The reading I’ve been doing lately for my Development for Sovereignty and Autonomy class has turned my whole world completely upside down in the most wonderfully liberating way. This has been the most important and rewarding coursework of my grad school career, and maybe even of my entire life. Hungrily eating up the many intricacies of this discourse has made me excited to be a scholar like nothing else ever has. When I’m not farming this summer I plan to familiarize myself with as much of the related literature as I can. I hope that, by summer’s end, my scholarship will be richer than ever.
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The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
The Industrial Revolution has been defined in lots of ways, but what truly accounts for its damage is the establishment of a market economy: “Previous to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets.”
“As long as markets and money were merely accessories to an otherwise self-sufficient household, the principles of production for use [not trade, etc.] could operate.”
“Mercantilism, with all its tendency towards commercialization, never attacked the safeguards which protected these two basic elements of production – labor and land – from becoming the objects of commerce…But labor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself into the laws of the market…As the organization of labor is only another word for the forms of life of the common people, this means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself. All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system.”
“Unbounded hope and limitless despair looking toward regions of human possibilities yet unexplored were the mind’s ambivalent response to these awful limitations. Hope – the vision of perfectibility - was distilled out of the nightmare of population and wage laws, and was embodied in a concept of progress so inspiring that it appeared to justify the vast and painful dislocations to come…Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and unlimitedness of man had come to an issue just when the promise of a boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter…Harmony was inherent in economy, it was said, the interests of the individual and the community being ultimately identical – but such harmonious self-regulation required that the individual should respect economic law even if it happened to destroy him.”
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The Development Dictionary, Wolfgang Sachs
“Establishing economic value requires the disvaluing of all other forms of social existence. Disvalue transmogrifies skills into lacks, commons into resources, men and women into commodified labour, tradition into burden, wisdom into ignorance, autonomy into dependency. It transmogrifies people’s autonomous activities embodying wants, skills, hopes and interactions with one another, and with the environment, into needs whose satisfaction requires the mediation of the market.”
“By equating education with diplomas, following the economic definitions of learning, they lacked teachers and schools…After equating health with dependence on medical services, they lacked doctors, health centres, hospitals, drugs…After equating eating with the technical activities of production and consumption, linked to the mediation of the market by the state, they lacked income and suffered scarcity of food…Rather than being the iron law of every human society, scarcity is an historical accident.”
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Probably all intro anthropology courses include a discussion of the misguided notions of early anthropologists who believed that primitive cultures were less evolved versions of affluent (Western) cultures and that inevitably they would follow the same trajectory towards civilization. The anthropology of today teaches that human cultures do not follow trajectories and that “civilization” is not superior, nor “traditional” cultures inferior.
So I’m no stranger to the idea that it is unacceptable for members of one culture to attempt to bestow their ways of life on another. And where anthropology and development meet, the implication is that development ought to be carried out with cultural sensitivity. That is, that any efforts to improve quality of life must be contextual, adaptable, and non-disruptive. In particular, development workers should be wary not to impose Western beliefs and ideals on peoples of other cultures.
I’ve heard all of that before. But these readings took that idea and told a story about it that I had never really heard before. I had sort of a transcendent moment while reading – I was sitting in a cafe learning the origin story (myth) of development and suddenly I stopped and looked around at the people sitting near me. To my left was a group of students discussing Lincoln republicans and the Wigs Party and Jeffersonians. And I just couldn’t believe that anyone could spend any time talking about that when the reality of everything is mostly just a lie.
I know that sounds dramatic, but I really feel that after having read this volume there will be a great deal of discussion that I can no longer take seriously. Not only that, but how can I even have a conversation with anyone who hasn’t read this? Because my degree has the word development in the title, I feel that this theory is absolutely crucial for myself and my cohort to study and understand before entering the world of development. It’s frightening for me to think how many folks with wonderful intentions propagate this mistelling of history through development practice.
I can say that the alternatives to development that the authors discuss – green economies, earth democracies and the Andean Cosmovision – do not go undiscussed in the IAD curriculum. These are things that we are thinking about, talking about and working on and although I’m deeply pessimistic, I do feel so much hope that at least we’re headed in the right direction.
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