorial struggle between Portugal and Spain. The subsequent 50-​ year debate on the humanity and sovereignty of Indigenous occupants and the merits of colonisation sparked by two Papal Bulls was brought to a conclusion with the declaration of the doctrine of discovery by the Council of the Indies in 1550.The findings of the Council foreshadowed the conviction of Christian/​European superiority that underpinned the establishment of world order and international law. The declaration of discovery enabled the Pope to place non-​Christian peoples under the tutelage and guardianship of the first Christian nation discovering their lands provided that those peoples were reported by the discovering nation to be ‘well disposed to embracing the Christian faith’, a precursor to the proposed creation of a wardship for Indigenous peoples which would enable European states to administer their countries on their behalf. A hundred years later, a case heard in London, England, in 1622, found an Elizabethan Protestant doctrine that declared the English to be in covenant with God to bring ‘true’ Christianity to ‘heathen natives’, to have necessarily abrogated the legal and political authority of ‘heathen infidels’ when it came into contact with Christian sovereignty. Thus the doctrine of discovery and the right to win souls became the justification for the seizure of Indigenous lands and the waging of war on Indigenous peoples. By the end of the 16th century, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English imperialist policies of expansion and resource extraction for export to core countries saw the invasion

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360  Makere Stewart-Harawira of many Indigenous peoples’ territories throughout the ‘known’ world accompanied by genocide of unimaginable magnitude. During this drive for the expansion of territory and resources during the 16th century, the influence of Hobbes and Locke saw an increasing disconnect between the state of nature and social organisation by giving the state of nature ‘political expression’. As Tourraine (1995), cited in Stewart-​Harawira (2005: 62), points out, ‘[t]‌he analysis of a community and the needs of its members is replaced by an analysis of labour and property which must be protected by laws’. Thus the function of natural law was changed from protecting the common ownership of land and its produce to protection of ‘the freedom to act, trade and to own property’. Lockean distinctions between different types of Indigenous societies and a natural-​law duty to till the soil became the rationale for overriding Indigenous peoples’ objections to the usurpation of their lands. It was achieved by both violent occupation and the establishment of colonial law accompanied by the subjugation of the Indigenous occupants. This was the case in territories settled by both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of colonisation (Tully, 2008). Recommended reading: Ivison et al. (2000).

Imperial and settler colonialism Colonialisation—​the process by which another country or nation lays claim to the territories and resources of another—​is commonly categorised in two ways. External colonialisation, as defined by Tully (2008), is the process by which a colonising power imposed a colonial system of law and governance, often leaving in place people to administer on its behalf or, as in the case of territories in Africa, trained selected individuals as administrators in England before sending them home to govern on their behalf. Here the primary objective was the acquisition of wealth under mercantilism. Colonised primarily by Spain but also by Portugal and France, countries in Latin America, including for instance Mexico and Brazil, were sources of commodities such as gold and sugar, as well as coerced labour, in some cases provided by people forcibly relocated from African countries. Internal colonisation, commonly referred to as settler colonialism, is the process by which the colonising society is built on the territories of formerly free people, imposing a system of colonial law, and exclusive jurisdiction, over them and their territories with the objective of accumulation (Tully, 2008: 261). As an example of settler colonialism, the British system of colonisation was driven by ideas about systems of accumulation that would support capital accumulation through inflating the price of land to ensure both a constant supply of labour and the underwriting of the cost of human migration. This model of colonisation depended upon attracting capitalists who would have a ready supply of labour in the form of migrant labourers who eventually buy land with their savings (Stewart-​Harawira, 2005). The imposition of colonial systems of land ownership, governance, and market capitalism saw these ‘settlers’ became the new populations, systematically dispossessing the diminishing Indigenous populations who were relocated to ‘reserve’ areas inadequate to sustain them. While the appropriation of land and resources of the Indigenous peoples is common to both forms of colonisation, the foundational difference is jurisdiction.Whereas in external or imperial colonisation, the imperial power and the colonies exist on different territories, settler or internal colonisation involves permanent occupation with the aim of exercising exclusive jurisdiction over lands, resources, and peoples. The incorporation of Indigenous peoples in the service of capital through

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Indigenous resistance and resilience  361 ‘strategies of containment’ was integral to the goal of capitalist expansion (Adamson & Davis, 2016). The process involves strategies of extinguishment (Tully, 2008). In settler colonies, extinguishment included the appropriation of Indigenous flora and fauna for the great botanical collections of Europe and England. Documented by environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby, Geoff Parkes, and Catherine Knight, this was accompanied by the colonisation of Indigenous terrains with foreign flora and fauna and intended to create the conditions for agriculture, hunting, and fishing in the image of the home countries. Developmentalism was responsible for the taming and channelling of waterways, the toxification of freshwater systems, and the degradation of lands which were the source of Indigenous communities’ collective continuance (Whyte, 2018). The weaponising of education by settler colonial states as a tool for removing ‘obstacles to development’ targeted Indigenous foundational ontological identities, languages, and cultural norms. The extinguishment of Indigenous social and political structures, relations of trade and exchange, and the means of survival have been well documented by scholars such as Judith Simons, J.S. Millloy, and Carolyn Marr. In North America, education policies aimed to ‘Kill the Indian in the child’ and ‘Save the Man’, in Aotearoa New Zealand to replace the ‘beastly communism of the pa’ with the values of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, and train Maori youth to be docile labourers, and in Australia to eradicate the Indigenous identities of stolen Australian Aborigine children, replacing them with false ethnic identities such as Italian. The wielding of colonial law as a strategy for deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of Indigenous customary lands, the eradication of existing Indigenous law, and the dispossession and reincorporation of Indigenous peoples in the service of capital and the colonial state have been documented by postcolonial scholars and experts in Indigenous law, such as James Tully, Michael Asch, and John Borrows.What also defines settler colonialism, however, is the resistance and refusal of Indigenous peoples to surrender sovereignty based on historical occupation and relational obligations to non-​human entities. Recommended reading: Armitage (1995).

Resilience and resistance on the global stage Throughout colonialism’s onslaught, Indigenous peoples have deployed multiple strategies to retain their sovereignty, their culture, and their rights. The politicising, counter-​ discourses of Indigenous peoples and responses of international agencies sit at the intersection of evolving international human rights law, competing understandings of sovereignty, and developmentalism in the service of market capitalism. Engagement in the global political arena began as early as 1923 with the attempt of both Haudenosaunee Chief Deskaheh and Maori Leader W.T. Ratana to speak to the League of Nations in Geneva to defend the right of their people to self-​determination. However it was the 1970s resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ international movements that saw the deployment of a politics of indigeneity and refusal against the collective power of colonising states across national and international forums. The first global Indigenous conference which was held in British Columbia in 1975 formalised the establishment of the World Council on Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) with a Declaration which included the statement: ‘We vow to control again our own destiny and recover our complete humanity and pride in being Indigenous People’ (Lightfoot, 2016: 88). At the first meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP), comprised of representatives of states, non-​governmental organisations (NGOs) and Indigenous

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362  Makere Stewart-Harawira people, the WCIP presented a document of Principles for Guiding the Deliberations. The document specifically invalidated all versions of the doctrine of discovery applied by states to deprive Indigenous peoples of their self-​determination, lands, and natural resources, without their ‘free prior and informed consent’ and insisted that treaties made between Indigenous peoples and states be internationally protected (Lightfoot, 2016). Over 25 years of struggle and negotiation throughout which states argued that the rights requested by Indigenous peoples were already recognised in various ways within their constitutions, parallel regional and international meetings were the venues for Indigenous peoples’ reaffirmations of their rights to free, prior, and informed consent, to their cultural practices and to determine their own forms of development, and the urgency of protecting and defending nature. The resurgence of Indigenous communities in Latin America in the 1990s brought fresh impetus to Indigenous opposition to the exploitation and extractivism that threatened Indigenous lands. The Andean worldview of Pachamama, an Andean goddess who sustains life on earth, and a ‘collectivist notion of a community of all species and ecosystems’ (Humphreys, 2017), resonated with the cosmologies of Maori and Pasifika Indigenous activists as well those of North America. From international gatherings such as the historic 1992 Kari-​Oca I meeting of 400 Indigenous peoples gathered at Kari-​ Oca, Brazil, one week before the Rio de Janeiro Conference from which came the Kari-​Oca I Declaration, came further declarations such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Earth Charter, the ‘Cochabamba Declaration’ (2010), which called for the establishment of an International Climate Justice Tribunal, and Kari-​Oca II (2012). Throughout, Indigenous peoples have called attention to the impacts of destructive practices in agriculture, mining, and water management and to the need for a new global paradigm to restore harmony between nature and human beings. Of primary importance in these gatherings was the reaffirming and re-​enacting of ceremony and Indigenous peoples’ responsibility to defend and protect the natural environment. In Bolivia in 2006, the inauguration of Evo Morales, the Indigenous leader whose two key planks were economic prosperity and the re-​ nationalisation of resources, also gave effect to the right of Indigenous people to control their own natural resources and to the opening of new possibilities for deepened, more inclusive forms of democracy. At the same time, this has raised questions about whether this ‘deepening of political and economic democratization, allowing the people to “live well” (vivir bien), while at the same time continuing to hoe the line of extractive capital and its global assault on nature and livelihoods’ can be successful (Veltmeyer & Bowles, 2020: 11). The passing of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) in 2006 and its ratification in 2007 were ultimately the culmination of decades of often tense negotiation between states and Indigenous peoples, particularly around the language of self-​determination and ‘peoples’. En route to reaching some kind of agreeable position, states adopted a variety of tactics to avoid confirming and ratifying the draft proposal. During the lead-​up to the annual negotiations in 1995, for example, the New Zealand caucus was instructed by the Cabinet Working Group to ‘appear to be in agreement but to consent to nothing outside of existing New Zealand policies,’1 a position New Zealand, along with Canada and Australia, continued to hold for many years before finally ratifying the Declaration. For these states, any acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-​determination was seen as a major threat to state sovereignty and integrity. Article 3 of the Declaration declares that, ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to self-​determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political

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Indigenous resistance and resilience  363 status and freely pursue their economic, social and economic development’.The proposed requirement for ‘free, prior and informed consent’ by Indigenous peoples before any form of development be undertaken on their territories was also a major issue of contention. Article 19 requires that: ‘(s)tates shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them. This includes ‘[t]‌he undertaking of projects that affect indigenous peoples’ rights to land, territory and resources, including mining and other utilization or exploitation of resources’ (Article 32) and the relocation of Indigenous peoples from their lands or territories (Article 10). Of particular significance is Article 26, which includes: ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired’ and ‘States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources’. Such recognition, the Article adds, shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, traditions, and land tenure systems of the Indigenous peoples concerned. Notably, these and other rights, such as the rights to ‘cultural expression, practice of traditions, relationships with their land and territories’ (Articles 11–​13; 24–​27) are carefully circumscribed. Article 46, for instance, includes that, ‘[n]‌othing in this Declaration may be interpreted … or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States’—​addressing the contention over potential secession that states had consistently argued lay at the base of their continuing objection to any notion of Indigenous peoples’ self-​determination. Nonetheless, in stark contrast to Bolivia and Ecuador, both of which enshrined the rights of nature within their constitutions in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the four settler states—​Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand—​initially refused to ratify the Declaration, arguing that it had no legal standing and that such rights were included in their constitutions. At issue then, as now, was states’ anxieties regarding the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own development and to refuse destructive forms of development on their traditional lands. Settler states’ responses to challenges to the legitimacy of their jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples’ customary lands and to demands for recognition of customary rights and practices involve new ways to limit or redefine these rights and reincorporate Indigenous natural resources into their own economic agenda. In Canada, such strategies have included the British Columbia provincial government’s ‘reallocation’ of the timber rights in the Carrier Sekani peoples’ traditional territory to large corporate logging companies despite then ongoing treaty negotiations to settle long-​ standing issues surrounding Carrier Sekani land and resource rights (Anaya & Williams, 2001). When faced with the refusal of Indigenous communities to consent to destructive and unwanted forms of development on their lands, a ploy common to settler states is to bypass traditional Indigenous leadership, deploying instead coercive modes of engagement with state-​appointed governance bodies, often involving the promise of jobs and benefit sharing. Hence the refusal of hereditary chiefs in British Columbia to consent to the Coastal GasLink pipeline crossing fragile ecosystems in their traditional territories

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364  Makere Stewart-Harawira saw this traditional governance structure bypassed in order to garner benefit-​sharing agreements and consents from elected chiefs and councils. Where controversial practices such as these are concerned, it is not uncommon for full community-​wide consultation to be omitted. Where required consent from Indigenous communities fails to materialise and Indigenous communities put their bodies on the line in active resistance against the desecration of sacred lands, it is likewise not uncommon for government agencies such as militarised police to be deployed against Indigenous communities attempting to prevent pipeline construction on their lands, as on Wet’suwet’en nation’s ancestral lands in British Columbia (Dhillon, 2019). An alternative strategy recently deployed in Western Australia with state consent was to blow up the offending sacred artifacts (previously identified as being over 46,000 years old) and apologise afterwards (Wahlquist, 2020). Recommended reading: McCreary and Turner (2018).

Enacting resilience in an over-​heating world In challenging ongoing environmental destruction through deforestation, damming, water, and soil pollution, and fossil fuel extractivism, Indigenous demands for the recognition of rights, for environmental justice, and for the cessation of forms of destructive development on traditional lands and waters have been some of the most powerful voices against the devastating impacts of market capitalism. This includes the increasing acceptance of human–​non-​human relationships through legally defined personhood rights, such as the rights of rivers and sacred mountains. Co-​governance arrangements which provide for shared management of waterways and forests are a clear signal of the increasing recognition of the importance of Indigenous ontologies, values, and ethics and the importance of human–​non-​human relationships as we look towards our fragile future. Nevertheless, as a closer examination of the Whanganui River legislation and the struggle to protect freshwater in Aotearoa New Zealand shows, there is much yet to be done to overcome the challenges posed by settler colonialism’s embrace of market-​driven capital (Stewart-​ Harawira, 2020). Confronted with statistics of massive species loss, irretrievable ecosystem damage, and carbon feedback loops as yet excluded from our carbon accounting, there is an imperative to replace market-​based systems with forms of governance predicated on the right of all beings to thrive. Fulfilling the terms of UNDRIP would be a positive step in that direction. We have a long way to go.

Note 1 Confidential Cabinet instructions to the New Zealand Caucus for the Declaration of Indigenous Rights negotiations, 1995, in a document received by the author.

References Adamson, J., & Davis, M. (eds.) (2016). Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice. London: Routledge. Anaya, J., & James, S.A. (2004). Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press. Anaya, S.J., & Williams, R.A. Jr. (2001). “The Protection of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights over Lands and Natural Resources under the Inter-​American Human Rights System.” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 14: 33–​86.

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Indigenous resistance and resilience  365 Armitage, A. (1995). Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.Vancouver: UBC Press. Brown, K. (2015). Resilience, Development and Global Change. Abingdon: Routledge. Dhillon, J. (2019). “Canada Police Prepared to Shoot Indigenous Activists, Documents Show.” The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2019/​dec/​20/​canada-​indigenous-​land-​defenders​police-​documents. Humphreys, D. (2017). “Rights of Pachamama: The Emergence of an Earth Jurisprudence in the Americas.” Journal of International Relations and Development, 20(3): 459–​484. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​09644016.2020.1827608. Ivison, D., Patten, P., & Sanders, W. (eds.) (2000). Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lightfoot, S. (2016). Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution. Abingdon: Routledge. McCreary, T., & Turner, J. (2018). “The Contested Scales of Indigenous and Settler Jurisdiction: Unist’ot’en Struggles with Canadian Pipeline Governance.” Studies in Political Economy, 99(3): 223–​245. Penehira, M., Green, A., Smith, L.T., & Aspin, C. (2014). “Māori and Indigenous Views on R and R: Resistance and Resilience.” researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz Rossiter, D.A., & Wood, P.B. (2016). “Neoliberalism as Shape-​shifter: The Case of Aboriginal Title and the Northern Gateway Pipeline.” Society & Natural Resources, 29(8): 900–​915. Stewart-​ Harawira, M. (2005). The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization. London: Zed Books. Stewart-​Harawira, M. (2020).“Troubled Waters: MaoriValues and Ethics for Freshwater Management and New Zealand’s Fresh Water Crisis.” WIREs Water, 5(7). https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​wat2.1464 Tully, J. (2008). Public Philosophy in a New Key, Vol. I. Democracy and Civic Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. United Nations. (2007). “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” www. un.org/​esa/​socdev/​unpfii/​documents/​DRIPS_​en.pdf. Veltmeyer, H., & Bowles, P. (2020). “Dynamics of Extractivist Resistance: Linking Latin America and Northern British Columbia, Canada.” En ligne 14. http://​web. isanet. org/​W eb/​Conferences/​ FLA CSOISA% 20BuenosAires. Wahlquist, C. (2020). The Guardian, May. www.theguardian.com/​australia-​news/​2020/​may/​26/​ rio-​tinto-​blasts-​46000-​year-​old-​aboriginal-​site-​to-​expand-​iron-​ore-​mine. Whyte, K. (2018). “Settler Colonialism, Ecology and Environmental Injustice.” Environment and Society, 9(1): 125–​144.

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43  Workers’ control and self-​management Dario Azzellini

Workers’ control and workers’ self-​management have manifested themselves in all kinds of crisis and historical changes. They proliferated in revolutions and anti-​colonial struggles, during political, economic, social, and cultural crises, and as a response to capitalist restructuring. Different forms of and struggles for workers’ control and self-​management occurred in capitalist and in declared socialist political systems. In the Global South, workers’ control was especially present in anti-​colonial and postcolonial emancipation efforts from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Over the past two decades there has been a renewed global interest in workplace democracy, cooperativism, and workers’ control. The contemporary crisis has put self-​management and the control of the means of production by workers and communities back on the agenda in many different forms. From a growing cooperative movement in many countries, struggles for the collective democratic administration of resources as commons to workplace takeovers through workers (from radical models as in Latin America and beyond to workers’ buy-​outs) and the broader societal practices of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Communes in Venezuela, and Rojava/​ Kurdistan. This chapter clarifies some conceptual differences, and looks at the history of workers’ control and workers’ self-​management, focusing especially on the Global South. It summarises why larger-​scale initiatives in the 20th century failed and looks especially at the Worker Recuperated Companies as a 21st-​century phenomenon to analyse the anti-​ capitalist and emancipatory potential of workers’ control.

Self-​management, cooperatives, and workers’ control: origins and terms The origins of the cooperative movement are usually connected with the Rochdale Pioneers in Lancashire, England; in 1844 they founded the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, an early consumer cooperative. The roots of workers’ control are generally situated within the council movements and revolutions in Europe in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, forms of mutualism, control of the own labour process, and the collective administration of means of production are obviously much older than industrial capitalism. Historians found evidence and proof of forms of work association in old Egypt, Babylonia, and in the second Jewish kingdom. In old Greece, several pottery producers shared collectively one oven. In the Roman Empire, under Emperor Marc Aurelius (121–​180), associations comparable to consumer cooperatives were founded and continued to exist in Rome and other cities throughout the middle ages. Today we can still find many traditional forms of cooperative labour with collective democratic decision making regarding the use of land and resources, and forms of institutionalised mutual DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-52

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Workers’ control and self-management  367 help. They are often described as commons. Ancient and traditional forms persist and are renewed not only by indigenous communities in Latin America, usually the best-​known example, followed by Asia, but also in Africa and the Pacific and even in Europe and North America. Workers’ control generally means control over the production process and the administration of a company. Originally the term workers’ control during the Russian revolution meant indeed only the monitoring of the immediate production process in order to ensure the fulfilment of the orders of the revolutionary government. Nevertheless, most workers interpreted it quickly as taking into their hands the control of the production process and the administration of the factory, which led to conflicts with the Bolsheviks. Later in history workers’ control was sometimes limited to certain areas of the company. This was the case in Japan after World War II when workers in several industries, especially heavy industries, took control of the production process, forcing the administration to follow the needs of the production process without taking control of the administration (some researchers therefore spoke of ‘production control’) (Azzellini, 2015). Many different forms of cooperatives and workers’ control existed throughout history. Cooperatives were created as part of the workers’ movement, as an instrument of worker solidarity. They advanced to be organisational principles for a revolutionary society. In his description of the Paris Commune Marx writes that the Capitalist system can be superseded ‘if united co-​operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan thus taking it under their own control’, and as Marx sums up, ‘what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, “possible” Communism?’ (Marx, 1975: 335). Nevertheless, over the past decades, cooperatives were often seen (and taught in business schools) as an alternative business model or even used to not abide to national labour laws. This has seriously harmed the reputation of the many genuine cooperatives and the cooperative movement, especially in countries with a great number of cooperatives. To differentiate between formal cooperativism self-​management and directly engaged democratic self-​management, activists and researchers started to use the term autogestion for the latter. The term, coming from Spanish, goes beyond ‘management’ and includes the creative dimension of gestating. Especially in Latin America the question of workers’ self-​management and autogestion is often connected to a debate on popular economy, meaning an economy of popular sectors of society built beyond the production and distribution cycles of the formal economy, which encompasses what is also discussed as social and solidarity economies (Santos, 2006). Although differing cases exist and cooperatives can very well apply workers’ control, in general terms there are some basic differences between cooperatives and workers’ control: 1. Cooperatives usually bring together people who already share a common set of ideas and goals, while workers’ control is introduced in existing workplaces and brings together all workers regardless of political orientation. 2. In cooperatives the right to participate in decision making is based on some kind of ownership while under workers’ control it is based on work. 3. Workers’ control is about shop floor democracy, cooperatives not necessarily. These differences can also affect the emancipatory potential of the different forms of self-​ management. However, the terms autogestion, cooperativism, self-​ management, and workers’ control have been used interchangeably and have different meanings or

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368  Dario Azzellini connotations in different languages and even in different countries using the same language. Over the past 150 years, since the Paris Commune, workers have taken control of their workplaces in different historical circumstances. Plys differentiates ‘three waves of worker self-​managed firms in the peripheries of the capitalist system … in the past 100 years’ and notes that “[e]‌ach of these waves occurred during periods of systemic chaos marked by economic downturn, war and antisystemic movements (Plys, 2016: 4). She situates the first wave from 1917 to 1936 (most European countries experiencing workers’ takeovers during revolutions were at that time part of the periphery and semi-​periphery); the second wave occurred in the context of national liberation and decolonisation efforts between 1952 and 1979 (the period she studies); and the third wave refers to ongoing workplace takeovers since the crisis in 2001 (Plys, 2016: 4). Ness and Azzellini use the same first and last category, but differentiate the second into ‘workers’ control under state socialism’ (with the state, as in Yugoslavia or early socialist Poland, and mostly against the state, as in workers’ uprisings in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1981) and ‘anticolonial struggle, democratic revolution, and workers’ control’ (e.g., Indonesia, Algeria, Chile, Portugal), adding another category before the contemporary wave: ‘workers’ control against capitalist restructuring in the twentieth century’ (referring to takeovers in struggles from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, as in Italy, Canada, the UK, France, China) (Ness & Azzellini, 2011). Two more categories could be added to those: workers’ takeovers in the destroyed economies at the end of World War II, as in France or in Japan, and the takeovers in uprisings and labour struggles in capitalist states from the 1960s to the early 1980s, as in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, the US, Australia, Sweden, or South Korea (Azzellini, 2015). Recommended reading: Azzellini (2015); Ness and Azzellini (2011).

Workers’ control in peripheral and semi-​peripheral states in the 20th century Workers’ control is a concept and a practice not limited to factories or to industrialised countries. In peripheral and semi-​peripheral states struggles for workers’ control and production under workers’ self-​management have existed since the Russian revolution in 1917, and workers have self-​managed any kind of production: tea plantations, agriculture, national railway companies, steel production, factories, sugar refineries, public transport, shipyards, etc. Between the 1940s and the end of the 1970s workers’ control existed in anti-​colonial and national liberation struggles, and as part of policies aiming at independence, as in Algeria or Indonesia, China, India, Egypt, and Sri Lanka; in democratic revolutions and transformations in the second half of the 20th century, as in Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile; in revolutions, as in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, or Iran; as a consequence of broad labour struggles, as in Malta, Costa Rica, and Jamaica; and in attempts to build African Socialism from Ujamaa in Tanzania to Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara, in Mozambique, and in Libya. Bayat uses four different categories for the context in which workers’ control and self-​management arose in the Third World: (i) in revolutionary situations of dual power (Russia, Algeria, Chile, Portugal, and Iran; (ii) in Third-​World socialist states (China, Cuba, Mozambique, and Nicaragua); (iii) under populist regimes (Tanzania,Velasco’s Peru, Ecevit’s Turkey, and Nasser’s Egypt); and (iv) under common conditions of ‘peripheral capitalism’ (Bayat, 1991: 5–​6).

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Workers’ control and self-management  369 Plys differentiates the different conditions under which workers’ control emerged: (i) in a revolutionary context (national liberation, as in Mozambique and Tanzania or general revolution, as in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, and Peru); (ii) in the context of labour movements (as in Cuba, Jamaica, Malta, Bolivia, Costa Rica, or India); and (iii) from above by the state—​as in China, Egypt, Libya, and Sri Lanka (Plys, 2016: 15–​19). Often workers and communities were either demanding or already practising forms of self-​management that then elevated to state policies. Tanzania’s Ujamaa Socialism was based on the experience of the Ruvuma Development Association. Based on a basic-​democratic movement of young politicised farmers, this organisation not only brought together up to 18 cooperative villages in southwestern Tanzania, it also became the inspiration for President Nyerere to put his vision of a modern socialist society built on the image of the traditional extended family into a concrete development model on national scale (Mann, 2017).Walter Rodney considered workers’ control as a necessary element for development and emancipation from colonial hierarchies (Rodney, 1972). This idea was shared by many movements and even some governments. Praznikar differentiates between countries that introduced workers’ participation and self-​ management with a clearly defined political goal (Algeria, Peru, Tanzania, and Yugoslavia) ‘and those in which this explicit goal was not formally established’ and ‘participation and self-​management were used solely as political device to satisfy ideological imperatives, as in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guyana, India, Malta, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Zambia’ (Praznikar, 1991: 33–​34). He identified seven possible political goals of which several could apply in different cases: (i) ‘[g]‌uarantee of independent socioeconomic development’ in order to preserve independence; (ii) ‘[r]emoval of exploitation’; meant as overcoming the economic division resulting from colonial dependence; (iii) educational process and transformation of the existing hierarchical social structure; (iv) decrease workers’ alienation; (v) ‘[d]evelopment of political democracy’; (vi) ‘[t]o build a harmonious democratic society”; and (vii) ‘[e]limination of bureaucracy from decision making’ (Praznikar, 1991: 34). At the end of the 1980s almost nothing was left of the state policies of workers’ control. This leads us to the question of why all these different models of workers’ control and workers’ self-​management failed. The mainstream explanation is that administration of the production process by workers was inefficient and failed economically. According to Bayat the motives for failure are partly specific to the realities (such as economic backwardness, foreign interference and so on) of the Third World, and are partly general, notably the failure to change systematically the division of labour that is conducive to authoritarianism in enterprises in the first place (Bayat, 1991: 4–​5). Especially the populist regimes which tried to ‘secure the interests of both labour and capital simultaneously’ could not represent any ‘substantial and long-​term programme of transforming existing power relations and the division of labour’ (Bayat, 1991: 6). What were the causes of these developments? Research demonstrates that workers’ control and workers’ self-​management rarely failed economically because the workers were not able to produce or administer the companies effectively. Mostly the practices of workers’ control and self-​management were terminated by state intervention because the state wanted to regain control of the production. The position in the world system (peripheral or semi-​peripheral) or the political system (nationalist, socialist, revolutionary, reformist,

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370  Dario Azzellini right-​wing) did not make a big difference (Azzellini, 2015; Ness & Azzellini, 2011). Plys demonstrated in her comparative study of worker self-​management in 19 Third-​World countries between 1952 and 1979 that, contrary to general assumptions, ‘states are equally likely to terminate profitable and unprofitable enterprises, whether in socialist or capitalist states, and in periphery or semiperiphery’ (Plys, 2016: 3). It was only in two (India and Egypt) out of the 19 examples studied that the failure had financial reasons that were the responsibility of the workers’ administration, and in one more case, the sugar industry in Jamaica, the financial failure was a consequence of a global sugar price crash. In ten cases the state had intervened to control labour and in five cases to strengthen capital. This had mostly external reasons and followed international pressure (Plys, 2016: 20–​22). Recommended reading: Azzellini (2015); Bayat (1991); Brown (1997); Ness and Azzellini (2011); Plys (2016); Praznikar (1991).

Workers’ recuperated companies as a contemporary form of workers’ control The latest wave of workers’ control started and became widespread with the 2000–​2001 crisis in Argentina, when workers occupied their closing workplaces to restart production, and this has not yet come to an end. The companies were termed as worker-​recuperated (or recovered) companies/​ enterprises (WRCs or WREs), from the Spanish empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERT), coined in Argentina; the term and definition were also adopted by workers and researchers in Uruguay and Brazil. WRCs are former privately owned businesses that were closed down by their owners or went into bankruptcy, leading to a workers’ occupation and a struggle to restart operations under collective and democratic self-​management. The individual private property of the means of production is transformed into collective property with a social purpose and with no individual ownership (CDER, 2014). The occupations of 2000–​2001 also spread to Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela. After 2010, in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, this practice spread to Europe and North Africa. Countries where one or more WRCs came into existence include Italy, France, Greece, Bosnia, Croatia, Tunisia, Egypt, the US, and Turkey. Since the year 2000, workers have recuperated hundreds of companies worldwide. Altogether, in 2020 there existed more than 430 WRCs in Argentina, employing more than 15,000 workers; at least 78 in Brazil, with more than 12,000 workers; 22 in Uruguay; and approximately 80 in Venezuela. In Venezuela several WRCs are managed jointly by workers and communities. Struggles for workers’ control also took place in a few dozen of the nationalised and state-​owned companies in Venezuela (Azzellini, 2017). Aside from the WRCs mentioned, more exist in other Latin American countries, India, and Southeast Asia. Considering that systematic research and data are available for only Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, it is probable that more WRCs exist. Most WRCs take the form of cooperatives. Apart from Venezuela, it is usually the only legal form that allows collective management, thus providing a legal base for the operation of the company (Azzellini, 2018; Ruggeri, Novaes, & Sarda de Faría, 2014). One of the most important differences with prior waves of workers’ control is that while earlier takeovers happened in the context of labour or revolutionary offensives, the takeovers of the past two decades occurred out of defensive situations. In the general context of the crisis many workers have no other job prospect or means of subsistence. In most cases they do not have the support of the main unions or institutional political

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Workers’ control and self-management  371 forces. Additionally, the machinery is often obsolete, in need of repair, or has been taken away by the owners and the old business relations do not exist any more. The workers do not have prior experience in self-​management or access to financing in order to invest. In several cases workers had therefore to reinvent themselves and change the production. Almost all WRCs are small and medium-​sized enterprises. There are WRCs in most industries, such as metal, textile, shoes, leather, ceramics, food production and processing, plastic and rubber, print shops, and others.There are also WRCs in the service sector, such as clinics, education facilities, media, hotels, restaurants, and even fast-​food restaurants. Material conditions, laws, and political context vary from country to country. Despite all differences, there exist common characteristics among WRCs. The departure point of any WRC is a self-​organised group of workers that refuses to accept that private ownership determines whether the workplace will continue existing. They dismiss individual solutions and advance an alternative based on collective processes. Workplace recuperations entail the transformation of a hierarchically structured capitalist business, which pursues primarily the increase of surplus value, into a democratically self-​managed company with the workers’ well-​being at its centre. In this process almost everything changes: the workers’ subjectivities; social relations among the workers; labour process; internal dynamics and relationship with the providers, customers, and communities. A workplace recuperation is therefore not only an economic process but also—​or even primarily—​a social process. Economic viability is important, but in WRCs it is intrinsically connected with the aims of democratisation, solidarity, justice, dignity, alternative value production, and overcoming workers’ alienation (Azzellini, 2015; Ruggeri, Novaes, & Sarda de Faría, 2014). Even once the status of a WRC is legalised, it might still suffer attacks from private owners and state authorities. Moreover, WRCs do not have any other choice than to enter hegemonic capitalist market relations, and they have to gain market shares under adverse conditions in a situation of shrinking markets. Pressure to abide by the rules of capital is not only external; internal conflicts are most often linked to payment, social hierarchy at work, working hours, and commitment. But ‘[m]‌anagerial decisions are made and applied within a framework of non-​capitalist ideas’ (Ozarow & Croucher, 2014: 1003). The starting point of WRCs is precisely the moment a capitalist enterprise closes down. In this disadvantageous situation they have proven their viability ‘and largely maintain their central values of equity and worker self-​management’ (Ozarow & Croucher, 2014: 990), as shown for most WRCs (Azzellini, 2015, 2018; CDER, 2014). In the case of Argentina, of 205 WRCs studied in 2010, only six had shut down at the end of 2013 and 63 new WRCs were organised (CDER, 2014: 10, 13). Research and empirical evidence indicate that WRCs are long-​enduring, not despite but because of struggle and conflict. Expropriations, financial support, and the drafting of new laws in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela demonstrate that WRCs have influenced state policy. To do so is easier the more WRCs exist and are connected with each other. Recommended reading: Azzellini (2017, 2018); Ruggeri, Novaes, and Sarda de Faría (2014);Vieta (2019).

Conclusions Workers’ self-​management and workers’ control have huge transformative potential and are intrinsically connected with the human desire for freedom and self-​emancipation. Therefore, they have always resurfaced and existed in many different forms over the past

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372  Dario Azzellini 150 years despite facing repression and adverse conditions. Workers and communities have proven that they are able to organise and self-​administer any kind of production process. The failure of historical attempts was almost never due to their inability. The new wave of workers’ control and workers’ self-​administration since 2000 has shown how in the midst of a capitalist crisis and a crisis of traditional unionism, workers can move to self-​organised offensive struggles.The production of different values based on solidarity and mutualism shows the transformative potential of WRCs and workers’ self-​ administration. In most WRCs the workers see the means of production as collectively managed commons and not as the property of individuals. Therefore, WRCs—​beyond a few cases forced by external circumstances—​do not have individual shares of property, unequal distribution of shares, or external investors, as is the case with some workers’ buy-​ outs (Azzellini, 2015, 2018). WRCs socialise the former private capitalist property. This transformation was at the origin of parts of the workers’ cooperative movement a century ago, but it is no longer present in most cooperatives (Ruggeri, 2014: 16).WRCs originate from the contradiction between capital and labour and the existence of a struggle.Workers in WRCs are well aware of this.Through the experience of occupying and self-​managing a workplace the workers reaffirm their identity as workers (but without an employer), which entails the question of class, instead of an identity as ‘cooperativists or excluded, … in which the notion of a class living off its work gets lost’ (Ruggeri, 2014: 16). The workers build a ‘free association of producers’, in Marx’s terms. The labour power of the workers of a WRC is put to use for and by the collective. Work has stopped being a burden, it ‘has become synonymous with the recovery of dignity, self-​esteem and self-​realisation’ (Ozarow & Croucher, 2014: 1000). Democratic control over their work, understanding of the whole production process and the new social relations built contribute to the disalienation of workers. Despite all contradictions, hurdles, and external attacks, WRCs are an important example of a new understanding of labour power as a form of the commons and an economy built by workers and communities for workers and communities. The potential of WRCs lies in their ability to provide people with concrete solutions and a perspective for the future when the market and state fail to do so; in their inclusion of different subjectivities; and in their ability to join forces with other sectors, such as the solidarity economy and social movements, in building non-​capitalist relations.The ongoing wave of workers’ control and workers’ self-​administration allows therefore the assumption that it is not a temporary phenomenon.

References Azzellini, D. (ed.) (2015). An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy. London: Zed Books. Azzellini, D. (ed.) (2017). Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below. Leiden: Brill. Azzellini, D. (ed.) (2018). Vom Protest zum sozialen Prozess. Betriebsbesetzungen und Arbeiten in Selbstverwaltung. Hamburg:VSA. Bayat, A. (1991). Work, Politics, and Power: An International Perspective on Workers’ Control and Self-​ Managem. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brown, J.C. (1997). Workers’ Control in Latin America, 1930–​1979. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. CDER—​Centro de Documentación de Empresas Recuperadas. (2014). Nuevas Empresas Recuperadas 2010–​2013. Buenos Aires: Continente.

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Workers’ control and self-management  373 Mann, D. (2017). ‘The Smell of Ujamaa Is Still There’:Tanzania’s Path of Development between Grassroots Socialism and Central State Control in Ruvuma, Vol. 121. Würzburger Geographische Arbeiten. Würzburg: Würzburg University Press. Marx, K. (1975). “The Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 2. pp. 306–​ 355. New York: International Publishers. Ness, I., & Azzellini, D. (eds.) (2011). Ours to Master and to Own:Workers’ Councils from the Commune to the Present. Chicago: Haymarket Books. http://​site.ebrary.com/​id/​10488357. Ozarow, D., & Croucher, R. (2014). “Workers’ Self-​Management, Recovered Companies and the Sociology of Work.” Sociology, 48(5): 989–​1006. DOI: 10.1177/​0038038514539064. Plys, K. (2016). “Worker Self-​Management in the Third World, 1952–​1979.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 57(1–​2): 3–​29. DOI: 10.1177/​0020715215627190. Praznikar, J. (1991). Workers’ Participation and Self-​Management in Developing Countries. Boulder: Westview Press. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Ruggeri, A. (2014). “Crisis y Autogestión en el Siglo XXI,” in Ruggeri, A., Tahan, Novaes, H., & Sarda de Faría, M. (eds.), Crisis y Autogestión en el Siglo XXI, pp. 13–​26. Buenos Aires: Continente. Ruggeri, A., Tahan Novaes, H., & Sarda de Faría, M. (eds.) (2014). Crisis y Autogestión en el Siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Continente. Santos, B. de Sousa (2006). Another Production Is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon. London:Verso. Vieta, M. (2019). Workers’ Self-​Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-​Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión. Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/​ 9789004268951.

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44  Communitarian revolutions Ecological economics from below David Barkin

Around the world, communities are organising alternative ways of assuring their livelihoods and their autonomy. In urban areas, people are promoting local activities, workshops, cooperatives, and markets for local exchanges (often through barter or use of local currencies) within and among communities in ever-​expanding areas of collaboration. However, collective organisations strengthening alternatives are particularly notable among peasants and indigenous groups, reinforcing their communitarian roots, forging a wide variety of social, solidarity, and ecological economies (SSEE). The proliferation of these initiatives reflects the recognition of their importance for human development and the relationship of socio-​economic processes with the environment.1 Peoples are reorganising themselves,2 forging coalitions to overcome the terrible conditions imposed on societies around the world by the capitalist organisation of production and society. Their new integrated paradigms highlight the ethical character of exchange, production, and consumption processes. These alternatives are succeeding and spreading as people strengthen their participation in collective and communitarian organisations, harkening back to traditions and beliefs that contributed to their continuity since time immemorial. The search for alternatives and the consolidation of communities are also changing the logic of production, deepening and extending communal processes, and contributing to improve synergies with their environments. They are creating new powerful communitarian subjects, building postcapitalist societies (Barkin & Sanchez, 2020). Many theoretical approaches contribute to our work. Among these we might include: (i) ecological economics, a discipline emerging from the contributions of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al., 2004) and Georgescu-​Rogen (1971), who insisted on the need to include the Second Law of Thermodynamics in social analysis, obliging society to reconsider the problem of energy, introduced long before many were conscious of the depths of the environmental crisis we face; (ii) the diverse forms of communities based on alternative cosmologies and systems of social construction, one of which has become well known as buen vivir or ‘living well’, originated in the Andes centuries ago and another, more recent, Comunalidad, in Mexico (Barkin & Lemus, 2016; Wolfesberger, 2019); and (iii) the proposal for ‘degrowth’, emerging as a critique of today’s dominant consumer-​ based growth model (Escobar, 2015). Although offering radically different visions of the future, their insights contribute to understanding the possibilities for change to confront the social and environmental crises of our times. Numerous peoples around the world are constructing alternatives that offer more opportunities and a better quality of life than offered by today’s capitalist economy, while also contributing to environmental preservation. Their communities are realising that DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-53

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Communitarian revolutions  375 alternatives are necessary—political, economic, and social, within the territories they occupy—so that they can effectively resist the destructive impacts of the spread of capitalist organisation of production on the quality of life, social organisation and the planet. This process is of great significance globally, as communities are collectively searching for means to: (i) appreciate and enhance the significance of diversity within and among themselves; (ii) accept the necessity of coordination and cooperation emerging within the diversity that their projects offer; (iii) develop new means for concerted political action for socio-​economic and environmental governance on a supranational scale; (iv) recognise the need to compensate for the asymmetries that exist on a global scale, accepting responsibilities for assuring the well-​being of those unable to undertake significant initiatives on their own; and finally, (v) strengthen or (re)construct their own sense of identity. This is the broader context within which ‘social and solidarity economies’ (SSE) are emerging locally while also creating broader networks. Underlying this dynamic is an understanding that their insertion into the world market continues to impoverish. Their experiences in the market economy—​be it as wage labourers, as independent workers, as peasants or artisans, and even as small-​scale business people—​cannot assure them a reasonable quality of life for their families, much less improve their lot, create opportunities for the future, and attend to the needs of the environment. The search for SSE involves more than attempts to produce goods; rather than depend on private accumulation that generates profound inequalities it involves a commitment to the ethical organisation of a society and all of its activities: ethical in the sense that the needs of all people in the community are attended to, while also making provision for the well-​being of future generations, and the planet. Indigenous and peasant groups around the world are reorganising production processes to escape the traps of the market economy. Their communitarian commitments are grounded in five basic principles that shape their social and political organisation, offering a realistic but challenging strategy for local progress: autonomy, solidarity, self-​sufficiency, productive diversification, and the sustainable management of their natural heritage (Barkin, 2000; 2005).Their participation in local and regional economies, the use of traditional and agro-​ecological approaches in production and the integrated management of ecosystems contribute to their ability to guarantee a minimum standard of living for their members and for a corresponding responsibility to participate, thus eliminating the phenomenon of unemployment. Both women and men become involved in the complex task of managing their communities, devising solutions that assure a ‘convivial austerity’ (Illich, 1973). Recommended reading: Altman (2017); Barkin and Lemus (2016); Escobar (2015); Gonzales and Gonzalez (2010).

Development from a grassroots and indigenous perspective: the search for a sustainable path This raises two fundamental questions: how and why do our societies perpetuate the poverty prevailing in most rural communities? Why do so many societies continue to persist in their stubborn ties to the land and to their traditional structures for production and reproduction? Communities around the world explain that what appears as poverty in many rural societies is the result of deliberate choices of their members to shape or reshape their communities on the basis of different cosmovisions, focusing on satisfying their own basic needs and assuring an ever more effective ability to govern themselves and

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376  David Barkin negotiate their autonomy, counteracting the exploitative and often racialised institutions that reinforced their marginalisation, attempting to integrate them into national and global labour markets, imposing a competitive individualism that contributed to social disintegration and environmental degradation by placing monetary valuations on interpersonal relations and natural resources.3 Societies throughout the Americas are forging their own solutions, in alliance with others, or in collaboration with outside agents. Worldwide, there are numerous social movements defending their territory and proposing alternatives that lead to a better quality of life, although not necessarily more consumption.What is striking is the volume of literature documenting these efforts, a literature so blithely ignored by most international development institutions and in the textbooks. Many of the peoples involved in this process are ‘bringing up to date’ the long-​held traditions of many groups that tenaciously defend their ideological and cultural heritages (Toledo & Barrera Bassols, 2008) while others are searching out new paths, controlled by themselves (see, for example, Zermeño, 2010). The significance of these activities cannot be overemphasised: globally, small-​scale farming and fishing communities provide 70 per cent of the food we eat, generally in harmony with the lands and waters that sustain us, with their ‘Territories of Life’ (for a compilation of experiences from around the world, see Gaia, 2020). The global movement to reassert indigenous identities was strengthened in the aftermath of the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) (Muñoz, 2008).4 New local governments, Caracoles, in Chiapas are directly improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of their citizens, creating a model of social organisation and change that continues to have a powerful effect on other communities as well as in other countries.5 These activities are improving the well-​being, contributing to diversifying the economy, and increasing productivity in a region where perhaps as many as 500,000 people are participating; they have achieved a very high level of self-​sufficiency in food, health, and education (Mora, 2008). Since then the activity and visibility of indigenous peoples throughout Mexico and in much of Latin America have increased along with a gradual recognition of their importance, because of and in spite of the growing intensity of repressive actions by the state and other actors, including private corporations given concessions in these territories to exploit their natural wealth. Globally, there is a flourishing of indigenous peoples organising to improve their well-​being while conserving and defending their territories; a recounting of the initiatives being implemented in these communities would be too lengthy for inclusion here, suffice it to say that the consolidation of the Indigenous Community and Conservation Areas Consortium in 83 countries reflects the resolve and ability of millions of peoples in hundreds of communities to carry their projects forward (see www.iccaconsortium.org).6 Recommended readings: Mora (2018); Toledo and Barrera Bassols (2008); Zermeño (2010).

Community-​based development from below: the battle over the commons In connection with their efforts to gain recognition and elaborate local management strategies, control of water resources continues to be particularly contentious as communities try to assure adequate supplies for their own use and for production while protecting their sources (Mestrum, 2015). Successful efforts to reinforce control by developing systems for

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Communitarian revolutions  377 managing water resources impede encroachment by national and state-​level authorities trying to limit their historical access and privatise management (Fuente et al. 2019; Sultana & Loftus, 2020). These movements are inextricably combined with others in opposition to large-​scale dam projects, mining operations, or for long-​distance transfer between water basins to supply urban areas that think little of taking water from poorer rural areas. As a result, many communities that have historically been able to satisfy their own needs and even share surpluses are now building coalitions to defend their water sources, along with ecologists who argue that the engineering and public works approaches of the public sector (pumps and tubes) ignore nature’s imperative, aggravating ecological destruction. Our collaborations with communities involved with protecting water sources demonstrate the value of combining traditional and leading-​edge technologies to protect their natural sources—​the streams and springs on which they depend. This combination of technologies with direct community involvement in water management contrasts sharply with the national water authorities’ approach that eschews local diversity, preferring a homogeneous administrative model conducive to centralised management and engineering solutions. In response to the great differences in local conditions, there are many examples of water-​saving technologies and rainwater collection systems, such as installing composting toilets and separating grey from black water flows to allow for low cost and passive biological processing conducive to restorative environmental practices. A particularly noteworthy project,Water Forever, promoted local cooperatives to transform a million hectares of barren plateau and steep slopes, using ‘appropriate’ technologies to construct a large number of low-​impact landscaping projects, including rock dams and ponds to channel surface flows and collect run-​off, recreating underground aquifers and structures found in some of the oldest irrigation projects in the western hemisphere from the 11th century. This project combines community-​managed agro-​ecological and agro-​industrial activities and enterprises belonging to the participants, creating jobs and products that are proving attractive to consumers for their social, ecological, and nutritional qualities (Hernández & Herrerías, 2008).7 In Bolivia, the experience of the ‘Water War’ of 2000 in Cochabamba is still vivid in people’s memories as local water committees continue to organise actively while resisting the state’s effort to manage the commons (Fogelberg, 2013). Recommended reading: Barkin (2001, 2005); Fogelberg (2013).

Examples of community-​based resource management Forestry is another important activity in many communities. They waged an unrelenting and difficult battle during the last half of the 20th century to control these lands, wresting exploitative lumber contracts from private firms. A variety of strategies for forest management are contributing to reconciling pressures for ensuring conservation with the need to create jobs and generate incomes. The literature explores the close relationship between these approaches and the cosmologies of the participating communities, particularly in community-​managed forests, which comprise 71 per cent of the nation’s forests (Barkin & Fuente, 2013).8 Other communities are collaborating with university and civil society researchers, contributing to understanding their alternative views of well-​being while diversifying economies and improving production in sustainable ways (Toledo & Ortiz-​Espejel, 2014; Toledo et al., 2013). One particularly illustrative innovation involves the use of unsalable avocados as fodder for hogs in backyard settings, producing low-​cholesterol pork that is

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378  David Barkin sold at a substantial premium, contributing to the quality of life in the communities; in this case, as in others based on a similar paradigm, indigenous women were especially benefited, as they implemented the projects and were soon recognised for their leadership capabilities. In a different approach, scholar-​activists collaborate with producers in diverse regions to protect and enhance production of a traditional Mexican alcoholic drink, mezcal, modifying the traditional planting and harvesting techniques of agaves, taking care of the forest, and enriching community life by promoting cooperative production that is contributing to raising incomes and rehabilitating ecosystems. In Guerrero, this work is part of an ambitious programme of the Grupo de Estudios Ambientales for collaborative promotion of local forms of ‘buen vivir’ and ecosystem restoration that was awarded the ‘Equator Prize’ in 2012 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Textiles are another area where the integration of agriculture and handicrafts is the basis for environmental care and community well-​being. In Oaxaca, for centuries communities cared for their mulberry trees and raised silkworms to produce the traditional thread that they continue to weave into attractive garments, displayed and marketed locally and through a well-​curated textile museum. The renewed appreciation of varieties of native cottons (that were cultivated before the Spanish conquest) are ideal for handicraft weaving as an alternative to genetically modified cotton that currently dominates the industry. In Peru, and more recently Bolivia, a well-​established technical promotion and development organisation, Pratec, is deploying effective approaches for community-​ based learning, improving production in the multiple ecologies of the Andean world, focusing on potatoes but carefully balancing its work to support broad-​based, diversified progress (Gonzales, 2014). Ecotourism is yet another, more controversial activity, because it involves an explicit opening of the community to outsiders who are frequently unable to comprehend the magnitude of the cultural and economic chasm that separates them from their hosts (Warnholtz & Barkin, 2017). Recommended reading: Toledo and Ortiz-​Espejel (2014); Toledo et al. (2013).

Agro-​ecology and the peasant way (La Via Campesina) The process is not limited to ethnic communities. It is interesting to note the significance for many peasant communities of the consolidation of one of the largest social organisations in the world, La Via Campesina. La Via Campesina has about 200 million members in more than 80 countries and promotes local capacities for self-​sufficiency based on technologies that combine the benefits of organic cultivation, where appropriate, with the intensive use of the producer’s own equipment and traditional knowledge to increase production. This approach, known as agro-​ecology, is widely acknowledged to be appropriate for overcoming many of the considerable obstacles that impede the successful expansion of small-​scale farming in the Third World (Altieri & Toledo, 2011; Holt-​Giménez, 2010).These strategies reflect the benefits not just of the productive gains from a production system reoriented to local needs and distribution systems, but of their contribution to strengthening local communities and environmental balance (Rosset & Martínez Torres, 2012). The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has slowly moved to recognise the significance of small-​scale farming and agro-​ecology ‘as the key to food security and rural well-​being’, although the large agro-​chemical and agro-​industrial corporations try to avoid mention of the fact that they only attend to 30

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Communitarian revolutions  379 per cent of the world’s food production under terrible conditions for workers and the planet. Recommended reading: Altieri and Toledo (2011); Holt-​Giménez (2010); Rosset and Martínez Torres (2012).

Collective action and a global alliance against capitalist modernity There is no space here to delve into the details of these innovative strategies that offer new meanings for the ‘quality of life’. Instead of trying to consume more ‘commodities’, the communitarian subjects are revolutionising their ways of organising and living, assuring all their members of their basic necessities and the collective services, like healthcare and education, essential for a convivial existence. In this different setting, then, it might be that the poverty to which most of the ‘development’ literature refers just simply ‘evaporates’; this ‘poverty’ is revealed to have its origins in the individualism and alienation embedded in the Western model of modernity, a model of concentrated accumulation based on a system of deliberate dispossession of the majority by a small elite. The communitarian subjects are building new societies, forging new links of solidarity among them, inherent in these alternative strategies. The realisation of the importance of people involved in identifying and protecting their territories is an integral part of a complex dynamic that examines the significance of the place-​based nature of cultures and their survival. As a result, peoples around the world are being accompanied in their efforts to protect these areas by a global alliance of such communities and organisations, like the Indigenous and Community Conserved Area (ICCA) Consortium and La Via Campesina, mentioned above.These entail hundreds of initiatives in which people are able to improve measurably their living conditions as part of processes that enable them to govern themselves more effectively while also contributing to ecosystem protection and rehabilitation. Recommended reading: Pimbert and Borrini-​Feyerabend (2019).

Ecological economics from below: sustainable management of regional resources In this context, then, we reiterate the underlying principles of this construction—​distilled from the practice of many recent experiences—​that help avoid the ‘syndrome’ of poverty: autonomy and communality; solidarity; self-​sufficiency; productive and commercial diversification; and sustainable management of their natural patrimony (Barkin, 2009). In the parts of the world where these alternatives are under construction, the collective commitment to ensure that there are no individuals without access to their socially defined basic needs implies a corresponding obligation of every single person to contribute to the strengthening of the community’s productive capacity, to improve its infrastructures (physical, social, and environmental), and to enrich its cultural and scientific capabilities. As a result, then, unemployment as it is understood in the global marketplace becomes a scourge of the past. Poverty, in this light, is an individual tragedy—​created by the dynamics of a society based on individualism and its isolation—​that is structurally anchored in the very fabric of society. To escape from this dynamic, the communitarian subject that is emerging offers a meaningful path to overcoming the persistence of poverty in our times. Recommended reading: Barkin (2009); Barkin and Sanchez (2020).

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Notes 1 The large literature that is now available is a reflection of the importance of these approaches and the growing community of people involved. An early and widely read text throughout Latin America is Max-​Neef et al. (1991). The continuing success of the journals Otra Economía, Community Development Journal, and the International Journal of the Commons, to mention just three, offers testimony to the quality and volume of work being done in this area; they offer a valuable fount of materials for students interested in exploring alternative approaches being implemented in the SSEE. 2 I use the expression ‘peoples’ to indicate that I am referring to social groups or classes rather than individuals. 3 The significance of the rejection of a monetary valuation of social and natural phenomena is enormous. In the development literature, the widespread acceptance of apparently value-​free concepts such as ‘social capital’ and ‘natural capital’ offers a justification for placing prices and values on elements outside the market by asserting the need to assign them ‘relevance’. This creates a new category of ‘commodities’ that contributes to other mechanisms for personal and collective alienation. Fine (2010) offers an excellent description of this problem that Polanyi (2001) warned about in 1944! 4 Cf. http://​enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx for materials in both English and Spanish about this experience. 5 ‘Five Caracoles or ‘Good Government Councils’ were established in 2003 to implement a local governance structure in Zapatista territory; another seven were formed in 2019. 6 Few people realise that indigenous peoples around the globe occupy at least one-​quarter of the total land area of the planet (Garnett et al., 2019). 7 This project continues to mobilise the participation of more than 100,000 people in a region and has been in operation for more than a quarter of a century. By focusing on a broad range of activities that create numerous opportunities, requiring an ever-​increasing range of skills, the region is encouraging people to remain, strengthening communities, and improving people’s welfare. 8 The efforts to assume collective control of the forests began in the 1970s. Today, Mexico’s community forest movement is recognised as one of the most effective and sustainable in the world, encompassing more than one-​quarter of the nation’s land area with differing management strategies that are cited as exemplary. The MOCAF and the Mexican Civil Society Organization for Sustainable Forestry (www.mocaf.org.mx and www.ccmss.org.mx) continue to play an important role in coordinating their activities and providing information about their history and achievements.

References Altieri, M., & Toledo, V. (2011). “The Agroecological Revolution in Latin America: Rescuing Nature, Ensuring Food Sovereignty and Empowering Peasants.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(3): 587–​612. Altman, P. (2017). “Sumak Kawsay as an Element of Local Decolonization in Ecuador.” Latin American Research Review, 52(5): 749–​759. Barkin, D. (2000). “Overcoming the Neoliberal Paradigm: Sustainable Popular Development.” Journal of Developing Societies, XVI(1): 163–​180. Barkin, D. (2005). “Reconsiderando las alternativas sociales en México rural: estrategias campesinas e indígenas.” Polis, 5(15): 7. Barkin, D. (2009). “Principles for Constructing Alternative Socio-​economic Organisations: Lessons Learned from Working Outside Institutional Structures.” Review of Radical Political Economics, 41(3): 372–​379.

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Communitarian revolutions  381 Barkin, D., & Fuente, M. (2013). “Community Forest Management: Can the Green Economy Contribute to Environmental Justice?” Natural Resources Forum, 37(3): 200–​210. Barkin, D., & Lemus, B. (2016). “Local Solutions for Environmental Justice,” in de Castro, F., Hogenboom, B. & Baud, M. (eds.), Environmental Governance in Latin America. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barkin, D., & Sanchez, A. (2020). “The Communitarian Revolutionary Subject: New Forms of Social Transformation.” Third World Quarterly, 41(8): 1421–​1441. Escobar, A. (2015). “Degrowth, Postdevelopment, and Transitions: A Preliminary Conversation.” Sustainability Science, 19(3): 451–​462. Fine, B. (2010). Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly. London: Pluto. Fogelberg, K. (2013). “From Adopt-​a-​Project to Permanent Services: The Evolution of Water for People’s Approach to Rural Water Supply in Bolivia.” Water Alternatives, 6(2): Article 6. Fuente, M., Barkin, D., & Clark-​Tapia, R. (2019). “Governance from Below and Environmental Justice: Community Water Management from the Perspective of Social Metabolism.” Ecological Economics, 160: 52–​61. GAIA. (2020). We Feed the World: A Celebration of Smallholder Farmers and Fishing Communities. Dorset: Little Toller Books. Garnett, S., et al. (2019). “A spatial Overview of the Global Importance of Indigenous Lands for Conservation.” Nature Sustainability, 1: 369–​374. Georgescu-​Rogen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gonzales, T. (2014). “Kawsay (Buen Vivir) y Afirmación Cultural: Pratec-​Naca, un Paradigma Alternativo en los Andes,” in Marañon, B. (ed.), El Buen Vivir y Descolonialidad: Critica al Desarrollo y la Racionalidad Instrumentales. Mexico: UNAM-​Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas. Gonzales, T., & Gonzalez, M. (2010). “From Colonial Encounter to Decolonizing Encounters. Culture and Nature seen from the Andean Cosmovision of Ever: The Nurturance of Life as Whole,” in Pretty, J. & Pilgrim, S. (eds.), Nature and Culture. pp. 83–​101. London: Earthscan. Hernández G.R., & Herrerías, G. (2008). “El Programa Agua para Siempre: 25 Años de Experiencia en la Obtención de Agua Mediante la Regeneración de Cuencas,” in Paré, L., Robinson, D., & González Ortiz, M. (eds.), Gestión de Cuencas y Servicios Ambientales. Perspectivas Comunitarias y Ciudadanas. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Ecología. Holt-​Giménez, E. (2010). “Linking Farmers’ Movements for Advocacy and Practice.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(1): 203–​236. Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. London: Calder and Bacon. Max-​Neef, M., Elizalde, A., & Hopenhaven, M. (1991). Human Scale Development. New York: Apex Press. Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., & Meadows, D.L. (2004). Limits to Growth: The 30-​Year Update. London: Earthscan. Mestrum, F. (2015). The Social Commons. Rethinking Social Justice in Post-​Neoliberal Societies , www. socialcommon.eu Mora, M. (2018). Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Muñoz, G. (2008). The Fire and the Word:A History of the Zapatista Movement. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press. Pimbert, M., & Borrini-​Feyerabend, G. (2019). Nourishing Life—​Territories of Life and Food Sovereignty. Coventry, Teheran: ICCA Consortium. www.iccaconsortium.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2019/​ 11/​Consortium-​Policy-​Brief-​6-​Territories-​of-​Life-​and-​Food-​Sovereignty.pdf. Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rosset, P.M., & Martínez Torres, M.E. (2012).“Rural Social Movements and Agroecology: Context, Theory and Process.” Ecology and Society, 17(1).

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382  David Barkin Sultana, F., & Loftus, A. (eds.). (2020). Water Politics Governance, Justice and the Right to Water. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Toledo, V., & Barrera Bassols, N.N. (2008). La Memoria Biocultural: La Importancia Ecológica de las Sabidurías Tradicionales. Barcelona: Icaria. Toledo, V., Garrido, S., & Barrera Bassols, N. (2013). “Conflictos Socio-​Ambientales, Resistencias Ciudadanas y Violencia Neo-​Liberal en México.” Ecología Política, 46: 115–​124. Toledo, V., & Ortiz-​Espejel, B. (2014). México, Regiones que Caminan Hacia la Sustentabilidad: Una Geopolítica de las Resistencias Bioculturales. Puebla: Universidad Iberoamericana, Campus Puebla. Warnholtz, G., & Barkin, D. (2017). “Development for Whom? Tourism Used as a Social Intervention for the Development of Indigenous/​Rural Communities in Natural Protected Areas,” in Borges, I. & King, V. (eds.), Tourism and Ethnodevelopment Inclusion, Empowerment and Self-​determination, pp. 27–​43. London: Routledge. Wolfesberger, P. (2019). “Processes of Territorialization in Mexico: Indigenous Government, Violence, and Comunalidad.” Conflict and Society. DOI: 10.3167/​arcs.2019.050103. Zermeño, S. (2010). Reconstruir a México en el Siglo XXI: Estrategias para Mejorar la Calidad de Vida y Enfrentar la Destrucción del Medio Ambiente. Mexico: Océano.

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45  Moving towards another world Possibilities and pitfalls Henry Veltmeyer

Capitalism is a system in crisis. This is the first overarching conclusion that we can draw from the multiple analytical probes into the state of the world today provided by the contributors to this handbook. Another conclusion is the failure of orthodox development approaches of both the past and present to grasp the root causes of the crisis and thus find a solution or a sustainable and workable—​and livable—​alternative. A third conclusion that we derived from the first two is the theoretical necessity for a critical stance in regard to understanding the dynamic forces of development and the resistance to these forces: to be precise, the need for critical development to help grasp the nature of the forces at work in the current crisis and state of the world, and to identify the pathway towards another world beyond capitalism. The chapters of this Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies point towards the availability of a number of useful toolboxes of ideas both for understanding the diverse dimensions of the current state of the world and for meeting the challenge presented by capitalism in its current form of hyper-​financialised economic development and monopoly corporate power, neoliberalism, and extractivism. These toolboxes of ideas are constructed within the framework of diverse critical development studies (CDS) approaches and perspectives, ranging from Marxist political economy, the new dependency and world systems theory, to ecosocialism (the environmentalism of the poor), feminism, postdevelopment, and postcolonialism (Klein & Morreo, 2019; Martinez-​Alier, 2003; Martins, 2020; McEwan, 2001; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, 2009; Patnaik & Moyo, 2011). The broad range and depth of the ideas advanced within these frameworks suggest and point towards the theoretical and political necessity of CDS for meeting the momentous challenge of capitalist development in the 21st century. In response to this challenge, they can be placed into two categories: ideas used to (i) facilitate understanding of the forces at work in the global crisis and the current state of the world; and (ii) grasp the potential of diverse available forces of progressive change that could be mobilised to help us move forward.

The political economy of agrarian change and capitalist development: three cycles For political economists in the Marxist tradition, it is a matter of principle that the development of the forces of production within the institutional framework of the capitalist system generates forces of social change that can be mobilised in one direction or the other by social movements that embody the forces of resistance. That is, each advance in the march of capitalism brings about a corresponding change, or advance, in the forces DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-54

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386  Henry Veltmeyer of resistance—​in the form taken by the resistance, and the class struggle generated by the resistance to the advance of capital. Thus, it is possible to trace the evolution of capitalism in a particular temporal and spatial context in terms of diverse cycles of development and resistance. Political economists in the CDS tradition, with particular reference to Latin America, where the forces of change engendered by capitalist development have been closely studied, have identified three development–​resistance cycles, the dynamics of which can be summarised as follows. In the immediate post-​war period, the advance of capital in the development process on the peripheries of the world system was assisted by the agency of what we have come to know as the developmental state (see Chapter 15)—​the use of the powers of the state to facilitate the expansion of capital and its penetration of the production apparatus in the form of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment (FDI). The resistance to this advance was led by organised labour, i.e., the union movement in the cities, and by peasant-​based social movements in the countryside—​movements formed in the resistance against forces that led to the expulsion or forced abandonment of the land and their livelihoods by the direct producers, small-​scale peasant farmers from the land, and to a process of productive and social transformation. On this see Chapter 26. On the Latin American periphery, these movements took the form of armies of national liberation and the demand for revolutionary change in regard to land ownership, production relations, and rural livelihoods. The response to this challenge by the agents of capitalism and the guardians of the system was to offer the ‘rural poor’ an alternative to the confrontational politics of the social movements in the form of a programme of integrated rural development, land reform, and micro-​development projects. Through a combination of this development strategy based on international cooperation, with the intermediation and agency of non-​ governmental organisations—​what in the 1980s would be described as ‘civil society’—​ together with the deployment as deemed necessary of armed force by the state, the land struggle was defeated by the forces mobilised by capital in its class war against labour and the resistance. To all intents and purposes, both the peasant rebellion and the state-​led agrarian reform programme across the region were brought to an end in the 1970s by a combination of integrated rural development and state repression. The second development–​resistance cycle unfolded in the 1980s in conditions of neoliberal globalisation (on this see Chapter 10), which took the form of ‘structural reforms’ (globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation, decentralisation) in the direction of free-​market capitalism. Fast forward to the 1990s, which saw a massive inflow of capital in the form of FDI—​ capital in search of resources and economic opportunity, markets, and profit.This advance of capital was facilitated by neoliberal policies of structural adjustment, under the aegis of the World Bank and the IMF, the fundamental agencies of US imperialism at the time. However, this advance also brought about powerful forces of resistance to the neoliberal policy agenda in the form of social movements with their social base in the indigenous communities of peasant farmers and a semiproletariat of landless rural workers—​the ‘rural poor’ in the World Bank’s development discourse (on this indigenous resistance see, for example, Bargh, 2007; Coates, 2004; Fisher, 2014; Meyer & Alvarado, 2010; Orta-​Martínez & Finer, 2010; Quijano, 2000, 2005). In the context of the neoliberal policy agenda and the advance of resource-​seeking ‘extractive’ capital, and the resistance to these developments in the form of the indigenous communities and peasant-​led social movements, the ‘rural poor—​as the World Bank and

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Moving towards another world  387 the agencies of international cooperation conceived of them—​mostly dispossessed rural landless rural workers, were encouraged by these development agencies to take the available development pathways out of rural poverty, namely, labour and migration. On these pathways see the World Bank’s World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (World Bank, 2007)—​a capitalist manifesto of what has been described as ‘modernisation theory’. However, some of the ‘rural poor’ took the pathway not of development, but of resistance—​mobilisation of the forces of resistance in the form of socio-​political movements led by what remained of the peasantry (mostly landless rural workers and the ‘rural poor’) directed predominantly against the neoliberal policy agenda. The activism of the peasant movements in the 1990s created conditions that in effect allowed elements of the political class, the centre-​left, to aspire to and assume state power in the wake of a sea tide of regime change from 2003 to 2006—​what analysts have dubbed as a ‘pink tide’ of progressive policies. This so-​called ‘progressive cycle’ (see Chapter 29) came to an end in 2012 with the onset of an economic production crisis and the resurgence of the neoliberal right (on this see Walden Bello in Chapter 39), parallelled by the beginnings of the end of a cycle of rising commodity prices on capitalist markets. The coincidence between these two cycles raises questions that can only be answered in the context of a close look at the current dynamics of capitalist development in different parts of the world. And to unravel and deconstruct these dynamics—​for an analysis of these dynamics in the context of North Africa, see Chapter 38—​we need to distinguish between two different forms of capitalism, two modalities of accumulation, at work both here and other peripheries: capitalism in its classical or industrial form, based on the exploitation of labour, as theorised by Marx; and an older and now-​resurgent form of extractive imperialism and capitalism based not only on the exploitation of labour but on the pillage of natural resources, the exploitation of indigenous communities and peoples on the periphery of the system, and the degradation of nature and the human habitat: i.e., extractivism. Of course, in any specific temporal and spatial context these two forms of capitalism are always combined in one way or the other. But we need to analytically—​ and theoretically—​distinguish between them because they implicate very distinct and different development and resistance dynamics.

The advance of extractive capital in the development process One of the major consequences of the installation in the 1980s of a new world order designed to liberate the forces of ‘economic freedom’ (free-​market capitalism) was the destruction of productive forces in both industry and agriculture built up on the peripheries of the system under the aegis of the developmental state. Another consequence was the accelerated outflow of capital in the form of FDI in the search for ‘profit-​making opportunities’ in the large-​scale acquisition of land—​‘land grabbing’, in the discourse of critical agrarian studies—​and the extraction of natural resources (minerals and metals, oil and gas and other fossil fuels, and agro-​food products) to meet the growing demand for these commodities on capitalist markets (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014). One of the consequences of this advance of extractive capital in the development process is a reduction of private land ownership all over the world, a development that is reflected directly in the concentration of capital in the agricultural sector and a contraction in the volume of land available for small-​scale and peasant agricultural production. Chapter 38 elaborates on these dynamics in the North African context and Chapter 41 does so in the Latin American context.

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Moving beyond capitalism: forces of change and the dynamics of the resistance Under the guise of ‘development’, a globalising capitalism has continued to generate conditions of underdevelopment and poverty, destruction of forces of production, livelihoods, and habitats as well as the degradation of the environment, through diverse mechanisms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and the exploitation of labour across the Global South (see Dip Kapoor in Chapter 40). This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in Latin America, South and East Asia, and the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting their forced emigration and the appropriation of their land and their natural resource wealth, as well as the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life. Much of this resistance has been concpetualised and viewed through the lens of postcolonial theorising and postdevelopment thought (see Kapoor, 2008; also Chapter 40 by Kapoor in this volume). To conclude from these studies: the anti-​capitalist resistance, which includes protest actions and struggles in workplaces, the streets, and the countryside, as well as the formation of anti-​systemic social movements and the construction of alternative models, takes multiple and diverse forms. These can be placed into different categories, including in particular the following: 1. Class and anti-​imperialist struggles on the front of electoral politics. For a review of these dynamics, see Chapters 28 and 39–​44. 2. The struggles of small-​scale agricultural producers, peasants, and what remains of them in the form of a semiproletariat of landless rural workers, for land and alternative agricultural development (Chapters 31, 32, and 34). 3. Resistance in the form of cooperativism, workers’ self-​ management, solidarity economics from below, communalism, and community-​based local development (Chapters 43 and 44). 4. Environmental activism against the negative socio-​ economic consequences, disruptions, and damage caused by open-​air mining, large-​scale hydro-​electric and other macro-​development projects, the fossil fuel economy, global warming, and climate change (Chapter 36). 5. Indigenous resistance against settler colonialism, globalisation, and capitalism; anti-​ colonial struggles that promote decolonisation and autonomous development, indigenous identity and citizenship, anti-​racism, and depatriarchalisation (Chapter 42). 6. Eco-​ territorial struggles of communities on the extractive frontier against the destructive impacts of extractivism on livelihoods, habitats, and the environment, and in defence of territorial rights and the rights of nature (Chapters 35 and 44). 7. Rural environmental struggles for system change. Within the broad theoretical framework of CDS, with primary reference to the resistance of indigenous communities to mega-​mining in Mexico (but with an eye on the resistance and mining conflicts across Latin America), Darcy Tetreault (2019) sorts the critical thinking that has surrounded the resistance into three main categories: diverse manifestation of a class struggle over land, labour, and territory; community strategies for confronting socioenvironmental conflicts (see, for example, Van Teijlingen & Dupuits, 2021); and an eco-​territorial struggle of indigenous communities to reclaim

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Moving towards another world  389 their territorial rights and for access to the commons. But Tetreault also argues that these approaches are not mutually exclusive, and that they can be combined in a complementary fashion to explain the multiple dimensions of specific conflicts and struggles, with shifts in emphasis at different moments of the struggle against the expansion of the neoliberal model, which is most forcefully expressed in the processes of social, cultural, and environmental predation undertaken by corporations in the so-​called Global South. As for an assessment of the forces of progressive or transformative change in the resistance, the research and analysis of the complex dynamics of the resistance presented in this volume are inconclusive. First, in regard to the peasantry, we have probably the most advanced form of anti-​capitalist resistance. Not only do the peasant-​based and indigenous social movements all over the Global South contain some of the most dynamic forces of resistance, but in diverse contexts the leaders of the movements have been able to form strategic alliances to concert actions in the class struggle for land and the eco-​territorial struggles of indigenous communities on the extractive frontier, and to coordinate with movement leaders and activists all over the world in the construction of an alternative model to capitalism in the agricultural sector. The most dynamic manifestation of this achievement and advance in organisational capacity—​transiting from mobilising the forces of resistance in the sector to the construction of an alternative non-​corporate, non-​capitalist model based on small-​scale production for local markets, agro-​ecology, and food sovereignty is La Via Campesina, the world’s largest network of peasant and indigenous organisations (on this, see Chapter 34). La Via Campesina’s political analytic regarding the intersection of the peasant and indigenous movements in the contemporary context is manifest in a statement on the land question, to the effect that no reform that is based only on land redistribution is acceptable. We believe that the new agrarian reform must include a cosmic vision of the territories of communities of peasants, the landless, indigenous peoples ... who base their work on the production of food and who maintain a relationship of respect with Mother Earth and the oceans.1 From the perspective of social ecology and political economy of capitalist development, the systemic crisis has crystallised and brought forth diverse forces of resistance with uncertain outcomes but a clear dynamism. On the one hand, some researchers and analysts point towards the many instances of successful resistance in diverse regional and local contexts of the class struggle for land and labour and the eco-​territorial struggle of communities to reclaim their territorial rights and cultural heritage. On the other hand, some analysts have emphasised the inability of the resistance to scale up these successes from local communities, or to counter the strategic actions and tactics of the mining companies in concert with local and national governments, and the ability of these companies to garner the support of not only governments but also local indigenous communities. What is particularly revealing in this regard is the effective alliance formed by many companies in the extractive sector with both local states and the imperial state in the implementation of a strategy and plans for ‘inclusive growth’ and resource development based on ‘corporate social responsibility’. What can we conclude in regard to the correlation of force in the class struggle for land and labour, and the eco-​territorial struggle of farming and indigenous communities on the extractive frontier of the Global South? What are the implications of these

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390  Henry Veltmeyer struggles for moving beyond capitalism and constructing ‘another world’? It is difficult to say. On the one hand, the Global South is clearly in the forefront of the class war against capital with the most dynamic forces of resistance. The world capitalist system is clearly in crisis, and while the conditions of this multidimensional crisis are global in scope, the sharpest contradictions of the system—​and the most powerful forces of resistance, the subjective dimension of the crisis and thus the presumed agency of transformative change—​can be found in the Global South. They include the resistance of what remains of the peasantry—​the semiproletarianised ‘peasants’—​and the indigenous communities on the extractive frontier (on this resistance in the Latin American context, see Barkin & Sánchez, 2019). And, as emphasised by Zibechi (Chapter 41 in this volume), they include the construction of new territorialities as indigenous communities and landless peasants engage in prolonged struggles to create or broaden their spaces for their livelihoods and resistance by seizing millions of hectares from estates or landowners or consolidating the spaces they already had by recovering control over their own communities (Zibechi, 2005: 17–​18). Whether these and other forces of resistance—​including resurgent working classes in the cities and urban areas—​are sufficient to constitute a counter-​hegemonic agency of social transformation or revolutionary change is an open question requiring further study.

Note 1 www.viacampesina.org/​en/​index.php/​main-​issues-​mainmenu-​/​agrarian-​reform-​mainmenu-​ 36/​i65-​final-​declaration.

References Bargh, M. (ed.) (2007). Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism. Wellington: Huia. Barkin, D., & Sánchez, A. (2019). “The Communitarian Revolutionary Subject: New Forms of Social Transformation.” Third World Quarterly, 41(8): 1421–​1441. Coates, K. (2004). A Global History of Indigenous People: Struggle and Survival. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, E. (2014). “Constitutional Struggle and Indigenous Resistance in Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives, 41(6): 65–​78. Kapoor, I. (2008). The Postcolonial Politics of Development. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Klein, E., & Morreo, C.E. (2019). Postdevelopment in Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Martinez-​Alier, J. (2003). The Environmentalism of the Poor:A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuations. New York: Edward Elgar. Martins, C.E. (2020). Dependency, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Latin America. Leiden: Brill. McEwan, C. (2001). “Postcolonialism, Feminism and Development: Intersections and Dilemmas.” Progress in Development Studies, 1(2): 93. Meyer, L., & Alvarado, M. (eds.) (2010). New World of Indigenous Resistance. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Mignolo, W., & Walsh, C. (2018). On Decoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, S. (2009). Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa. Myths of Decolonization. Dakar, Senegal: Codesria Books. Orta-​Martínez, M., & Finer, M. (2010). “Oil Frontiers and Indigenous Resistance in the Peruvian Amazon.” Ecological Economics, 70(2): 207–​218. Patnaik, U., & Moyo, S. (2011). The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press.

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Moving towards another world  391 Quijano, A. (2000). “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, 15(2): 215–​232. Quijano, A. (2005). “The Challenge of the ‘Indigenous Movement’ in Latin America.” Socialism and Democracy, 19(3): 55–​78. Tetreault, D. (2019). “Resistance to Canadian Mining Projects in Mexico: Lessons from the Lifecycle of the San Xavier Mine in San Luis Potosí.” Journal of Political Ecology, 26(1): 84–​104. DOI: 10.2458/​v26i1.22947. Van Teijlingen, K., & Dupuits, E. (2021). “Community Strategies for Confronting Socio-​ environmental Conflicts: Beyond Resistance.” ÍCONOS Revista de Ciencias Sociales, XXV(69). Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (eds.) (2014). The New Extractivism: A Model for Latin America? London: Zed Books. World Bank. (2007).World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.Washington, DC: World Bank. Zibechi, R. (2005). “Subterranean Echos: Resistance and Politics desde el Sotano.” Socialism and Democracy, 19(3): 13–​39.

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Glossary of terms

Accumulation by dispossession. Capitalist development is a process based on the accumulation of capital, i.e., of resources available for productive investment. A fundamental requirement for bringing about this process is to dispossess the direct producers, or small-​scale ‘peasant’ farmers, from the land and their means of production (enclosures of the commons, in Marx’s England; privatisation in the neoliberal era), what Marx described as ‘original’ or ‘primitive accumulation’. David Harvey popularised the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to describe this process as it has unfolded in the contemporary neoliberal era and includes many forms of ‘dispossession’. Agrarian question. A debate on the fate of the peasantry under conditions of capitalist development and whether and how the agricultural sector (the persistence of peasant agriculture and the peasantry) might be a barrier to capitalist industrial development. Agribusiness. Capitalist enterprise based on the operations of multinational (capitalist) corporations in the agricultural sector of the economy. Agro-​ecology. Agriculture based on the use of environmentally protective ‘green’ technologies. Agro-​extractivism. Extractivism in the agricultural sector broadly defined. This includes, for example, the ‘Soy Republics’ of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and has been extended to include activities such as forestry and fisheries. See also extractivism. Another development. Forms of development that in theory are initiated ‘from within’ civil society and ‘from below’ (in the popular sector); and that are equitable, socially inclusive, participatory, and empowering; human in scale and form; and sustainable in terms of both the environment and livelihoods. Anthropocene. A term used to describe the time period during which humans have had significant impacts on the planet’s environment. It is often, although not universally, dated as starting with the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s and linked to phenomena such as climate change. Making climate change the responsibility of all humanity obscures the system that produces planetary environmental and climate destruction. For this reason, James W. Moore has argued for the use of the term Capitalocene to indicate that it is capitalism’s historical operations and impacts that need to be analysed. Authoritarianism. A term used by political scientists and others to describe non-​democratic forms of governments such as military dictatorships, socialist one-​party states such as Cuba and China, or the dictatorships and bureaucratic (quasi-​authoritarian) capitalist states of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, as well as some of the states that had been part of the Soviet Union.

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Glossary of terms  393 Autonomy. Taken from the Greek (to give oneself laws), autonomy is politically and theoretically an enigmatic term. It has very different meanings among different disciplines and discourses and is also viewed very diversely in political usage. It is used by Indigenous peoples, but also by social movements and trade unions. Three arenas in which the concept of ‘autonomy’ is widely advocated are: the cultural-​ethnic, the political-​legal, and the territorial-​economic. BRICS. A collective term for the so-​called ‘emerging economies’ of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Originally used as a descriptor and predictor of a shifting of the centre of gravity in the world economy in the 21st century, it also became formalised as a political organisation in 2009, holding its own summits reflecting the increasing geopolitical influence of the five countries. Buen Vivir (Ecuador) or Vivir Bien (Bolivia).This concept comes from ancestral indigenous traditions in the highland Andean region of South America. The reference is to an alternative way of living (‘living well’ in social solidarity and harmony with nature). Local communities here are viewed as the fundamental axis of the reproduction of life, based on principles of reciprocity and complementarity. Capital. Wealth that begets more wealth; assets or productive resources such as land and associated resources such as minerals (natural capital); money available for productive investment (financial capital); wealth embodied in machinery and physical plant, facilities, and infrastructure (physical capital); knowledge and skills generated through education (human capital); investments in the extraction of natural resources for sale in primary commodity form (extractive capital); and relations of solidarity and reciprocal exchange (social capital). Capitalism. An economic and social system based on the wage–​ labour relation, the functioning of markets, the agency of the nation state, and the institution of private property in the means of production. Capital(ist) accumulation. See Accumulation by dispossession. Capitalist development of the forces of production is based on the accumulation of capital, money available for productive investment. Capitalocene. See Anthropocene. Civil society. This term usually refers to the collectivity of institutions within society not controlled by the state, such as non-​governmental organisations and faith groups. More controversially, some include corporations in this definition. The presence of civil society is thought to be a necessary, if not sufficient, guarantee of democracy. Class. A fundamental social grouping formed in the relationship of individuals to the means of production. The two main classes of capitalist society, according to Marxist theory, are the bourgeoisie (or capitalists) and the proletariat (the workers). However, contemporary societies are characterised by a broad spectrum of social classes, a number of which occupy positions outside the structure of the capital–​ labour relation. (See Chapter 21.) Class struggle. The functioning of capitalist societies is based on an exploitative relationship between capital and labour. In theory, when workers become class-​conscious, i.e., aware of this exploitation, they will enter into a relationship of conflict with capital and initiate a struggle for social change. In this context, class conflict and struggle are viewed theoretically as the fundamental agency for social change and systemic transformation. Clean energy. Sources of energy which emit less carbon emissions than other forms. A contested term since some fossil fuel producers also claim that their energy is ‘clean’, in relative terms.

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394  Glossary of terms Climate change. One dimension of capitalist crisis is the climate crisis.This includes climate change associated with the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and an associated warming of oceans and resulting extreme climate changes. These have negative and destructive impacts that are threatening ways of living, livelihoods, and the welfare of people across the world. Colonial(ism). A long 500-​year period characterised by territorial expansion, imperialist exploitation of the labour power of workers on the periphery of the world system, and the subjugation of the population, as well as the dispossession of property and the expropriation of the society’s wealth of natural resources. Commodification. Capitalism is a system of expanded commodity production. Under capitalism goods and services are produced for sale on the market, i.e., as commodities. This includes ‘labour power’, the commodity that workers exchange on the labour market, but increasingly involves all aspects of existence, including life itself (e.g., biotechnology) Commons. Forms of wealth which belong to all. What constitutes ‘the commons’, from land and water to ideas and knowledge, is continually being contested and redefined. Whether a COVID-​19 vaccine should be seen as part of ‘the commons’, available to all, is a recent example of this. Cooperatives. A cooperative is a local organisation and collective enterprise that is owned and democratically controlled by its members who have formed a voluntary association to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned enterprise. Cosmovision. Each culture has its own worldview, sense, perception, and projection. The set of these different forms is known as a cosmovision or worldview. When applied in practice, a cosmovision can be interpreted to mean different things to people with the same culture. Crisis. A crisis occurs when a system is pushed towards or beyond the limits of its normal functioning. It can take many forms—​economic or financial, social, environmental—​ and in some historical contexts, as in the current neoliberal era, can reach global proportions. On the multidimensional form taken by the crisis in the current conjuncture of capitalist development, see Chapter 8. Decolonisation/​decolonial. A concept that has arisen out of the common historical experience of living under colonial rule. This postcolonial perspective, advanced by postdevelopment theory, is based on the liberating awareness that the capitalist system is not real but is a social or mental construct; that it does not generate structural forces beyond human control; that an awareness and knowledge of one’s own power to effect transformative change dissolve the illusionary power of capitalism. Also, decolonisation seeks ‘alternative worlds and knowledges’ that either pre-​date colonialism or that emerged in a process of resistance. Democracy. A form of government based on the rule of ‘the people’ (the demos) and respect for constitutional law, the mechanism of party politics and free elections, and the principles of universal suffrage, representation, and accountability. In practice the idea of democracy takes a liberal or bourgeois form associated with a parliamentary or presidential system set up by a multi-​or two-​party system. Democratisation. Ostensibly a process associated with a transition from an authoritarian form of government, such as a military or class dictatorship, or leading to more democracy, however defined. Previously seen as an inevitable historical process, this view has been challenged by the contemporary authoritarian turn.

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Glossary of terms  395 Deregulation (of capital, labour, and product markets). A neoliberal policy promoted by the Washington Consensus, which has as its aim greater access to markets, including financial markets, and to empower capital. Developing countries. A group of countries, once 77 in number (the Group of 77) but now some 140 located on the periphery of the world capitalist system almost entirely in sub-​Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South/​Southeast Asia.The terms used for classifying this group of countries—​‘developing’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘Third World’, ‘Global South’—​are highly contentious. Development. Viewed alternatively as a ‘process’ (as in ‘capitalist development’, i.e., expansion of the forces of production and an associated process of productive and social transformation) or as a ‘project’ (policies implemented or strategic actions taken to advance or realise one idea or the other as to how to improve the social condition of a people or targeted population). Developmental state. A state committed to (typically economic) development. It takes various political and institutional forms and is often applied to explain the economic ‘catch-​up’ of countries in East Asia such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (See Chapter 15.) Discourse analysis. A method of analysis based on the deconstruction of subjective meaning (rather than the objective reality of phenomena). This ‘meaning’ is embedded in ‘discourse’ (all ways of thinking, speaking, writing, and expression). In development studies it is counterposed to the scientific method, which presupposes the objectivity and reality of conditions and forces generated by the structure and workings of a system. Dispossession. See Accumulation by dispossession. Empowerment. The process of discovery of intrinsic, personal, and collective worth and skills, the exercise of which reaffirms and strengthens individuals and groups and their capacity to act in their own interest. Enclosure. See Accumulation by dispossession. Endogenous development. Stresses local, regional, and/​or national dimensions as the key factor to bring about ‘development’. Characteristic features include local decision over development options, local control over development processes, the retaining of benefits in the community, and self-​reliance. Equity. A concept of social justice that is remedial, intended to overcome bias and inequalities as well as to protect natural or intrinsic rights. In development discourse it is equated with an ‘equality of opportunity’ for all individuals, a level playing field in accessing a just share in the distribution of (and struggle over) limited resources, income, and wealth. Exploitation. Appropriation of surplus value—​the value added to social production by cooperative labour in the production process.The basic mechanism of exploitation in capitalist systems is to offer workers a wage that represents not the total value of the commodity but the value of the workers’ labour power, the value of which—​as with all commodities—​is determined by the socially necessary time needed to produce it. Extractive capital(ism). Resource-​seeking capital in large-​scale (usually foreign) investment in the acquisition of land and the appropriation of natural resource wealth as a source and form of capital accumulation. The main sectors of extractivism are: (i) the extraction of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal); (ii) the mining of industrial minerals and metals; and (iii) agro-​extraction, the extraction of agro-​food products, often based on plantation agriculture. Also see agro-​extractivism.

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396  Glossary of terms Extractive frontier. Activities in the enclave economies formed by large-​ scale foreign investments in the extraction of natural resources or the acquisition of land for the purpose of natural resource extraction. Extractivism. Process of capitalist development based on a scramble for natural resources that are exported in primary commodity form on capitalist markets. See extractive capital(ism). Financial inclusion. A proposition or policy based on the idea that poverty reduction can be achieved by giving poor people and their businesses greater access to financial institutions, products, and services. Financialisation. A concept that points to the power or hegemony of financial capital or indicates that financial markets and institutions play a greater role in the economy. It is also argued that it represents a new phase of capitalism starting in the 1980s, replacing the dominance of industrial capital in the development process. This has implications for the distribution of income as holders of financial assets increase their relative income and wealth at the expense of wage earners. Food regime. A food regime specifies and analyses the ways in which food is produced and distributed. Such regimes in the past have been patterned on colonial relations, for example, or in terms of the export of food from surplus countries such as the US as well as the EU. Currently, alternative food regimes compete for dominance, including the ‘global food regime’ based on capitalist monoculture, movements for national and local ‘food sovereignty,’ and agro-​ecological pathways. Foreign direct investment (FDI). A form of capital associated with the operations of the transnational (or multinational) corporations that dominate the world economy. FDI involves setting up or purchasing productive assets in other countries. It was increasingly deregulated as a result of the Washington Consensus (on the need for free markets). Gender. The social construction of characteristics attributed to women, men, boys, and girls. This leads to the specification of gender norms, behaviour, and roles in society. These social constructions are continually changing and being challenged and vary across time and space. Gender identity—​the gender with which individuals self-​ identify—​is no longer viewed as a binary. Gender and development. A development perspective and process that are participatory and empowering of women, based on a relationship of equity (an equality of opportunity) and equality between both men and women, and critical of both patriarchy (the domination of women by men) and capitalism (the exploitation of labour). Gender structures of constraint. The role of both formal institutions and informal norms in creating and maintaining gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work. (See Chapter 24.) Global governance. The idea of a set of standardised practices emerging on a world scale, as effected by a perhaps impartial world authority and institutions. Since global anything is only guaranteed by the cooperation of the most powerful states, global governance is also seen by some as the pursuit of national interest by other means. Globalisation. A process (or project, an ideology) designed to integrate economies all over the world into a single system based on the dynamics of capitalist development, and in which capital and the international trade in goods and services are freed from the regulatory restraints of national governments. A highly contentious project in its neoliberal form and economic dimension—​financial and trade liberalisation. Other dimensions include an associated interconnectedness of societies and cultures, the

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Glossary of terms  397 dramatic shrinking of time and space, and increase in the sharing and global flows of information that are facilitated by rapid changes in information technology. Human development. A concept elaborated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its annual publication, the Human Development Report. It is defined as an increased capacity to make choices in one’s life measured by the Human Development Index, a weighted measure of ‘human development’ based on per capita gross domestic product (GDP), life expectancy, and years of education. Ideology. A set of ideas or beliefs that is used not to describe or explain a phenomenon but to mobilise action in a desired direction. The concern of an ideologue is to advance not knowledge but the economic or political interests of the social group or class with whom he or she identifies. Political ideologies are normally categorised in terms of their orientation towards social or political change. In these terms the dominant ideologies are: liberalism, a (centrist or reformist) belief in the need for reform and the possibility of change in the direction of individual freedom and equal opportunity: socialism, a (leftist or radical) belief in the need for equality and substantive change or systemic transformation; and conservatism, a (rightist or reactionary) concern for order, to restore or establish order in the belief that change is neither progressive nor liberating but destabilising and productive of chaos. Imperialism. A doctrine and practice of some states based on the belief in the right to rule and the perquisites of state power, and the dream of world domination. It has a long historical pedigree but within the world capitalist system it has been associated with Pax Britannica, the rule of Great Britain over much of the world as of the late 19th century and well into the 20th century. After the Second World War, the dream of world domination and the state policy of world domination were taken over by the US. Imperialism as the projection of state power in support of the expansion of capital takes multiple forms—​economic, political, and military. Import substitution industrialisation (ISI). A set of policies, especially popular in the 1960s and 1970s, in which governments in developing countries rejected their presumed ‘comparative advantage’ in the export of primary products and sought to industrialise by producing the manufactured goods which they imported. Inclusive development. The concept of inclusive development (or growth) is focused on the policy of extending the income benefits of economic growth to the poor and lower rungs of income distribution. It was advanced in the context of a post-​Washington Consensus formed in the early 1990s in the form of a new social policy focused on poverty reduction. Inequality. In regard to the social distribution of wealth and income, inequality is viewed by many as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. On this see Capital in the Twenty-​First Century by Thomas Piketty (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Informal sector. Used to refer to unregistered small-​scale and loosely organised activities, in both rural and urban areas. Characteristically the activities are precarious and unprotected in law, often casual or short-​term (although the informal organisation may be very sophisticated) but yield some income /​remuneration. It encompasses many services but also some production processes, including those which can be ancillary to and adding value to formal sector activities. International governmental organisations (IGOs). A body formed by a treaty between two or more states to work on issues of common interest. They include organisations such as the International Labour Organisation (created in 1919) and the International

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398  Glossary of terms Court of Justice (created in July 2002). In 1909 there were 37 of them; by the new millennium, there were 260. This increase is taken as evidence of globalisation. International Monetary Fund (IMF). Founded, together with the World Bank, at Bretton Woods in 1944, it was designed as a means of assisting countries in a temporary balance of payments difficulty and conceived as a bulwark against a return of a cycle of depression and war. It was also meant to manage the world’s currency system and in this capacity it helped maintain economic stability in the capitalist system in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the 1980s and 1990s by its advocacy of the deregulation of capital markets it contributed substantially to economic instability. Widely criticised for placing the interests of capital owners above those of other social classes and over poorer countries. Labour-​centred development (LCD). The concept of LCD has been constructed to counter the anti-​labour, anti-​working-​class bias in mainstream development studies and the pro-​ capitalist political economy.The concept establishes the fundamental contributions of labour to the development process. (See Chapter 26.) Labour power. A critical force of production under capitalism, it is the capacity of the worker to labour and is sold, as a commodity, to the capitalist. Land grabbing. Large-​scale foreign investments in the acquisition of land for the purpose of extracting agro-​food products and exporting them in primary commodity form. See also agroextractivism. Liberalisation, economic (of trade, investment and finance). Since the mid-​ 1980s trade liberalisation has been undertaken universally among developing countries. Liberalisation has taken the form of opening up markets (i.e., removing protectionist impediments), privatising public enterprises, and encouraging foreign investment. Liberalisation, political. The opening up of space for greater participation by individuals and political parties in political affairs. Associated with the process of democratisation. See democracy. Liberalism. See ideology. Local economic development. Some proponents of ‘alternative development’ argue that the main impetus and agency of development and transformative change are community-​ based organisations concerned with local development. Notably this includes proposals of diverse grassroots and community-​based organisations, especially in Latin America, to construct a ‘social and solidarity economy’ based on cooperativism, workers’ self-​management, and community development. Market.An institution in which goods are bought and sold. Markets are normally embedded in other social and economic institutions, and both constructed and protected by states. In this regard, property rights lie at the foundation of any market while law and order shapes them. In the 1970s and 1980s neoliberals argued that a return to the free markets—​i.e., laissez-​faire, which diminishes the role of the state, would revive lagging economies. Increasingly markets are mediated by digital technologies and companies with states slow to regulate them. Metabolic rift. A term derived from Marx to indicate that under capitalism humans in their economic activity have broken their necessary link with the processes and cycles of nature to the detriment of both. Advanced by Monthly Review Marxist theorist John Bellamy Foster, the term is used to explain the current ecological crisis. Microcredit. The microcredit model, advanced initially by the Bangladeshi economist and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, in the early 1980s provides the tiny loan sums—​microloans—​that could assist the poor in the Global South to move

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Glossary of terms  399 into petty entrepreneurship projects and self-​employment (informal microenterprises). The model, however, has been subjected to intense debate (see Chapter 16). Multinational corporations (MNCs). Also transnational corporations (TNCs). Refers to firms with production facilities in more than one country. The operations of MNCs are key to understanding economic globalisation since they account for about two-​thirds of world trade and are the fundamental—​and lucrative—​bearers of both foreign direct investment and the most advanced production technologies. A small number of MNCs monopolise world markets for oil, minerals, foods, and other agricultural products and services—​a condition described as monopoly capital. The basic source of information on MNCs is the World Investment Report, published periodically by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Neodevelopment(alism). The ‘progressive’ governments in Latin America of the 2000s promoted a series of policies aimed at moving beyond neoliberalism by generating a more ‘inclusive’ form of development based on a new social policy of poverty reduction financed by fiscal revenues derived from the export of natural resources that were in high demand in capitalist markets. On this, see extractivism. However, the rejection of neoliberalism did not lead to a questioning of ‘development’ defined as economic growth. Rather, the left-​leaning ‘progressive ‘governments formed in the context of the advance of resource-​seeking ‘extractive capital’ in the development process turned towards extractive industries and the export of natural resources (primary commodity exports) as an engine of growth. Neoextractivism. A ‘new’ dimension of contemporary extractivism, as opposed to the classical form of extractivism based predominantly on mining, is its link to financial capital. Financial capitalists increasingly profit from investments in mines, oil fields, or agricultural activities, and the purchase of raw materials, to speculate on price trends or derivative markets. This, linked to the creation of new financial instruments, is based on the commodification and exploitation of nature facilitated by a policy of privatisation (privatising the means of production) and separating the direct producer from the land and their means of production. On this see accumulation by dispossession. Neoliberal globalisation. The form of globalisation associated with the post-​1980s emphasis on the deregulation of markets, increased power of corporations, and reduced social protections provided by the state. Its operations have been widely criticised as increasing inequality and destroying environments. See also neoliberalism. Neoliberalism. An economic doctrine, model, and ideology which rose to prominence in the 1970s that repudiates the role of the state in the economy, preferring to leave the economy in the hands of the market (free-​market capitalism). The architects of neoliberalism were the economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and formed the basis of the Washington Consensus. Neostructuralism. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a United Nations agency, in the 1950s–​1960s elaborated a ‘structuralist’ theory that the underdevelopment of economies on the periphery of the world system was the result of an international division of labour based on the exchange of primary commodities for goods manufactured in the centre of the system. The latter appropriated the benefits derived from technological innovation and productivity gains, and resulted in a deterioration in the terms of trade for peripheral economies. In the 1990s, the economists at ECLAC revised their position, taking into account the need for peripheral economies to be integrated into the globalisation process.

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400  Glossary of terms New social movement(s). A type of social movement(s) that emerged in the 1980s and that was (were) characterised by heterogeneity, a concern for a wide range of socio-​ economic, cultural, and political issues (e.g., identity) rather than a struggle over land and labour and other class issues such as land reform, improving wages, and freedom from exploitation. NGO(s)—​non-​governmental organisation(s). First established in the 1960s in the form of private voluntary organisations, NGOs serve a range of contradictory purposes, some charitable, some political. Often they are supported by governments and therefore serve not to promote change but to sustain the existing order. The World Bank, in its untiring attempts at co-​option, claims to favour them as instruments of ‘good governance’. Overseas development assistance (ODA). A programme of technical and financial assistance provided by international organisations and/​or governments of advanced capitalist countries to developing countries inaugurated in 1948 by President Harry Truman in the form of a Point Four programme. From a critical development studies perspective, ODA has been conceptualised as a form of imperialism, a means of advancing the foreign-​policy interests of the US and the interests of those concerned to ensure that countries in the ‘Third World’ would pursue development along a capitalist pathway. The emergence of ‘new’ aid donors, such as China, has added new dimensions to the debate. (See Chapter 14.) Participation. The act of taking part and having a share in a process. Participation can be both an individual and collective identity, whose desirable outcome is empowerment, and it should be distinguished from merely being present during an event, assembly, or conference. Patents. The exclusive right to produce and sell a good by a corporation for a specified period. Widely applied to goods and intellectual property (ideas), patents are controversial where they favour producers over human needs (in the case of vaccines, for example) or rich corporations over poor producers (in the case of seeds, for example). Periphery. Dependency and world systems theory characterise economies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and explain their relative ‘underdevelopment’, as a product of an international division of labour in which the countries on the periphery are pressured to export the social product in the primary commodity form of natural resources or as low-​value-​added manufactured goods. With the rise of global value chains, the periphery is incorporated into global capitalism as the provider of the low-​value-​ added processes in the chains. Philanthrocapitalism. A systemic change by large foundations choosing to advance private capital for the explicit goal of addressing social problems using business methods.They argue their investment in social programmes, requiring efficiency and ‘evidence-​ based results’, will benefit the recipients, as well as provide a return on investment to their foundations. (See Chapter 11.) Populism. In development discourse a form of development theory and practice associated with the idea that ‘small is beautiful’ and the virtues of small-​scale enterprise as well as balanced rural–​urban development. In political discourse, however, ‘populism’ refers to a form of politics and policies that appeals to the general populace or the masses (‘the popular sector’) vs. the entrenched interests of the oligarchy and the political elite. Populism is often a feature of right-​wing or conservative politics associated with the ideology of nationalism, where it is mobilised against ‘outsiders’, such as migrants.

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Glossary of terms  401 Postcolonial(ism). See decolonialisation/​decolonial. A subsequent (postcolonial) phase of development, the result of progressive or transformative social change and a struggle waged by countries (mostly in South and Southeast Asia and North/​sub-​Saharan Africa) for political independence. That struggle continues in the form of reclaiming the history and agency of colonised peoples. Postdevelopment. In the 1980s there emerged what has been described as a ‘theoretical impasse’ (Frans Schuurman, Beyond the Impasse, Zed Books, 1993), which led to a new direction of development theory based on a critique and rejection of ‘structuralism’ (social science, materialism) in its various forms (including Marxism). The result was a new approach and ‘critical theory’ based on the liberating belief in the power of people to effect transformative change, and the need for a ‘poststructuralist’ form of discourse analysis that emphasises the role of agency (social practice and the social construction of reality). On this postdevelopment critical perspective see The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Sachs, 1992, Zed Books) and Pluriverse: A Post-​Development Dictionary (Kothari et al., 2019, Tulika Books). Post-​Washington Consensus. Policy changes at the World Bank to focus more on poverty reduction and increase ‘participation’ by governments and civil society following the failure of the Washington Consensus to produce its promised economic growth outcomes. (See Chapter 13.) Poverty. A condition defined by deprivation and the inability of households to satisfy the basic needs of its members. The basic indicator of poverty is low income. According to the World Bank, whose fundamental masthead mandate is a global war on poverty, the global poor are those who earn less than $3.10 a day ($1.90 for the destitute or absolute poor). However, there are also non-​income measures of poverty such as lack of schooling, poor health and vulnerability to disease, food insecurity and malnutrition, poor life chances, an inequality of economic opportunity, and very limited capacity to make choices in their lives. Privatisation. The policy and practice, universally supported by neoliberal regimes, of taking publicly owned assets and publicly controlled services (railways, airlines, prisons, hospitals, water supplies, road maintenance, garbage collection) and selling them, often at below-​market prices, to private investors. Production. All the activities that go into the transformation of raw materials into finished goods and services. These activities are increasingly segmented between and within countries in the ‘international division of labour’ and organised into global value chains or global production networks in which multinational corporations are the dominant actors controlling the terms on which other firms in the chain or network participate. Proletarianisation. The process of social transformation that accompanies capitalist development. It involves the conversion of a society and economy of small-​scale direct producers on the land, the peasantry, into an industrial working class. Proletariat. A class dispossessed from its means of production and thus that owns nothing except for the capacity to labour, which forces workers to exchange their labour power for a wage. In parts of the periphery, capitalist development processes have led to a ‘semiproletariat’, with one foot in agriculture and the rural communities, and the other in the informal sector of the cities and urban centres. Race. The social construction of group differences based on assumed shared physical and societal attributes. (See Chapter 4.)

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402  Glossary of terms Reprimarisation. The process experienced in developing countries during the last two decades of neoliberal policies in the context of a growing demand for natural resources, which led to a ‘primary commodities boom’, an extractive development strategy, and a policy of increasing the exportation of primary commodities with little value added. Reproduction. The biological reproduction of the human species, and the care and maintenance of life, which include the investment of time, effort, and skills in unremunerated household and subsistence tasks. Reproduction is viewed, therefore, as a social function and as the formation of ‘human capital’, of ‘human resources’, or of ‘the replacement of labour’. Although vital for the functioning of any economic system it is typically underestimated, often hugely, in national economic accounts and falls disproportionately on women. See Chapters 7, 23, and 24. Resistance. Each phase in the evolution of capitalism and the capitalist development process generates forces of resistance that are often mobilised by social movements. On the periphery of the world capitalist system the resistance from the 1960s to the 1980s took the form of a land struggle waged by peasants and landless rural workers (rural resistance) and of a class struggle waged by workers in urban centres; in the 1990s the resistance took the form of anti-​neoliberalism and anti-​imperialism; in the 2000s the resistance has taken multiple forms, including an eco-​territorial struggle by local communities to reclaim their territorial rights as well as the rights of nature. Resistance in urban centres normally takes the form of a labour movement; in the rural areas (rural resistance) it often takes the form of a land struggle or related ‘dispossession-​related struggles’. Resource nationalism. The capturing of the economic rents from, and control over, natural resource extraction and production by states. This can take various forms such as nationalisation of companies, the formation of state-​owned enterprises, and reserving some production for domestic use. Rights of Nature. If Nature and Mother Earth were to be recognised as an identity, a living being, an interrelated community of beings, various advocates have said it must also be a subject of rights. This has legal and cultural implications. It implies, for example, that Nature must be protected and defended for itself and not just as a source of ‘natural capital’—​a repository of natural resources that can be mobilised in the process of economic development. Rural dispossession. See accumulation by dispossession. Social capital. The capacity to form networks of solidarity based on relations of trust. Within the mainstream development paradigm it is argued that social capital, so defined, is the one ‘asset that the poor have in abundance’, an asset formed by a culture of solidarity and a community spirit, which can generate a process of self-​ development, i.e., improvements and changes initiated from within and below, by grassroots organisations in local communities. Social class(es). See class. Social inequality. See inequality. State (the). A complex of political institutions that include the government in its various divisions and levels (‘the Executive’); an administrative, regulatory, or bureaucratic apparatus (the institutional structure of whatever economic and social programmes are established by the government); the legislature (the lower and upper houses of Parliament or the Congress and Senate); the judiciary, and the security (or repressive) apparatus (the Police and the Armed Forces). The actual form and role of the state,

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Glossary of terms  403 its diverse assigned or assumed functions and responsibilities, and its relation to civil society, are dynamic and adaptive to changing conditions.They require contextualised empirical, political, and sociological analysis. For example, at the end of the Second World War governments all over the world assumed the responsibility not only for social welfare (a fundamental response to the 1930s crisis) but for ‘development’ (improving the social condition of the population). Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). A package of ‘structural reforms’ based on neoliberal policies; designed by economists at the World Bank and applied to countries on the periphery of the world system, particularly in Africa and Latin America, in the 1980s and 1990s. The leverage provided by the Third World debt crisis enabled to Bank to extend further loans on the condition (the conditionality) that SAPs be implemented. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Following on the heels of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs were adopted by the UN in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Consisting of 17 goals, they represent development aspirations and are, according to the UN, achievable even though it is admitted that action is not fast enough to meet them at present. Critical development studies perspectives view the absence of critical analysis of the underlying operating system, namely capitalism, as a major shortcoming. Sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA). A form of ‘another development’. Promoted by academics such as Robert Chambers and other exponents of a people-​ centred approach towards development, it is predicated on the need to sustain not only the environment but also rural livelihoods. Transnational corporations (TNCs). See multinational corporations (MNCs). Unequal exchange. Processes by which some countries gain at the expense of others through international trade. Used in the 1970s to argue that industrialised countries gained at the expense of developing countries. One example of how this might occur is through different wage-​setting behaviour in the two types of economy. The term is now more commonly found in analysing unequal ecological exchange, the proposition that the benefits and harms of production are unequally distributed between the countries of the Global North and Global South, with the latter bearing the costs of environmental destruction and waste disposal. Washington Consensus. A consensus of the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund (of which the Treasury is the largest shareholder), the World Bank, and US investment bankers and the source of the dogma that minimum government and free markets are achievable and desirable throughout the world and that finance capital should be globalised. Workers’ self-​management. The struggle of workers for control of their workplaces (workers’ self-​management) has been manifest in all kinds of crisis, anti-​colonial and revolutionary struggles, and, in the current context as a response to capitalist restructuring. (See Chapter 43.) World Bank. Since the mid-​1970s the World Bank has been the chief arbiter of questions of development. Its annual publication, the World Development Report, establishes the priorities, the terminology, the concepts, and the questions around which development is advanced. Created, together with the International Monetary Fund, at a conference in Bretton Woods in 1944, the World Bank had as its original mission the financing of the reconstruction of western Europe and Japan. Implicit here was the maintenance of the world economic order, the institutional framework for a global process of capitalist development into which all countries would be inserted. Its first task

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404  Glossary of terms accomplished, as the lead institution for international cooperation the Bank began to finance Third-​World development, particularly in the form of infrastructure and institutional development, technological conversion and employment, and income generation projects—​and global poverty reduction, its professed key mandate. In the 1980s and 1990s the Bank’s main concern was to advance free-​market capitalism (neoliberal or economic globalisation) via a programme of ‘structural adjustment’ or reforms in macroeconomic policy. Subsequently, the Bank’s basic concern returned to its original mandate (in the 1970s) regarding poverty reduction.

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Index

accumulation 8, 71, 74, 149, 152, 174, 205, 223, 277, 287, 345, 375, 379; capital 5, 18, 35, 67, 70, 78–​9, 103, 225–​7, 230, 233–​4, 238, 241–​2, 250–​2, 259, 265, 269, 271, 273, 276, 303–​9, 317, 320–​1, 343, 354, 360; of debt 19, 159; by dispossession 103, 271–​2, 327–​9, 332, 341–​4; fossil fuel, 177; of human capital, 239; knowledge, 235–​7; original, 102, 271; over-​ 321; peripheral 103; primitive 24, 102, 271, 276, 327, 342–​4; strategies 35, 269, 315, 319–​21, 322, 327, 330–​1, 387–​8; of wealth 192, 322–​4, 354 Africa 5–​7, 13, 16–​18, 32–​4, 97, 99, 122–​3, 141, 186, 199–​200, 213–​14, 217, 267–​8, 315, 341–​8; North 8, 327–​33, 387; socialism 4, 368; South 8, 140, 145, 171–​7, 218, 229–​30, 253 African National Congress (ANC) 134, 171, 176–​7 agriculture 217; agrarian change 265–​73, 276, 385–​7; agrarian economy 155, 160; agrarian reform 28, 158, 242, 271, 294, 297, 386, 389; agrarian society 265, 354; capitalist development of 4, 25, 79, 182, 266, 329; commercial 205; employment 156–​8, 160–​1, 209; intensive 8, 277; investment 267; modernisation of 267; participation 79, 159, 208–​9, 265; peasant 99; policies 160, 233; profits 267; share of gdp 156, 158, 160–​2; subsistence 209; transformation 78, 183, 284–​7 agribusiness 96–​8, 152–​3, 256, 259, 268–​72, 294, 297, 327–​8, 330, 344, 352–​3 agrofuel 294, 320–​4, 328 Algeria 257, 327–​33, 368–​9 Alliance for Progress 5, 14 Amin, Samir 6, 13, 250 ANC see African National Congress apartheid 32, 140, 145, 171–​3, 176–​7, 230, 253, 346 Argentina 14, 17–​19, 150–​1, 184, 251, 253, 268, 279, 287, 351, 355, 368, 370–​1

authoritarianism 27, 132, 167–​8, 241, 246, 253, 258–​9, 261, 324, 331–​2, 335, 369 Baran, Paul 5, 26–​7 biodiversity 5, 75, 99–​100, 268–​9, 309, 327–​8, 358 Bolivia 4, 6, 52–​3, 138, 184, 249, 252, 253, 268, 279, 289–​90, 297, 330, 362–​3, 368–​9, 377, 378 Brazil 8, 13–​14, 18, 22, 32–​4, 52, 74–​5, 80, 117, 123, 125, 130, 145, 147–​53, 167, 184, 195, 200, 229–​31, 248–​9, 251–​4, 268, 289–​90, 297, 324, 350–​3, 355, 360, 362, 368, 370–​1 buen vivir 6, 21, 51–​5, 57–​60, 63, 153, 316, 362, 374, 378; see also vivir bien Canada 14, 32, 145, 213, 235, 257, 362, 363, 368 capital: accumulation 5, 18, 35, 67, 70, 78–​9, 103, 225–​7, 230, 233–​4, 238, 241–​2, 250–​2, 259, 265, 269, 271, 273, 276, 303–​9, 317, 320–​1, 343, 354, 360; advance of 4, 23, 65, 79–​80, 94, 186–​7, 238, 242, 335–​6, 353–​6, 385–​9; alternatives to capitalism 3–​8, 20, 28–​9, 49–​53, 60, 65, 82, 87, 94, 98–​9, 105, 108–​9, 130–​1, 226, 250, 266, 281, 292–​8, 303, 309, 316, 331–​3, 335–​6, 342, 371, 374–​9, 385, 388–​9; contradictions 3–​6, 21, 23, 44, 52–​3, 65–​70, 89–​91, 190–​1, 233–​4, 303–​9, 321–​2, 331, 390; crisis 18–​20, 65, 70, 80, 242; extractive 4, 6, 79, 104, 187, 265, 301, 328, 329–​30, 332, 335–​6, 342–​4, 350–​6, 362, 386–​7; flight 115, 148, 195, 351; foreign 6, 18–​19, 26, 115–​16, 242–​5, 330; human 27, 50, 103, 207, 229, 233, 238–​9; -​labour relation 4, 15, 23–​4, 78, 80, 103–​5, 183–​6, 223, 246, 265, 276, 285–​7, 306, 308, 342, 372; postcapitalism 4, 51, 348, 374; resistance to capitalism 4, 35, 79, 332, 335–​6, 348, 353–​6, 385–​90; social 7–​8, 99 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 43–​4, 150 cdm see Clean Development Mechanism

406

406 Index cepal see United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America Chile 4, 14, 46, 52, 184, 252–​4, 338, 352–​3, 355, 368–​9 China 4, 8, 13–​19, 34, 42, 52, 71, 74–​5, 123–​7, 129, 133–​4, 145, 155, 158–​9, 160, 163–​9, 186, 203, 205–​11, 216, 223–​4, 226, 241–​7, 267, 279, 313, 320, 321, 324, 344, 350–​2, 368–​9; and U S debt 166 class 37, 61, 73–​4, 181–​7, 198, 203, 205, 235, 258, 273, 287, 293–​4, 297, 303, 317, 320, 339, 387; analysis, 181, 183–​4; capitalist, 67, 69, 80–​1, 86–​7, 104, 147, 153, 223–​4, 234–​7, 259, 293, 305, 344, 347; comparador 5, 153, 329; conflict 16, 70, 80, 106, 166–​8, 183, 248, 335, 337, 342, 346, 353; consciousness 181–​2, 187, 246, 252, 331; entrepreneurial 5; exploitation 68, 73, 75; formation 8, 78, 244, 256, 259–​62; inequalities 60, 247; landlord 5, 40; land-​owning, 71; middle 149–​50, 171–​2, 185–​6, 218, 278, 280, 288, 324, 337–​9; migrant 8; oppressed 40; power 3, 259, 281, 324; and race 31; revolutionary 24; ruling 24, 153, 230, 276, 293, 329–​230, 354; structure 5, 58, 134–​5, 179, 181, 185–​6, 259, 262; struggle 71, 148, 152, 181, 186–​7, 241, 248–​9, 252, 290, 331, 385–​6, 388–​90; transnational 86–​7; upper, 98, 337; working 23, 66, 70–​1, 102–​3, 109, 134–​5, 149, 186–​7, 223–​4, 225–​31, 241, 248–​52, 289, 292, 304, 306, 338, 348, 354–​5, 372, 390 Clean Development Mechanism (SDM) 313–​14 Colombia 52, 174, 251, 253, 279, 330, 352–​3 colonialism 3, 13–​14, 21, 24–​5, 31–​3, 42, 77–​8, 171–​3, 256, 305, 327–​8, 341, 343, 358–​64, 388; anti-​ 341; postcolonialism 21, 29, 256, 385 colonisation 36–​7, 67, 129, 194–​5, 246, 341, 345, 359–​61; de-​ 13, 123, 214, 368, 388; of nature 309 commodities 16, 18, 23–​4, 25, 41, 50–​2, 67–​70, 73–​5, 79, 96, 127, 133–​4, 166, 176, 182, 234–​8, 242, 251, 257, 267–​72, 275–​8, 281, 293–​6, 304–​8, 313, 321, 327, 330, 344, 350–​4, 360, 379, 387 cooperative 20, 60, 227, 251, 296, 347–​8, 366–​72, 374, 377–​8 core-​periphery model 45, 147–​8, 182, 250 covid-​19 5, 8, 35, 37, 87, 90, 95, 109, 124, 133, 153, 160, 163, 173, 177, 189, 203, 215, 217, 218–​19, 262, 267, 276, 280, 323–​4 crisis 26, 52, 177, 198, 199, 204, 280, 351, 358, 366–​8; Asian 19, 67, 132; climate 8, 175–​6; debt 5, 14–​18, 44, 113, 123, 200–​1, 257–​8, 330; ecological 307, 327, 332; economic 19–​20, 51, 73, 246, 248, 251, 260, 267, 304,

307; energy 268; environmental 57, 301, 374; financial 51, 68, 87, 113, 124, 132, 152, 163, 201, 208, 215, 268, 350; fiscal 72; food 268–​73, 276, 354; global 10, 87, 208, 242, 321, 350, 385; health 35, 124, 203, 262; humanitarian 262; mechanisms 70–​4; production 305–​6, 387; propensity toward 65, 70, 75, 306–​7; refugee 107; social 57, 150–​1, 246; systemic 80, 276, 368, 385, 389–​90 Cuba 4, 14, 27, 35, 40, 141, 252, 368–​9 DAC see Development Assistance Committee debt 19, 166, 171, 175, 177, 199, 201, 260, 324; bad 159; crisis 5, 14–​18, 44, 113, 123, 200–​1, 216, 257–​8, 330, 351; debtor countries 15, 18, 126, 262; over-​indebtedness 138, 174, 219; perpetual 36; relief 17; service 17, 74, 267, 351; socialised 16; sustainability 127, 173; worker 160, 260 Denmark 125, 324 dependency theory 5–​6, 21–​2, 24–​5, 28–​9, 40, 42–​6, 78–​9, 88, 103–​4, 129–​30, 148–​50, 152–​3, 265, 328–​9, 385 development: agencies for 17–​18, 113, 124–​6, 290, 387; agenda 13, 37, 45, 107–​9, 113, 116–​18, 124–​5, 153, 189, 192–​5, 297, 315; aid 122–​3, 127, 343–​4; alternatives 7, 51, 53–​4, 57, 98–​9, 102, 123, 130, 332; anti-​ 29, 51, 316; assistance 14, 17, 111, 121–​2, 125, 215–​16; capitalist 4–​6, 21, 23–​7, 65–​6, 71, 77–​9, 82, 102–​4, 131, 141, 151, 174, 179, 182–​3, 186–​7, 227, 236, 238–​9, 241–​3, 250, 266, 276, 284, 286, 303, 306, 321, 328, 335–​6, 341, 353, 358, 385–​7; community-​ based 7, 335, 374–​9, 388; combined 71–​2, 172, 304; cooperation 34, 119, 121–​7; critiques 7, 21–​2, 49–​55, 89–​91; dependent 6, 42–​3, 149–​50; economic 7, 16–​17, 27, 88, 114–​15, 118, 125–​6, 130, 138, 140, 148, 151, 153, 158, 176, 180, 205, 226, 239, 246, 252–​3, 258, 289, 362–​3, 385; feminist contributions, 5–​7, 37, 55, 57–​62, 89, 197–​8, 201–​4, 205–​11, 254, 307, 316, 343; financing 119, 124–​6, 139, 142–​3; goals 3–​4, 6, 34, 37, 45, 51–​2, 214, 235, 311; green 134, 242, 268–​9, 295, 301, 311–​13, 322, 347; human 53, 108, 157, 205, 225, 374; inclusive 6, 49, 65, 108–​9, 159–​60, 184, 194, 266, 288, 330; indicators 161, 165, 189, 192, 205, 217, 219, 250; industrial 80, 133–​4, 149, 157–​8, 175–​6, 284, 295, 320, 328–​9; institutions 44, 278, 376; international 94, 119, 123, 233; and labour 225–​31, 248–​54; local 137–​43, 296, 331; lumpen 152–​3; mainstream 3–​4, 8, 22, 32–​4, 36, 51, 77–​8, 82, 164, 184, 223, 226–​7; mal-​ 87–​8, 90; and migration 102–​9; model

407

Index  407 3, 5–​6, 14, 16, 45–​6, 53, 65, 89–​90, 109, 127, 129–​35, 149–​50, 153, 163–​9, 324, 332–​3; neodevelopmentalism 151–​3, 316; neoliberal 99, 114–​16, 180, 192, 205, 210, 330, 353; origins of the concept 13–​16, 28, 40, 53–​5, 77–​81, 85; path to 28, 57, 61, 74–​5, 124, 127, 155, 171, 226, 387; policy 8, 111, 113–​19, 132–​3, 137, 152, 201, 289; post 5, 21, 23, 28–​9, 49–​54, 78, 87–​8, 153, 385, 388; process 4, 45, 61, 77, 79, 117–​18, 129, 139, 179, 181, 186–​7, 234, 236, 238, 248–​50, 289, 290, 335, 356, 387; project 89–​90, 164, 173, 223, 290, 330; and race 31–​8; rural 79, 265–​6, 345, 385–​6; social 59, 155, 161, 193–​4, 218; state 81–​2, 86, 88, 111, 129–​35, 194, 271, 385, 387; strategies 41, 123, 147–​53, 241, 311–​12; studies 14, 20–​2, 37–​8, 42, 51–​3, 61, 77, 81–​2, 86, 111, 134–​5, 163, 182, 223–​4, 225–​6, 248, 311, 314–​16, 342; sustainable 29, 51, 108, 179, 189, 192–​3, 195, 215, 321; theory 5–​7, 13, 15, 21, 23–​9, 40–​6, 88, 103–​4, 118, 129, 148, 262, 285, 303–​9; under 4–​6, 26–​8, 42–​3, 78–​9, 106, 141, 233–​9, 250, 328–​9, 341, 388; unequal 104, 108–​9, 179, 213–​19, 250, 285, 343; urban 265–​6, 284–​90 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) 121 Doha Declaration 216–​17 East Asia 7, 18–​19, 117, 130–​5, 160, 163, 341–​2, 388 ECLA see United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America ECLA see United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean ecology 4, 28–​9, 52, 57, 97–​9, 168, 295, 309, 327–​33, 378–​9, 389 economy: agricultural 18, 78, 155, 160–​1, 265, 267; deregulation 115, 352; domestic 41–​2; globalised 316; informal 103, 140, 202, 223, 284–​5; local 138, 322–​4; organisation of, 20, 41, 57–​63, 121, 147–​8, 156, 173–​4, 176, 181–​2, 328, 332, 372, 376; peasant 25, 271–​3; political 4, 5, 31, 42–​3, 52, 67, 69–​71, 77–​8, 81, 86, 102, 116, 119, 130, 145, 177, 181–​2, 189–​95, 226–​7, 231, 250, 257–​9, 267, 286, 329–​30, 385–​7, 389; regulation 322; rural 158; social 20, 60, 335; socialist 16, 164, 241; solidarity 60, 335; urban 79, 286–​7; vulgar 68–​70 Ecuador 4, 6, 52–​3, 184, 202, 249, 253, 279, 297, 322, 330, 351–​4, 363 Emmanuel, Arghiri 6, 249–​50 empowerment 7, 88, 95, 139, 180, 205–​6, 210–​11, 338–​9

energy: crisis 87, 268; prices 173; renewable 168, 176, 301, 313, 315, 319–​24, 350; security 176, 317, 350, 374; solar 176, 313, 320–​4; sources, 149, 171, 176, 233, 256–​7, 301, 320, 328, 350, 358; sovereignty 333; transition 301, 317, 319–​24; wind 176, 320–​4 environment 75, 85–​6, 106, 301, 304, 319–​21; conflicts 306–​7, 356, 388; costs 8, 265, 306–​7, 327–​8, 331; crisis 57, 374; damage 50, 187, 193, 235, 268–​9, 286, 314–​5, 389; degradation 20, 145, 289–​90, 308–​9, 327–​8, 330, 353, 355, 376, 388; destruction 8, 271, 327, 355, 364; efficiency 312; environmentalism of the poor 330–​1; ethics 54–​5; justice 31, 307–​8, 322, 330–​1, 333, 356, 364; knowledge 358; militarised 354; movements 307–​8, 331, 346–​7; policies 192–​4, 375; protection 152–​3, 168, 316, 348, 362, 374, 377–​8; regulation 322; sustainability 153, 168, 295, 321 EU see European Union Europe 13, 17, 24, 33, 35, 37, 61, 77, 85–​6, 107, 122, 129, 131, 133, 133, 148, 182, 228, 230, 250, 305, 309, 324, 328, 338, 343, 361, 366–​8, 370; Eastern 117, 167, 268; imports 36, 329; markets 16, 41, 257 European Union (EU) 278 exchange 69, 99, 296, 342, 361; foreign 109, 131, 166, 269–​70, 272; labour 79, 182, 296; local 374; market 60, 68, 71; material 303; rates 114–​15; social 7, 297; unequal 6, 41–​4, 103, 249–​50, 321–​4; value 234–​6, 304 exports 14–​18, 26, 35–​6, 41, 44–​5, 67, 74, 79, 115, 130–​2, 147–​52, 163–​9, 176, 180, 205, 210, 239, 254, 257–​8, 262, 267–​9, 272, 313, 321, 324, 327–​33, 335, 354, 359–​60 extractivism 6, 8, 61, 98, 152–​3, 301, 308, 319, 321–​3, 327–​33, 335, 352–​4, 362, 364, 385, 387–​8; progressive 6, 330 farms: capitalist 99, 269–​73, 295; in China 243; commercial 173; contract 160–​1, 294; farmers 16, 293; financialisation 269–​71, 276; fish 327, 347; incomes 97, 271; industrial 280, 327; knowledge 98; labour 172, 277–​8, 346, 348, 388; livestock 269, 280; markets 296; mega 269, 276, 277–​8; monocropping 97, 99; networks 98–​9; peasant 267, 271–​3, 355, 386; production 275–​6; sector 269; sharing of seeds 97–​8, 100; smallholder 95, 98–​100, 160–​1, 186, 270–​1, 327, 332, 342, 346–​7, 376–​9, 386; subsidies 278; systems 275–​6; women’s participation 199, 345 FDI see Foreign Direct Investment feminist: approach 5; critique 7; eco-​ 57, 60, 307; feminism 52, 57; movements 29;

408

408 Index perspective 61–​2, 179–​80, 205–​11, 385; poststructuralist 29; studies 58, 60, 201; theory 28–​9, 37, 55, 57–​62, 89, 197, 203, 254, 316 financial crisis see crisis; financial financialisation 18–​19, 80–​1, 142, 145, 171, 173, 177, 238–​9, 267, 269–​71, 276 fishing 328, 361, 376 food: agrofood 78; 215, 269–​73, 276–​8, 350–​2, 387; consumption 202, 277; crisis 87, 267–​70, 344, 354; economy 277; enclosure food regime 272–​3; imports 217, 277; industry 296; prices 173; 227, 270, 275–​6, 352; production 15–​16, 96–​7, 99; 276, 292–​3, 296, 328, 352, 371, 376, 378–​9; regime 8, 265, 267, 270, 273, 275–​81, 294; scarcity 96, 198, 201–​2; security 156; 161, 175, 199, 213, 229, 235, 267, 269, 288, 311, 378–​9; sovereignty 269, 297, 332–​3, 345, 389; staple 117; sustainability 100; system 265, 271, 273, 275, 278, 280, 297 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 16, 79, 121, 124, 330, 344, 350–​3, 386–​7 fossil fuels 8, 134, 176, 177, 257, 277, 295, 311, 319–​24, 350–​4, 358, 364, 387–​8 fracking 330 Furtado, Celso 13, 43, 148

gross domestic product (GDP) 19, 129–​30, 155–​60, 163–​6, 194, 202, 218, 260, 277–​9, 329 growth 5, 70–​1, 122, 185, 307, 358; agricultural 160–​1, 279; benefits of 206; constrained 131; de-​ 49, 316, 374; as development 21, 89, 102, 192, 316–​17; diminishing 67, 73–​4; economic 14, 43, 49–​50, 52–​5, 77, 88, 103, 105, 117, 122, 124–​6, 137, 145, 151, 158–​9, 194, 215–​16, 226, 289, 304, 320; engines of 5–​6, 15, 286; and the environment 75, 193, 321; with equity 45; export-​led 131–​2, 133, 166, 269; female-​led 132; inclusive 159–​61, 389; jobless 157, 159–​60, 173, 177; market-​based 192, 200; measurement 158; money supply 115; in the periphery 147, 288; perpetual 54–​5; political economy of 5; population 103, 284; in productivity 118, 164; pro-​poor 195; rapid 138, 145, 149, 159, 163–​4, 167–​9, 226, 230, 243, 257, 269; rates 15–​16, 155–​6, 158–​9, 161, 165, 184; stages of 14–​15, 148–​9; strategies 138, 153, 200, 211, 287–​8, 324; surplus 115; sustainable 14, 80, 194, 242; and trade 6; trickle-​down 161; unbalanced 115 Guatemala 279 Gunder Frank, Andre 5–​6, 79

GDP see gross domestic product gender: analysis 7, 106, 179, 197–​204, 210; -​ based violence 207; bias 173, 207, 309; constructions 58; and development 6, 29, 132; division of labour 207–​9, 226, 254, 272, 346; empowerment 139, 244–​5, 288; gap 208; hierarchies 8, 71; inequality 57, 61–​2, 87, 95, 153, 179–​80, 197, 205–​11, 227, 253, 339; mainstreaming 7, 37; relations 6–​7, 61–​2, 295; structures 205–​6; studies 8, 54, 345 Germany 16, 71, 97, 129, 130–​1, 133, 145, 324, 368 Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) 121, 126 globalisation 17–​19, 31, 44, 65, 77–​9, 81–​2, 85–​91, 129–​30, 150–​1, 180, 185, 194, 205, 208–​10, 234, 241, 251, 279, 342, 386, 388; anti-​ 87, 292; forces of 132, 194; and health 215–​17; of markets 190, 193; neoliberal 4, 7, 42, 81, 103–​9, 223–​4, 248, 250, 265, 267–​73, 285–​6, 321, 350, 353, 386; post-​ 87; processes 132–​4, 192, 332; studies 8, 86–​7, 89 GPEDC see Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation green revolution 65, 95, 97–​8, 295 greenhouse gases 175–​6, 280, 311–​13, 320–​1

Haiti 35–​8 health 59–​60, 119, 172, 226, 235, 353–​5; coverage 215, 279; crisis 35, 67, 87; expenditures 115, 156, 194, 216; global 214–​15; healthcare system 36, 96, 109, 145, 161, 180, 202, 213–​14, 218, 289, 379; inequalities 87, 180, 197, 213–​19; international 214–​15; public 95–​6; services 96, 129, 208, 210, 215–​16, 284, 314, 376; social determinants 214, 216, 287; of women 201; of workers 203, 245 High-​Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (UN-​HLD) 108 Hirschman, Albert 13, 15, 41 hydrocarbons 256–​8, 262, 316, 329–​30, 351 ICCA see Indigenous and Community Conserved Area IDB see Inter-​American Development Bank ILO see International Labour Organisation IMF see International Monetary Fund imperialism 31, 71, 152, 241, 305–​6, 327–​9, 342–​3; anti-​ 332; capitalist 26; cultural 86; debates 24–​5, 27, 77–​83; economic 118, 258; European 33, 85; extractive 387; sub​ 148–​50; theory 25, 40, 44, 238–​9; ultra 26; United States (US) 352, 386; Western 28 import substitution industrialisation (ISI) 16, 41–​4, 147

409

Index  409 India 8, 13–​14, 16, 18, 21, 26–​8, 34–​8, 75, 123, 125, 134, 138, 155–​61, 164, 172, 174, 186, 200, 203, 214, 218, 228, 260, 262, 279, 287, 311–​12, 315–​16, 320, 323, 337–​9, 343–​8, 368–​70 Indigenous: capabilities 33; communities 187, 335, 353–​6, 358, 361–​4, 367, 386–​90; deprivation 33; approaches to development 37–​8, 51, 153; and education 34; exploitation of 387; identity 252; knowledge 358, 361, 364; land 32, 353, 359–​63; liberation 40; movements 249, 271–​3, 297, 346, 374–​5, 389; peasantry 40, 341; peoples 55, 278, 281, 344, 353–​4, 359, 362–​3; reserves 152; resistance 251, 347, 355–​6, 358–​64, 376, 386–​8; rights 57, 61, 316, 348, 358–​9, 361–​4; scholarship 342–​3, 361; sovereignty 345, 358, 362; traditions 61; women 378; worldview 6, 55, 316 Indigenous Community and Conserved Area (ICCA) 376, 379 Indonesia 14, 16, 18, 214–​15, 230, 324, 344, 346, 368 Industry: auto 246; capitalist development of 4, 23–​6, 158, 173, 182–​3, 227, 351–​4; carbon emissions 312–​13; cotton 378; in development theory 41, 234; fossil fuel 358; and labour 24, 78–​9, 305; large-​scale 308; policies 133, 323, 332, 344, 387; state-​led industrialisation 131, 134, 226, 320–​1; sugar 370; transformation from agriculture 286–​7 inequality 3, 34–​7, 43–​4, 57, 59–​60, 67, 95, 104, 107, 145, 161, 166–​9, 171–​3, 177, 179, 184–​5, 190–​4, 205–​6, 209, 218, 234–​5, 243, 247–​9, 256, 269, 275, 278–​9, 285, 287–​90, 295, 301, 314–​16 innovation 20, 26, 45, 86, 91, 118, 124, 131–​2, 148, 235–​9, 241–​2, 251, 253, 286, 290, 322–​3, 342, 358, 377, 379 Inter-​American Development Bank (IDB) 44, 140–​1 International Labour Organisation (ILO) 122, 202, 205–​6 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 15–​16, 18–​19, 44, 114–​15, 121–​3, 166–​7, 215–​16, 219, 239, 248, 261, 329–​30, 351, 386 ISI see import substitution industrialisation Israel 37, 261, 324 Italy 145, 185, 324, 338, 368, 370 Kozul-​Wright, Richard 5 labour: African 172; agricultural 18, 78, 156, 243, 346, 348; alienation 308; capital-​labour relation 4, 15, 23–​4, 78, 80, 103–​5, 183–​6, 223, 246, 265, 276, 285–​7, 306, 308, 342, 372; -​centered development 227–​8, 230–​1,

250; cheap 19, 78, 80, 133, 173, 226, 236, 238, 304; child 159; colonial 17–​18; as a commodity 23–​4, 74, 275; cooperative 366; cost 167, 244, 249; defeminisation 208–​9; displacement 235; division of 6, 24–​5, 35, 57, 79, 104, 127, 147–​8, 183, 207, 226, 233–​4, 254, 285, 287, 321; empowerment 267; enslaved 32, 78; exchange 303; excluded 159–​60; exploitation 43, 149, 150, 173, 256, 304–​5, 307, 328, 342–​3, 353, 387–​8; family 198, 202, 254, 292–​3; feminisation 272; forced 172; indentured 32, 344–​5; industrial 187, 201; informality 61; labourforce 102–​3, 149, 156–​7, 159, 208, 223, 228, 239, 250, 253, 256; landless 347; laws 245, 367; -​led development 223, 228, 231; market 58–​9, 68, 70, 74, 103–​4, 131, 159, 173, 194, 199–​201, 203, 205, 209, 216, 225–​6, 243, 249, 260, 266, 286, 288, 375–​6; migrant 102–​3, 167, 172–​3, 223–​4, 242, 244, 259–​62, 344–​5, 366; mobility 273; movement 247, 248, 249, 251–​2, 289–​90, 307, 355, 369–​70, 386; as a pathway out of rural poverty 7; peasant 272, 294–​5; power 78–​9, 102, 182, 228, 275, 306, 342, 354–​5; precarianisation 151, 271–​3; pro-​ 228, 231; productivity 234, 236, 306; protest, 167, 368, 389; racialised 343; regulation 245, 272; reproductive 275; rights 94, 106–​7, 132, 246; role of 241, 253; rural 228, 273; skilled 172–​3, 236, 242, 273, 284–​5, 287, 331; social 69; standards 210; state-​labour relation 133–​4; surplus 4, 78–​9, 102–​3, 115, 157, 174, 272–​3, 287; -​ technology relation 235, 323; unions 226, 249; unpaid 207, 275, 288; urban 284, 286–​7, 335; and value 67, 250, 304; wage 68, 99, 102, 160, 207, 276, 278, 293, 296, 304, 341, 375; white 172; participation of women 58, 199, 205–​11, 303, 307 land 75, 227; access to, 172–​4, 209, 259, 285, 293–​6, 323, 387; agricultural 160–​1, 268, 270–​1, 278, 280, 354, 387; autonomy 346; as commodity 68, 70, 74, 242, 278, 308, 328, 353; concentration 266–​70, 276, 322–​3, 342; degradation 75, 280, 361, 377; dispossession 172, 305, 341, 344–​5, 358–​9, 386; for energy production 328, 352; foreign investment in 352; Gini coefficient 279; grabbing 98, 267–​71, 322, 330, 341, 344, 347, 350, 353, 387; indigenous 32, 353, 358–​64, 375–​6; -​ less rural workers 4, 151, 182, 187, 278, 297, 355, 386–​7, 388; management 5, 366–​7; markets 160–​1, 267, 360; occupations 229, 284, 290, 354, 360, 390; -​owning class 5, 40, 69, 134, 165, 186, 293, 322, 348, 354, 390; privatisation 327; reform 79, 130, 165, 209, 252–​3, 269, 386, 389; rights, 209, 353, 363;

410

410 Index separation of the peasantry 78, 102–​3, 265, 284, 304–​5, 355, 388; social function of 297; sovereignty 346; struggles 8, 151, 186–​7, 229, 266, 289, 292, 295, 313, 335, 341–​8, 355, 388–​90; titling 209, 267, 271, 314, 363; valuations 345–​6; and women 209, 279, 314, 388 Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) 151, 297 Latin America 4–​8, 14, 17–​21, 33–​5, 40–​6, 54, 60–​1, 79, 104, 108–​9, 129, 134, 137, 140, 147–​9, 179, 184, 186–​7, 200, 202, 230, 248–​54, 269, 279, 284, 287–​9, 297–​8, 306, 316, 350–​6, 360, 362, 366–​7, 376, 386, 388, 390 Malaysia 16, 37, 164, 324, 344 market 14, 18, 25, 32, 44, 57, 60–​2, 68, 71, 73, 74, 105, 119, 148–​50, 159–​60, 169, 173–​4, 183, 185–​6, 195, 269–​71, 279, 281, 293, 296, 305, 312–​13, 324, 329, 351, 354, 358–​61, 364, 371; access to 17, 237, 346; expansion 23, 205; failure 113–​15, 118, 134, 140, 372; free 28, 49, 79–​81, 96, 130, 137, 153, 192, 194, 238, 386–​7; fundamentalism 7, 89, 225; incentives 8, 88, 117, 211, 241, 295; internal 27, 103–​4, 147–​50, 191, 268, 284, 374, 389; labour 58–​9, 103–​4, 194, 199, 201, 203, 207, 209, 243, 248–​50, 260, 265–​6, 272, 286–​8, 376; land 160–​1, 267, 360; liberalisation 216, 226, 285, 294, 315; regulation 45, 52, 58, 60, 129, 131–​2, 208, 252, 308; role of 50, 69–​70, 99, 111–​16, 189, 192–​3, 217, 227, 275–​6, 289, 306; socialist 16, 53; stock 19, 67, 131, 259; world 18, 27, 45, 163, 165, 190, 200, 234, 242, 253, 257–​8, 262, 277–​8, 327, 329–​30, 343, 350, 352–​3, 375, 379 Marshall Plan 13, 122–​3 Marx, Karl 23, 67, 68–​9; Marxist analysis, 237, 293, 335, 385; -​ism 4, 21, 23, 25–​6, 28–​9, 35, 40, 46, 52, 68, 247, 286, 306; theory 21–​9, 37–​43, 46, 60, 68, 73, 78, 81, 102–​4, 148–​50, 153, 186, 207, 250, 252, 303–​9, 342–​3 MDGs see Millennium Development Goals metropolis–​satellite see core-​periphery model Mexico 14, 18–​19, 80, 137–​8, 150, 184, 195, 218, 235, 251, 253, 284, 287, 330, 351–​4 microcredit, 137–​43 Middle East 8, 14–​15, 163–​4, 199, 256–​62, 356 migration 7–​8, 78–​9, 87, 102–​9, 123, 160, 173, 197–​201, 205, 210–​11, 234–​6, 256, 259–​62, 272, 286, 341, 360, 387–​8 military 14, 17, 27, 36–​7, 87, 116, 129–​30, 148, 150, 253, 258, 262, 329, 353–​4, 356, 364; industrial complex 149 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 5, 51–​2, 88, 195, 235

mining 150, 152–​3, 157, 172–​6, 268, 294–​5, 305–​6, 321–​4, 327–​31, 344–​8, 352–​6, 362–​3, 377, 388–​9 Morocco 138, 327–​33 MST see Landless Workers’ Movement NAFC see North Atlantic Financial Crisis NAFTA see North American Free Trade Agreement NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organisation needs: basic 15, 119, 178, 183, 197–​8, 201–​2, 203–​4, 205, 289, 305, 375–​6, 379 neostructuralism 40, 43, 44–​6, 90–​1 NGOs see non-​governmental organisations non-​governmental organisations (NGOs) 8, 17, 253, 285, 315, 341, 344, 346–​7, 361–​2 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 17, 218, 252 North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) 124 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 17, 122 OAS see Organisation of American States oil 74–​5, 126, 149, 176, 223–​4, 256–​62, 268, 294–​5, 311–​12, 317, 320–​4, 327–​9, 330–​1, 352, 387 Organisation of American States (OAS) 14, 44 pandemic 8, 67, 87, 90, 95, 109, 132, 139, 152, 159–​60, 163, 185, 189, 194, 203, 215, 217–​19, 262, 267, 276 patriarchy 3, 6–​7, 50, 57, 60–​2, 198, 211, 253, 295, 303, 307, 388 peasantry 4, 8, 18, 24–​6, 40, 66, 78, 99, 102–​3, 130, 155, 164, 182, 186–​7, 228, 241–​4, 265–​6, 267–​8, 271–​3, 275–​8, 281, 284, 286–​7, 292–​8, 304–​5, 330–​1, 335, 341, 344–​6, 348, 353–​5, 374–​5, 378–​9, 386–​90 periphery see core-​periphery model Peru 52, 138, 214, 252, 330, 352–​6, 368–​9, 378 pink tide 6, 45, 52, 153, 249, 251, 253, 387 political economy 4–​5, 31, 42–​3, 52, 67–​71, 77–​81, 86, 102, 116, 119, 130, 145, 177, 181–​2, 189–​95, 226–​7, 231, 250, 257–​9, 267, 286, 329–​30, 385–​6, 389 populism 25, 87, 107, 147–​8, 182–​3, 246, 273, 292, 324, 335, 337, 368–​9 poverty: alleviation 45, 116, 166–​7, 195, 235, 269, 289; culture of 37; extreme 172, 213, 216, 229; gender dimension of 57–​8, 173, 179–​80, 197–​204, 208, 279, 288; mass 73, 161, 172, 229, 327; reduction 6–​7, 45–​6, 116, 138–​9, 141–​2, 166–​8, 169, 179, 184, 189, 194, 203, 215–​16, 315; rural 7, 140, 156, 161, 169, 174, 265, 278–​80, 327, 341, 375–​6, 386–​8; urban 79, 230, 243, 265, 272–​3, 285, 287–​9

41

Index  411 Prebisch, Raúl 6, 14–​15, 41–​2, 46, 147–​8 privatisation 15–​17, 68, 96, 98–​100, 115, 117, 124, 139, 150, 159, 171–​3, 176, 216, 237, 248–​51, 271–​2, 285, 289–​90, 294 proletariat 4, 23–​6, 66, 78–​9, 102, 182, 186–​7, 223, 243–​4, 246, 273, 292–​4, 297–​8, 304–​5, 332, 342–​3, 355, 386, 388, 390 protectionism 49, 121, 133 racism 3, 31–​8, 171–​3, 288, 343, 388 reciprocity 7, 60, 96, 190, 199, 293, 295–​6 resistance 4, 7–​8, 35, 50–​1, 54, 67, 79, 87, 90–​1, 171, 186–​7, 244, 251–​2, 266, 271–​3, 292, 297, 308, 327, 330–​3, 335–​6, 341–​8, 342–​8, 350–​6, 358–​64, 385–​90 rights: collective 57, 61, 321, 353; to development 15–​16; human 33, 57, 105–​6, 108, 194, 211, 244, 251, 260, 289–​90, 339, 346–​7; indigenous 57, 61, 316, 348, 358–​9, 361–​4; investor 17; labour 94, 106–​7, 132, 173, 227, 245–​6, 248–​9, 272; political 327–​8, 339; property 96, 115, 129, 155, 174, 209, 216–​17, 271, 305, 354, 388; socio-​economic 59, 331; women’s 199, 205, 209, 253 Rostow, Walt Whitman 5, 13–​14 Russia 4, 8, 14–​19, 24–​9, 117, 145, 166–​7, 218, 337–​8, 367–​8 SAPs see structural adjustment programmes Saudi Arabia 256–​62, 324 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals Singapore 35, 129–​30, 134, 166, 324 social movements 7–​8, 25–​6, 29, 40, 46, 50–​1, 55, 57–​62, 77–​9, 88, 90–​1, 108–​9, 141, 151, 153, 171, 186–​7, 225, 228–​31, 246–​7, 248–​54, 257, 261, 266, 267, 269, 273, 284–​5, 289–​90, 292, 294–​8, 306–​8, 321, 330–​3, 337–​9, 344–​7, 353, 355–​6, 361, 366–​9, 372, 376–​7, 385–​9 socialism 4, 15, 17, 26–​8, 40, 52, 67–​70, 150, 153, 155, 227, 251–​3, 316, 339, 368–​9, 385 solidarity 7, 34, 57–​61, 90–​1, 99, 183, 244–​6, 293, 295–​6, 331, 335–​7, 367, 371–​2, 374–​5, 379, 388 South Africa 8, 140, 145, 171–​7, 218, 229–​30, 253 South Korea 13, 16, 18, 42, 44, 74–​5, 129–​34, 166, 169, 174, 226, 230, 241, 248, 324, 368 Spain 122, 129, 324, 359–​60 state: developmental 7, 44–​5, 49, 82, 88, 111, 129–​35, 271, 342, 386–​7; intervention 45–​6, 70, 88, 113, 118, 129–​31, 160, 192, 242, 330, 369–​70; non-​aligned states 14; power 15, 78, 81, 129–​30, 187, 225, 238–​9, 258–​9, 306, 347, 361, 386–​7; welfare 17, 36–​7, 44, 61, 82, 103, 187, 228, 230, 338–​9

structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) 44, 200–​2, 343–​4 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5, 88–​9, 119, 189–​95, 343–​44 Taiwan 13, 16, 42, 44, 129, 130–​3, 166, 169, 226, 241, 324 Tanzania 4, 97, 217–​18, 279, 344, 347, 368–​9 Tavares, Maria da Conceição 148 theory: dependency 5–​6, 21–​2, 24–​5, 28–​9, 40, 42–​6, 78–​9, 88, 103–​4, 129–​30, 148–​50, 152–​3, 265, 328–​9, 385; development 5–​7, 13, 15, 21, 23–​9, 40–​6, 88, 103–​4, 118, 129, 148, 262, 285, 303–​9; modernisation 4–​6, 14, 28–​9, 284; world system 25–​6, 46, 78–​9, 82, 103–​4 Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) 216–​17 transnational studies 8, 86–​7 TRIPS see Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights UN see United Nations UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP) 361–​2 UNCTAD see United Nations Commission on Trade and Development UNDCF see United Nations Development Cooperation Forum UNDP see United Nations Development Programme UNDRIP see United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People UN-​HLD see High-​Level Dialogue on Migration and Development UNICEF see United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund United Nations (UN) 5, 13, 33, 94, 98, 108, 121–​2, 179, 189, 206, 214–​15, 286, 312, 358, 362 United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 5, 14–​15, 42, 350–​1 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) 362–​4 United Nations Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) 126 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 378 United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) 21–​2, 40–​2 United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 44, 147–​8, 150, 183–​4 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) 122

412

412 Index United States (US) 5, 13–​19, 35, 37, 41, 44, 71, 80, 108, 115, 122, 129–​30, 133, 141, 145, 148–​50, 152, 163–​6, 168–​9, 192, 215, 216, 241, 242–​3, 256–​8, 261–​2, 312, 320, 324, 337–​9, 344–​5, 350–​2, 363, 368, 370, 386 urbanisation 118, 243–​4, 265–​6, 273, 284, 284–​8, 313 US see United States Venezuela 4, 14–​15, 52, 184, 249, 251, 253, 279, 322, 330, 351, 366, 370–​1 Vietnam 4, 14, 16, 27, 34, 130, 133, 279, 344 vivir bien 57, 60, 362; see also buen vivir war 3, 8, 13–​14, 17, 21, 25–​6, 27, 33, 36, 70, 74, 77, 80, 85–​8, 108, 121–​3, 130, 147, 163, 166, 226, 228, 230, 241–​3, 252, 254, 257, 261–​2, 284, 292, 329, 335, 343, 353, 359–​60, 367–​8, 377, 386, 389–​90 Washington Consensus 4, 7, 15–​16, 44–​5, 88, 111, 113–​19, 129, 131, 150, 163, 167, 216, 355; post-​ 4, 45, 111, 113–​19, 123–​4, 126, 184, 286 water 8, 13, 16, 18, 25, 68, 97–​8, 138, 157, 160, 168, 174–​6, 187, 218, 227, 229, 233, 268, 287–​9, 294–​5, 306, 309, 311, 313–​15, 317, 321–​3, 327–​8, 345, 353, 355, 361–​4, 376–​7 WCIP see World Council on Indigenous Peoples

WGIP see UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples WHO see World Health Organisation women: in agriculture 209, 279, 345, 388; capacities 33; decade for 6; in development theory 6–​7, 28–​9, 132; emancipation 59; empowerment 180, 205–​6, 254, 346; gender division of labour 226, 254, 295; health 200, 203, 213, 377–​8; inclusion 6–​7, 49, 62, 375; incomes 58, 95, 197, 201, 203, 208, 210, 226, 228; inequalities 59–​60, 203–​4, 205–​11, 303; invisible 50; and migration 210–​11; mobility 199; movements 249, 251, 253–​4; opportunities 57, 59, 314; and poverty 139, 198–​201, 206; solidarity 7; subordination 60, 62, 198, 305, 307; unemployment 173, 199, 201–​3; violence against 57, 62, 171, 198, 202, 207; and work 58–​9, 159, 199, 205–​11, 250, 272, 275, 288, 303, 388 worker-​managed companies 251–​2, 366–​72 World Bank 3, 7, 15–​16, 17–​18, 44, 82, 96, 99, 114–​16, 121–​3, 132, 139, 141, 142, 179, 185, 191, 206, 213–​16, 219, 239, 261, 267, 285–​6, 289, 311, 313, 315, 328–​30, 355, 358, 386–​7 World Council on Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) 361–​2 World Health Organisation (WHO) 122, 213–​15