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Re: Language of development is useful
I disagree. The normative term is "modernization" and that term is
wrought with ethnocentric implications when it is applied to anything
more than technological change. Development however is a valuable term,
it carries weight and it is what people of all cultures do when they
build civilization. In terms of Latin America, the question is how to
have balanced, democratic development, rather than the pattern of uneven
development, or mere "growth" without development that has accompanied
foreign investments in the past. All this is old pat for people trained
in the developmental schools of the 1950s-1980s and the dependency
analysis of the 1960s-1980s. We probably do not need to debate
development as a term so much as figure out how Mexico can accomplish a
more healthy economy, and we all know what that means - a higher standard
of living for most people, and a more democratic and open polity and
society, that is, a more just society and a better one to live in. Our
cultural diffences do not really disable us from understanding this and
using the term development usefully. It is our cultural differences that
get in the way of addressing the problem rationally. We need to get away
from all the dead old terms and ideas of anti-capitalist rhetoric and we
need to address what makes capitalism screwed up in Mexico and how it can
be adjusted to a pattern that allows Mexico to develop the way all people
of good will desire it to, that is, in a way that leads to a decent life
for the Mexican people, not just the few.
Victor
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