Development,
Part 7
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Development
is Class Struggle
David
Moore’s article (attached; download linked below) “The Brutal Side of
Capitalist Development” appeared in the
now-defunct Johannesburg newspaper “ThisDay” in 2004, as an “op-ed”
feature.
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
2013, eight years later, there is continuing talk of a “developmental state”
and perhaps an implied assumption that what we already have is that very
“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. It still is being driven by class struggle.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Brutal Side
of Capitalist Development, Moore.
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