Rethinking The Third World

Contributions Towards A New Conceptualization

Rosemary E. Galli

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317824145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1991. This is a collection of essays that deal with the various issues of Third World development and additionally propose unique ways of looking at them as well as more radical thinking. Based on experience and research the essays are provocative and provide an alternative approach to fundamental Third World problems that will be useful for both students and scholars.

Chapter 1
Winners and Losers in Development and Antidevelopment Theory

Rosemary E. Galli

Introduction

There is a convergence in liberal and Marxist scholarship that development means industrialization and that the process involves a more or less clean sweep of ail previous patterns and relations of production. History is conceived as the working out of social laws whose outcome is always the same: rationalism, industrialization, modernity, and eventually postindustrialism (Williams, 1979). The objective of development theory is to comprehend the process to accelerate the change from so-called underdevelopment to development, from traditionally to modernity and, for Marxists, from capitalism to socialism. This chapter argues that social science in the service of developmentalism loses its critical faculty.

The notion of progress originated during the Enlightenment, The rationalization of human relations was perceived to be leading mankind toward the end of all that had been known previously. Marx theorized the process in the economic sphere through the laws of motion of capital, while Weber traced its political development. The idea that progress could be directed from above was behind Jacobin optimism and Napoleonic reforms. Lenin in Russia, Taylor in the United States, and the Fabian Socialists of Great Britain refined and legitimized the practice. The principal beneficiaries have been administrators in the ministries and armies of centralizing nation-states and managers in expanding industries.

Development theory—whether in the guise of development economics, sociology, or comparative politics—categorizes social groups in the Third World according to their capacity and willingness to rationalize their economic and social behavior along Western lines. The "forward-looking," "modernizing," agents of history—the winners of the title—are government officials, military, international bureaucrats, and national and international capitalists who are strategic economic and political actors. Their positions and interests have moved center stage in the development literature, "... the banks provide the capital, the state provides the muscle and brains to force-march the countries into the industrialized world" (Frieden and Lake, 1987:299). The losers, by definition "backward-looking" and "traditional," tend to be peasants,¹ small-scale traders, and artisans.

There is very little room in development theory for the notion that small-scale agriculture can be efficient; that is, highly productive and ecologically sound over the long-term. Such ideas are labeled romantic, archaic populism, and bad economic policy (Kitching, 1982). The argument that simple commodity producers and petty traders along with other social groups should be involved in making agricultural policy (at least) is branded unrealistic. Peasants, artisans, and traders are expected to disappear—hopefully quietly.

The first section of this chapter demonstrates that both development and antidevelopment theories deny peasants and others historical importance and give prominence instead to the state. In so doing, various stereotypes are constructed that oversimplify the historical process. The second section reviews recent literature about peasants to try to find a balanced view. It argues that the image of peasants as "backward" is counterproductive, and that those who promote it, wittingly or unwittingly, support a structure of economic and political interests that threatens to overwhelm the agricultural base of most Third World countries.

The Theories

World systems analysis and dependency theory are characterized as antidevelopment theories because they understand the fate of the Third World under capitalism as "immiseration." In Immanuel Wallerstein's conceptualization (1983), capitalism is a self-generating and expanding system that creates and recreates an international division of labor through market relations. It benefits mainly those in core or central areas of the system and those allied to them in other areas. For those in peripheral areas, however, there is mainly misery.

The earliest agents (and beneficiaries) of capital were merchants, bankers, landed elites, and yeomen turned entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs of all kinds, along with the officials of the European states at the center. Today, a world bourgeoisie and state structures in the core of the world economy have the greatest influence within the system. Wallerstein signals a special relationship between capitalists and states over the past 400 years, . "... the state has been a crucial mechanism for the maximum accumulation of capital. ... in historical capitalism, capitalists relied upon their ability to utilize state-machineries to their advantage. ..." State machineries were useful because of their power to (1) modify the social division of labor; (2) expand by swallowing up other territories, thus extending markets; (3) regulate and enforce social relations of production; (4) assist accumulation through taxation, subsidies, services, redistribution of income, and finally; (5) enforce law and order through the monopoly of legitimate force (Wallerstein, 1983:49-56).

Contradictions and conflicts among world capitalists and states move the system across time and space forcing it to expand and polarize. Productive forces develop endlessly in the center, which also shifts in time and space. For social groups in the periphery, there is nothing but increasing marginalization and immiseration. Rural populations in particular have no autonomy and are, in effect, prisoners of the system.

Arrighi, Cardoso, Evans and others (including Wallerstein) identified an intermediate position between core and periphery, a semiperipheral capitalism, in such countries as Brazil, Mexico, and other so-called newly industrializing countries. More than mere description was involved. For Cardoso and Evans, a "strong" state had helped to redefine their countries' place in the international division of labor. This signified that at least some states and some social groups had relative autonomy within the capitalist world system and that change and development could occur outside the center.

A much greater challenge to world systems analysis and dependency theory came from those who defined development and underdevelopment in terms of internal relations of production rather than an international division of labor based on market relations. Ernesto Laclau (1977) and Robert Brenner (1977) defined capitalism as a mode of production in which capitalists appropriate relative surplus value from wage laborers. They explained the fact that this type of labor organization was not universal by the persistence of other modes of production, characterized variously as precapitalist, feudal, semifeudal, peasant, colonial, African, Asian, and so on. These modes come into contact with the capitalist mode through the mediation of the state in the international relations of trade, indebtedness, and so on. Contact produces a variety of social formations, not simply the main three of core, semiperiphery, and periphery. Wallerstein describes the many varieties of labor organization, including peasant agriculture as capitalist, and explains their persistence by the need for cheap labor within the international division of labor.

While the modes of production theorists broadened the range of social inquiry by focusing on both internal and external relations of production and distribution, they were no more successful than world systems theorists in describing the various forms of articulation and interaction of individuals and groups with dominant modes. Moreover, they too were pessimistic about the outcome. Much of their analysis at field level also tended to be structuralist and abstract. Individuals tended to be treated as representative of certain stereotypes, which is apparent in the analyses of James Scott and Goran Hyden reviewed in the next section

The early work of Henry Bernstein (1979, 1981) is noteworthy among Marxist scholars for its portrayal of rural producers as neither backward nor traditional nor isolated in their own separate mode of production. Rather, Bernstein saw simple commodity producers as full but very unequal participants in the capitalization of agriculture. The struggles between rural producers, states, and other agents of capital determined the relations of production and distribution, which, in turn, distinguished various social formations rather than the other way around. The upshot of his analysis was that the so-called capitalist transition took a variety of concrete forms, none of which was predetermined.

Outside an explicitly Marxist framework, Harrington Moore (1966) identified the commoditization of agriculture (a key concept in Wallerstein and Bernstein also) as the essential initial step in the process of industrialization and modernization of societies, whether European or Third World. For Moore, peasants along with state officials, landed elites, and bourgeoisie are pivotal groups in determining whether the path to industrialization becomes a capitalist, fascist, or communist one—three variations that he identified as successive stages of the same process. Yet, regardless of which path is followed, peasants, small traders, and artisans are portrayed as doomed once industrialization takes hold.

Liberal scholarship goes to the opposite extreme of describing development as an open process involving all groups regardless of their structural position in production or exchange. Economic development is characterized as dependent upon the initiative of individuals (rather than social relations)—producers, employers, traders, bankers, and so on—all of whom, are theoretically equally free to buy and sell in the marketplace. Liberal theory not only does not account for power and privilege in markets, it also endows all humans with the same economic logic regardless of their role in production or exchange. A further discussion of this point occurs in reference to Samuel Popkin's characterization of peasants, in the next section.

The traditional liberal view was one of a dominant civil society with the state in a minimalist role. Yet, even for classical theorists, political authority had a crucial role in legalizing property rights, legitimizing the existing division of labor and maintaining social order. Moreover, they recognized that states perform other tasks essential to a functioning economy such as establishing a social and economic infrastructure—roads, railways, ports, educational systems, health facilities, the tax structure, and subsidies—that motivates and supports private enterprise and maintains a healthy and productive workforce.

Thus, liberals and Marxists both recognized that states have a strategic function in a capitalist economy and downplayed the importance of peasants. They differed insofar as the extent to which they were willing to recognize an autonomous role for the state. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as peasants, workers, and intellectuals throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa took up arms in anticolonial, anti-imperialist wars and movements, liberal social scientists were willing to extend the powers of states. Samuel Huntington (1968) was typical when he observed that centralized power was necessary to promote order in Third World societies—an order that he maintained was essential to their industrialization and development.

Non-Marxist structuralists (Prebisch, Furtado, Seers, Singer, and others) were even more explicit about the importance of the state for industrialization and development. One point of departure from both liberal and Marxist theory was their almost exclusive focus on the state as the agent of social change. The objective of structuralists was to reinforce national capital in opposition to international capital. Empirical analysis was openly prescriptive. Theory blended with ideology.

Structuralists shared with dependency theory the view that capitalist development was blocked in the Third World because of the hegemonic structure of international trade, investment, and aid, which they considered operated in the interests primarily of multinational corporations, banks, and the wealthy countries. During the 1970s, they advocated a restructuring of the international economic order through international institutions, invoking an image of collective bargaining between governments of the Third World banded together (in the Group of 77, for example) and the governments of the major capitalist countries. In regard to domestic policy, structuralists advocated a strong state armed with both Keynesian and supply-side policies to break down what they saw as structures of underdevelopment. The latter were identified mainly with a lack of national investment that was attributed to a stranglehold of "nonproductive" landed elites and "backward" peasants and the monopoly hold of multinational corporations on industry.

None of the foregoing analyses attach importance to small commodity producers and traders. In some theories, peasants are important in the birth processes of capitalism or socialism but they are then condemned to disappear from the stage of history. There is, however, a convergence of views about the pivotal position of states, whether as instruments of national or international capital, or as actors in their own right (see also Kohli, 1986 and Bates, 1988).

The major difference between the views characterized above is between those who explain Third World societies in terms of a blocked or incomplete capitalist transition or a separate capitalist development (Amin, 1976) and those who view the transition as just a matter of time and correct policy. For the former, socialism is evoked as the only alternative historical path. Yet, in most views, socialism also entails the forced separation of the means of production from direct producers, the transformation of rural cultivators into wage laborers and the vesting of the means of production in a separate class, whether private or public.

History, however, has not been as neat as theory—as the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe clearly show. What one sees, once the blinders of ideology are removed, is an incomplete transition everywhere. Neither capitalism nor socialism exist as universal, exclusive systems. A reconceptualization of the process of social change and the respective roles of the actors is long overdue.

Geoffrey Hodgson (1984) eschews the notion that class struggle between two major polarized classes moves history forward. He sees the lines as more complex, the social actors as many, the interaction between system and actor as mutual. Hodgson treats the existence in highly industrialized and postindustrial societies of such noncapitalist forms as the family, the corporation, the grant economy, and so on, not as a sign of prevailing capitalism (as per Wallerstein) but as evidence of what he calls the "impurity principle." Although there is support and antagonism between capitalism and the other forms, their overall relationship is structured by power.

Hodgson's view suggests a more dynamic way of approaching development and underdevelopment th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Winners and Losers in Development and Antidevelopment Theory
• Chapter 2 Conditions of People's Development in Postcolonial Africa
• Chapter 3 In Defense of the Primitive
• Chapter 4 Toward an Historical Understanding of Industrial Development
• Chapter 5 Toward a Relevant Psychology
• Index
• About the Authors