Chapter 4 Review Questions Answer Key

The Critical Political Economy of Development

Intersectionality refers to the way in which different forms of oppression overlap and explain how the relations of oppression and exploitation relate to each other. Feminists today use the term intersectionality to argue that relations of oppression such as gender and race are mediated by the class relation in capitalist societies. Socialist feminists tend to argue that the mainstream concept of intersectionality is simply inadequate. It fails to explain how the relations of oppression and exploitation relate to each other. Although these different social locations are experienced together and cannot be separated in our experiences. [p. 74]

They can be explained by the cumulative wealth of the richest 26 people that exceeded that of over half of the world’s poorest, or more than 3.8 billion people; by the way racialized women face disproportionate levels of poverty and economic insecurity, which can be connected to the combination of gender inequality and racial wealth divisions; and by generational falling in income and wealth generated in Western societies. [p. 61]

Mainstream, liberal development theories argue that capitalist forms of development are the best or the most feasible way of creating generalized prosperity, bringing about gender equality, and advancing human rights. By contrast, critical development theories are much more pessimistic about the possibility that capitalism can overcome its inherent contradictions. They are optimistic, however, about our collective ability to do better. [p. 61]

Three historical factors help to explain the rise of what Philip McMichael (2016) calls “the development project,” which ruled the collective imaginary of powerful people across the world from the 1940s to the 1980s. First, the Marshall Plan—a multilateral aid and trade deal financed by the US that was successfully passed by Congress in 1948—helped to restore the European economies that were devastated by war. The success of this plan and the establishment of the Bretton Woods system fuelled optimism that aid and technology transfer could play key roles in sponsoring economic growth in lagging economies, including those in the former colonies. Second, the modern concept of development is heavily infused with Cold War ideology. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical upheavals between the Soviet Union and the United States that started in the late 1940s and ended when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This post–World War II tension was rooted in ideological differences between these Eastern and Western powers as they sought to gain global influence and dominance over most areas of the world. Third, after WWII, national liberation movements in the colonies demanded freedom from colonial rule. For example, between the 1950s and the 1980s throughout the African continent, there were periods of massive unrest and revolts as nations gained independence. During this period, violence and political turmoil were particularly evident in nations such as French Algeria, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, the Belgian Congo, and British Kenya. Post-independence, the new national leaders hoped that the benefits of technology and trade would integrate these new nation-states into the world market, although the terms of integration were very unequal. [pp. 62-3]

The concept of exploitation is central to Marxist understandings of relations of production and development. In capitalist societies, exploitation occurs when surplus value is extracted from labour during the labour process when a worker sells their labour-power (their capacity to work). Another way to think of surplus value is “surplus labour time,” which is the part of the working day when you no longer create value for yourself but for your boss. [p. 64]

The market can be manipulated to gain, maintain, and exert power. Therefore, the market is an arena of political and social contestation in which different actors come together to buy and sell but also to define the rules of the game or the “rules of reproduction.” It is not a neutral space of fair dealing. The poor do not have the resources necessary to play the game and have very little influence over setting its rules. This class relational approach of Marx stands in contrast to stratification perspectives that dominate the contemporary social sciences. The stratification perspective is primarily associated with another founder of modern sociology, Max Weber. Weber’s understanding of social class is expressed in the measures of income used by multilateral and global institutions. For example, the United Nations and the World Bank present figures representing the material conditions of labour without any reference to the process of exploitation. According to Marxists, this narrow definition of class is more accurately labelled socio-economic status, since this measure does not tell us how wealth is being created and by whom. [p. 65]

Class relationships are inherently conflictual. The work processes under capitalism are controlled by the bosses to ensure that workers continue to produce value and profit. Bosses tend to try to speed up production and drive down wages. Workers find this situation unfair, so they organize trade unions to press for more favourable conditions and to gain a greater share of the profit they produce. Far from being docile, trade unions tend to be very militant in new zones of capital accumulation, such as the trade unions that helped to end authoritarian rule in the 1980s in Brazil and struggled against apartheid in South Africa. Since trade unions have been the most active organizations defending workers against the onslaught of the bosses, the elements of the working class organized in trade unions (e.g., the male, industrial proletariat) were seen as the key social agents in much of Marxist thinking for most of the 1800s and 1900s. It is important to note, however, that the “working classes” have always been diverse with respect to gender, race, ability, etc., but not all workers are represented by unions. Trade unions also tend to replicate the oppressive relations witnessed in the wider society, since bosses tend to hire along racial and gender lines. [p. 65]

Colonialism is the practice of domination and control by one nation over another. It is underpinned by the ideology of imperialism, which is the formal or informal command of one nation over another politically or economically. In other words, in the Marxist view, imperialism is the idea, and colonialism is the practice. [p. 66]

Rosa Luxemburg argued that imperialism was not the “highest” stage of capitalism but rather a stage of “primitive capitalist accumulation,” similar to what Marx described in his work on the enclosures. Luxemburg helped to challenge Lenin’s “stagist” view of history that suggests that capitalism must develop within one place before it moves outwards and extends its influence elsewhere in a series of automatic stages. She argued it is much more dynamic. [p. 68]

One of the most popular bodies of critical development theories that try to understand how colonialism and imperialism have shaped the world market is the dependency school of thought. Dependency approaches are not a unified body of theory but a number of conflicting theories that emerged in the Global South, primarily as a reaction to and critique of modernization theory. The dependency tradition inspired a lot of excitement among progressive intellectuals and even became a dominant perspective in policy circles and in university research centres in the 1960s and 1970s. It was appealing because it appeared to describe the widening inequalities that were emerging among the core and peripheral countries in the wake of World War II. And it was unique insofar as it was the first major body of thought on capitalist development to originate with thinkers from developing countries. [p. 69]