Polarizing Development: Introducing Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis
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- Published on Sunday, 24 May 2015 23:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1122 .... May 25, 2015
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Polarizing Development:
Introducing Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis
Taken from Polarizing Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis (2015), edited by Lucia Pradella and Thomas Marois, Pluto Press. We thank Pluto Press for permission to reproduce this excerpt.
Thomas Marois and Lucia Pradella
Neoliberal economic policies, with their emphasis on market-led development and individual rationality, have been exposed as bankrupt not only by the global economic crisis but also by increasing social opposition and resistance. Social movements and critical scholars in Latin America, East Asia, Europe and the United States, alongside the Arab uprisings, have triggered renewed debate on possible different futures. While for some years any discussion of substantive alternatives has been marginalized, the global crisis since 2008 has opened up new spaces... to debate, and indeed to radically rethink, the meaning of development. Debates on developmental change are no longer tethered to the pole of ‘reform and reproduce’: a new pole of ‘critique and strategy beyond’ neoliberal capitalism has emerged.
Despite being forcefully challenged, neoliberalism has proven remarkably resilient. In the first years since the crisis erupted, the bulk of the alternative literature pointed to continued growth in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and in other big emerging market countries to affirm the necessary role for the state in sustaining capitalist development. New developmental economists have consequently reasserted themselves. Their proposals converged into a broader demand for global Keynesianism (Patomäki, 2012) -- a demand that is proving to be less and less realistic in the face of a deepening global economic crisis.
