Multitudes 10 on Development
- Special Issue: Multitudes 10: Development
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Discussion
Review by Michel Bauwens, 2003:
Imperialism was already a factor during the early stages of merchant capitalism, and created a "international division of labor", which lasted until the 1950s. At that time, following decolonisation, the new nation-states in the South, attempted to create self-centered development, on the model of the early West. So, while it rejected Western domination, it embraced its model, 'lock, stock, and barrel'. But the very success of some countries in changing the terms of the international division of labour, will break the unity of the South, which had emerged in the period from 1950 to 1980.
The debt and monetary crisis of the early 80s would then bury its development model and make place for the "Washington Consensus", i.e. neoliberalism. The new trinity is "austerity, privatisation, liberalisation". The idea being that spontaneous market development would bring specialized production to the most suited countries. But it failed to reduce the debt load, on the contrary, and increased under-development in many countries. On top of that came the financial crisis of 1997-8, which would even destabilize the relatively successful South-East Asian nations.
Polanyi had already noted a regular historical balancing between the regulatory function of the State vs the Market. After 2 decennia of market domination are we now going back to the state or to a new synthesis of the two ?
But such a vision fails to take into account the transition to new phase of cognitive capitalism as well as 3 other key factors:
- 1) the ecological limits making classic industrial development a force of destruction (and fails to integrate local farming knowledge) - 2) a new division of labor based on the availability and diffusion of knowledge - 3) the shift towards Empire as the new form of global governance
Under cognitive capitalism, the old division is replaced by a new one, based on the capacity to mobilize expertise in networks, but this is still geographically determined
There are important "new enclosures" of knowledge, through patents and IP rights, especially the biopiracy of traditional knowledge, which produces a new permanent 'rent'.