Louis Proyect wrote:
The absence of foreign investment today is
> not so much a sign of "benign neglect", but rather that the bones have been
> already been picked clean. Colin Leys, on the Socialist Register editorial
> board, has written an analysis of underdevelopment in Africa that
> elaborates on these points. Titled "Rise and Fall of Development Theory",
> it attempts to skirt the dialectical poles of the sort of stagist Marxism
> represented by James Heartfield and the late Bill Zimmer,
That's Bill Warren. He begins with Marx's famous statement in the
preface to the first edition of Kapital "The country that is more
developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of
its own future." Warren was different from the
LM crowd in that his argument was empirical and LM's is a priori.
Capitalism will industrialize the third world because it *is*
industrializing the third world. This was written in the early and mid
70's. Warren could not see the extent to which most foreign investment
would go to a
select few countries and a select few areas within those countries. Like
classical imperialism and orthodox economics he does not consider how
capitalism and foreign investment retards economic development.
No country has ever made into the rich boys club by foreign
investment. Economic history suggests that development can only be had
through each country seizing control of its own destiny, shaping its
market relations to its own advantage and upgrading its land, labor and
capital.
Sam Pawlett
