A Manifesto for Socialist Development in the 21st Century
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1674 ... September 25, 2018
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A Manifesto for Socialist Development in the 21st Century
Benjamin Selwyn
In early 2017, it was revealed that eight men owned as much wealth as half the world’s population (Oxfam 2017). This is in a world where, according to the most conservative figures, around one in three workers live in poverty. More realistic calculations show that the majority of the world’s population suffers from poverty of one form or another. These inequalities and deprivations are only one symptom of capitalist development. Others include environmental destruction, systematic racism and gender discrimination, each of which generate their own poverty burdens.
Whether in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile (the laboratory for free-market development) or in Park Chung-hee’s South Korea (the most celebrated case of state-led development), capitalist development is... founded upon the exploitation and political oppression of labour. Moreover, capitalist development is predicated upon environmental ruin and the (re)production of various forms of discrimination.
Theories of capitalist development are united by a common conception of labour as a resource, or as an input into the development process. This is equally the case for the self-stated free-market followers of Adam Smith as it is for the statist followers of Friedrich List (Selwyn 2014, 2017). Such theories are united in viewing the world through the lens of capital, and they perform a major ideological role in fortifying capitalist development by encouraging the world’s poor to do so.
Such capital-centred development perspectives reproduce themselves in at least four ways: (i) they identify capital accumulation as the basis for the development of the poor; (ii) they identify elites (corporations and/or states) as drivers of capital accumulation; (iii) myriad actions, movements and struggles by the poor are disregarded (that is, not considered developmental), and are often considered to be hindrances to development; and (iv) as a consequence of point (iii), elite repression and exploitation of the poor is legitimized, especially when the latter contest capital-centred development.