Abstract
Since the early 2000s, public interest in development, poverty and inequality in the Global South has grown. A whole genre of popular books on Development Studies thus emerged, explaining the pitfalls and promises of various schemes to the layperson. Lecturers teaching undergraduates about development often find students opinions already shaped by these popular texts and rehearsing the orthodox positions of the discipline. First-year discussions might cite climate and environmental factors outlined in Jared Diamond’s (2013) Guns, Germs, and Steel to explain why sub-Saharan Africa remains trapped in poverty. Economically inclined students latch on to James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoglu’s (2012) claims that nations without ‘open’ institutions to reward innovation will fail to develop, no matter what their initial endowments. Those up to date on international development practice will have read Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics (2011) and argue that individuals living in poverty only need a ‘nudge’ towards market-supporting behaviours. But since Gilbert Rist’s seminal The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith ([1997] 2019), there have been comparatively few heterodox books on development for the non-specialist. Ben Selwyn’s The Struggle for Development (2017) addresses this deficit.
Selwyn has already made a considerable contribution to the academic literature on development. His early work critically engaged with the Global Commodity Chains (GCC) approach via a study of the export grape sector in Northern Brazil (2012). Selwyn argued that agricultural workers were not passive subjects of capitalist development, but won concessions from employers by organizing for struggle. He later developed this theme into a distinction between ‘capital-centred’ development aimed at increasing accumulation, and ‘labour-centred’ development that improved workers’ wellbeing (Selwyn, 2016). The Struggle for Development is a readable book of six chapters outlining Marxist contributions to understanding development as a process defined by class struggle. Similar to Poor Economics or Why Nations Fail, the text is not intended to advance a whole new framework of analysis, but to make key ideas accessible to a popular audience.
Selwyn begins by dispelling the myth that global poverty has reduced thanks to market-led development under neoliberal globalization. The author describes the formation of an ‘anti-poverty consensus’ (APC) in the mainstream of development thinking, which sees economic growth via expansion of market relations as the key to ending global poverty within our lifetimes (Selwyn, 2017: 2). Selwyn observes that the optimistic claims of the APC depend upon how we measure poverty. If we define absolute poverty as subsistence on under $1 day at purchasing power parity (PPP), it validates the APC assertion that global absolute poverty has declined since the 1980s. But if we define absolute poverty as living on less than $2.50 PPP per day, then global absolute poverty has risen by 13% in the same period (Selwyn, 2017: 5). The remainder of the book sets out a Marxist response to approaches which see development as a process of maintaining and expanding capitalism. Chapter Two outlines how the power of capital to employ labour below the value of its contribution to production reproduces poverty. Notably, Selwyn’s account also takes in not only direct wage relations but also the gendered and racialized aspects of capitalist domination. This theme is developed further in Chapter Three, which critiques ‘global value chains’ of production outsourced to the developing world by the West. The APC claims that allowing multinationals to shift parts of their production chains to developing countries increases profitability and alleviates poverty by connecting impoverished workers to global markets and ‘upgrading’ production from low-cost to high-value activity. Incorporation into a globalized labour force is presented as mutually beneficial for employers and employees alike. The author counters these claims by conceptualizing outsourcing as ‘global poverty chains’, showing how workforces integrated into global production networks are maintained in poverty rather than lifted out of it. Selwyn further argues that multinationals prefer to relocate production to areas where women provide a large amount of unremunerated labour for social reproduction, as this gendered exploitation enables employers to pay poverty wages (Selwyn, 2017: 57). Chapter Four lays out Selwyn’s category of ‘Capital-Centred Development’ theories. Selwyn notes that an Anti-Poverty Counter-Consensus (APCC) has emerged which criticizes the market fundamentalism of the APC. The APCC includes many authors who place a greater emphasis on the role of the state in supporting, managing and governing markets – for example, Robert Wade, Ha-Joon Chang and Mariana Mazzucato. However, Selwyn suggests that the APCC continues to accept the centrality of markets, and implicitly the capitalist exploitation of labour, which is at the heart of the APC. His overall argument is that even nominally radical projects which emphasize capital accumulation, including the ‘Modernization Marxism’ of the Soviet Union, accept the need to suppress labour’s demands for a greater share of the profits which constitute capital accumulation. In this sense, the various approaches view development from the perspective of capital, with labour as an input to be managed and controlled. Chapter Five invites the reader to adopt the perspective of labour, describing a theory of ‘Labour-Led Development’. Where capital-centred development has an interest in gender and race inequality to drive down costs of production, labour-led development focuses on the improvement of workers lives and the erasure of these forms of oppression. The book also provides an advance over Selwyn’s previous work (inter alia, Selwyn, 2014, 2016) by distinguishing between elite-led ‘pro-labour’ policies such as India’s rural employment guarantee, labour-driven development policies such as the welfare-state social compromise post-Second World War and labour-led development where working-class movements actively create means for improving their own wellbeing (Selwyn, 2017: 10). The book provides useful sketches of labour-led development, including introductions to the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil and the Shack Dwellers Movement of South Africa and their respective demands for agrarian reform and secure tenure. In the final chapter, Selwyn outlines a step beyond ‘Labour-Led Development’, by imagining what a democratic society under workers’ control might look like in terms of Universal Basic Income, race and gender equality, food provisioning and environmental preservation.
Critics might argue that the book does more to highlight the need for labour to organize politically than to describe the practicalities and obstacles of such struggles – for example through a detailed theory of state power, or an outline of how to organize atomized and alienated social groups. However, accessible works on these topics are available elsewhere already. The Struggle for Development is an excellent work to recommend to undergraduates for pre-course reading before a degree in Development Studies. The book deserves particular attention for foregrounding the viewpoint of labour as a class, and the role of collective struggles, within a discipline that increasingly focuses on geography, institutions and individual behaviours.
