Development,
Part 7 Favela Morumbi and Sao Paulo, Brazil Development is Class Struggle At the time, at the height of the Mbeki Presidency, the article was remarkable in the mainstream South African media for being frank about the class struggle. Most of such material one would read at that time, in the depths of the 1996 Class Project years, was of the one-eyed “Development Studies” variety. Moore only had to say how dull and derivative all this other material had been, to win the case unarguably. The dispute between “neo-liberal GEARs and social-welfarist RDPs” is a sterile one, he says. Like a new broom, Moore swept away all the “happy synergistic tales”, while reminding people of “capitalism’s brutal genesis” and also its saving grace, the “vibrantly emerging working classes.” The document is a nice, short read, though packed with hints and pointers. Now in 2010, six years later, there is much talk of a “developmental state” and perhaps even an assumption that what we already have is that “developmental state”. Yet the diverse origins of “developmentalism” have hardly been re-examined. Hence the other, longer documents that will be introduced this week, for the sake of completeness. But this article of David Moore’s will be more than adequate as a discussion text. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, meaning that the entire historical development of humanity had been driven by the dynamic of class struggle. Please download and read this 2-page text: The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development, Moore (1137 words) Further (optional) reading: Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa, Walter Rodney (34211 words) Contradictions of Neo-Colonialism, Leys (8510 words) The Second Age of the Third World, Moore (12938 words) -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . |
