Beyond 2015: Is Another Development Possible?

Details: Published on Saturday, 27 September 2014 21:40; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1040 .... September 28, 2014
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Beyond 2015: Is Another Development Possible?

Benjamin Selwyn

As we near 2015, the United Nations (UN) will probably set new objectives on behalf of the global community to supersede the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs are held largely by the UN, the World Bank and many anti-poverty campaigners, which I label here the anti-poverty consensus, to have been a success. According to the UN, The First MDG -- the objective of halving world poverty between 1990 and 2015 -- was achieved already in 2010.

U.S. President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, amongst others, have been arguing for some time now for the total elimination of world poverty by 2030. Who on Earth could possibly fail to celebrate the global community's... achievements to date on poverty alleviation? Who could disagree with the objectives of achieving zero global poverty?

To see what is wrong with the above proclamations and objectives, we need to view them from a radically different perspective to that of the anti-poverty consensus. To do so we may start by reminding ourselves of the term ‘doublethink’ coined by George Orwell in his dystopic novel 1984. Winston, the novel's main character defines Doublethink as “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies... to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it...”