Development beyond the capitalist state PDF

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WEEK 10: Development Beyond the Capitalist State Is it possible to think about a situation where development occurs beyond the capitalist state? Rationale for a transformative agenda The world economy is set to triple in size by 2050 – entailing three times more production, consumption and trade bas...

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WEEK 10: Development Beyond the Capitalist State Is it possible to think about a situation where development occurs beyond the capitalist state? Rationale for a transformative agenda -

The world economy is set to triple in size by 2050 – entailing three times more production, consumption and trade based upon current trends

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Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) warns that ‘limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ (IPCC 2018)

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IPCC is saying that the current trends is unsustainable

What’s wrong with the current system? -

Pope Francis criticizes capitalism’s emphasis on ceaseless profit which ‘imposes the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature”.

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Furthermore, ‘this system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable; labourers find it intolerable; communities find it intolerable; people’s find it intolerable. The earth itself…also finds it intolerable.”

Key Questions in Political Economy What Political Economy is NOT: states vs markets? 1. Who owns what (property rights) 2. Who does what? (division of labour) 3. Who gets what? (fruits of labour) 4. What do they do with it? (political economy of consumption)

Problems with Market-led development -

Labour market inflexibilities were defined by Robert Solow as follows:

‘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 of statutory health and safety regulation are too stringent.’ (Solow: 1998, 1)

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Argument against this is that the state needs to play a really big role

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Workers should and can be exploited

Problems with state-led development -

Alice Amsden on South Korean Industrialisation:

‘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.’ alongside effective investments, ‘cheap labour’ and ‘labour repression is the basis of late industrialisation everywhere.’

What is the alternative? Amartya Sen – Development as Freedom -

Freedom – not just an ‘end’ but a ‘means’

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Development can and should be understood “as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” (1999, 3)

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Negative freedoms

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Positive freedoms (role of state, progressive policies)

Negative and positive freedoms (following Isiah Berlin) Core Freedoms: -

Ability of individuals to live life free of “starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature morality, as well as the freedoms that are associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and uncensored speech

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From Bourgeois Rights to Human Rights

Sen castigates critics of markets: -

Market as a Sphere of Freedom

‘To be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations between people’

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Exclusion/inclusion binary

‘we must…examine…the persistence of deprivations among segments of the community that happen to remain excluded from the benefits of the market-orientated society.’

Critique of DAF: -

Markets are NOT a sphere of freedom IF: o They require force to establish them o They subject millions to very high levels of risk

From pro-labour to labour-led development -

Pro-labour development: where state actors design policies and enact policies that benefit workers

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Labour-driven development: where workers’ collective actions push states and capital to make concessions to labour

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Labour-led development: where workers’ collective actions aim to generate, and succeed in generating, tangible gains for them and their communities.

Decommodification -

‘the degree to which individuals, or families, can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of market participation.’

Green New Deal for Agriculture -

DE commodify food

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Rewilding as reclamations of the commons

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Agrarian reform

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Vertical agriculture

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Shift from feed crops/meat to feed crops

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High level of democratic organisation

GND for industry -

Solar powered and renewables to replace fossil fuels

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New transport systems

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Production for need not profit

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Green cities

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De-growth

Conclusions

1. Capitalism – creative destruction 2. Capitalism has created basis for alternative society based on human fulfilment of needs 3. We need a class-relational perspective to think about alternative and how to achieve them 4. Ultimate paradox – solutions possible, but risk of global collapse before they are achieved 5. Role of political economy – to understand in order to change the world

Key Readings: Degrowth, post development, and transitions: a preliminary conversation – Arturo Escobar 

The paper seeks to initiate a conversation between degrowth and postdevelopment frameworks by placing them within the larger field of discourses for ecological and civilisational transitions and by bridging proposals emerging from the North with those from the Global South.

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to fully understand the emergence and potentiality of degrowth and postdevelopment it is important to consider, first, the entire ensemble of TDs and, second, the bridges that can be established between northern and southern TDs, to come up with a clearer picture of what might constitute a radical and effective politics for transformation.

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Post development advocates claimed that development constituted a set of discourses and practices which had profound impact on how Asia, Africa, and Latin America came to be seen as ‘underdeveloped’ since the early post-ww2 period and treated as such thereafter.

A manifesto for Socialist Development in the 21st Century – Benjamin Selwyn 

Inequalities and deprivations are only one symptom of capitalist development

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Theories of capitalist development are united by a common conception of labour as a resource, or as an input into the development process. Such capital centred development perspectives reproduce themselves in at least four ways: o They identify capital accumulation as the basis for the development of the poor o They identify elites as drivers of capital accumulation

o Myriad actions, movements and struggles by the poor are disregarded and are often considered to be hindrances to development o Elite repression and exploitation of the poor is legitimised, especially when the latter contest capital-centred development 

This article argues that we need to think about socialist development strategies as beginning in a single state, on that exists within a capitalist geo-economic world system and that the material resources to ameliorate the conditions of labouring classes already exist in poor countries.

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The core issue is that the use of already existing wealth to ensure real human development for labouring classes. It’s the social relations within and through which the wealth is generated and distributed that determines the feasibility if socialist development.

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The process of enhancing labouring class power can be conceptualised as an intermittent revolution

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The redistribution of wealth through the transformation of social relations represents the fastest means to alleviate poverty, and, in doing so, establishes genuinely progressive possibilities and processes of human development.

1. First objective would be to cancel odious debts (debts incurred by the previous administration for the benefits of capitalist rather than labouring classes) – introduce capitalist controls which will regulate the export of money and finance. 2. Contribute to establish socialist development – industrial policy will seek to generate an appropriate mix of high and low-tech activities orientated towards the satisfaction of basic needs. 3. The state will invest in establishing small-scale workshops in local communities. Such investments will make possible the expansion of neighbourhood economies based on appropriate technologies. 4. The objectives of an agrarian reform are to: a. Contribute to the achievement of national food security b. Generate high-quality employment 5. Achieve de-commodified food security, where food is a basic human right independent of purchasing power 6. The foreign policy will be founded upon a dual approach. On the one hand, the guiding principle of external relations is non-aggression and the search for peaceful

coexistence with capitalist powers. And on the other, we will establish links with social movements around the globe that strive to transform their societies. 7. Promote the cause for a global living wage, form political alliances with movements, organisations and institutions as a means of maintaining pressure for this and related policies, and generating collaborative global networks 8. There will be a demand that the international community generates a collective agenda to combat environmental destruction. 9. To establish full employment for those who can work through the spreading and sharing of work tasks. Longer-term objectives are to use the democratic control over, and social direction of, the means of production to reduce the working day. 10. Attempts to generate socialist development will fail unless gender, ethnic and racial discrimination is overcome. 

Capitalism has established enough wealth on a global scale for a world free of poverty but it can never realise this potential. Socialist approaches must be founded upon the recognition that labour exploitation is anathema to real human development....