Response Post on Development from Below SYP

Choose ONE of the following three questions and respond in four sentences or less.

What does it mean to view development as an “uneven and combined” process according to Antunes de Oliveira?

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Using one of the four contemporary examples of labour-centered developed described by Selwyn (South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea/China), describe what labour-centered development is and whether you think this is a useful lens with which to evaluate human improvement.

How do women’s struggles over land (as described by Federici) demonstrate that capitalist development entails what Antunes de Oliveria describes as “variegated [varied] forms of development, involving gains and losses for different social groups”?

Vol:.(1234567890)

Journal of International Relations and Development (2020) 23:924–946
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-019-00173-9

O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

Development for whom? Beyond the developed/
underdeveloped dichotomy

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira1

Published online: 9 April 2019
© Springer Nature Limited 2019

Abstract
The developed/underdeveloped dichotomy is the starting point of mainstream theo-
ries of development. Based on a theoretical framework inherited from modernisa-
tion theories, they represent development as the process through which productive
structures in the Global South are transformed following the footsteps of the Global
North. Dependency theories productively challenged this linear conception of devel-
opment, but failed to provide a consistent alternative because of their incapacity to
move beyond the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy. In this article, I claim that
Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development finally indicates a way to
think of development beyond the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy. Through
analogies with the work of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, I contrast the concept of
uneven and combined development with competing views of development to show
both that it makes better sense of particular development trajectories and that it offers
a better theoretical base for political action. By stressing the necessarily perspectived
character of development, the concept of uneven and combined development makes it
possible to ask a crucial question often overlooked: development for whom?

Keywords Dependency theory · Development studies · Escher · Trotsky · Uneven
and combined development

Development for whom?

Development is a matter of perspective. Material changes in productive structures
are far from socially neutral. They emerge from social relations—in their intra- and
inter-societal forms—and they reshuffle class and international relations as a con-
sequence. The black-and-white opposition between development and underdevelop-
ment, therefore, often conceals more than it reveals. Instead of assessing particular
countries’ successes or failures according to a predefined standard of development,
the critical question to be asked is: development for whom?

* Felipe Antunes de Oliveira
F.antunes-de-oliveira@sussex.ac.uk

1 University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1057/s41268-019-00173-9&domain=pdf

925Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

This question is overlooked by mainstream economic theories of development. Largely
based on a linear view of development inherited from modernisation theory, they end up
reinforcing a Eurocentric world-historic view. Development is perceived as the undisputed
goal of each and every country. Even when some form of international competition is rec-
ognised, the ultimate presupposition is that ‘underdeveloped’ nations can catch-up with
‘developed’ nations by adopting the right set of policies. The fact that the overwhelming
majority of nations have so far failed to do so is dismissed as their own fault—a discourse
sometimes seasoned with thinly disguised doses of racism and cultural colonialism.

Genealogies of the concept of development have convincingly revealed its problem-
atic origins in the modern idea of progress (Nisbet 1969; Wallerstein 1984; Escobar
1995; Rist 2002). Contemporary post-development authors rightfully emphasise the
epistemological violence involved in the representation of two thirds of humanity as
‘underdeveloped’ (Esteva 1992). For Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Western promises
of modernity—among which are ‘progress, and the sharing of progress’—have been
converted ‘into an ideology that legitimizes subordination to Western Imperialism’. As
a consequence, ‘social groups that use these systems to support their own autonomous
paths of development have been humiliated’ (de Sousa Santos 2007, p. xviii).

Yet, the contemporary intellectual denunciation of development seems insufficient
to touch the hearts of the editors of the World Development Report, reduce the expecta-
tion around the Millennium Development Goals, stop the constitution of the BRIC’s New
Development Bank and convince social movements claiming for variegated forms of devel-
opment. At least since the US President Truman pledged to foster ‘the improvement and
growth of underdeveloped areas’ (1949), development has become a global obsession. Win-
ning an election in Brazil, India, Nigeria or indeed any other self-perceived ‘underdevel-
oped’ or ‘developing’ country is impossible without making repeated promises of develop-
ment. A myriad of public policies are justified in terms of development. Momentous choices
are made, directly affecting the lives of millions of people, all in the name of development.

There is a double reason for the resilience of development, contradicting its declared
death prematurely announced by post-development writers in the 1990s (Rahnema
and Bawtree 1997). Firstly, some concept of development is needed to make sense of
material change. What differentiates historical narratives from a random juxtaposition
of facts is precisely some idea of development—be it implicit or explicit. Secondly,
problematic as it is, the idea of development catalyses the legitimate desire for a better
life (de Vries 2007). In itself, the aspiration for positive change should not be rejected
or repressed; on the contrary, it is a pre-condition for the conscious transformation
of exploitative social relations. Therefore, the concept of development fills in a real
epistemological and political gap. It does not suffice to repeal it, as post-development
authors very convincingly do at a theoretical level (Sachs 1992; Escobar 1992, 1995;
Rist 2002; Ziai 2007). The challenge is to replace it.

Here is the theoretical-political1 conundrum I address in this article: on the
one hand, some concept of development is fundamental to make sense of material
transformations and inform counter-hegemonic struggles; on the other hand, the

1 By defining it as ‘theoretical-political’ problem, I take Kees Van der Pijl’s point that ‘the quest for
a new society’ shall be recovered as ‘a criterion for relevance in social science’ (Van Der Pijl 2001, p.
380). De Sousa Santos (2007, p. xviii) also makes a similar claim.

926 F. Antunes de Oliveira

development/underdevelopment opposition is in itself inseparable from the Eurocen-
tric epistemological imperialism which negates agency and legitimate knowledge to
subordinated social groups.

Is it possible to imagine a concept of development that overcomes that dichot-
omy? The core idea that must be captured by such a concept is the notion of radi-
cally perspectived material change. For, there can be no doubt that material reality
is dynamic. Organised social groups can bring about substantial transformation in
the relations within and across societies. Positive change is certainly possible. Nev-
ertheless, what counts as positive change? Indeed, what may appear as a positive
change from a certain social perspective can feel much different from another. A
renewed attention to the multiplicity of legitimate social perspectives can dissolve
the putative materiality of the dichotomy between development/underdevelopment
into a complex and interactive reality filled with potentially contradictory claims for
development. In a nutshell, development is what different social groups make of it.

In the present article, I shall argue that such a concept of development can be
derived from the idea of uneven and combined development, originally coined by
Trotsky (1906/1986, 1931/2011, 1932/2008). ‘Born in struggle’—as required in
emancipatory epistemologies of the south (de Sousa Santos 2014)—Trotsky’s con-
cept of development defied the canonical Marxism of his time, opposed the stagiest
thesis that a liberal revolution was a necessary pre-condition for the socialist revolu-
tion, and finally clashed with the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in a single country.
In the process, Trotsky provided a better understanding of historical events (the Rus-
sian Revolution) and showed new possibilities for struggle from below.

The recent rediscovery of Trotsky’s ideas in the fields of International Relations
and International Historical Sociology (Rosenberg 2006, 2013a, b; Matin 2013a,
b; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015, among others) has brought the concept of une-
ven and combined development to its most radical consequences. Originally pre-
sented as relevant for countries of ‘the second, third or tenth cultural class’ (Trot-
sky 1932/2008, p. 5), the intrinsic unevenness of any development process—and the
consequent material combination resulting from that fact—can actually be analysed
in relation to any society. Because every social structure is uneven and combined,
the opposition developed/underdeveloped is radically undermined. In its place,
inter- and intra-societal struggles for development emerge.

In Development Studies—an academic field particularly divided by different and
not always reconcilable understandings of development—the theoretical and politi-
cal potentials of the concept of uneven and combined development are still largely
unexplored (Makki 2015; Selwyn 2014 are pioneering examples). This article is
intended as a contribution to that field. My argumentative strategy is to contrast the
concept of uneven and combined development with competing views of develop-
ment in order to show both that it makes better sense of historical change and that it
offers a powerful theoretical base for political action.

Methodologically, the contrast between different views of development is carried
out through analogies to three graphic works by the Dutch artist/mathematician M.
C. Escher. The monochromatic work of Escher captures some aspects that I claim
are central to different conceptions of development: the dramatic opposition between
developed/underdeveloped, the mosaic-like idea of a totally filled plane, and the role

927Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

of contrasting perspectives in organising the apprehension of dynamic multiplicities.
The analogical reasoning followed here is inspired by Boaventura de Sousa San-
tos’ call for renewed methodologies (de Sousa Santos 1988).2 Escher himself often
turned to the music of J. S. Bach in order to find the spark of creativity his imagina-
tion required to start a new picture (Escher 1982, p. 172). May his own work help us
find the creativity necessary to grasp the elusive idea of development.

The remainder of the article unfolds as follows: in the next section, I use the graphic
work ‘Sky and Water I’ (1938) to represent contemporary views on development that
explicitly or implicitly draw on modernisation theory’s presuppositions. In the following
section, I turn to dependency theories, a valuable and often underestimated early attempt
to radically reframe development theory. Here I use the woodcut ‘Plane Filling II’ (1957)
to represent dependency itself, including the fixed and unresolved opposition between
development and underdevelopment. The lithograph ‘Relativity’ (1953) is then used to
represent uneven and combined development, as it accurately depicts different perspec-
tives on ascension and descent. Finally, the argument is wrapped up in the conclusion.

Flying geese and sinking fishes: stagiest views of development

2 For Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1988, p. 63), ‘the post-modern science is declaredly analogical,
knowing the things it knows worst through the things it knows best’. According to that perspective, anal-
ogies are much more than mere illustrations. They have the power to illuminate our understanding of
things that defy our capacity of representation. The power of analogies will become clear in the fifth sec-
tion of this text, particularly regarding the concept of ‘pluriverse’.

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928 F. Antunes de Oliveira

In the woodcut ‘Sky and Water I’ (1938), we can see a sequence of fish and geese.
Two different directionalities are immediately identifiable. If the graphic work is read
from the left to the right, fish and geese appear to be going in the same direction.
If the picture is read from the bottom to the top, however, the fish appear to be los-
ing their forms, thereby allowing the geese to take off. The animals in the higher and
lower extremities are better defined, while the shapes become increasingly intertwined
towards the centre, in a tense and somewhat confusing contrast. The whole point of
the artwork seems to be emphasising the dualities fish/goose; water/sky; black/white.
As explained by Escher, ‘the idea of a duality such as air and water can be expressed in
a picture by starting from a plane-filling design of birds and fish; the birds are “water”
for the fish and the fish are “air” for the birds’ (Escher 1982, p. 170).

Exactly because the artwork is premised on a duality, even if it is read as a process of
transformation, the background dichotomy is not dissolved. There is a marked qualitative
difference between the geese flying in the bright sky and the fish sinking in the dark waters.
Furthermore, the sky is not fully taken up by geese; there is space for future take-offs. A
second picture in which all the water is transformed into geese, making the fish disappear
against the empty background of the sky, is perfectly imaginable. The goose at the top
appears to have come out of the water first. Its detailed figure shows a model for the subse-
quent five rows of birds—the last one barely identifiable among the school of fish.

Development economists’ poor imaginations often reduce development to an
ascending line—normally showing a positive relation between some aggregate form
of wealth measurement (per capita GDP is favourite) and time, considered in its
absolute form as the passing of years. The following example was taken from Daron
Acemoglu’s book (2009, p. 13), but similar graphic representations of development
are to be found in almost every mainstream book on development economics (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Source: Acemoglu (2009, p. 13)

929Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

The simple point they are trying to make could also (and most beautifully) be
represented by Escher’s ‘Sky and Water I’. Development is an ascending process,
through which countries lose their old, underdeveloped, abyssal form and become
increasingly like those that came out of the darkness first. Typically, the top goose
is England, followed in the nineteenth century by other European countries, Japan
and the US. In the twentieth century, a number of newly industrialised countries
appeared, although many of them are still stuck in less-defined forms, be it because
of their imperfect institutions, or because of their putative incompetence or cor-
ruption. In the end, however, it is perfectly possible that all countries will get their
institutions and their policies right and finally take off. After all, ‘in the long run,
countries’ progress is primarily dependent on their own efforts rather than on the
international environment’ (Williamson 2004, p. 197). As optimistically remarked
by a Nobel Prize winner

The task of less developed countries today is in some ways easier than that
which faced Europe and the United States as they industrialized in the nine-
teenth century: they simply have to catch up, rather than forge into unknown
territory. (Stiglitz 2007, p. 30)

Simply ‘catch-up’! How complicated can this be? The road to development is
already paved. This linear perspective is famously schematised in Rostow’s ‘Stages
of Economic Growth’ (1959). Development is the process through which countries
pass from an idealised condition of ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ to another ide-
alised condition, namely, ‘developed’. Outdated as it may sound, these ideas still
lurk behind much of the contemporary economic development literature. Of course,
nobody claims that Rostow got the actual stages of growth right—although the
expression ‘take-off’ referred to the kick-start of the development process remains in
current use. The influential Millenium Project Report, for instance, claims for a ‘big
push’ in aid-related investments to break poverty trap, allowing economic growth to
‘take off in a self-sustained manner’ (UNDP 2005).3

Rostow’s inductive method—which tries to infer from ‘successful’ development
experiences the path to be universally followed—is widely replicated in a much
more ‘scientific’ fashion. Impressive examples come from empiric literature on eco-
nomic growth (Barro 1991; Barro and Sala-I-Martin 1995). Building on the work of
Solow (1956) and Swan (1956), contemporary writers define formalised relations
between growth and a set of variables. After empirically testing their models run-
ning regressions with the help of massive statistical databases, they claim to have
‘identified a substantial number of variables that are partially correlated with the
rate of economic growth’ (Sala-I-Martin 1997, p. 178). The ‘results’ of the ‘two mil-
lion’ regressions run by Sala-I-Martin show, among other things, that being close to
the equator, as well as being in Latin America, is negatively correlated to growth.
Conversely, the number of years as an open economy appears to be positively cor-
related to growth (ibid, p. 181).

3 I thank an anonymous reviewer at JIRD for calling my attention to the use of the term ‘take off’ in that
context.

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930 F. Antunes de Oliveira

Even more nuanced, qualitative studies presuppose and reinforce a similarly
problematic view of development. Atul Kohli’s (2004) in-depth analysis of South
Korea, Brazil, India and Nigeria, for instance, finds that the relative ‘success’ of
the first country can be explained by a certain pattern of state intervention. It is not
hard to see the similarities between his representation of development and Escher’s
graph(ic work) presented at the beginning of this section: South Korea figures at the
top among its fellow flying geese, Brazil and India in the middle, with their confus-
ing shapes, Nigeria at the bottom, lost in the darkness of corruption, clientelism and
unproductiveness. The argument is clear enough for policymakers across the global
South: the South Korean experience is to be emulated, if possible, with the addition
of democracy.

The strong denunciation of the Washington Consensus that emerged in the last
decade (Stiglitz 2007; Serra and Stiglitz 2008; Chang 2002) is essentially a disa-
greement about the form through which development is to be achieved—more
state activism, less market fundamentalism—not an attempt to redefine the con-
cept of development itself. At their best, therefore, mainstream economic devel-
opment theories appear as a generous promise of universal convergence at high
standards of income and consumption, a win–win game in which poor nations
climb up the ladder of development (Sachs 2006, p. 51). Even if developed coun-
tries try to kick away the ladder (Chang 2002), developing countries can still
resist and claim their moral right to preserve key state capabilities conducive to
capital accumulation.

The epistemological and political shortcomings of the concept of development
adopted in much of the economic development literature have been identified from
different standpoints. To start with, it the concept relies on problematic neoclassical
economics presuppositions and methods to assess economic growth (Shaikh 2016;
Smith 2012). As famously argued by Amartya Sen, development should not be pri-
marily measured in terms of GDP; instead, it should enhance people’s capabilities to
‘lead the kind of lives that we have reason to value’ (Sen 2000, p. 285). The mate-
rial ecological limits of development understood as never-ending increase in con-
sumption standards are now evident (Raworth 2017). Furthermore, as convincingly
claimed by Naila Kabeer (1994) and Kalpana Wilson (2013), mainstream economic
development literature fails to acknowledge properly the crucial role gender and race
play in the development process.

These and many other laudable efforts to build theoretical alternatives to main-
stream economic understandings of development recognise that development can-
not be reduced to the elusive promise of capitalist catch-up. In this sense, they
implicitly abide by the foundational ontological premise that development must be
defined in relation to competing social perspectives. As I will argue in the fourth
section, Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development explicitly incor-
porates that ontological premise, providing a coherent re-grounding of develop-
ment itself.

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931Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

The mosaic of the word development—dependency theories
revisited

The woodcut ‘Plane Filling II’ (1957) is an intriguing composition, in which forty
bizarre figures mutually determine each other’s shapes. Although some similarities can
be found and an overall opposition between white and black figures can be discerned,
all characters are different. The graphic work as a whole apparently has no background,
no space is left empty. No new character can enter the picture, unless as a partition of
the already existing figures. Furthermore, no directionality is self-evident. Each char-
acter is looking at (and apparently pushing towards) a different direction. Nevertheless,
despite being seemingly alive, they cannot go anywhere. Because the shape of one char-
acter is determined by its neighbours, whose shape, in turn, is determined by their own
neighbours, changes in the shape of one unity affect the whole system. In other words,
‘Plane Filling II’ depicts an interdependent system, instead of a sequence of stages.

A careful look at the graphic work reveals that not all characters seem to be
equally upset by their current positions. The peaceful, meditative man in the centre
is apparently not troubled by the half-human beast trying to push him with its head;
the white devil on the right border is confidently stepping in the picture, while the
feathered monster on the left has a malignant smile on his face. Contrastingly, the
white donkey next to it really seems to be trying to escape its uncomfortable posi-
tion and the fish-tailed dragon on top of the kangaroo is ready to bite anything that

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932 F. Antunes de Oliveira

moves. Nothing moves, though, as nothing can move. The units are perfectly deter-
mined by the system, either it changes as a whole or it does not change at all.

The consciousness of the limits the international capitalist system casts on the
development prospects of underdeveloped or ‘peripheral’ countries is the start-
ing point of dependency theories.4 Born in Latin America out of—and in criti-
cal opposition to—the pioneering developmentalist researches of the ECLAC,5
dependency theories became popular in the 1960s in the context of two interre-
lated historical circumstances. Firstly, there was a disappointment with the early
results of post-war development cooperation, announced by President Truman and
better exemplified in the Alliance for Progress. Notwithstanding the US’ repeated
promises of support for capitalist development, the strategic choice to prioritise
the reconstruction of Western Europe prompted a sense of injustice among its
Latin American allies. With the expressive growth experienced by Europe and the
US itself during the golden age of capital expansion in the post-war years (Hob-
sbawm 1995), it was difficult to avoid the perception that Latin America was not
only failing to catch-up, but was actually lagging behind once more, despite the
recent industrialisation of its biggest countries. The supposedly dynamic game
of development seemed rigged, as everything was changing only to be exactly
the same. Just like in Escher’s ‘Plane Filling II’, the place of each country in the
world capitalist system appeared to be determined from the start.

Secondly, in 1959, an unexpected revolution triggered by a handful of idealist
guerrillas took over one of the Latin American countries with the closest his-
torical ties to the US, where the scarce development possibilities appeared to be
the most determined by the dynamics of the US economy (Bambirra 1974). The
Cuban Revolution reclaimed the agency of subaltern classes, dramatically prov-
ing that the stagiest strategy of subjecting the fight for socialist revolution to the
previous development of capitalist productive relations—a perspective embraced
by many Latin American communist parties—was essentially wrong. Because
capitalist development never fully materialises in dependent countries, the social-
ist revolution could not wait for the full development of capitalism.

Inspired by these circumstances, a number of critical Latin American sociolo-
gists and economists set out to map the condition of dependency and the systemic
constraints to development imposed by a subordinated insertion into global capital-
ism, whose origins were to be ultimately found in colonial times. Most of dependency
theories’ rich literature was originally written in Spanish and Portuguese, although it
came to be popularised in the English-speaking world by the work of Gunder Frank, a
German economist trained at the University of Chicago. One of Frank’s merits is plac-
ing the dependency perspective in relation to international mainstream development

4 Under the label of dependency theories many different ideas are loosely reunited, therefore I prefer
referring to them in the plural. For a comprehensive bibliography on dependency theories put together by
one of its most important names, see dos Santos (1998).
5 The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean was established in 1948, under
the leadership of the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch, soon becoming the home of Latin American
Developmentalism. Key texts of different generations of ECLAC economists were republished in a two-
volume collection organised by Bielschowsky (2000). For an overview of ECLAC and dependency theo-
ries, including the tense but fruitful relations between the two schools, see Kay (2010).

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933Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

theories of his time, particularly the modernisation scheme of Rostow, but also the het-
erodox development ideas of Galbraith and Myrdal (Frank 1970). For Frank, the stagi-
est perspective of modernisation theory mistook ‘underdevelopment’ for ‘undevelop-
ment’, wrongly portraying the contemporary situation of underdeveloped countries as
if they were in a previous stage of capitalist development (Frank 1969).

Against this perspective, Frank argues that development and underdevelopment
are differentiated results of the expansion of the capitalist system. Therefore, the
‘present underdevelopment of Latin America is the result of its centuries-long par-
ticipation in the process of world capitalist development’ (Frank 1969, p. 7). As a
conclusion, the only hope for development in dependent countries would be through
radical social change, as captured in the title of Frank’s book Latin America: Under-
development or Revolution (1969).

Frank popularised and synthesised ideas that are fully developed by other depend-
ency theorists, most notably dos Santos (1969, 1970), Marini (1973/2009), and Bam-
birra (1974, 1978, 2012). Among the merits of this tradition is the clear identification
of an ‘international and internal structure which leads to […] underdevelopment’ (dos
Santos 1970, p. 231). Contrary to the idea that a set of wise economic policies could
eventually raise countries out of underdevelopment, dependency theories portray
development insightfully as a function of class and international relations. Neverthe-
less, exactly because development and underdevelopment are ultimately determined
by the dynamics of world capitalism, dependency theories cannot account for cases of
seemingly successful national capitalist development. For the underdogs, development
means moving out of capitalism. But what about cases in which the transformation of
the parts did not challenge the system? What about development within capitalism?

This theoretical limitation became evident in the 1970s, as rapid economic growth
in peripheral countries—notably in East Asia, but also in Brazil and Mexico—appar-
ently gave reason to stagiest views of development. Instead of being a mosaic of con-
flicting monsters, world development seemed to be better captured by a directional
picture of gradual transformation, as in Escher’s ‘Sky and Water I’; after all, some
geese were finally coming out of the water. The debate about the existence of nec-
essary constraints to capitalist development in peripheral economies came to mark
the culmination of dependency theories, dividing this tradition into two irreconcilable
sides—with both providing unsatisfactory answers to that problem.

The best expression of the split in the dependency field was the bitter controversy
opposing Serra and Cardoso (1978) and Marini (1978) in the pages of the Mexi-
can Review of Sociology. Eventually sliding to personal attacks, Serra and Cardoso
accuse Marini of ‘economic reductionism’, as his concepts of ‘super-exploitation’
and ‘sub-imperialism’—seen as necessary traces of peripheral capitalist econo-
mies—leave no room for the ‘creativity of history’ expressed in the actual class
struggle. For Serra and Cardoso, conversely, instead of being by definition economi-
cally impossible, the capitalist development process in peripheral countries could be
positively influenced by the correct definition of ‘allied field’ in the class struggle,
i.e., by progressive class alliances (Serra and Cardoso 1978, p. 53).

Marini, on the other hand, provides a consistent historical materialist analysis
based on the labour theory of value to reaffirm the key tenets of Marxist depend-
ency theory, previously presented in his influential book Dialectics of Dependency

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934 F. Antunes de Oliveira

(Marini 1973/2009). According to him, fundamental differences in the way the
working class is exploited in central economies and in peripheral countries create
insurmountable difficulties for the appearance of dynamic internal markets in the
periphery, thereby reproducing dependency overtime.6 Super-exploitation of labour
(labour being paid below its reproduction cost) and sub-imperialism (subordinated
expansion of capitals led by the militaristic states) would therefore be necessary
‘monstrous’ traits of capitalist development in peripheral countries. For Marini, by
denying that the condition of underdevelopment could only be overcome by a com-
plete social revolution, Serra and Cardoso were actually playing the game of the
national bourgeoisies and reasserting the false promises of national developmental-
ism,7 against which dependency theories rose in the first place.

Although fascinating in itself and pregnant with theoretical insights, the debate led
to a dead end. Neither Serra and Cardoso nor Marini could offer convincing alternative
concepts of development. Serra and Cardoso were right in criticising Marini’s incapacity
to explain capitalist development in peripheral countries except as a lifeless reflex of the
dynamics of central economies. Marini was right and incredibly prescient in denouncing
Serra and Cardoso’s solution as a step back to stagiest, elitist views of development.8

More recent works coming from the dependency and the world-system analysis tra-
dition suffer from the same limitations. Even when change over the longue durée is
explicitly incorporated, as in Giovanni Arrighi’s account of different hegemonic cycles
(Arrighi and Silver 1999; Arrighi 2009), the overarching global logic of capital expan-
sion governs history in such a way that the place of each country in the system is

6 Marini’s argument relies on Marx’s distinction between relative and absolute surplus value. While the
former is based on a reduction of the relative value of labour, by pushing down the value of the working
class’ consumption goods (i.e. its reproduction cost), the latter is based on an increase in the absolute
exploitation of labour, via increasing working hours, or intensification of work in regular working hours.
In both cases, capitalists extract surplus value from the production process, but in the first case, the side
effect is the creation of a dynamic mass consumption market for the working class, while the latter leads
to a continued depression of internal markets in peripheral countries due to low salaries, sometimes
below the cost of reproduction of labour itself (super-exploitation). Furthermore, these two forms of sur-
plus extraction complement one another, as the extraction of relative surplus value in central economies
requires the continued reduction of the value of consumption goods produced elsewhere.
7 ‘[T]oday, the new ideologists of the Brazilian bourgeoisie [Serra and Cardoso] find themselves obliged
to retake this tradition [developmentalism] and try to give credibility to a Brazilian capitalist develop-
ment in an American or European fashion. In a nutshell, we are facing a neodevelopmentalism, still
ashamed of itself, but that will soon lose its inhibitions’ (Marini 1978, p. 102–103). This is the first aca-
demic use of the term ‘neodevelopmentalism’, which would become popular three decades later in refer-
ence to post-neoliberal governments in Latin America (Antunes de Oliveira 2018).
8 Cardoso’s final retreat to an unquestionably developmentalist theoretical position is clear in texts pub-
lished in the 1990s, in which he dismisses the thesis that peripheral countries would necessarily develop
in ‘distorted’ ways: ‘Today we know that it is not true. Countries which were able to manage their econo-
mies sensibly to the transformation of modes of production within capitalism, as well as to social issues,
have had more favourable trajectories than others. The case of the Asian Tigers is well-known. What
remained of “determinism” in the dependency theory, maybe a Marxist trait—and I always criticized
determinism—certainly must be fundamentally reformulated’ (Cardoso 1995, p. 151). His practice as
President actually reveals an even more drastic stepping back, including alliances with traditional oligar-
chies and the full-scale embrace of neoliberal policies. As summarised by Perry Anderson, ‘[i]n pursuit
of office Cardoso had sacrificed not only his early convictions, which were Marxist and socialist, but over
time his intellectual standards’ (Anderson 2016).

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necessarily determined. Although nations may shift places from time to time, particu-
larly during systemic crises, little space is left for diverging development trajectories.

During an early moment in his career, Escher believed he had found a way of creating
a picture without a background, by filling in the entire plane with recognisable figures,
as in ‘Plane Filling II’. Later, he was convinced that this was not really possible, because
the eye cannot capture at the same time all the individual figures in a given picture. As
a result, the viewer inevitably chooses some figure to focus on, relegating the others to
a subjectively constructed background (Escher 1982, p. 158). A similar thing has hap-
pened with both sides of the dependency debate. In the complex reality of peripheral
development, productive structures appear to be at the same time in rapid transformation,
while not changing substantively at all. By focusing on just one aspect of this contradic-
tion and relegating the other to the background, the analyst misses the whole picture.

But how can the mosaic of world development be apprehended in its totality? In anal-
ogy to Escher’s reasoning, I am convinced that it cannot. There is, however, a concept of
development that indicates a way of approaching the overwhelmingly differentiated yet
interconnected multiplicity of world history systematically. I shall now turn to this.

Where is the top of the stairway? Uneven and combined
development

https://www.mcescher.com

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936 F. Antunes de Oliveira

In the lithograph ‘Relativity’ (1953), we can see a system of stairs. At first glance,
three main stairways dominate the picture, forming an inverted triangle at its centre.
It takes no more than one second to find many other stairs—some shorter, some
longer, some apparently coming from or going to nowhere, others leading to pleas-
ant and sunny plateaus, where food is served. All the stairs start and finish at differ-
ent points, no convergence is suggested. The stairs do not lead to the same place, yet
they are placed in relation to each other. To complicate matters, the stairways to the
left and to the right of the big plant behind the arch are actually two-folded. How are
we supposed to know which of the two sides is the right one? Where is the top of the
stairs? Where is the top of the picture, anyway?

The stairs are but one of the two key elements in this lithograph. They form the
setting against which the action happens. The second element, essential to give
meaning to this setting, are the people. Escher depicts similar, but different kinds
of people. Some are working, as is the case of the person going downstairs with a
bottle on a tray. Some may be doing something illegal, as in the case of the person
walking up the dark stairs with a suspicious bag. The couple in the top left corner
appear to be simply wandering in a garden, while the person next to the window
in the top right corner is quietly watching those below him. The artist seems to be
representing a simple idea, captured in the very title of this artwork. The top of each
stairway is essentially a relative place. It is to be defined in relation to the people, in
reference to someone.

The dynamic non-convergence suggested in ‘Relativity’ contrasts with the lin-
earity of ‘Sky and Water I’ and the frozen tension of ‘Plane Filling II’. While, as
I have argued, ‘Sky and Water I’ can be taken as a representation of regular, lin-
ear processes of material change, and ‘Plane Filling II’ captures the interdependent
nature of world development, the idea of change and interdependence that Escher
invites us to imagine in ‘Relativity’ is qualitatively different. The stairs are inter-
connected and each of them obviously has a top and a bottom, but the picture is
deliberately made to be completed by the viewer’s eye—more precisely, by her
choice of perspective.

This is, I claim, the core idea captured in the concept of uneven and combined
development. Development is uneven, in the double sense that creates and reinforces
material differences within and across societies. Furthermore, development is com-
bined in a double sense as well, because productive structures in each society change
in relation to foreign pressures and opportunities, resulting in amalgamated forms
that can be witnessed in any society at any particular time. As a consequence, there
is no univocal form of development that should be universally desired. Development
for some could mean underdevelopment for others—in the same way that the top of
the stairs in Escher’s ‘Relativity’ depends on which character the viewer chooses to
take as reference.

The perspective of development just described derives from the theoretical and
historical work of Trotsky (1906/1986, 1931/2011, 1932/2008), the revolutionary
leader who played a key role in the Russian Revolution prior to the ascension of
Stalin and also one of the most creative and prolific Marxist writers of the twentieth
century. It originally appeared as part of a theoretical-political solution to the lack of

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937Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

a consistent concept of development in historical materialism, which generated dif-
ficulties similar to those previously identified in linear views of development.9

In fact, in Marx’s writings, different concepts of development are to be found. As
noticed by Wallerstein, ‘like all great thinkers, there was the Marx who was the pris-
oner of his social location and the Marx, the genius, who could on occasion see from
a wider vantage point. The former Marx generalized from British history. The latter
Marx is the one who has inspired a critical conceptual framework of social real-
ity’ (Wallerstein 1984, p. 393). Accordingly, in passages such as the much quoted
introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explic-
itly announces a stagiest scheme of social evolution going from the ‘Asiatic’ to the
‘modern bourgeois’ modes of production, concluding that inevitable contradictions
in the latter would bring about its own destruction (Marx 1859/2010, p. 263). In the
preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx is once again clear when allud-
ing to the ‘iron laws’ of capitalist production: ‘the country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx
1867/2010, p. 9).

Although some authors are quick in conflating this economically deterministic
view of development with Marxism tout court (Nisbet 1969; Landes 1998), other
perspectives of development also appear in Marx’s own works. Michael Löwy
(2010) remarks that, when analysing the political conjuncture in specific countries,
such as Spain, Germany and Russia, Marx often realises that in concrete cases the
national bourgeoisie may be unable to accomplish the revolutionary task expected
from it, resting on the workers’ shoulders the only hope for successful revolutionary
uprisings. Supported by an extensive and careful reading of Marx’s published and
unpublished works, Lucia Pradella argues that the theory of value in Marx explains
systematic differences in development trajectories among societies, partially antici-
pating Marini’s historical materialist dependency theory (2015, p. 152). Ben Selwyn
highlights Marx’s calls for the emancipation of the working class as a form of
labour-centred development, inasmuch as ‘Marx argued for the need to create an
alternative political economic system organized to achieve maximum collective and
individual fulfilment, based on the “absolute working out of [her] creative potential-
ities”, where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all”’ (Selwyn 2014, p. 207).

Today, linear views of development are largely rejected by most Marxist authors.
In the first eary decades of the twentieth century, nevertheless, stagiest interpreta-
tions of Marx were dominant. In that context, the socialist revolutionary attempts
in Russia—a mainly agrarian absolutist monarchy full of feudal vestiges—seemed a
complete material impossibility. Against this perspective, Trotsky’s critique of linear
views of development appeared for the first time in the pamphlet Results and Pros-
pects, published in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution:

9 The lack of a consistent concept of development in Marx can be seen as a consequence of the lack of
theorisation of ‘the international’ in classical sociology (Rosenberg 2006; Makki 2015). No consistent
concept of development is possible without a proper theorisation of international relations, as the rela-
tional character of development is missed.

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938 F. Antunes de Oliveira

Is it true that, in Russia, the weakness of capitalist liberalism inevitably means
the weakness of the labour movement? Is it true, for Russia, that there can-
not be an independent labour movement until the bourgeoisie has conquered
power? It is sufficient merely to put these questions to see what a hopeless
formalism lies concealed beneath the attempt to convert an historically-relative
remark of Marx’s into a supra-historical axiom. (Trotsky 1906/1986, p. 64)

Although not explicitly formulated in a concept of development yet, Trotsky’s
perception that material changes in Russian productive structures unevenly affected
different classes is clear enough. Instead of creating an increasingly powerful bour-
geoisie, the recent industrialisation of Russia gave birth to a small but highly self-
conscious working class—at the same time as reinforcing Russian absolutism vis-à-
vis its external enemies. The insights of Results and Prospects would be expanded
into a ‘systematic, coherent and rigorous’ (Löwy 2010, p. 85) theory of the dynamic
of social revolutions in backward countries in The Permanent Revolution, published
in exile twenty-five years later, amidst Trotsky’s controversy with Stalin regarding
the (im)possibility of socialism in one single country. Building on his previous texts,
the best formulation of Trotsky’s concept of development appeared in the History of
the Russian Revolution, when the author applied his theoretical framework to explain
how the Russian Revolution succeeded despite Russia’s general backwardness:

The laws of history have nothing in common with pedantic schematism.
Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most
sharply and complexly in the destiny of backward countries. Under the whip
of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From
the universal law of unevenness, thus derives another law which, for the lack
of a better name, we may call the law of combined development—by which we
mean a drawing together of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more
contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course in its whole mate-
rial content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of
any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class. (Trotsky 1932/2008, p.
5)

Unevenness and combination—the two key features of development—are clearly
spelt out in this paragraph. Taking them into account, Trotsky is able to take a deci-
sive step out of the ‘pedantic schematism’ of linear views of development. Societies
were not expected to follow a clear and predetermined road towards development
anymore. The necessarily interactive nature of development allowed for ‘leaps’ and
resulted in mixed forms of development.

Is Trotsky’s theoretical innovation—the uncovering of the inherently uneven and
combined character of development—sufficient to redefine the concept of develop-
ment in a way that overcomes the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy? Appar-
ently not, one could say. Indeed, in the very same paragraph of the History of the
Russian Revolution where he challenges linear views of development, Trotsky makes
arguably Eurocentric references to ‘backward’ cultures and the ‘cultural class’ of
countries. The overarching notion of an unfolding Western modernity necessarily
spreading through the globe remains unchallenged. Sooner or later—with or without

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939Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

leaps and whips of ‘external necessity’—capitalism would end up creating a world
after its own image. In the end, Trotsky’s ‘law’ of uneven and combined develop-
ment would only replace one pre-determined view of history for another—perhaps
more complex, but not less deterministic or Eurocentric.

Two different versions of this critique have been proposed by contemporary
authors, sceptical about the renewed interest the concept of uneven and combined
development is attracting, particularly in the fields of international relations and
international historical sociology.10 The law-like character of uneven and combined
development was quickly picked out by Teschke (2014), who takes issue with its
conception as a ‘causal and transhistorical IR theory’. According to him, the focus
on an overarching logic of development empties agency, rendering uneven and com-
bined development incapable of providing concrete historical explanations. ‘[S]ince
the theoretical premises of UCD—development, unevenness, combination—are
explicitly evacuated of social agency and socio-historical content, it cannot, despite
its stated objective of explaining interactive change over time, account for change,
unevenness, and differences.’ (Teschke 2014, p. 33) Because of its lack of specific-
ity and its disregard to agency, uneven and combined development ‘is fundamen-
tally barred from explaining not only social change, but development itself—not to
mention non-development and de-development’ (ibid.). Ashman (2009), Davidson
(2009), Kiely (2012) and Rioux (2014) make similar points, taking issue particularly
with the conception of uneven and combined development as a trans-historic law
and its application to pre-capitalist inter-societal dynamics.

Another version of essentially the same critique was proposed recently by de-
colonial authors (Blaney and Tickner 2017a). Instead of directly criticising the law-
like or trans-historic character of uneven and combined development, they aimed at
the very concept of development, perceived as irremediably Eurocentric. For Blaney
and Tickner, ‘UCD remains grounded in an ontology of development.’ Exactly
because of the centrality of ‘development’, UCD necessarily fails to effectively
account for multiplicity, as ‘development is part of the colonial/capitalist political
and economic grammar and knowledge production central to and constitutive of cul-
tural encounters as moments of violence in which alternative ontologies (or worlds)
are subordinated or destroyed’. Hence, UCD explicit negation of a linear logic of

10 The concept of uneven and combined development—now under the acronym UCD—was revisited
and reappropriated by Justin Rosenberg as the cornerstone of an alternative perspective to the neorealist
paradigm in international relations. Neorealism, as it is widely accepted, confines geopolitical and socio-
logical phenomena into two different and incommensurable realms, thereby divorcing international rela-
tions from other social sciences (Waltz 1979). Drawing on UCD, Rosenberg found a simple yet ingenious
way around this theoretical problem. Avoiding the standard Marxist procedure of reducing inter-societal
relations to simple expressions of the class struggle—which would represent not a real bridging between
geopolitical and sociological phenomena but the subordination of the first to the second—the author
finds in the principle of unevenness, understood as ‘the most general law of the historical process’, the
sociological origin of political multiplicity. Hence, international relations can be understood sociologi-
cally as the uneven and combined development of multiple societies in permanent interaction. In Rosen-
berg’s words: ‘the international, quite simply, […] is nothing other than the highest expression of uneven
and combined development. This is its sociological definition’ (Rosenberg 2006, p. 328). After Rosen-
berg’s pioneering work, a number of writers have been exploring the potentialities of UCD. Outstanding
examples include Matin (2013a), Morton (2013), Anievas (2011), Anievas and Matin (2016).

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940 F. Antunes de Oliveira

development would not be enough: ‘[t]he ladder of development may be tipped a bit,
but not brought down’ (Blaney and Tickner 2017a, p. 74).

Although certainly valuable as pre-emptive efforts to avoid the enshrining of une-
ven and combined development as yet another version of a-historical Western laws
of history, these critiques miss the point by not taking into account the full conse-
quences of Trotsky’s ideas. In fairness, these consequences were not clear in Trot-
sky’s own writings and were obfuscated by the author’s outdated choice of words.
Nevertheless, the contemporary literature is starting to unleash the full theoretical
and political potential of Trotsky’s revolutionary concept of development.

To start with, the law-like character of uneven and combined development have
been largely exaggerated by Teschke. Instead of a necessary causal law, capable of
predicting concrete developmental outcomes, uneven and combined development is
better understood as a concept of development, i.e., a definition of what develop-
ment is. Of course, concepts can also be seen as ‘laws’, in the rather limited sense
that they rule what shall be included under their representation. As such, uneven and
combined development can be captured by the following formula: development is
always uneven and combined. Or, in other words, material transformation in pro-
ductive structures always happen in relation to external pressures and opportunities,
resulting in differentiated gains and losses for different social groups.

These apparently law-like formulations, however, are purely analytical. They just
spell out what was already presupposed under the concept of development. No mate-
rial prediction can be made solely based on the concept of development, just like
no prediction can be made based on any concept on its own. Nevertheless, explor-
ing alternative understandings of key concepts—like development, production or
class, to mention just a few—helps to craft better historical narratives and to frame
political action. The point of a conceptual definition is exactly shedding light on
the constitutive parts of the concept under analysis, directing the attention to crucial
aspects that have been previously ignored. In this sense, the sentence ‘development
is uneven and combined’ belongs to the same category as E. P. Thomson’s claim
that ‘classes’ are ‘formed in the process of conflict and struggle’ (Wood 1982, p.
47). They are both general conceptual definitions of what shall be understood as
‘classes’ or ‘development’. Classes are that thing that arise from conflict and strug-
gle; development is that thing that arises from unevenness and combination.

If development can be defined as the outcome of unevenness and combination,
then the concrete historical expressions of development go much beyond the par-
ticular form observed in the so-called ‘developed’ countries. Here is the exact point
where the dichotomy developed/underdeveloped is dissolved by Trotsky’s insight.
No wonder uneven and combined development cannot account for ‘non-devel-
opment’ or ‘de-development’ (Teschke 2014, p. 33). When uneven and combined
development is brought to its full consequences, it becomes clear that there are no
such things. The negation of absolute forms of development logically implies the
negation of absolute forms of ‘non-development’. Instead, a radically perspectived
notion of development admits variegated forms of development, involving gains
and losses for different social groups. What appears as development from one per-
spective is actually underdevelopment from another—just like the top of the stairs

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941Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

in Escher’s picture may be in different places, depending on who is taken as a
reference.

It shall now be clear that Blaney and Tickner underestimate the role of multi-
plicity in uneven and combined development. Since unevenness is inscribed in the
very definition of development, not only there are potentially many ways to achieve
‘development’, but, much more radically, different peoples and social groups can
create many alternative ‘developments’. In other words, uneven and combined devel-
opment is not about ‘tipping’ the ladder of development (Blaney and Tickner 2017a,
p. 74)—rather, it is about imagining multiple, non-converging stairs, as represented
in Escher’s ‘Relativity’.

The mind-boggling vision of the totality depicted by the artist—inaccessible to
any of the people actually represented in the picture—can be taken as a glimpse into
the ‘pluriverse’ evoked by Blaney and Tickner as an alternative to the universe of
colonial modernity (Blaney and Tickner 2017a, b). As noticed by Rosenberg (2017),
the very fact that Blaney and Tickner refer to the pluriverse in the singular—as in
‘a pluriverse’—indicates that some form of unity is still presupposed over the over-
whelming multiplicity of human social existence. Indeed, the stairs of development
are multiple, but they are placed in relation to each other, forming a whole that can
only be intuited through an extraordinary act of imagination. Even though we, con-
crete historical people, with our inevitable positionalities, can never fully access the
totality of the pluriverse, imagining it is paramount if any form of fruitful exchange
between societies and cultures is possible. The concept of uneven and combined
development offers exactly this kind of grand imagination, allowing us to grasp
‘the human world as simultaneously multiple and yet—by virtue of its interconnec-
tions—making up a single whole’ (Rosenberg 2017, p. 98).

In as much as all development is uneven and combined, the very rise of capitalist
modernity must be understood as an expression of uneven and combined develop-
ment. The mammoth challenge of rewriting the history of the rise of the West from
an uneven and combined perspective was recently met by Anievas and Nisancio-
glu in their landmark book How the West Came to Rule (2015). As an alternative
to Wallerstein’s world-system analysis and Brenner’s political Marxist thesis, the
authors reclaim the agency of extra-European sources of the breakthrough of capi-
talism in Western Europe and the subsequent ‘Great Divergence’ between the West
and the rest of the world. Anievas and Nisancioglu’s book is an outstanding example
of how the concept of uneven and combined development can be used fruitfully to
inform historical narratives that empty the clear-cut dichotomy of development and
backwardness. As the authors show, the developmental trajectory of each society—
both in the centre and in the periphery—can be analysed in terms of their relations
with other societies, always resulting in mixed and amalgamated social formations.

In a nutshell, the contemporary formulation of the concept of uneven and com-
bined development offers a useful alternative to unidirectional views of develop-
ment, calling into question the dichotomy developed/underdeveloped. Instead of a
linear, stagiest and Eurocentric perspective of development—which impels global
South countries to emulate the capitalist institutions of the global North in the hope
of one day becoming ‘developed’—we can devise a concept of development capable
of apprehending differentiated social change within and across societies.

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942 F. Antunes de Oliveira

As in Escher’s ‘Relativity’, the first step to making sense of the seemingly con-
tradictory global picture of development is embracing a perspective. The working
and the ruling classes—to mention only one of the most visible opposed material
perspectives—see the top of the stairway in quite different places. The real challenge
for oppressed people—be their oppression defined in terms of class, race, gender,
nationality or any other form—is, therefore, not reaching the top of the stairs per
se, as if development were unproblematically defined. The challenge is reaching the
top of the stairs according to a self-defined perspective. Hence, the radically per-
spectived view that emerges from the concept of uneven and combined development
allows for different struggles for emancipation to also claim the character of strug-
gles for development.

The original example of a successful struggle informed by an uneven and com-
bined perspective of development has just completed hundred years. During the
Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks refused the guidance of the
weak national bourgeoisie, took into their own hands the leadership of the move-
ment and accomplished a thoughtful transformation of the Russian state (Trotsky
1932/2008). Anti-colonial uprisings reveal a similar refusal to abide by the guidance
of top-down views of development imposed by colonialist countries and the interna-
tional bureaucracy of development agencies. ‘Come, comrades, the European game
is finally over,’ wrote Franz Fanon. ‘We can do anything today provided we do not
ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching-up with Europe.’ (Fanon
2004, p. 236). For Fanon’s empowering call of emancipation to make sense, differ-
entiated developmental trajectories must be possible.

A contemporary example of the potential of radically perspectived views of
development to inform emancipatory social struggles from below can be found in
the new political discourse emerging within the post-developmentalist left in Bra-
zil (Antunes de Oliveira 2018). Refusing the classical developmentalist conflation
between growth and development, the real priorities of historically oppressed social
groups are brought to the centre of the political priorities. Guilherme Boulos, the
young leader of the homeless workers movement puts it clearly in a recent interview:

The development model cannot aim only at economic growth. Some people
believe that making the GDP grow by 5% a year is the solution for all prob-
lems. It is not like that. The period when Brazil had the highest economic
growth rates in its recent history—in the last 50 years—was the economic
miracle of the military dictatorship. It was a period of deep income concentra-
tion, of environmental degradation, of bulldozing indigenous and quilombola
[slave-descendant] populations. This is not the model that we want. We want
growth with income distribution, environmental sustainability, and respect to
our peoples (Boulos 2018).

Instead of a denial of development, this political statement explicitly calls into
question the established economic development wisdom and reframes development
according to the perspective of specific social groups. The concept of uneven and
combined development represents the theoretical and ontological expression of
insurgent, bottom-up development discourses such as these.

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943Development for whom? Beyond the developed/underdeveloped…

Conclusion: development beyond the developed/underdeveloped
dichotomy

Across the global South, the political consequences of development strategies based
on simplistic, linear concept of development are ever renewed calls for sacrifices
directed towards oppressed social groups. Low salaries, long working days, poor
social protection, job insecurity and even violent, direct instances of dispossession
are justified as transient side-effects of capitalist modernity. Guaranteeing favourable
conditions for capital accumulation is considered paramount to development. The
sacrifices of today will pay off when development finally arrives, development econ-
omists say. Unfortunately, they forget to specify for whom this development will be.
The other side of the same coin are unsatisfactory historical narratives of develop-
ment trajectories, which always blame transient and circumstantial events for the
permanent underachievement of peripheral countries.

In this article, I have argued that it is possible to imagine alternative concepts of
development. Dependency theories have represented the world capitalist system as a
mosaic where nations mutually determine their development possibilities. As a con-
sequence, the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries is expected to
be permanently reproduced. Although insightful as a critique to mainstream devel-
opment theories, this perspective has limited explanatory and horizons, failing to
account for cases of material transformation within capitalism and to inform strug-
gles against concrete cases of exploitation.

The recent reframing of Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development
opens up promising new ways to analyse historical cases of development, leading
to new forms of intervention in social disputes. Because development is never even,
the very direction of development—involving the definition of specific develop-
ment goals—is open to contestation from below. The powerful banner of develop-
ment—for too long monopolised by national modernising elites—can finally be
democratised.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the participants of the Cornell-Sussex Development Workshop
for comments on an early version of this paper. I offer my special thanks to Dr Louise Wise and Profes-
sors Justin Rosenberg, Ben Selwyn and Fouad Makki.

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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is a Research Associate at the University of Sussex. His previous publications
appeared in The Monthly Review, Globalizations and Latin American Perspectives. Although he is a Bra-
zilian Civil Servant, his views do not reflect the official position of the Brazilian Government.

https://doi.org/10.2307/3539682

https://doi.org/10.2307/1884513

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4932.1956.tb00434.x

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https://doi.org/10.2307/223344

Development for whom? Beyond the developedunderdeveloped dichotomy

Abstract
Development for whom?
Flying geese and sinking fishes: stagiest views of development
The mosaic of the word development—dependency theories revisited
Where is the top of the stairway? Uneven and combined development
Conclusion: development beyond the developedunderdeveloped dichotomy
Acknowledgements
References

WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND

GLOBALIZATION: AN INTERNATIONAL
PERSPECTIVE (2004)

Despite a systematic attempt by colonial powers to destroy female sys-tems of farming, across the planet, women today constitute the bulk of
agricultural workers and are in the forefront of the struggle for a noncapi-
talist use of natural resources (land, forests, waters). Defending subsis-
tence agriculture, communal access to land, and opposing land expropria-
tion, women internationally are building the way to a new nonexploitative
society, one in which the threat of famines and ecological devastation will
be dispelled.

How can we ever get out of poverty if we can’t get a piece of land
to work? If we had land to plant, we wouldn’t need to get food
sent to us all the way from the United States. No. We’d have our
own. But as long as the government refuses to give us the land
and other resources we need, we’ll continue to have foreigners
running our country. —Elvia Alvarado1

Women Keep the World Alive
Until recently, issues relating to land and land struggles would have failed
to generate much interest among most North Americans, unless they
were farmers or descendants of the American Indians for whom the im-
portance of land as the foundation of life is still paramount, culturally at
least. For many land issues seemed to have receded to a vanishing past.

127WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

In the aftermath of massive urbanization, land no longer appeared to be
the fundamental means of reproduction, and new industrial technolo-
gies claimed to provide the power, self-reliance, and creativity that people
once associated with self-provisioning and small-scale farming.

This has been a great loss, if only because this amnesia has created
a world where the most basic questions about our existence—where our
food comes from, whether it nourishes us or instead, poisons our bod-
ies—remain unanswered and often unasked. This indifference to land
among urban dwellers is coming to an end, however. Concern for the
genetic engineering of agricultural crops and the ecological impact of the
destruction of the tropical forests, together with the example offered by
the struggles of indigenous people, such as the Zapatistas who have risen
up in arms to oppose land privatization, have created a new awareness in
Europe and North America about the importance of the “land question,”
not long ago still identified as a “Third World” issue.

As a result of this conceptual shift it is now recognized that land is
not a largely irrelevant “factor of production” in modern capitalism. Land
is the material basis for women’s subsistence work, which is the main
source of “food security” for millions of people across the planet. Against
this background, I look at the struggles that women are making world-
wide not only to reappropriate land, but to boost subsistence farming and
a noncommercial use of natural resources. These efforts are extremely
important not only because thanks to them billions of people are able to
survive, but because they point to the changes that we have to make if we
are to construct a society where reproducing ourselves does not comes at
the expense of other people nor presents a threat to the continuation of
life on the planet.

Women and Land: A Historical Perspective
It is an undisputed fact but one difficult to measure that in rural as well
as urban areas, women are the subsistence farmers of the planet. That is,
women produce the bulk of the food that is consumed by their families
(immediate or extended) or is sold at the local markets for consumption,
especially in Africa and Asia where the bulk of the world population lives.

Subsistence farming is difficult to measure because, for the most
part, it is unwaged work and often is not done on a formal farm. Moreover,
many of the women who do it do not describe it as work. This parallels
another well-known economic fact: the number of house-workers and
the value of their work are hard to measure. Given the capitalist bias to-
ward production for the market, housework is not counted as work, and
is still not considered by many as “real work.”

128 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

International agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Association
(FAO), the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the United
Nations have often ignored the difficulties presented by the measurement
of subsistence work. But they have recognized that much depends on what
definition is used. They have noted, for instance, that “in Bangladesh,
[the] labour force participation of women was 10 percent according to the
Labour Force Survey of 1985–86. But when, in 1989, the Labour Force
Survey included in the questionnaire specific activities such as threshing,
food processing and poultry rearing the economic activity rate went up
to 63 percent.”2

It is not easy, then, to precisely assess, on the basis of the statis-
tics available, how many people, and women in particular, are involved
in subsistence farming; but it is clear that it is a substantial number. In
sub-Saharan Africa, for example, according to the Food and Agriculture
Organization, “women produce up to 80 percent of all the basic food-
stuffs for household consumption and for sale.”3 Given that the popula-
tion of sub-Saharan Africa is about three-quarters of a billion people,
with a large percentage of them being children, this means that more than
a hundred million African women must be subsistence farmers.4 As the
feminist slogan goes: “women hold up more than half the sky.”

We should recognize that the persistence of subsistence farming
is an astounding fact considering that capitalist development has been
premised on the separation of agricultural producers, women in particu-
lar, from the land. It can only be explained on the basis of a tremendous
struggle women have made to resist the commercialization of agriculture.

Evidence for this struggle is found throughout the history of colo-
nization, from the Andes to Africa. In response to land expropriation
by the Spaniards (assisted by local chiefs), women in Mexico and Peru
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ran to the mountains, rallied
the population to resist the foreign invaders, and became the staunch-
est defenders of the old cultures and religions, which were centered on
the worship of nature-gods.5 Later, in the nineteenth century, in Africa
and Asia, women defended the traditional female farming systems from
the systematic attempts that the European colonialists made to dismantle
them and to redefine agricultural work as a male job.

As Ester Boserup (among others) has shown with reference to West
Africa, not only did colonial officers, missionaries, and later agricultural
developers impose commercial crops at the expense of food production,
but they excluded African women, who did most of the farming, from the
study of modern farming systems and technical assistance. They invari-
ably privileged men with regard to land assignment, even when absent

129WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

from their homes.6 Thus, in addition to eroding women’s “traditional”
rights as participants in communal land systems and independent cul-
tivators, colonialists and developers alike introduced new divisions be-
tween women and men. They imposed a new sexual division of labor,
based upon women’s subordination to men, which, in the colonialists’
schemes, included unpaid cooperation with their husbands in the cultiva-
tion of cash crops.

Women, however, did not accept this deterioration in their social
position without protest. In colonial Africa whenever they feared that
the government might sell their land or appropriate their crops, they re-
volted. Exemplary was the protest that women mounted against the co-
lonial authorities in Kedjom Keku and Kedjom Ketinguh (northwestern
Cameroon, then under British rule) in 1958. Angered by rumors claim-
ing that the government was going to put their land up for sale, seven
thousand women repeatedly marched to Bamenda, the provincial capi-
tal at the time, and in their longest stay camped for two weeks outside
the British colonial administrative buildings, “singing loudly and making
their rumbustious presence felt.”7

In the same region, women fought against the destruction of their
subsistence farms by foraging cattle owned by members of the local male
elite or by nomadic Fulani to whom the colonial authorities had granted
seasonal pasturage rights expecting to collect a herd tax. In this case too,
the women’s boisterous protest defeated the plan, forcing the authorities
to sanction the offending pasturalists. As Susan Diduk writes,

In the protests women perceived themselves as fighting for the
survival and subsistence needs of family and kin. Their agri-
cultural labor was and continues to be indispensable to daily
food production. Kedjom men also emphasize the importance
of these roles in the past and present. Today they are frequently
heard to say, “Don’t women suffer for farming and for carrying
children for nine months? Yes, they do good for the country.”8

There were many similar struggles, in the 1940s and 1950s,
throughout Africa, by women resisting the introduction of cash crops
and the extra work it imposed on them, which took them away from
their subsistence farming. The power of women’s subsistence farming,
from the viewpoint of the survival of the colonized communities, can
be seen from the contribution it made to the anticolonial struggle, in
particular to the maintenance of liberation fighters in the bush (e.g., in
Algeria, Kenya, and Mozambique).9 In the postindependence period as

130 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

well, women fought against being recruited in agricultural development
projects as unpaid “helpers” of their husbands. The best example of this
resistance is the intense struggle they made in the Senegambia against
cooperation in the commercial cultivation of rice crops, which came at the
expense of their subsistence food production.10

It is because of these struggles—which are now recognized as the
main reason for the failure of the agricultural development projects of the
1960s and 1970s—that a sizable subsistence sector has survived in many
regions of the world, despite the commitment of pre- and postindepen-
dence governments to “economic development” along capitalist lines.11

The determination of millions of women in Africa, Asia, and the
Americas to not abandon subsistence farming must be emphasized to coun-
ter the tendency, common even among radical social scientists, to interpret
the survival of female subsistence agriculture as a function of international
capital’s need to both cheapen the cost of the reproduction of labor and
“liberate” male workers for the cultivation of cash crops and other kinds
of waged work. Claude Meillassoux, a Marxist proponent of this theory,
has argued that female subsistence-oriented production, or the “domestic
economy” as he calls it, has served to ensure a supply of cheap workers for
the capitalist sector at home and abroad and, as such, it has subsidized capi-
talist accumulation.12 As his argument goes, thanks to the work of the “vil-
lage,” the laborers who migrated to Paris or Johannesburg provided a “free”
commodity for the capitalists who hired them; since employers neither had
to pay for their upbringing nor had to support them with unemployment
benefits when they no longer needed their work.

From this perspective, women’s labor in subsistence farming is a
bonus for governments, companies, and development agencies, enabling
them to more effectively exploit wage labor and obtain a constant trans-
fer of wealth from the rural to the urban areas, in effect degrading the
quality of female farmers’ lives.13 To his credit, Meillassoux acknowledges
the efforts made by international agencies and governments to “under-
develop” the subsistence sector. He sees the constant draining of its re-
sources, and recognizes the precarious nature of this form of labor-repro-
duction, anticipating that it may soon undergo a decisive crisis.14 But he
too fails to see the struggle underlining the survival of subsistence work
and its continuing importance, despite the attack waged upon it, from
the viewpoint of the community’s capacity to resist the encroachment of
capitalist relations.

As for liberal economists—their view of “subsistence work” com-
pletely degrades it to the level of “uneconomic,” “unproductive” activ-
ity, in the same way as liberal economics refuses to see women’s unpaid

131WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

domestic labor in the home as work. Thus, liberal economists, even when
appearing to take a feminist stand, propose, as an alternative, “income
generating projects,” the universal remedy to poverty and presumably the
key to women’s emancipation in the neoliberal era.15

What these different perspectives ignore is the strategic impor-
tance that access to land has had for women and their communities, de-
spite the ability of companies and governments to use it at times for their
own ends. An analogy can be made here with the situation that prevailed
in some islands of the Caribbean (for example, Jamaica) during slavery,
when plantation owners gave the slaves plots of land (“provision grounds”)
to cultivate for their own support. The owners took this measure to save
on their food imports and reduce the cost of reproducing their work-
ers. But this strategy had advantages for the slaves as well, giving them
a higher degree of mobility and independence such that—according to
some historians—even before emancipation, in some islands, a proto-
peasantry had formed with a remarkable degree of freedom of movement,
already deriving some income from the sale of its own products.16

Extending this analogy to illustrate the postcolonial capitalist use
of subsistence labor we can say that subsistence agriculture has been an
important means of support for billions of workers, giving wage laborers
the possibility to contract better conditions of work and survive labor
strikes and political protests, so that in several countries the wage sector
has acquired an importance disproportionate to its small numerical size.17

The “village”—a metaphor for subsistence farming in a communal
setting—has also been a crucial site for women’s struggle, providing a base
from which to reclaim the wealth the state and capital was removing from
it. It is a struggle that has taken many forms, often as much directed against
men as against governments, but always strengthened by the fact that women
had direct access to land and, in this way, they could support themselves and
their children and gain some extra cash through the sale of their surplus
product. Thus, even after they became urbanized, women continued to culti-
vate any patch of land they could gain access to, in order to feed their families
and maintain a certain degree of autonomy from the market.18

To what extent the village has been a source of power for female
and male workers across the former colonial world can be measured
by the radical attack that, since the early 1980s through the 1990s, the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World
Trade Organization (WTO) have waged against it under the guise of
structural adjustment and “globalization.”19

The World Bank has made the destruction of subsistence agricul-
ture and the promotion of land commercialization the centerpiece of its

132 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

ubiquitous structural adjustment programs.20 In the late 1980s and 1990s,
not only has land been fenced off, but “cheap” (i.e., subsidized) import-
ed food from Europe and North America has flooded the now liberal-
ized economies of Africa and Asia (which are not allowed to subsidize
their farmers), further displacing women farmers from the local markets.
Meanwhile, large tracts of once communal land have been taken over by
agribusiness companies and devoted to cultivation for export. Finally, war
and famine have terrorized millions into flight from their homelands.

What has followed has been a major reproduction crisis of a type
and proportions not seen even in the colonial period. Even in regions
once famous for their agricultural productivity, like Southern Nigeria,
food is now scarce or too expensive to be within reach of the average
person who, in the wake of structural adjustment, has to simultaneously
contend with price hikes, frozen wages, devalued currency, widespread
unemployment and cuts in social services.21

Here is where the importance of women’s struggles for land stands
out. Women have been the main buffer for the world proletariat against
starvation under the World Bank’s neoliberal regime. They have been
the main opponents of the neoliberal demand that “market prices” de-
termine who should live and who should die, and they are the ones
who have provided a practical model for the reproduction of life in a
noncommercial way.

Struggles for Subsistence and against “Globalization”
in Africa, Asia, and the Americas
Faced with a renewed drive toward land privatization, the extension of
cash crops, and the rise in food prices in the age of globalization, women
have resorted to many strategies pitting them against the most powerful
institutions on the planet.

The primary strategy women have adopted to defend their com-
munities from the impact of economic adjustment and dependence on
the global market has been the expansion of subsistence farming also in
the urban centers. Exemplary is the case of Guinea Bissau, where since
the early 1980s, women have planted small gardens with vegetables, cas-
sava, and fruit trees around most houses in the capital city of Bissau and
other towns, in time of scarcity preferring to forfeit the earnings they
might have made selling their produce in order to ensure that their fami-
lies would not go without food.22 Still with reference to Africa, Christa
Wichterich notes that in the 1990s women subsistence farming and ur-
ban gardening (“cooking pot economics”) was revived in many cities, the
urban farmers being mostly women from the lower class:

133WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

There were onions and papaya trees, instead of flower-borders,
in front of the housing estates of underpaid civil servants in
Dar-es-Salaam; chickens and banana plants in the backyards
of Lusaka; vegetables on the wide central reservations of the
arterial roads of Kampala, and especially of Kinshasa, where the
food supply system had largely collapsed. . . . In [Kenyan] towns
[too] . . . green roadside strips, front gardens and wasteland sites
were immediately occupied with maize, plants, sukum wiki, the
most popular type of cabbage.23

To expand food production, however, women have had to expand
their access to land, which the international agencies’ drives to create land
markets have jeopardized. In order to have land to farm other women
have preferred to remain in the rural area, while most men have migrated,
with the result that there has been a “feminization of the villages,” many
now consisting of women farming alone or in women’s coops.”24

Regaining or expanding land for subsistence farming has been one
of the main battles also for rural women in Bangladesh, leading to the
formation of the Landless Women Association that has been carrying
on land occupations since 1992. During this period, the Association has
managed to settle fifty thousand families, often confronting landowners
in pitched confrontations. According to Shamsun Nahar Khan Doli, a
leader of the Association to whom I owe this information, many oc-
cupations are on “chars,” low-lying islands formed by soil deposits in the
middle of a river.25 Such new lands should be allocated to landless farm-
ers, according to Bangladeshi law, but because of the growing commercial
value of land, big landowners have increasingly seized them; however
women have organized to stop them, defending themselves with brooms,
spears of bamboo, and even knives. They have also set up alarm systems,
to alert other women when boats with the landowners or their goons
approach, so they can push the attackers off or stop them from landing.

Similar land struggles are being fought in South America. In
Paraguay, the Peasant Women’s Commission (CMC) was formed in
1985 in alliance with the Paraguayan Peasant’s Movement (MCP) to
demand land distribution.26 As Jo Fischer points out, the CMC was the
first peasant women’s movement that went to the streets in support of its
demands, and incorporated in its program women’s concerns, also con-
demning “their double oppression, as both peasants and as women.”27

The turning point for the CMC came when the government
granted large tracts of land to the peasant movement in the forests close
to the Brazilian border. The women took these grants as an opportunity

134 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

to organize a model community, joining together to collectively farm
their strips of land. As Geraldina, an early founder of CMC pointed out,

We work all the time, more now than ever before, but we’ve also
changed the way we work. We’re experimenting with commu-
nal work to see if it gives us more time for other things. It also
gives us a chance to share our experiences and worries. This is a
very different way of living for us. Before, we didn’t even know
our neighbors.28

Women’s land struggles have included the defense of communities
threatened by commercial housing projects constructed in the name of “ur-
ban development.” “Housing” has historically involved the loss of “land”
for food production. An example of resistance to this trend is the struggle
of women in the Kawaala neighborhood of Kampala (Uganda) where the
World Bank, in conjunction with the Kampala City Council (KCC), in
1992–1993, sponsored a large housing project that would destroy much
subsistence farmland around or near people’s homes. Not surprisingly, it
was women who most strenuously organized against it, through the forma-
tion of an Abataka (Residents) Committee, eventually forcing the Bank to
withdraw from the project. According to one of the women leaders:

While men were shying away, women were able to say anything
in public meetings in front of government officials. Women were
more vocal because they were directly affected. It is very hard for
women to stand without any means of income . . . most of these
women are people who basically support their children and without
any income and food they cannot do it. . . . You come and take their
peace and income and they are going to fight, not because they
want to, but because they have been oppressed and suppressed.29

Aili Mari Tripp points out that the situation in the Kawaala neigh-
borhood is far from unique.30 Similar struggles have been reported from
different parts of Africa and Asia, where peasant women’s organizations
have opposed the development of industrial zones threatening to displace
them and their families and contaminate the environment.

Industrial or commercial housing development often clashes with
women’s subsistence farming, in a context in which more and more women
even in urban centers are gardening (in Kampala women grow 45 percent
of the food for their families). It is important to add that in defending land
from the assault by commercial interests and affirming the principle that

135WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

“land and life are not for sale,” women again, as in the past against colonial
invasion, are defending their peoples’ history and their culture. In the case
of Kawaala, the majority of residents on the disputed land had been living
there for generations and had buried there their kin—for many in Uganda
the ultimate evidence of land ownership. Tripp’s reflections on this land
struggle are pertinent to my discussion so far:

Stepping back from the events of the conflict, it becomes evident
that the residents, especially the women involved, were trying to
institutionalize some new norms for community mobilization,
not just in Kawaala but more widely in providing a model for
other community projects. They had a vision of a more collab-
orative effort that took the needs of women, widows, children,
and the elderly as a starting point and recognized their depen-
dence on the land for survival.31

Two more developments need to be mentioned in conjunction with
women’s defense of subsistence production. First, there has been the for-
mation of regional systems of self-sufficiency aiming to guarantee “food
security” and maintain an economy based on solidarity and the refusal of
competition. The most impressive example in this respect comes from
India where women formed the National Alliance for Women’s Food
Rights, a national movement made of thirty-five women’s groups. One
of the main efforts of the Alliance has been the campaign in defense
of the mustard seed economy that is crucial for many rural and urban
women in India. A subsistence crop, the seed has been threatened by
the attempts of multinational corporations based in the United States to
impose genetically engineered soybeans as a source of cooking oil.32 In
response, the Alliance has built “direct producer-consumer alliances” in
order to “defend the livelihood of farmers and the diverse cultural choices
of consumers,” as stated by Vandana Shiva (2000), one of the leaders of
the movement. In her words: “We protest soybean imports and call for
a ban on the import of genetically engineered soybean products. As the
women from the slums of Delhi sing, “Sarson Bachao, Soya Bhagaa,” or,
“Save the Mustard, Dump the Soya.”33

Second, across the world, women have been leading the struggle
to prevent commercial logging and save or rebuild forests, which are the
foundation of people’s subsistence economies, providing nourishment as
well as fuel, medicine, and communal relations. Forests, Vandana Shiva
writes, echoing testimonies coming from every part of the planet, are
“the highest expression of earth’s fertility and productivity.”34 Thus, when

136 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

forests come under assault it is a death sentence for the tribal people
who live in them, especially the women. Therefore, women do every-
thing to stop the loggers. Shiva often cites, in this context, the Chikpo
movement—a movement of women, in Garhwal, in the foothills of the
Himalayas who, beginning in the early 1970s, started to embrace the trees
destined to fall and put their bodies between them and the saws when
the loggers come.35 While women in Garhwal have mobilized to prevent
forests from being cut down, in villages of Northern Thailand they have
protested the Eucalyptus plantations forcibly planted on their expropri-
ated farms by a Japanese paper-making company with the support of the
Thai military government.36 In Africa, an important initiative has been
the “Green Belt Movement,” which under the leadership of Wangari
Maathai has been committed to planting a green belt around the major
cities and, since 1977, has planted tens of millions of trees to prevent de-
forestation, soil loss, desertification, and fuel-wood scarcity.37

But the most striking struggle for the survival of the forests has tak-
en place in the Niger Delta, where the mangrove tree swamps are being
threatened by oil production. Opposition to it has mounted for twenty
years, beginning in Ogharefe, in 1984, when several thousand women from
the area laid siege to Pan Ocean’s Production Station demanding com-
pensation for the destruction of the water, trees, and land. To show their
determination, the women also threatened to disrobe themselves should
their demands be ignored—a threat they put in action when the company’s
director arrived, so that he found himself surrounded by thousands of na-
ked women, a serious curse in the eyes of the Niger Delta communities,
which convinced him at the time to accept the reparation claims.38

The struggle over land has also grown since the 1970s in the most
unlikely place—New York City—in the form of an urban gardening move-
ment. It began with the initiative of a women-led group called the “Green
Guerrillas,” who began cleaning up vacant lots in the Lower East Side. By
the 1990s, eight hundred and fifty urban gardens had developed in the city
and dozens of community coalitions had formed, such as the Greening of
Harlem Coalition that was begun by a group of women who wanted “to re-
connect with the earth and give children an alternative to the streets.” Now
it counts more than twenty-one organizations and thirty garden projects.39

It is important to note here that the gardens have been not only a
source of vegetables and flowers, but have served to promote community-
building and have been a stepping stone for other community struggles
like squatting and homesteading. Because of this work, the gardens came
under attack during Mayor Giuliani’s regime, and for some years now one
of the main challenges this movement has faced has been stopping the

137WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION

bulldozers. One hundred gardens have been lost to “development” over
the last decade, more than forty have been slated for bulldozing, and the
prospects for the future seem gloomy.40 Since his appointment, in fact,
the current mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, like his prede-
cessor, has declared war on these gardens.

The Importance of the Struggle
As we have seen, in cities across the world, at least a quarter of the inhab-
itants depend on food produced by women’s subsistence labor. In Africa,
for example, a quarter of the people living in towns say they could not
survive without subsistence food production. This is confirmed by the
UN Population Fund, which claims that “some two hundred million city
dwellers are growing food, providing about one billion people with at
least part of their food supply.”41 When we consider that the bulk of
the food subsistence producers are women we can see why the men of
Kedjom, Cameroon, would say, “Yes, women subsistence farmers do good
for humanity.” Thanks to them, the billions of people, rural and urban,
who earn one or two dollars a day do not go under, even in time of eco-
nomic crisis.

Women’s subsistence production counters the trend by agribusi-
ness to reduce cropland—one of the main causes of high food prices and
starvation—while also ensuring some control over the quality of the food
produced and protecting consumers against the genetic manipulation of
crops and poisoning by pesticides. Further, women subsistence produc-
tion represents a safe way of farming, a crucial consideration at a time
when the effects of pesticides on agricultural crops are causing high rates
of mortality and disease among peasants across the world, starting with
women.42 Thus, subsistence farming gives women an essential means of
control over their health and the health and lives of their families.43

We can also see that subsistence production is contributing to a
noncompetitive, solidarity-centered mode of life that is crucial for the
building of a new society. It is the seed of what Veronika Bennholdt-
Thomsen and Maria Mies call the “other” economy, which “puts life and
everything necessary to produce and maintain life on this planet at the
center of economic and social activity” against “the never-ending accu-
mulation of dead money.”44

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Theory and practice of labour-centred
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Benjamin Selwyn

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Theory and practice of labour-centred development

Benjamin Selwyn

School of Global Studies, university of Sussex, Brighton, uK

Introduction

This article advances new ways of thinking about human development. An earlier article
identified the way elite development theories (EDTs) – including neoliberal, statist and some
Marxist theories – conceive of ‘the poor’ (including labouring classes) as human inputs into or
at best as junior partners within elite-led development processes.1 A foundational assump-
tion shared by EDTs is that the poor cannot achieve their own amelioration and that they
must (be forced to) acquiesce to superordinate agents’ conceptions of and strategies for
achieving their development. This elitism (re)frames the poor as passive beneficiaries of elite
policy and legitimates their economic exploitation and political repression. The essential
paradox of EDT and its practice is that it oppresses and exploits labouring classes for the
ostensible benefit of those labouring classes.

Against EDT, this article argues for an alternative paradigm of development thinking and
practice that allocates primary agency to labouring classes. Such a paradigm shift requires
an enquiry into, investigation of and an attempt to theorise how collective actions by labour-
ing classes can generate developmental improvements for themselves and their commu-
nities.2 Following this introduction section two provides the theoretical foundations for the
concept of labour-centred development (LCD). It roots LCD in Marx’s identification of the
political economy of the working class. Section three provides contemporary examples of
LCD. These range across economic sectors (industry and agriculture) and vary to the extent
of the (in)formality of the labouring classes involved. They illustrate how collective actions

ABSTRACT
This article outlines the theory and practice of labour-centred
development (LCD). Much development thinking is elitist, positing
states and corporations as primary agents in the development
process. This article argues, by contrast, that collective actions by
labouring classes can generate tangible developmental gains and
therefore that, under certain circumstances, they can be considered
primary development actors. Examples of LCD discussed here include
shack-dwellers’ movements in South Africa, the landless labourers’
movement in Brazil, unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina
and large-scale collective actions by formal sector workers across East
Asia. The article also considers future prospects for LCD.

KEYWORDS
labour-centred development
labouring classes
Brazil
argentina
east asia
South africa

ARTICLE HISTORY
received 6 october 2015
accepted 8 February 2016

CONTACT Benjamin Selwyn b.selwyn@sussex.ac.uk

mailto:b.selwyn@sussex.ac.uk

1036 B. SELwyn

can generate immediate material improvements in the livelihoods of the participants and
their communities, and novel organisational and collective resources. The fourth section
concludes by discussing the extent to which LCD is a minority phenomenon and prospects
for its expansion in the future.

The term ‘labouring classes’ here refers to ‘the growing numbers…who now depend –directly
and indirectly – on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction’.3 The global
labouring class includes formal, informal and unemployed workers across economic sectors. The
global expansion and reproduction of capitalism simultaneously increases the direct wage-labour
force (employed workers) and the reserve army of labour (unemployed workers).4

Large labouring classes exist in the rural sector as rural wage labourers and unemployed
workers, and as disguised workers within peasantries.5 The definition of labouring class used
here illuminates workers’ incorporation into and dependence upon the labour market for
their social reproduction and the forms of employment and work undertaken following the
sale or non-sale of their labour power.

Before continuing, two caveats are warranted. This article provides a few cases of LCD.
Other cases exist, historically and contemporarily, and future scholarship will illuminate
them. This is not an exercise in comparative analysis – the following cases are illustrated in
order to outline the concept of LCD, rather than to assess the relative strengths, weaknesses,
gains and losses of each case.6 The article represents, then, a statement of first principles.

The political economy of labour and the theory of labour-centred
development7

In most economic theory capital is understood in relatively simple terms – as stocks of money
and assets.8 The conception of capital adopted here is of wealth derived from the exploita-
tion of labour by capitalists, which is then reinvested to reproduce labour exploitation and
extend wealth accumulation. Capital is therefore a fundamentally social relation out of which
a particular form of wealth is created.9

EDT understands the process of development from the perspective of capital. It views
capital’s needs (of accumulation, enhanced competitiveness) and its ability to systematically
appropriate workers’ unpaid labour as the basis for achieving human development. It also
views labour from the perspective of capital – where labour’s needs (for better conditions and
higher wages) are achieved on the basis of first securing capital’s needs. EDTs are therefore
forms of trickle-down economics. The roots of EDT’s elitism lie in viewing the world through
the lens of capital and they represent, in one form or another, the political economy of capital.

But this is not the only form of political economy that derives from the analysis of capi-
talist social (class) relations. These class relations generate an alternative political economy
and, deriving from it, alternative understandings of and strategies for achieving human
development. This section introduces the twin theories of the political economy of labour
and LCD. The former was identified by Marx; the latter represents this article’s contribution
to development theory.

The political economy of labour

In his inaugural address to the First International Marx provided two examples of the politi-
cal economy of labour. The first example, the Ten-Hours Act (introduced in England in 1847

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1037

which legally reduced the working day to a maximum of 10 hours), was the first time that
‘in broad daylight the political economy of the [capitalist] class succumbed to the political
economy of the working class’. The second example was the creation of worker-run cooper-
ative factories. The latter were significant because ‘by deed instead of by argument…[such
organisations]…have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests
of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing
a class of hands’. 10 Colin Barker notes that other principles of this political economy include
negating competition between workers (for example, between workers of different ethnicity
or gender), restricting capital’s coercive control in the workplace, maintaining the ‘normal’
working day and reducing the rate of surplus value extraction.11

The political economy of labour does not emerge spontaneously but is generated through
labouring-class collective action and organisation. An objective of the political economy of
capital, however, is to preclude the emergence of the political economy of labour, or at least
to incorporate and neutralise it.

EDT views the relationship between labour and capital as follows:

where K = capital and wL = wage labour. In this schema capital reproduces and expands
itself (accumulates and heightens its competitiveness) through its employment or exploita-
tion of wage labour in order to produce exchange values (goods to sell on the market), and
surplus value (K′), through the institutionalised capture of workers’ unpaid labour. As noted,
the reproduction of a wage labour force entails the simultaneous reproduction of a reserve
army of labour (the unemployed). In what follows therefore the wage labour category refers
to employed and unemployed workers.

From this vantage point any disruption to capital’s employment of wage labour harms
capital’s objectives of accumulation and labour’s objectives of higher wages and better
conditions. A range of strategies designed by capital to discipline labour is therefore theo-
retically and practically justified.

An LCD perspective starts from the opposite side of the capital–wage labour relation,
which it views as follows:

Here workers must sell their labour power to capital in order to earn the wages required
to sustain themselves. From this vantage point it is observable how capital mediates the
reproduction of labouring class needs – by determining whether workers are employed
(and if so under what conditions) or not. However, in this context of mediation the objec-
tives of labour are not simply subsumed under those of capital. They are sought by workers
within and sometimes against the wage-labour relation. workers, whether employed or
unemployed, can act collectively against capital’s attempts to determine the form of their
social reproduction.

These two sets of needs (of capital and of wage-labour) mostly coexist within an institu-
tionally defined context where the needs of the former determine those of the latter. The
existence of the latter means, however, that there is always the possibility that it will, through
collective action, begin to be formulated in ways that reject the primacy of capital and its
determining role in the reproduction of wage labour.

K−WL−K
�
,

WL−K−WL

1038 B. SELwyn

From this perspective the core concerns for LCD analysis are not those of capital (how to
enhance accumulation) but those of labouring classes. These may include: gender and eth-
nic equality (to reduce differential rates of exploitation); provision of material and temporal
resources to secure and ease the social reproduction of labour (for example the provision
of child and crèche care, education, free or cheap food for children at school and beyond);
the attainment of higher wages and better conditions in work; more free time through
shorter working days and more decision-making ability within the workplace to reduce the
burden of work; sufficient time and space to secure the basic necessities of life and to be
able to get to and from work safely; access to the means of production (eg land, factories,
workplaces) and survival (eg water and electricity); adequate housing and nutrition; and
the ability to engage in culturally enhancing activities such as education, socialising and,
most importantly, leisure.12

The core of LCD’s understanding of social wealth is the concept of rich social beings who
identify, meet and expand their own developmental needs. These needs range from the
basic calorific essentials to cultural and social needs generated by an expansion of free time,
and the political activities to secure and expand them. This conception of human needs is
partially inspired by Amartya Sen’s advocacy of development as a process that expands
human freedoms by increasing individuals’ abilities and choices.13 However, LCD’s conception
of human development diverges from Sen’s in three foundational ways. First, it regards the
expansion of human needs from the perspective of labouring classes rather than from that
of abstract individuals. Second, it argues that these expanding needs are achieved through
collective actions by labouring classes, rather than by the state on behalf of ‘the poor’. Third,
contrary to Sen, it does not consider the capitalist market as a sphere of freedom where these
needs can be attained. rather, it views it as a sphere where capital’s needs are naturalised
and labouring classes are ideologically encouraged and materially impelled to subordinate
themselves to, and identify their needs with those of capital, ie to conceive of the fulfilment
of their needs through the K – wL – K′ relation.14

Two political economies and capitalist development

Because EDT denies (or is unable to conceptually comprehend) the potential existence of a
rival political economy to that of capital, it fails to understand how class struggles emerge
from and are constitutive of capitalist development. It portrays labouring class struggles as
products of ‘vested interests’ or as outcomes of mal-development which require contain-
ing by elite policy responses. EDT’s capital-centrism means that it reduces labour power
to an input into the production process. But because labour power is embodied within
workers, EDT conceptually reduces large swathes of humanity to the status of commodity
inputs into production. Such an initial conception of workers explains EDTs’ (political and
perhaps emotional) readiness to justify political repression to contain labouring class
struggles.

LCD’s vantage point enables it to comprehend labour power as something fundamentally
different from that envisioned by EDT. As Michael Lebowitz describes it:

The value of labour-power looks different from the two sides of the capital/wage-labour relation.
Just as for capital it is the cost of an input for the capitalist process of production, for workers it
is the cost of inputs for their own process of production.

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1039

Consequently:
Two different moments of production, two different goals, two different perspectives on the value
of labour-power; while for capital, the value of labour-power is a means of satisfying its goal of
surplus value…for the wage-labourer, it is the means of satisfying the goal of self-development.15

The existence of two potentially rival political economies is constitutive of the capitalist
development process in (at least) two ways. On the one hand, ‘capital does not merely seek
the realisation of its own goal, valorisation; it also must seek to suspend the realisation of
the goals of wage-labour’.16 This denial is observable in EDT’s ideological legitimation and
practical contribution to policies designed to demobilise labouring classes and subject them
to elite direction.17

However, the potential existence of a rival political economy is constitutive of capitalist
development in a second way. workers’ collective gains against capital are won through
‘negating competition, [and] infringing on the “sacred” law of supply and demand and
engaging in “planned co-operation”’.18 Such collective actions, elite responses to them and
the institutional formations that occur subsequently often engender the more progressive
features of capitalist development, such as workers’ rights, welfare provision and various
forms of democracy.

while EDT claims to point to a future characterised by a high and rising level of human
development, the way it views the capital – wage-labour relation (K – wL – K′) illustrates how
for labouring classes that future will be one eternally circumscribed by the needs of capital.
If capital is unable to realise its objectives of accumulation and enhanced competitiveness,
labouring class needs become expendable, hence the continual presence and expansion
of the reserve army of labour. However, as will be discussed below, members of the reserve
army of labour are able to engage in collective actions to enhance their human development
in different ways, though often in conjunction with those pursued by employed workers.

LCD’s view of the capital–wage-labour relation (wL – K – wL) suggests a variety of ways
in which labouring classes can reproduce themselves vis-à-vis capital (including various
forms of control or regulation of capital) and opens the way to enquiring how, and under
what circumstances, labouring classes can reproduce themselves and fulfil (identify, meet,
expand) their human developmental needs beyond capitalist social relations and concep-
tions of wealth.

States and the capital–labour relation

States play a central role in constructing and managing the political and legal structures
within which capital accumulation occurs. These structures constrain workers’ ability to
organise themselves and engage in collective actions through law. Capitalist states work
to naturalise and implement across society the political economy of capital. They establish
institutions and practices and generate ideologies that encourage workers to identify their
needs with the needs of capital. Bob Jessop illuminates the way states engage in building
institutions designed to structure the behaviour of their citizens and social classes, in order to
simultaneously reproduce state power and to guarantee the process of capital accumulation.
‘Institutionalisation involves not only the conduct of agents and their conditions of action,
but also the very constitution of agents, identities, interests and strategies’.19

However, states also respond to labour’s collective actions in ways that individual firms
do not. The production and reproduction of state institutions ‘is incomplete, provisional, and

1040 B. SELwyn

unstable, and…coevolve[s] with a range of other complex emergent phenomena [sic]’.20 State
institutions, ranging from those established to manage the capital–labour relationship (such
as ministries of labour) to their welfare functions, to their democratic forms, can themselves
be understood as outcomes of evolving contested relations between capital and labour.21
States may, in other words, incorporate and institutionalise (usually in order to neutralise)
aspects of the political economy of labour to a degree that individual firms cannot. This
means, however, that moments in state–capital–labour relations emerge in which labouring
class pressure for change is institutionalised in ways to its benefit (before being eroded by
a counter-movement by capital). An important challenge for labouring class organisations,
then, is to retain and defend institutionalised gains, as well as developing new strategies to
extend and deepen them.

Labour-centred development: contemporary examples

This section discusses how labouring class collective actions can extract developmental gains
from states and capital and generate new organisational forms that further enhance their
and their communities’ livelihoods. Cases discussed range from formal to informal sector
and across agriculture and industry (Table 1).

The reserve army in South Africa: Abahlali basemjondolo

Contemporary South Africa is characterised by extreme wealth and mass poverty. Despite
the ending of apartheid and the Black Economic Empowerment initiative established by the
AnC government, poverty continues to be racialised. roughly 47% of the population live
under the poverty line (uS$43 per month in 2013), of whom over 90% are black.22 The num-
bers living on under uS$1 a day doubled – from about two to about four million – between
1994 and 2006. The average rate of unemployment was 26% in 2004, while for black South
Africans the rate more than doubled from 23% to 48% between 1991 and 2002.23

In a context of limited job opportunities mass poverty and limited state provision of basic
human necessities, a shack-dwellers movement – Abahlali baseMjondolo – has emerged
across the country’s shanty-towns. Through collective actions it pressures local government
for resources to meet basic human necessities – in particular housing and sanitation – and
self-generates ‘human resources’ to provide services to its members and wider shanty-town
communities.

Founded in 2005, by 2013 Abahlali had more than 12,000 members across more than 60
shack settlements. The movement emerged from the Kennedy road settlement in Durban,
where in 2005 8000 people shared only five drinking water standpipes.24 Abahlali combines
mass street protests with land occupations to pressure local municipalities and city councils

Table 1. Contemporary labour-centred development: some examples.

Countries Example, sector, formality
South africa abahlali baseMjondolo (informal)
argentina Piquetero’s, unemployed workers movement, recuperated

factory movement (informal to formal)
Brazil agrarian-based Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra

(informal)
South Korea and China industrial wage workers (formal)

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1041

to provide basic services. For example, in 2009 Durban city council agreed to provide drinking
water, electrification and regularly cleaned latrines for 14 settlements, and to provide formal
housing for occupants of three settlements.25

Abahlali operates through direct democracy – where, for example, negotiators with city
councillors and leaders are directly electable and de-selectable, and are subject to scrutiny in
regular mass meetings.26 The movement’s high level of participation has also generated new
human resources – members volunteering to provide services to others and the wider shack
settlement communities. These include provision of crèches, monthly food parcels cooked
and delivered to the destitute, care provision for child-headed households and people with
AIDS, and security and fire patrols at night.27 S’bu Zikode, one of Abahlali’s founder-members,
describes how:

we cannot wait in the mud, shit and fire of shack life for ever. Voting did not work for us. The
political parties did not work for us. Civil society did not work for us. no political party, civil soci-
ety organisation or trade union is inviting us into the cities or into what remains of democracy
in South Africa. we have no choice but to take our own place in the cities and in the political
life of the country.28

Challenges from the informal sector in Brazil: the MST

The Landless Labourers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra, MST)
represents a significant case of LCD in Brazil. Since its foundation in 1984 and the mid-2000s
the MST’s membership grew to over one million. It is composed of former small farmers and
rural wage labourers and their families who are unable to get access to land, and of unem-
ployed workers from urban areas seeking a rural livelihood. The organisation contests the
highly unequal land structure in Brazil, where by 2008 around 3% of the population owned
over 60% of all arable land.29

The MST has pursued a long-term strategy of occupying and cultivating unused land
and claiming land-rights from the state. By the mid-2000s it had gained land-titles for more
than 350,000 families. while it faces repression from the Brazilian state, it has also been able
to work with state agencies to further its cause. The movement has, since its foundation,
had political allies in the national Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian reform (Instituto
nacional de Colonização e reforma Agrária, InCrA), the federal agency responsible for land
reform and registration.30

The MST uses agrarian legislation to justify taking over ‘unproductive’ land. The Brazilian
national constitution of 1988 (article 184) ruled that privately owned land must both be pro-
ductive and fulfil social functions. The latter conditions are met when workers are employed
legally (eg not under conditions of slave labour) and when the environment is preserved
adequately. while these definitions were formulated in intentionally vague terms, in the
context of the transition from dictatorship to democracy at the end of the 1980s, they have
nevertheless provided the MST with ideological justifications for land occupations.

Land occupation serves a double purpose of pressuring the Brazilian state to begin negoti-
ations over its appropriation and redistribution, and establishing the material and ideological
basis for MST settlement communities. Settlements seek to produce their own food and to
sell surpluses, often under brand names, onto local markets.31

The movement rejects a market-based conception of land simply as a commodity to
produce other commodities. As wendy wolford describes, its form of land use derives from

1042 B. SELwyn

a conception of human–natural relations that emphasise work, community and God.32 The
movement is influenced by liberation theology and Paulo Freire’s theory of the pedagogy of
the oppressed.33 Individuals within the movement take on a range of socio-political respon-
sibilities according to the principle that ‘here we are all leaders’.34

The MST aims to transform Brazilian agriculture from its current agro-industrial model
to a more family-farmer-centred form. Key demands include producing food for local and
national consumption rather than export, introducing agro-ecology by eliminating agro-tox-
ins, and job creation in the countryside. As João Pedro Stedile, one of the movement’s founder
members argues, the MST’s struggle for land reform entails the ‘democratisation of land
ownership, access to education at all levels and the development and application of new
agricultural techniques’.35

As one MST member and participant in its land occupations in the early 1990s explained:
Land conquered through the struggle has to be everyone’s. It should not be for an individual.
Land should not be a commodity so people can divide it and sell it. Land is meant to produce.
One has to use it. If one doesn’t, then one should pass it on to someone that will work it.36

while the MST has faced repression from the Brazilian state, and hostility from the media, it
has demonstrated the ability of members of the reserve army of labour to organise collec-
tively and to generate human developmental gains. As Stedile argues, on the settlements
‘people know that their fate is in their hands’.37 The MST has, in turn, influenced other unem-
ployed workers’ movements in Brazil.

In parallel and often in cooperation with the MST, an urban movement has emerged in
Brazil seeking to ameliorate the livelihoods of its members and their communities. Between
1997 and 2005 homeless workers organisations in São Paulo mobilised some 10,000 peo-
ple to occupy and live in empty buildings. The best known of these organisations is the
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Homeless workers Movement, MTST). Just as the
MST organises its members to occupy land, the MTST organises unemployed and informal
sector workers in urban areas to occupy and live in vacant buildings, hence establishing
the basic essentials of a livelihood. In the early 2000s the MTST also began establishing, in
collaboration with the MST, ‘rurban’ (rural–urban) settlements on the peripheries of cities in
which its participants could combine agricultural activities (rearing animals and planting
crops) with the search for urban-based work.38

From informal to formal sector: the Piqueteros, unemployed workers and
recovered factory movements

Since the 1990s Argentina has witnessed multiple economic crises but also the rise of myr-
iad, interconnected forms of LCD. Between 1991 and 1995 the national unemployment rate
increased from 6% to 18%, partially caused by falling competitiveness as the result of an
appreciating Peso.39 Following the 1997 East Asian crisis and the 1998 Brazilian devaluation,
Argentinian economic competitiveness vis-à-vis Brazil fell further and the costs of interna-
tional loans increased (following rising interest rates in Europe and north America). Despite
cutting wages and shedding jobs, Argentinian firms could not regain competitiveness. These
dynamics were magnified by the turn of the century crisis. By 2001 up to 40% of the pop-
ulation were living under the poverty line. According to Chris Harman, the extent of the
economic catastrophe was comparable to that which affected inter-war uSA and Germany.40

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1043

under circumstances of impoverishment and fast-retreating state welfare provision,
increasing numbers of the population began to engage in diverse and interconnected
forms of collective action which, in some cases, coalesced to generate notable bottom-up
developmental dynamics.

The Piquetero movement emerged in the mid-1990s as an organisation of unemployed
workers. The movement sought to wrest concessions from the state through blocking roads
and disrupting the circulation of goods through the economy. Between the mid- to late 1990s
there were tens of such roadblocks a year throughout the country, rising to hundreds in the
crisis year of 2001. The Piqueteros attempted to unite local communities and unemployed
workers to demand from the state job creation, public works to provide essential services,
and their participation in the management of employment programmes previously run by
the central state.41 In 2001 Piquetero collective actions escalated, with over one 100,000
people participating in shutting down over 300 motorways and effectively paralysing the
economy. These actions pressured the Argentine state to provide thousands of minimum
wage temporary jobs and food allowances to local communities.42

The Piquetero movement generated new forms of collective agency and autonomy vis-
à-vis the state. Its actions were orientated simultaneously upwards (towards the state) and
outwards (through its communities). The unemployed workers’ Movement (Movimento de
Trabalhadores Desocupado, uwM) emerged from the Piqueteros in the late 1990s. It con-
tinued the earlier strategy of blocking roads, but also began pressuring the state for more
resources and for the political autonomy to manage those resources across its communities.
The uwM’s community projects include maintaining and repairing schools, hospitals and
other public buildings, construction and running of community soup kitchens, recycling
rubbish, organising volunteers in retirement homes, healthcare provision and visits to the
disabled, establishing small-scale craft production, provision of child-care, milk-provision
in schools, establishment of bakeries, basic education provision and health promotion and
improving sanitation.43 State-funded temporary jobs are distributed by the uwM through
collective decision making and are based on considerations such as families’ needs and their
members’ participation in the uwM.44

One of the regions where the uwM has had its biggest impact is the town of General
Mosconi in the Salta region of north west Argentina. By the early 2000s the movement
had generated numerous community projects to provide food for the unemployed both
within and beyond the uwM.45 These included organic gardens, bakeries, first aid clinics and
water purifying plants. The extent of the uwM’s coordination of the local economy meant,
according to James Petras, that the town was ‘ruled de facto by the local unemployed com-
mittee, as the local municipal offices have been pushed aside’. Furthermore, illustrating the
potential for a self-generating political economy of the labouring class ‘the emergence of a
parallel economy, on a limited scale, in General Mosconi, sustains popular support between
struggles and offers a vision of the capabilities of the unemployed to take command of their
lives, neighbourhoods and livelihoods’.46

A third form of LCD emerged in Argentina in the late 1990s, expanded rapidly in the early
2000s and has maintained itself to the present. The recuperated factory (fábricas recupera-
das) movement responded to the threat of rising mass unemployment by taking over and
running factories that had gone bankrupt or been shut by their owners under conditions
of worsening economic crisis. By the mid-2000s roughly 15,000 workers had taken over and
were self-managing around 200 enterprises across the country, ranging from metallurgical

1044 B. SELwyn

companies to food and meat processing plants, printing companies, hotels and supermar-
kets, and health and educational services.47 The movement collaborated with the Piqueteros
and the uwM in coordinating workplace production with community projects. By 2005 the
movement controlled most of the factories in the country’s southern province of neuquén
and nationally.48

while the fábricas recuperadas are defensive, in that they have maintained workers’
employment, in some cases they have also been able to expand the numbers of jobs in the
factories under their control, and raise productivity. For example, the occupied Zanón tile
factory (in neuquén) underwent a notable transformation under workers’ control:

In October 2001, the workers officially declared the factory to be ‘under workers’ control’. By
March 2002, the factory fully returned to production…During the period of workers’ control,
the number of employees has increased from 300 to 470, and wages have risen by 100 pesos a
month, and the level of production has increased. Accidents have fallen by 90%.49

Tile production grew from 1.07 to 4.31 million square feet per annum between 2005 and
2008.50 In occupied factories an alternative work ethic emerged:

workers defend their own power over the organization of production and the decision-making
process by proudly stressing their freedom from direct/supervisory control, the existence of
egalitarian relations and the benefits of democratic participation.51

In these cases hierarchical power structures have been replaced, or at least modified, by
assemblies where workers meet to discuss and decide questions of factory management,
and management councils which are elected by the assemblies to takes charge of daily
administration, commercial responsibilities and legal representation. new jobs created in
Zanón were initially allocated to members of the uwM in the region. Meyer and Chaves
describe how:

what they [Zanón] do not invest in production, they allocate toward public works serving the
needs of the people. From the beginning the Zanón workers donated tiles to first-aid facilities
in one of the poorest barrios of nequén, as well as to schools and even for the reconstruction
of a hospital in Santa Fe…they also promoted, together with unemployed workers, a program
of public works under the slogan ‘jobs for all’. They make monthly donations to soup kitchens
and hospitals.52

Formal sector mass movements in East Asia

Contemporary statist political economy’s (SPE) analysis of East Asian industrial upgrading
advocates a strong role of the state in generating rapid economic growth and industrial
diversification.53 It also advocates, often explicitly, labour repression as a means of achieving
large economic surpluses.54 It does not consider how labouring class collective actions are
themselves developmentally beneficial for large segments of the population.

In contrast to SPE, however, Dae-Oup Chang details how in South Korea collective actions
by labouring classes rose during the 1980s, and how, consequently, between 1983 and 1986
real wages increased in manufacturing by about 8.95% per annum. From 1987, at the peak
of workers’ mobilisations, real wage increases in manufacturing accelerated: 10.4% in 1987,
16.4% in 1988, 20% in 1989 and 16.8% in 1990. Furthermore ‘working hours decreased from
51.9 per week in 1987 to 47.5 in 1993, without decrease either in the workforce or in [the]
real wage’.55

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1045

Chang also notes, however, that the upward curve of workers’ struggles was met by a
state and employer counter-offensive designed to weaken trade unions and raise the rate
of exploitation (as under the previous dictatorship).

working hours, which had continually shortened since 1986… increased from 207 hours per
month in 1997 to 226 hours per month by late 1999…real wage increases… slowed down,
even showing a 9% real wage decrease in 1998. Increasing competition among workers has
also increased the intensity of labour.56

This attempt to demobilise labour and increase its rage of exploitation was partially achieved
throughout the 1990s by a shift in elite development strategy, away from statism towards
a more recognisably market-orientated form of capital accumulation.57

Comparable dynamics – of labourers’ collective actions attempting to alter the behav-
iour of states and corporations – are observable in contemporary China. From the 1990s
onwards China has been characterised by an intense and highly exploitative labour regime
where workers’ living standards have been squeezed to ensure rising profits for capital.
Consumption as a percentage of Chinese GDP fell from 44% to under 34% between 2002
and 2010.58. China’s one party system leaves little room for dissenting political organisation
or expression. Despite this deadening political and economic regime, however, Chinese
workers have engaged in large-scale collective actions and have been able to defend and
in many cases to ameliorate their conditions.

The number of mass protests across China has risen over the past two decades – from
10,000 incidents involving 730,000 protestors in 1993 to 60,000 incidents involving more
than three million protestors in 2003.59 In 2009 there were more than 90,000 mass inci-
dents across China.60 One consequence of these struggles has been that, as The Economist
(June 29, 2010) reported, ‘a spate of strikes has thrown a spanner into the workshop of
the world’, leading to manufacturing wages increasing by 17% between 2009 and 2010.
Beyond wage increases, Silver and Zhang argue that these protests have made the Chinese
government increasingly fearful of political instability and socio-political breakdown. In
response:

Between 2003 and 2005, the central government and the Chinese Communist Party began to
move away from a single-minded emphasis on attracting foreign capital and fostering economic
growth at all costs to promoting the idea of a ‘new development model’ aimed at reducing ine-
qualities among classes and regions as part of the pursuit of a ‘harmonious society’…Likewise…
the [state run] All-China Federation of Trade unions, amended its constitution to ‘make the
protection of workers’ rights a priority’ in 2003.61

External barriers to LCD: class and state power, market forces and political
incorporation

Gains to labour can be neutralised and/or reversed through counter-movements by organ-
ised capital and the state. Capital’s ability to respond to labouring class demands, through
new strategies of exploitation and accumulation, can undermine labouring class move-
ments. The power of the capitalist market, manifested in never-ending competitive capi-
tal accumulation, exerts a reactionary pressure upon organisations that seek to engender
alternative, non- (or at least lower) profit-orientated modes of resource generation and dis-
tribution. And the organisational political immaturity of labouring class movements makes
them susceptible to political capture and influence by more established and institutionally

1046 B. SELwyn

integrated conservative political forces. These four pressures represent external barriers to
the extension of LCD.

For all their dynamism the cases of LCD discussed above have been vulnerable to such
pressures. For example, segments of the Piquetero movement have been co-opted into elec-
torally supporting the left wing of the established Peronist political organisation, thus blunt-
ing their escalatory potential.62 Some of the fábricas recuperadas preside over rising worker
self-exploitation (increased working hours and an intensification of the labour process).63
The upward curve of land occupations and struggles that characterised the MST during the
1980s and 1990s came unstuck following the workers’ Party (PT) electoral victory in 2002. Part
of the PT’s strategy to establish its power within a hostile political environment was to incor-
porate its supporters into the Brazilian state through employment within the vast Brazilian
civil service and political system. A consequence of this was a declining independence of
pro-PT organisations. MST land invasions fell from 285 in 2003 to 30 in 2011 and 13 in 2012.64
Despite its objectives of maintaining political independence, in 2014 Abahlali basemjondolo
supported the centrist Democratic Alliance.65 And, as already noted, the mass struggles by
South Korean workers in the 1980s were ultimately contained and the state-managed shift
to neoliberalism reversed many of the economic gains won during this period.

Do these examples, and the identification of (at least) four external barriers to the exten-
sion of LCD, undermine the concept? not necessarily. As argued in the second section, the
reproduction of the political economy of capital is predicated upon the denial and under-
mining of the political economy of labour and the movements and collective actions that
nourish the latter. rather, the identification of these external constraints suggests the need
for a focus, by advocates of LCD, upon internal responses to these barriers through the for-
mulation of novel organisational strategies and designs, and an identification of and attempts
to generate counter-socio-institutional forces that can protect and advance labouring class
gains. Analysis of what such organisations and institutions have looked like and speculation
about what they might look like, while beyond the scope of this article, would contribute to
the extension of the theory and practice of LCD.

Summary and conclusions

Part one of this article argued that EDTs rest upon an unresolvable ideological paradox –
that the oppression and exploitation of labouring classes by states and capital is good for
those labouring classes.66 while EDTs claim that they represent the most practical route to
human development, even within their theoretical reasoning they tacitly or explicitly confirm
that such development occurs through the reproduction of an elite subject–subordinate
object relationship. This relationship confers primary agency to elites and, at best, secondary
agency to subordinates. EDTs confirm theoretically that labouring classes will be forever
locked into this inferior relationship. The empirical history of elite-led development verifies
this theoretical claim.

This article, against EDT, argues for a new paradigm of LCD where, conceptually, labour-
ing classes are allocated primary agency. Labouring class collective actions are, it has been
argued here, generative of immediate material improvements to their and their communities’
livelihoods, and of new collective resources derived from those collective actions. That such
ameliorations are established by labouring classes means that these classes cannot, con-
ceptually, be disregarded as forever secondary agents in the development process. under

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1047

particular circumstances labouring classes assume primary agency in pursuing and achieving
their own human development.

registering these collective actions and their developmental effects is just the first step
in recognising alternatives to elite-led development. Myriad further questions confront the
theory and practice of LCD: how sustainable – in terms of resource generation, in relation
to rival social forces (potentially hostile states and capital orientated to continued accu-
mulation), and in terms of their own abilities to generate innovate collective resources –
are the movements that engender LCD? To what extent are such movements vulnerable
to co-optation by better organised actors, in particular the state? To what extent are they
dependent upon middle classes, often working within the state, for their political survival
and expansion? How does a theory of LCD account for state power and the question of its
modification and potentially of its transformation? Can LCD be globalised?

Deeper questions about the very process of capitalist reproduction include the follow-
ing: is competitive capital accumulation and continued economic growth, where economic
surpluses are continually channelled back into the production of exchange values to sustain
firm-level competitiveness, compatible with labouring class direction of resources – away
from accumulation and towards their immediate and longer-term needs? To what extent
can a redistributive form of human development sustain itself within an economic system
based upon capital accumulation? Can a steady-state, zero-growth form of capitalism emerge
which accommodates resource generation and allocation according to labouring class needs
rather than to the requirements of capital derived from the pressures of competitive accu-
mulation? Could such a system generate the resources necessary to fulfil the objectives of
LCD for the globe’s population?

LCD rejects the axioms upon which EDTs are founded and argues that labouring classes
can become primary agents within the development process. The logical theoretical con-
clusion of this argument, illustrated in the third section, is that wage labour seeks to replace
progressively capital’s determining role in the reproduction of wL through its own collective
organisations and actions. As expressed by one of the organisers of the Zánon occupation
discussed above:

This [process of factory occupation and recovery] is big, because…what one has regarded as a
utopia, has become now necessary and possible…If we could take this…to a regional, country,
world level…we would be talking of another world.67

A key question for advocates of LCD is the extent to which K/capital is necessary to the
reproduction of human social relations or whether it can be limited and/or transcended.

It may be objected that the examples of LCD are too limited in number and in their trans-
formative capacity. That is, they are a minority current within broader state and corporate-led
developmental transformations on a global scale. This minority status, it may be argued,
justifies a relative ignorance of them in favour of achieving a deeper understanding of how
elite actors can formulate and deliver improved forms of human development.

LCD is a minority trend within broader developmental transformations in large part
because EDT and its practice seek to de-legitimate and to repress non-elite forms of human
development, in particular those generated by labouring class collective actions. The argu-
ment, then, that it is more useful to focus upon what can be done by elite actors and insti-
tutions, rather than on what is rarely achieved by labouring class collective actions, fails to
acknowledge that the legitimacy of the actors associated with EDT arises from their role in

1048 B. SELwyn

reproducing an intensely hierarchical, unequal and exploitative social world that is founded
upon institutionalised attempts to preclude alternative forms of human development.

The perspective here is not to reject a priori all forms of elite action. For example, more
generous social welfare provision by states is preferable to fewer forms of such provision. The
extent to which labouring class organisations can extract, (co-)manage and (co-)administer
resources within the capitalist state is a significant theoretical and strategic issue for LCD
advocates. However, an LCD perspective can highlight how progressive elite actions do not
emerge simply from an intellectual vantage point such as Keynesian theory, but derive, sig-
nificantly, from the collective activities of labouring classes and the pressures they exert upon
elite actors. To be sure, much more research is required into processes of LCD. But a first step
in such an investigation, and in conceiving of alternative forms of subaltern development,
is to begin to recognise and respect such movements as potentially developmental actors.

Disclosure statement

no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

on Contributor

Benjamin Selwyn is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at
the university of Sussex. He is author of Workers, State and Development in Brazil (2012) and The
Global Development Crisis (2014). His most recent publication is “21st Century International
Political Economy: A Class-relational Perspective.” European Journal of International Relations
(2015).

Notes

1. Selwyn, “Elite Development Theory.”
2. Complementary approaches include Pradella and Marois, Polarising Development; Silver and

Arrighi, “workers north and South”; Amoore, The Global Resistance Reader; and Chang, Capitalist
Development in Korea.

3. Panitch and Leys, “Preface,” 1x.
4. See Marx’s identification of the reserve army of labour in Capital: ‘The industrial reserve army,

during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army;
during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check…The
overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst
conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces
these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.’ Marx, Capital,
792, 789. For a useful discussion of the relations between employed and unemployed workers,
see Foster et al., “The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital”; and Pradella, “Imperialism.”

5. Bernstein, Class Dynamics; and Selwyn, The Global Development Crisis.
6. Further research will need to investigate a range of questions, including: processes (and

analytical definitions) of class formation and how these impact upon and are affected by
labouring class collective actions; the fragmentation of labour and impacts on objectives sought
and forms of collective action undertaken; comparative analysis of why some movements
are more successful than others in self-mobilising, formulating demands, achieving their
objects and retaining developmental gains acquired; the extent to which labouring class
movements collaborate with, are dependent upon or subordinate to middle class and more
elite actors; and ways in which labouring class movements intersect with other movements
such as those dealing with gender and ethnic rights and environmental conservation. More

THIrD wOrLD QuArTErLy 1049

ambitious work could explore: world historical processes of LCD over time and space in order
to ascertain whether contemporary globalisation has generated a more or less conducive
political economic environment for such movements to act and achieve their goals; and ways
in which LCD movements have altered the constitution of states and ways in which these
alterations have impacted back upon the movements. Methodological issues that arise from
this concept include: how to identify LCD processes and movements; how to delimit LCD (what
is and what is not LCD?); and how to conduct rigorous, inter-spatial and temporal research into
these processes of change.

7. As will become clear, this section is indebted to the work of Michael Lebowitz See Lebowitz,
Beyond Capital.

8. For example, this is Piketty’s conception of capital in Capital in the 21st Century.
9. Marx, Capital.
10. Marx, “Inaugural Address.”
11. Barker, “Capital and revolutionary Practice,” 68.
12. Expanded leisure time should be a core goal of advocates of alternative and progressive

development. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides the following definition of
leisure: ‘Opportunity afforded by free time to do something’. The etymological roots of the
word leisure, extending back to Latin and old French, emphasise how the concept referred
to opportunities to do things, freedom, ease and peace. OED, accessed January 14, 2016,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/leisure.

13. Sen, Development as Freedom.
14. For a critique of Sen’s Development as Freedom, see Selwyn, “Liberty Limited?”
15. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 127 (emphasis added).
16. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 85.
17. Such policies are outlined in Selwyn, “Elite Development Theory.”
18. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 67, citing Marx.
19. Jessop, State Power, 1230 (emphasis added).
20. Jessop, “Institutional re(turns),” 1228, 1230.
21. See Bergquist, Labour in Latin America, for an outstanding illustration of this interrelationship.
22. Bhorat, “Economic Inequality is a Major Obstacle.”
23. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, chap. 10.
24. Birkinshaw, “A Big Devil.”
25. Buccus, “Durban breaks new Ground.”
26. Selmeczi, “Abahlali’s Vocal Politics”; and Gibson, Fanonian Practices.
27. Pithouse, “Struggle is a School,” 10.
28. Zikode, “Despite the State’s Violence.”
29. Zobel, “we are Millions.”
30. wolford, This Land is ours Now; and Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom.
31. Brandford and rocha, Cutting the Wire.
32. wolford, “Agrarian Moral Economies.”
33. Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom.
34. Lucas, “Here we are all Leaders.”
35. Stedile, “El MST,” 39.
36. Quoted in Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom, 183.
37. Stedile, “El MST,” 39.
38. Levy, “Occupando o Centro,” 74; and Souza, “Social Movements,” 323.
39. Dinerstein, “Autonomy in Latin America,” 358.
40. Harman, “Argentina,” 17.
41. Dinerstein, “Autonomy in Latin America,” 358.
42. Petras, “The unemployed workers Movement,” 2.
43. Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy.
44. Petras, “The unemployed workers Movement.”
45. Petras, ibid, estimates the number of community projects to be as high as 300.
46. Ibid., 4,5.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/leisure

1050 B. SELwyn

47. Atzeni and Ghigliani, “Labour Process.”
48. Meyer and Chaves, “winds of Freedom,” 167.
49. Elliot, “Zanon workers.”
50. Meyer and Chaves, “winds of Freedom,” 171.
51. Atzeni and Ghigliani, “Labour Process,” 659.
52. Meyer and Chaves, “winds of Freedom,” 174.
53. See Selwn, “Elite Development Theory” for an overview of SPE.
54. Selwyn, “An Historical Materialist Appraisal”; and Selwyn, “Trotsky, Gerschenkron and the

Political Economy.”
55. Chang, “Korean Labour relations,” 18.
56. Chang, “Korean Labour relations,” 36.
57. Gray, Labour and Development.
58. Foster and McChesney, “The Global Stagnation and China.”
59. Silver and Zhang, “China as an Emerging Epicentre,” 176.
60. “A Decade of Change.”
61. Chan and Kwan, “union’s new Approach.”
62. Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy.
63. Atzeni and Ghigliani, “Labour Process.”
64. Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom, 305, n. 7.
65. Brown, “Abahlali’s Choice.”
66. Selwyn, “Elite Development Theory.”
67. Quoted in Aiziczon, Zanón, 12.

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Abstract

Introduction

The political economy of labour and the theory of labour-centred development7

The political economy of labour
Two political economies and capitalist development
States and the capital–labour relation
Labour-centred development: contemporary examples
The reserve army in South Africa: Abahlali basemjondolo
Challenges from the informal sector in Brazil: the MST
From informal to formal sector: the Piqueteros, unemployed workers and recovered factory movements
Formal sector mass movements in East Asia
External barriers to LCD: class and state power, market forces and political incorporation
Summary and conclusions
Disclosure statement
Notes on Contributor
Notes
Bibliography

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