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NAFTA, Capitalism and Alternatives, Debate, VIII/1
On Sun, 30 Apr 1995, JOHN CROSS wrote:
> The problem is with the word "development". This term assumes that
> there is some natural "progressive" form of social change ("development"
> implies a perfect "natural" state that beings are attaining--such as a
> human child "developing" into an adult), and the "model" always seems to
> be whatever happens to be the most "advanced" society at the time--ignoring
> all moral and practical questions about what we mean by "advancement". So,
> several years ago, when socialism still seemed to be "advanced", people
> thought there were "two models of development". Now, by the same twisted
> logic there is only one. But this presumes that "capitalism" IS "development"
> and thus _a priori_ "good". Can we escape from this logic? I don't know.
>
John: I agree that, at least at level of the choice of language, there is
a real problem with using the word "development". The problem is above
all its heavy, historically accumulated, load of ambiguity. The word
has meant so many things to so many different people, that when we use
the word we wind up talking about the word instead of what we want to
be talking about, namely how peoples lives can be made better, or what
is preventing them from achieving such improvement (however defined).
There is a very nice essay by Gustavo Esteva on the problems associated
with this word "development" in a book I have refered to before:
Wolfgang Sachs (ed) THE DEVELOPMENT DICTIONARY, London:Zed, 1992.
Among other points, Gustavo make one which you do: that the
concept development has increasinly been associated with movement toward
some ideal model. He traces the evolution from its biological origins
through its application to the social sphere in the 18th Century to the
present. His primary concern, however, is the use of the term in the
Post WWII era as "development" became the goal and "underdevelopment"
the scourge of humankind. In a paper I wrote for a conference in Mexico
some years back (1985, just after the earthquake), I discussed another
of your points, namely that part of the Cold War involved a struggle
between "two models of development", i.e., capitalist and socialist, but
argued, as I have been doing in this thread, that the two models were
really only variations on a common core and neither led anywhere beyond
the current morass of exploitation, brutality and suffering with which
we are all too familiar.
You ask "Can we escape from this logic?" I think the answer is yes, we
can, that increasing numbers of people are finding/creating paths out of
the morass that open into other kinds of relationships. If we take
seriously the idea that concepts not only do, but must, evolve with the
evolution (and revolutions) of history, then we should also see that WE
can be involved in engineering that conceptual evolution. And the best
way to do that is often not to look for some new adjective to hang onto
an old concept (e.g., nowadays people want to hang "sustainable" rather
than "capitalist" or "socialist" onto "development") but to scrap the
old concept and look for new ones. Forget the jargon and return to the
vernacular and find new ways of expressing new desires. This is less
likely to be a good idea when you are analysing new variations of old
processes and relationships than it is when you are striking out for
something new. For example "neoliberal capitalism" is not a bad name for
contemporary capitalist policy because it still IS capitalism, just with
a new twist. But when we want to think about avoiding being twisted, we
often do well to scrap jetison the old jargon and start fresh.
> Date: Mon, 1 May 1995 17:39:17 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Victor O. Story" <story@kutztown.edu>
> Subject: 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.
Victor: As discussed above, both by John and in my reply to him, the
concept of "development" is not as unproblematical as you make it seem.
It is rather just as difficult a nut as "modernization". Both concepts
carry a heavy load of historical context and meaning. Both have been
deployed by the same kind of people to achieve the same kinds of ends,
especially the "experts" from the North who have made careers out of
telling people and governments in the South what they need to do to
"modernize" or to "develop". The former term has been used mainly by
sociologists or political scientists, the later by economists. Moreover,
I might add that the term "civilization" is also a value laden term of
quite recent vintage (historically speaking) which derives from the
efforts of the lowland Scots in the 18th Century to impose Roman civil
law on not only their free Highland neighbors but on the entirely of
England, with the aim of wiping out English common law in the process.
There is an interesting recent article on this subject: George Caffentzis,
"On the Scottish Origin of 'Civilization'", COMMON SENSE (Edinburg), No.16,
December 1994.
> 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.
Victor: Certainly "balance" and "democracy" are attractive
characteristics. But how about we discuss them from scratch, without
mixing the term "development" into the discussion. You are right that
foreign investment in Latin America has often been a factor in creating a
lack of balance, inequalities (rich and poor, higher waged, unwaged etc)
and it has definately been associated with a lack of democracy
--especially where the CIA has intervened to wipe out more or less
democratic regimes seen as threats to foreign investment (e.g.,
Guatemala, Chile). But in as much as foreign investment has often
involved a handing over national resources to foreigners with little
benefit to the people of the country, authoritarian regimes have often
been seen as necessary to maintain control. The most obvious recent
testimony to this effect was Riordan Roett in his Report on Mexico which
suggested the PRI might want to steal the election in Jalisco to
demonstrate its control to foreign investors.
You are quite right that this is all old hat to the development experts
of the 1950s and 1960s who were intimately involved in planning and
managing policies friendly to foreign investment when they could, and
minimizing the threats when they had no other choice. It is worth
remembering that those experts, those economists who made their careers
spinning theories and strategies of "development" were working hard not
only to contribute to all that imbalance but also to foster an expansion
of a capitalism that went hand in glove with undemocratic regimes. The
dependency analysts, of course, deplored that imbalance and the lack of
democracy but offered mainly inward-looking local capitalism instead --a
position which only appealed to those business types who were afraid to
compete with multinational capital and prefered protection instead.
> 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.
Victor: Unfortunately, not only it is not at all obvious what a "healthy"
economy is, but the idea that "we all know" that it means a higher standard of
living for most people and a more open and democratic polity, a more just
society ignores the way the meanings of these terms (which have all
survived long histories of dispute) continue to be debated and contested.
Contemporary economics defines a "healthy" economy as a growing one, one
that produces more and more stuff to be sold on the market --regardless
of the makeup of the stuff, regardless of the negative side-effects of
both production and consumption. Recognition of this has been drummed
into our heads in the North by the "consumer movement" which has
contested the idea that "more" is necessarily "better", and sophisticated
critiques have been made by a wide array of social theorists of how the
usual criteria for a "healthy economy" hide the growth and spread of
unhealthiness of all kinds. Much of the debate over the quality of life
during the last 30 years has turned around such issues. Knowing that, it
makes no sense to turn around and freely weild such concepts as "healthy
economy" in Latin America without taking up the complexities we know to
exist --complexities which are multiplied by the cultural diversity of
Latin America. The same critique applies to the concept of a "higher
standard of living". In mainstream economics this just means access to
larger bunch of commodities. But the critique of consumption means we
can`t just accept such a definition without question. Is a campesino
better off with a brick house (which costs more) than with an adobe one?
What does "better off" mean? Status may go up, for some, but so does the
temperature in the summer and amount of frostbite in the winter because
the kind of brick houses usually substituted for adobe is poorly
insulated and so increased status is offset by decreased comfort and
perhaps even increased disease. We can, of course, let people define
"better off" for themselves. But once we do that, our neoclassical rules
of the thumb (e.g., more is better) go out the window as we see how
"better" can have the most diverse meanings. This is NOT "semantics", but
a question of whether the language and concepts of "economics"
(development) is adequate to talk about the things we want to talk about,
and whether the use of inadequate concepts can lead us to undesirable
policies and undesirable results.
>It is our cultural differences that get in the way of addressing the problem
> rationally.
Victor: I know you are getting sick of this kind of comment, but I've got
to make it anyway. "Rationality" is culturally relative. Even within a
culture, e.g., Western culture, you have choice of "rationalities".
"Addressing the problem rationally" means addressing it in a reasonable
manner, i.e., through the use of reason. But what is reason? It is the
use of some kind of logic. Even Aristotle knew that there were
different kinds of reason appropriate to different kinds of problems.
Today, in the wake of a thousand years of "reasoning" and of the
development of a diverse array of "logics" (i.e., rules for getting
from one acceptable proposition to another) it should be obvious that
two people of groups can both be quite "rational" and come to totally
opposite conclusions in the course of a discussion. I think most of
the people who engage in debate on this list seek to do so
"rationally". But that is no guarantee that they will agree.
> 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
Victor: You want to get away from the critique of capitalism and just get
on with talking about how to develop capitalism better. Well, you can do
that. You can can just avoid arguing with those of us who don't accept
the idea that it is possible to change things "in a way that leads to a
decent life for the Mexican people, not just the few" within the context
of capitalism., with those who think that capitalism is incompatible with
that goal. You can try and figure out how to "straighten out" capitalism
in Mexico, make it sit up and fly right, for the benefit of all. I just
hope you don't mind if those of us who are having a different
conversation, about alternatives to capitalism, listen in on your
discourse from time to time and point out why we think it is missleading
and obfuscating, and politically dangerous because it spreads illusions
about what is possible and leads people to focus on superficial
modifications and reject real changes that might better meet their needs.
To end on a positive note (believe it or not), we certainly agree that
that it would be good if the Mexican people can find new kinds of social
relationships in which all could prosper as a replacement from the
present one in which the few prosper at the expense of the many. At the
moment, I think we both agree that the PRI party-state stands in the way
of finding such alternatives (be they within or without capitalism) and
is hell-bent on crushing those, such as the Zapatistas, seeking new ways.
This said, we can continue to spread information about both the struggle
for democracy, liberty and justice and about the forces opposing it. We
can continue to support the former and oppose the latter, regardless of
how our critiques of both sides may differ.
======================================
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173
USA
Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 471-3211
Fax: (512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@mundo.eco.utexas.edu
======================================