Cro. boddi':
Hope this doesn't sound nit-picky, but could you expand on what you mean by
"development"? For example, when you write:
>*real* political economy. You see a world of excess that has to be
>reigned in by the state. I see a world of development stifled and
>perverted by capitalism. You see the horrors of capitalist
>industrialization as something that will scare people into the arms of
>your anti-development version of the Party. I see specific problems that
>the socialist economy will have to fix to compensate intelligently for
>development.
A note on why I'm badgering you with this.
I just had a very good round of teaching/learning here with students from
Bolivia and the US. My topic was "development" -- origins, ideas,
practices, apparatuses, etc. Together we decided there were three ways that
"development" -- as idea, practices, etc. -- could be dealt with, and that
the separation helped to get our ideas straight. They were:
1. "Development" as noun: things/stuff that make up the good life. We were
pretty expansive on this; "stuff" ranged from antibiotics to freedom of
expression and leisure time. In this sense, thinking about development was
really an exercise in basic political reflection on what makes up the good life.
2. "Development" as verb: the things you have to do, from you respective
"positionings", to get the things that make up a good life. Here, things
got a bit messy, with lots of back and forth on when we stop being
"developers" and must start being activists in social movements -- or
whether the nature of the beat is to be a bit of both always. Here the
reflection was on how to get the good life. Being an unrecycled pinko, I
tried to keep conflict (over all sorts of things) front and center in the
discussion.
3. "Development" as discourse: here we identified two facets of discourse:
(a) the reams of bullshit and hype churned out by agencies and individuals,
which (i) claim to know and (ii) suggest appropriate ways to change the
world; and, (b) the apparatuses that are purported to be the vehicles for
affecting those changes. The two together were seen to be sometimes
systematically mis-representing, sometimes "getting things right", in order to:
- reproduce/expand/deepen/protect world capitalism
- reproduce itself as discourse (language and apparatus, with bureaucratic
momentum feeding off itself)
I found the exercise with the students a very healthy deconstruction of
"development" -- the term I love to hate just now, still.
Tom
BTW: The government here has just enshrined micro-credit as THE path in the
"fight to eradicate poverty". The law now before the congress is called the
"Law of Property and Popular Credit". ĦQue viva el desarrollo!
Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
