 Welcome everyone to another session of the Development Studies seminar series, my name is Faisy Esmael. Today we're very pleased to welcome Ben Selwyn, who's going to be talking about the struggle for development. This is the title also of the new book that he's working on. Ben did his PhD at SOAS and he now teaches in International Relations at the University of Sussex. He's also the Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at Sussex. His research interests include global value chains and development, the political economy of development in Latin America, including rural and urban social movements, agrarian political economy, the global retail revolution and its impact on developing countries and theories of development. He's written two books. One is called Workers, State and Development in Brazil, Powers of Labor, Chains of Value. That was published in 2012 and was also shortlisted for the 2013 BISA International Political Economy Group book prize. He's also written The Global Development Crisis, which was published in 2014. He wrote this book to try and advance this concept of labour-centred development, which I'm sure he'll talk about today as well, which is attempting to overcome this paradox between the simultaneous presence of mass wealth in the world that we've seen alongside mass poverty. Currently, as I say, he's writing this book called The Struggle for Development. So he'll speak for 45 minutes and then we'll open it up for questions and discussion. And Kelpina Wilson, we also have, as just mentioned, but I will introduce her after the talk. So yeah, I'm very pleased to be here. I did my PhD here for many years before the ESRC rules limited to four years. I took about almost seven years to do my PhD, so I really enjoyed and appreciated being at SOAS and the colleagues and the students at which I was one. And I've got a lot of my inspiration from being from my time here. So this, the talk is called The Struggle for Development. And when we think about development, it is one of those words like freedom and democracy that everyone loves and is for. No one is against it, really. It goes back a long way to the idea of the good night, the good life, to the idea of happiness, human flourishing. Aristotle talked about it in terms of eudaimonia. Now people are about to say and talk about it. It's one of those core ideas of kind of civilizational ideas that we hold to. And it's very powerful. But I want to argue that the majority of development thinking is what George Orwell in his book in 1984 called Double Think. In the book, Winston, who's the main character of 1984, defines Double Think as follows. Double Think is the kind of the ideology that the ruling party uses to control people's thought. And he defines Double Think as follows. He says to know and not to know. To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies. To use logic against logic to repudiate morality while laying claim to it. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them. To deny the existence of objective reality and all a while take account of the reality of which one denies. I think the mainstream and many variants of development thinking represent a form of Double Think. It's ideology that legitimates the complete opposite of what it claims to strive for. And it's in the book I'm going to call it the anti-poverty consensus. Again, everyone is against poverty. The UN, the World Bank, Jeffrey Sachs, Bono. Everyone's against poverty. So the anti-poverty consensus holds to these kind of core truths, which is at the heart, I would say, of Double Think. First of all, a continued economic growth represents a surest route towards poverty reduction and development. Secondly, that a rising number of people across the world are enjoying the fruits of this development. That this improvement is due to the increasing participation in global markets and, of course, by 2030 with the sustainable development goals, we will be living the world free of poverty. Now, that all sounds great, but that is the core of the APC, the anti-poverty consensus. A lot of people see through this. My good friend Pope Francis says the following to quote him. He's talking about capitalism. He says, Capitalism imposes the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature. This system is by now intolerable. Farm workers find it intolerable. Laborers find it intolerable. Communities find it intolerable. People find it intolerable. The earth itself finds it intolerable. When you look a little bit more at the data from people who do not share the anti-poverty consensus idea of Double Think, you see what he and what many people in this room and elsewhere see as the real problem with the world. So, for example, Oxfam produces a report every year just to write at the same time as Davos. And every single year they show that the global concentration of wealth is increasing. So last year they had this report and they showed the following. In 2015, 62 individuals owned the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, the bottom half of humanity. The wealth of the richest 62 people increased by 44% between 2010 and 2015, an increase of over half a trillion US dollars. During the same period, the wealth of the bottom 50% fell by over one trillion dollars. So you can see concentration of wealth and also mass impoverishment as a consequence of that. So when we think about development, we need to think about what kind of development we're talking about. We can't just speak about development in empty terms. Otherwise it's like talking about freedom, dignity, liberty, democracy. You know, everyone can talk about this from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton to every single person. No one is against these things. We have to be very clear about what it is we are talking about when we mean development. One alternative, which I'll come back towards at the end of the talk, was put forward, advanced by Franz Fanon in his book, The Wretched of the Earth. I'll just read two quotes because he really captures what the problem is with mainstream development thinking and practice. He says, this is written in the late, I think in 1960, published in 1961, he says, the pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy to break and kill him. Then he says, the European game has finally ended. We must find something different. We today can do everything as long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. He was pointing at something very fundamental in the way people think about development and the way it's portrayed as something to be aspired to. He was basically saying that the mentality of saying, our way, our developed way is the way you should follow. What we know is good for you. We are the best. You can follow us. We have got medicine that you need. We are the healthy doctors. You are the sick patients. He was identifying this elite subject subordinate object conception of social change, this elitist concept of social change and the social structure, which legitimates the exploitation and impoverishment of the poor on their behalf. You'll see that again and again. So why is this double thing so prevalent? When we think about development and what I call capitalist development or capital-centered development, what we see is the same people who talk about freedom, liberty, democracy and so on actually justify an authoritarian version of social change, which is capitalist development. Capitalist development is immensely and fundamentally authoritarian. Now one of the people that captured this very well in quite an honest way was W. W. Rosto in his theory of modernization, theory and his ideas of stages of economic growth. In the 1950s and 1960s, these ideas were becoming increasingly powerful in the United States, in the State Department and being projected across the world. Now he has his five stages of growth, traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, age of high, mass consumption. And not many people today hold to the idea of modernization theory in its exactitude as he's spelled it out. But a lot of people do hold to its general thrust. And his argument, I would argue, were as much as understanding the process of development as part of generating and mobilizing ideology that could be used by the United States, state bureaucrats, academics, but especially for emerging post-colonial ruling classes and elites in the so-called third world that was emerging. People like him, people like Samuel Huntington all shared the same concern, which was you had a whole range of emerging post-colonial countries throwing off the colonial fetters and their fear, Rosto's and Huntington's fear, was that these countries in so doing would actually go one step or two steps further, not just throw off the colonial oppressors, but actually take a path towards something different, non-capitalist form of development, something that Franz Fanon was advocating. Rosto and Huntington were vehement that this was the wrong path. They formulated a whole range of theories, modernization theory to make sure that this wouldn't happen. And in so doing, they justified with great theoretical precision and sophistication, they justified mass, murder, oppression, dictatorship, and so on. Their whole concern was to avoid alternative forms of development. They wanted to make sure that the form of development that emerged in the less developed countries or third world or global south was capitalist development. So here I'm reading quite from Rosto. It is in such a setting of political and social confusion, before the take-off is achieved and consolidated politically and socially as well as economically that the seizure of power by communist conspiracy is easiest. And this is a crucial bit. And it is in such a setting that a pro-capitalist centralized dictatorship may supply an essential technical precondition for take-off and a sustained drive to maturity. I mean, many of you guys grew up in the 90s and 2000s and so this was the era of the third wave of democratization. But before that, it's quite commonplace to really know that mass was behind all kinds of dictatorship around the third world and so was Russia. They both actually shared a common concern to preclude any kind of transformation generated from below and to manufacture and install a transformation from above whether it was to be incorporated into the free markets, world system led by the United States or the so-called communist system led by Russia. Now, most people look at modernization theory and probably laugh and say, this is nonsense. You read Gershon Krone about it. You read any other people. I mean, you read Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development and you see that modernization theory, Rostow's ideas was just a fancy idea that one country can follow another without any problems. The idea that the advanced countries show the backward countries their future. So you can say, I'm not modernization theorist. I am something else. But actually, within liberalism, within statism, within a lot of Marxism, the key components of modernization theory are there and they loom very powerful and they structure our way of thinking. What they do basically is to demobilize us from thinking about alternative paths of transformation. Basically, these are stagious, Eurocentric and capital-centric forms of thinking. They see the already advanced economies. Well, their name says it all, advanced, as the place to be going. They see Europe as the origin of global capitalism and their kind of source. Anglo-European sphere is a source of civilization and their capital-centric. They see the only way of achieving development is through massive capital accumulation and essentially trickle-down forms of wealth dispersal. And in so doing, this form of stagism, Eurocentrism, capital-centrism denies, conceptually and politically, the agency of the mass of the world's population to even think about their own form of change or their own form of development. It's basically saying to them, we've got the answers already. You just follow our advice and you'll be all right. And don't protest and don't oppose us. And this is the same for liberalism, statism and the key paradox, and this is why I call it double-think, is that these theories and modernization theories, the way we think about it, basically proclaims the benefits for the poor of the exploitation and oppression of the poor. It is good for you to be oppressed, it is good for you to be exploited because the path we're going to, we know what lies ahead, you don't, we know what lies ahead and what's in the future is good for you. That's why you should support us and bow down to that and succumb to the exploitation and oppression that you face. Now I'm going to show that by looking at just a few kind of examples, a few texts, a few quotes, that really I think encapsulates a lot of these way of thinking within these traditions and they go further. So for example, the Washington consensus of the bad old days of the 1980s, neoliberalism at its starkest, at its most kind of extreme, the idea of getting prices right, solving all of the problems of the less developed countries' economies. So within the Washington consensus there's an idea which is quite powerful about perfect markets and how markets can function, but when they suffer from imperfections they don't function properly. So it is the role of states in a slightly paradoxical way because early neoliberals really pushed the idea of the state to decide it's the role of the state to remove these imperfections. So what are these imperfections? Well, one of the core imperfections that a lot of states in the Global South were held to suffer from was the idea of a labour market inflexibility or labour market imperfection. Robert Solo in one of his lectures defined a labour market inflexibility. So I quote, a labour market is inflexible if the level of unemployment insurance benefit is too high or the duration is too long or if there are too many restrictions on the freedom of employers to fire and to hire or if the permissible hours of work are too tightly regulated or if excessively generous compensation for overtime work is mandated or if trade unions have too much power to protect incumbent workers against competition and to control the flow of work at the site of production or perhaps if statutory health and safety regulations are too stringent. Basically, anything that's good for workers is a labour market imperfection. This is a very clearly articulated ideology to steamroller trade unions and any kind of collective action institutions that protects workers and is justified in a whole range of theories. And Kruger, the World Bank's chief economist between 1982 and 1986, argues and I quote that with a sufficiently low urban wage a zero unemployment level is a feasible outcome. You can have full employment but you have to have very low wages. We are doing you a favour by removing all these imperfections by pushing wages down we will actually increase employment generation. So you see, they are the elites they have the knowledge, they impart that knowledge to the rest of the population they justify the structural adjustment of society to remove any barriers to capital accumulation in the name of helping the poor. Okay, so we all, I mean it will be interesting to know if there are any neoliberals here. I doubt it, not at Siles. Not really anywhere, I mean you don't find many of them these days they're all quite sophisticated these days. People say, I'm not a neoliberal. I like, who do I like? I like the status. I like Hadjun Chang's kicking away the ladder. I like that tradition. And when you read kicking away the ladder it's a fantastic book in many ways because it destroys the free market ideologies. But that status tradition which goes back to Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List is presenting itself in many good ways as a progressive alternative to neoliberalism because it has a more realistic understanding of the world market. It doesn't talk about things like perfect markets, perfect competition. It understands that free trade is not a leveler but a mechanism for creating more inequality. So it has a good critique and it can point with great precision to all the cases where less developed countries have used states to their advantage to achieve rapid economic growth, structural diversification, industrialization and so on. But when you actually look at the status-policy economy analysis themselves you see a dark underbelly which is very similar to the neoliberals and it subscribes absolutely to the idea of stageism, Eurocentrism, capital centrism and it reproduces the elite subject-subordinate object perspective completely. So Alice Amsterdam was one of the kind of big thinkers in the late 1980s, early 1990s to really kind of start breaking the neoliberal hold of a development thinking in her work in South Korea. People like Robert Wade also on Taiwan and many others as well. But just to quote Alice Amsterdam about the South Korean experience a high profits in its mass production industries have been derived not merely from investments in machine and modern work methods which is what that status is always going on about but also from the world's longest working week then she says, alongside effective investments cheap labor and labor repression is the basis of late industrialization everywhere. When you read that article there's a new left review from 1989, you're not. Well, I find it a bit hard to understand if she's actually praising it or merely reflecting on it but nevertheless she does see this as the way to achieve late industrialization and to quote her again the women workers have lagged far behind those of men enabling employees in labor intensive industries to remain internationally competitive alongside the growth of mass production sector. Wade's discrimination against women in Korea and Japan is the worst in the world. One of Dae-up Chang who I think I'm not sure if he's still at size but he's wrote some really great material on South Korea. He showed that the South Korean industrial experiment was based on a massive denial of democracy, dictatorship terror concentration camps. So we've got the status. I mean there's many more examples of that. You can read in my book on the global development crisis I've got two chapters where I talk about that and quite a lot of length and I provide quote after quote textual analysis showing how labor repressions than norm is absolutely essential. So okay, you could say well, I'm sorry, I'm radical. Neither neoliberalism nor statism. They're two sides of the same coin. I reject both. I'm something else. Well, where is that something else? A lot of people go towards Marxism rightly but they end up in the wrong part of the Marxist framework. And some Marxism reproduces the things that we've been talking about just right here. So for example I mean there's a very famous book called Imperialism Pioneer of Capitalism by Bill Warren who talks about capitalism as a very dynamic force. It is very dynamic but it's also extremely destructive and if you just focus on the dynamism then the destructive side really falls away and it seems like you're celebrating capitalist dynamism and there are a lot of Marxists who do celebrate capitalist dynamism. So for example some people from Syris in fact from the 1980s they wrote about the development of capitalism in Africa and they wrote things as following. The rapid accumulation is unlikely to be achieved without significant reductions in the real incomes of a substantial portion of the population. To achieve such accumulation African states would need to contain subnational pressures through a combination of hegemonic official nationalism and the military means to reinforce this ideology. A method must be devised for the appropriation of sufficient surplus to ensure the smooth functioning of the military and repressive apparatus. For me I don't see what's Marxist about that at all but it just seems like another version of statism and in a way if you are talking about catch-up development that is the industrialization that Fanon said we shouldn't be aspiring for if you are talking about that catch-up development then yes that is probably what is necessary. And what you see then is you have three very powerful traditions liberalism, statism and some strands of Marxism which really advocate the oppression and exploitation of the poor on behalf of the poor it sets up an elite subject subordinate object situation and really legitimates what none of us would consider to be a development which is actually literally the opposite of many of us would intuitively think to be as development. So what then is the alternative? How do we think about the alternative? So in my about the global development crisis I talk about this concept of labour-centered development and a lot of Marxist talk in terms of the utopian future after capitalism we can have real human development we need to get rid of capitalism. Yes but what about now I mean we're talking about generations of a huge amount of time before that utopia will be realized if ever. What about the here and now? Do we mean do we just have nothing to say about the contemporary situation of human development across the global south and the north in fact. My argument is that the idea of labour-centered development enables us to both think in utopian times it's good to be utopian it's good to think about positive future. A lot of people say you should be realistic what they mean is you should not think about any kind of alternative at all except what there is there is no alternative no we should think about the possibilities of a future but we have to route that in the contemporary situation and the idea of labour-centered development does that in two ways. First of all we have to review the development process from the perspective of labouring classes I think that's a really important thing to do because as you've seen with these three perspectives those three perspectives really see labouring classes simply as inputs into the industrialization process as men and women to be controlled, manipulated crushed pushed into work and disciplined the labour process is the domain of the capitalist where he or she can completely dominate labour is just another commodity like the wood or metal that's being transformed into something else. Their labour power is the property once the contract has been signed of the capitalist and the capitalist must be able to do everything they want to do with that property. That is the ideal of a perfect labour market with no perfectionist where the capitalist have absolute control of the use of the labour power of the worker. So if you start looking at the development process from the perspective of labouring classes then you start thinking well this doesn't seem quite right. We can't really have someone dominating us and forcing us around and lying to us and doing all kinds of awful harmful things to us making us work 15 hour working weeks subject to all kinds of pollution and so on. Mortally threatening us in many ways. That's the first thing to do. I will come on to the idea of how you think about the labouring class but that's a first position. And secondly, the second aspect of labour centre development is to think about what it is and how do labouring classes shape the development processes in their favour through their own or potential collective actions. Once you ask that question and you start finding lots of examples but you also get away from this idea of the elite subjects subordinate object conception of social change where the subordinate objects have no agency at all. Where the subordinate objects actually start becoming the agents of their own transformation. Another way of thinking about it is that in the elite subject subordinate object conception of social change the primary agency is allocated to elites. State bureaucrats, corporate CEOs even NGO leaders, some of them and so on. And secondary agency is allocated to workers who perform what is necessary as defined by the primary agents, by the capitalist or by the agents of elite transformation. What the labour centre development conception starts to do is to say well that's certainly true, that's certainly the way that these people want the world to be but it's not always the case and it's sometimes the case that primary agency is taken up through collective action by labouring classes themselves. Their actual collective actions can be transformative, can lead to real human development in ways that are much more progressive and much more realisable and instant, instantaneous than that espoused by elite conception of social change. So you reverse it and suddenly the whole range of development looks very different. You start seeing the world in a very different ways. Now that's basically what I was saying in the book and then the next book I've realised I've done quite a few of these talks and I've got lots of concerned people who say yeah, I agree with everything you're saying on most of it but what about us? Surely we're the elites, there's nothing what you're saying there's nothing for us to do. People get very disturbed, they think this is all about proletarian revolution and so on, there's nothing for us to do apart from interesting commentary hopefully. But not at all, so I was thinking about that and I said well, maybe this is really falling back into some kind of reformist tendencies but I then thought well you can actually subdivide the concept of labour centre development a little bit further and you can think about pro-labor development, you can talk about labour driven development and you can talk about labour led development, I'll talk about the last one most but in terms of pro-labor development one of my colleagues, John Passenden has written a book about the state and development in rural India and he uses the phrase pro-labor development and he shows that the national rural unemployment guarantee scheme which basically allocates guarantees 100 days paid labour to the unemployed in rural areas he calls it an example of pro-labor development and so I adopt the phrase from him because it generates gains for the destitute workers the destitute unemployed and he also shows how with this income, with this work that takes some of the workers away from some more kind of forms of bonded labour and much more forms of oppressive labour in some situations it gives them power to engage in some kind of collective actions so yes, elites can do good things, there can be pro-labor development, there can be good things handed down from the state and that is basically where progressive development studies stops they say yes, we want good things to be done by elites for the poor and I certainly want more of that rather than less of that but the problem with that is that you still reproduce the elite subject subordinate situation, you don't perceive of the primary agency that labouring classes can generate through their own collective actions the second category is what I call labour driven development which is where through collective actions or the threat of collective actions labouring classes can force elites to to provide well developmental gains I mean the high point of this in many ways I would say is the formation of the welfare states in post-Second World War Europe I mean this came after something like 30 years of mass struggles but even before the Russian Revolution there's this huge wave of struggles sweeping Europe from 1910 onwards the Russian Revolution the mass uprisings in Spain and one of the responses by the European ruling classes and the American ruling classes was to institute the New Deal or the welfare states as Quentin Hogg who is or Lord Halsham, one of the Tory MPs famously said either we give them social reform or they give us social revolution and gendered a response a progressive response from above obviously that response was contradictory it had all kinds of limitations to it but it was a huge progressive move if you've seen Ken Loach's film The Spirit of Forty-Five you can critique it because it misses lots of things out but it did deliver real development gains so those two things are definitely should be on the table in our thinking about development but it's the third bit, the labour driven development it's really important to think about when we consider social change this is the idea of first of all you have to have the idea primary, secondary agency then you have to search around for it and think about what is it about labour and class collective actions that can generate development gains through their own collective actions themselves now this is where we start to think again about capitalism and a lot of Marxist analysis is quite narrow in the sense that it can be seen as a productivist Marxism where it looks at the workplace and it sees the workplace and usually the kind of white male worker or just the male worker as the kind of core core agent of social change and this is obviously this is one aspect of it but in this globalizing world that we have today in neoliberal world we see that you have a process of labour fragmentation across the world you have mass unemployment, you have over a billion people without formal sector work you have all kinds of different types of work so obviously a productivist Marxist approach is kind of limited it rules out a lot of the collective actions that exist around the world and also it has a limited I think consumption of capitalism itself what I think is necessary is the social reproduction approach which is where Marxism and feminism come together the radical aspects of socialist feminism come together and so it's the production of surplus value in the workplace where labour is directly exploited by capital but it's also about the reproduction of the labour force the second circuit of the reproduction of labour in the household in the community beyond the workplace this is what Harry Cleaver calls the social factory it's not just a factory, it's the social factory as a whole I mean when we think about the division between the workplace and beyond the workplace the household and the community you have to ask yourself the question you can't just assume that the labour force is there ready for capital to exploit you have to ask the question why is it there why is it exploitable how is it being produced why do we have this division between the workplace, the productivist sphere and the unproductive non-remuniative work is free and is undervalued why is that the case well if you read Sylvia Federici and a lot of radical feminism and critical Marxism you see that actually this is part and parcel of the emergence of capitalism was the creation of these two spheres just as you have the public and private sphere you have the workplace and the beyond the workplace where the labour force is reproduced once you see that once you have that perception of the cultural reproduction of capitalism once you have the idea of labour-led development suddenly a whole range of collective action social struggles from below are on the table to be appreciated and understood as developmental and in many ways these are more impressive and more beneficial than other forms of development that are advocated by traditional elite theories of social change and the emergence of development now I mean there are many examples of that just to mention a few in the Shack Rollers movement in parts of San Afga I mean these are the the collateral damage of the process of industrialisation in San Afga where you have mass unemployment according to elite theory these unemployed should just be passive but of course being passive is not an option where you don't have any kind of welfare state and so a lot of these movements have engaged in collective actions too force municipalities to connect electricity to provide sanitation to provide houses to build houses to repair them and so on. These collective actions from below have been quite important in securing and ameliorating the social reproduction of the informal reserve army of labour in class in the Shandetowns across parts of San Afga I read a recent very good special issue of review of African political economy recently about the labour in the time of platinum is caused, the reason the special issue came out was because of the Marikana mine massacre in 2012 and there's a fantastic article in there by a PhD student called Asunda Venya who looks at the workers in the Marikana mines these platinum workers are massively super exploited, they're paid very low wages and actually the only reason they can work at all is because of their social arrangements where the women who don't get paid for this obviously provide them with the social support necessary to live they get up early in the morning and provide them with water to drink to clean with they look after them, they nurse them because this is quite a murderous kind of work and she also showed how in the struggles around 2012 before and after the massacre is the women in the home basically and in the community who are supporting the male workers such as to have this idea that it's just male workers in struggle directly against the capitalist exploiters is to have a very limited conception of the idea of capitalist social reproduction another example is the landless labourers movement in Brazil again something like 30 million people are forced off the land following the conservative modernisation in 1964 where the dictatorship decided to modernise Brazilian agriculture concentrate it, capitalise it intensify it and so on push it even further towards export promotion they went into the cities into the favelas towns and so on and from the early 1980s there was a kind of re-ruralisation movement the MST the movement began taking over in veiling land and setting up their communities now obviously there are all kinds of issues with these communities these are not rich communities but the alternative was being basically flotsam on the heat of the reserve army of labour created by rural modernisation rather than remaining as passive victims of the modernisation process these workers in the formal sector took agency into their own hands through collective actions, set up their own communities and now they've also expanded to another movement that actually works in urban areas reclaiming and taking over houses to live in basic essential aspect of social reproduction other examples the mass strikes in South Korea again in the 1980s not only did they contribute to bringing about democracy but they also contributed to pushing wages up these mass strikes and mass movements from below you have to remember, South Korea, Brazil and South Africa they were changed fundamentally by these mass movements from below in contemporary China the mass struggles by industrial workers and many second generation immigrant workers now for their pension rights for better wages for better representation within the national trade union has led to new labour laws and in some ways progressive laws being implemented in some ways in a very contradictory way other examples I mean in Argentina you've had the unemployed workers the occupied factory workers who took over factories and ran them these factories were going to be shut down in the crisis of profitability following the 2001 crash the choice again was to be a passive victim or to establish some kind of primary agency through collective action take over the factories and in some of these factories I've written an article with a friend of mine and he's done very detailed research into this showing that some of these factories actually have higher productivity under workers control than under the former managers control and one of the reasons for that is because the mentality of work is quite different there's a very different mentality of work when you're working together for a common good or something could be described as common good than when you're working for a manager who wants to push you as hard as possible for the least gain possible so and in the article I sent you a forum it's called Labour Centre Development in Latin America we also look back to the example in 1972-73 in Chile where you had the A&A government but you also had the this huge industrial belt springing up with workers taking over factories organising communities and distributing means of production between themselves and reorientating production for the common good towards the common good there are many examples I mean one of the things that I think critical development studies students we are all development studies students what we can do is to try and identify these cases of labour-led development as I call them as a means of combating the elitism that you find in the mainstream development journal and mainstream development courses basically to conclude these movements that I've mentioned and many others what they do is not only do they reverse or attempt to reverse the important object relationship in the development process they redefine development their process of development is against oppression and against exploitation fundamentally all of these organisations talk in these terms in many ways they demystify the double thing for clouds perception and presents themselves masquerades as development thinking they redefine social value rather than production for profit which is the underpinning of contemporary capitalist development they say we should be producing for need and in some cases they've done so reasonably successfully and they redefine democratic participation contemporary democracy in this country across much of the world is what people like Chomsky and Gils and Rackamora called low-intensity democracy, LID basically you elect someone every five years they misrepresent you and you get along happily because well no one's dying low-intensity democracy which is not quite alive but it's something there to be desired they reinvent democracy through much higher levels of participation I'm not saying that we should aspire to a life spent in meetings I understand meetings but this is a high level of democratic participation ever before secondly these are prefigurative movements what I mean by that fancy term is to say that these democratically organised collective actions in gender democratic ends and democratic structures is fundamentally different to the kind of elite subjects subordinate object concept of development where you just have endless capital accumulation output for the sake of output accumulation for the sake of accumulation so to sum up really labour-led development and labour-centred development this is obviously I have a utopia of a world where there's enough food in the world now that no one needs to go hungry social wealth that exists under capitalism is there to make everyone's life pretty good the reason it's not good is because of the social relations of capitalism so you can quite easily foresee a much better world that is beyond competition beyond exploitation but I'm not just talking about this utopia in the future I'm saying in the here and now at this minute around parts of the all parts of the world there are struggles, collective actions for the amelioration of labour and class livelihoods for their communities in the workplaces beyond these are the examples of labour-led labour-centred development which we can look to as inspiring and as rethinking the development process and as trying to engage in solidarity and rethinking how we can actually change the world how we can move from here to there and just to end with a quote from one of the participants in one of the factory occupations that I mentioned a few minutes ago and the recovery is big because what one has regarded as utopia has become now necessary and possible if we could take this to a regional, country, world level we would be talking about another world development as I mentioned right at the beginning is an idea of hope of progress, of liberty of equality, of fraternity it's these kinds of transformations that we all of us want to see and the aim I think of progressive development thinking on development studies or action practice is to find a way of understanding how the human flourishing of each is the precondition for the human flourishing of all. Thanks very much Thanks very much Ben I should also say if anyone wants to tweet in this discussion session or has already been tweeting or if you'd like to tweet the hashtags always are so asked of studies and also ESRC we're very pleased also to welcome back Kalpana Wilson, Kalpana was also involved in the seminar series last year Kalpana teaches at Birkbeck, she was formerly a senior LSE fellow in Gender Theory Globalization and Development at LSE's Gender Institute and she's written and researched extensively on agrarian transformation in Bihar in India women's participation in rural movements, concepts of agency the appropriation of feminist ideas within neoliberal discourses and the ways in which race is inscribed within development and she's written a book on race, racism and development that was published in 2012 by Zed and the book combines insights from post-colonial and critical race theory within a political economy framework and it puts forward provocative theoretical analysis of the relationships between labour, race, capital and resistance and she's written a lot of articles on women's neoliberal development in India so she's just going to say a few words to draw out some of the themes in Ben's talk and then we'll open it out for questions Thank you very much Feizi for that introduction and thank you for inviting me to this very interesting session and one of the things I really liked about the ideas which Ben was discussing was the fact that on the one hand it reminded me of some of the insights of post-development theory which of course goes beyond critiques of particular development models and really highlights the way in which as he puts it, elite-led development has over and over again in different contexts marginalised those who are constructed as being the objects of development and denied them any agency in the development process but what he does, unlike a lot of the post-development theories is to recognise that people's movements themselves have an agenda of social transformation that coming out of these movements is our particular visions of development are also very often ideas of progress and of course recognising that these movements continue very often to be informed by particular understandings of Marxism and inspired by them so in a way it then avoids that whole trap of kind of romanticising communities as kind of static and somehow outside of development which we see in a lot of the post-development literature and really does focus, give us the opportunity to focus on the visions of development which movements are putting forward so as Faisi said I'm just going to really throw out there a few questions and I'm not going to speak for very long one of the things which I was wondering about what you talked about was whether in this framework it tends to assume quite an even spread of of capital labour relations of capitalist relations social relations because you talk about the labour process a lot and I wonder how within this framework then we address contexts where non-capitalist relations are in fact being sustained and incorporated into patterns of global capital accumulation so while I think you have quite a broad definition of labour classes do we perhaps need to go even beyond this for example to understand the current whole range of indigenous struggles against dispossession which are going on which in many places in the world are the kind of foremost struggles against capital accumulation and also because you mentioned of course imperialism and those self-styled Marxists who used to talk about imperialism as a progressive force at the beginning but I wondered where you saw imperialism fitting into this framework because of course you know when we talk about Fanol that's really very much what he was talking about and then of course you know Rostow for example was as we know the founder of modernization theory but he was also the person who lobbied for the escalation of the bombing of Vietnam at the same time so those sorts of structures which make particular labouring lives more valued than others how does that fit in with this framework I was also you know very interested that you made social reproduction quite central to your analysis but I was wondering about the way in which there are changes in the way in which gender is structurally incorporated in global capitalism and in process of accumulation of goods changing through this huge process of feminization of labour quite you know slogans like gender equality smart economics have now got so much purchase you know I would see them very much as being about the extension and intensification of women's labour within the market on top of all the care work and the reproductive work which continues and how are these relationships also incorporated into these into these labour movements which you're talking about you know for example how does unpaid care work actually sustain them in many contexts and finally I wanted to just sort of pick up on this idea of the importance of recognizing recognizing these movements as development actors which you talk about I mean I think that's important although I think it's potentially very much open to co-option as well you know we already hear a lot about civil society organizations as development actors we hear about stakeholders and so on but my sense is that you mean something very different from that but what I do think is really very interesting is this whole idea of actors and agents and how we conceive of agency in a collective context because of course the dominant idea about agency is very much around the idea of the individual so I wondered firstly of course this raises questions of how movements themselves are internally structured and whether power relations are reproduced there or if they're challenged but also I think you know the question of understanding agency in collective movements is something very very interesting and important and how do we transcend you know on the one hand the notion of false consciousness which tends to then reproduce the idea that movements are really only galvanized through exposure to external ideas so that which has been there very much within some strands of Marxism but on the other hand we have to also transcend this liberal conception of the collection of rational self-interested individuals who will come together and take action simply because the conditions are right so I think in order to do this we really need to think about the difference which the collective makes in thinking about agency and just as a last question I really was interested in this idea of prefigurative movements and I suppose I just wanted to raise the question of the state again is the capture of the state by these movements really ultimately the objective and if so what would the state then look like? Thank you Kapuna so well you can respond or we can open it up to the floor however you want to or you can just have a little response and then we can open it up to the floor I just want to say whoever is standing there are a few seats or if you're standing at the back and you want to sit down feel free or if there's anyone outside, is there anyone outside anymore? These are great questions sometimes just to run through a couple of things very briefly then maybe we can take them a bit further Indigenous struggles against dispossession so in the book I'm writing now the conceptualised capitalism is being based on exploitation of labour by capital but it's also fundamentally about the appropriation of the free gifts of nature the social construction of nature as something that can deliver free gifts time and again and that deliverance of free gifts is the process of dispossession and so that opens up the space for considering these Indigenous movements resisting dispossession as part of resistance to the social reproduction of capitalism and of course there are all kinds of problems there because within Indigenous movements you also have processes of class differentiation and so on which you have to be aware of you can't romanticise them at all but at the same time if you think about creating alliances I would definitely see these anti-dispossession movements as part and parcel of the same potential movement to stop the negative dialectic of capitalism expansion changes in gender I mean you've written very much about this I've read some of your work on the train up here it's fantastic so I'd reference you to answer that question and what you've found from reading around this subject is Amy Hyte and Jocelyn Vaterna wrote this book about a class structure in Latin America showing this feminisation of the labour force and as you say in much of your work this feminisation of the labour force is celebrated by neoliberals as empowering women what they show in their article is yes there's more inequality but it's downward inequality women's bad conditions to start with have been replicated across the labour force in many ways it makes sense you've got more workers competing against each other it's going to push wages down and they also use the phrase of shock absorbers where with the retreat of any kind of welfare state and welfare provision women have to undertake the double or as you put it the triple burden even more intensely on that work itself but they also point out as you do this process of degradation also has within the potential for progressive social change as well co-optation obviously and this does raise the question of political leadership which is very difficult to come to a very clear answer Leninism posits itself as having the solutions but Leninist parties have repeatedly shown themselves to be unable to do that very successfully so I have to say I'm not quite sure what the solution is but I don't think we need to have all the solutions at our hands and in terms of state capture and prefigurative movements I mean in his writings about the Paris Commune Marx talks about the state where the Commune reabsorbed state into society rather than this monolith standing over society in dominating and policing it in a very forceful way the state reabsorbed and staffed by the communards and it became something quite different so that is a pointer towards what could be the actual from here to there the politics are doing that is a big question which I wouldn't feel too happy by saying this is the road comrades I've got some ideas but definitely all of them OK, thanks Ben OK, so questions Francesco to indicate just speak up a bit if you can and the second one is related with this and I would ask if you can clarify the distinction with entities and top down in relation with the exploitation and development how we can end exploitation without constrain the capacity of the system to generate a surplus which is needed even in society we will need of the society to generate a surplus the surplus is needed to go to change there are basically two ways of ending exploitation one is that labor at all they produce an eliminate profit but in this way you eliminate surplus as well so you will not be able to use the surplus to generate a positive change in terms of development but you change the organization of production and produce a surplus but then the point is in relation to what it is that you in a sense need sort of like top down combination of production allocation of the surplus but not necessarily has to be an issue OK, thanks and I think we will take a couple of rounds so Joe and then yeah this labor led development it seems to me that to begin with you need labor you need capitalism you need classes you need capital labor relation so is it not then the case that the warrenite marxism that you criticized is actually necessary first of all before your labor led development is possible and therefore places that don't have much modern industry at the moment don't they need a pro-capital strategy to get big capitalist investment before your labor focus development is even a possible viable thing thanks and then you in the white ship first the direction of development but then what about the distractions that is caused by the capitalist elite in any community in any country for example in Iraq in other countries like this capitalist elite they have interest in bringing globalization and neoliberalism and the so called development as they say it and then they won't let people to get together they use ideologies, they use politics, they use nationalism to kind of to rip off the whole society and the whole community from even getting together with that effectiveness that you are talking about so where is that thanks my question is what role does perhaps conscious playing your approach on labor led development how hard is it for that to be cultivated in non-developed countries and what's the role of the elite countries in this respect thanks sorry the role of elites in how are they affecting how conscious is the the labor class in non-developed countries okay we'll take a couple more yep which is a very important point I think and then having to run this in the production to inside the institutional framework capitalism that's having to compete with other capitalist institutions so doesn't that necessarily mean there will be kind of exploitation maybe something as you were saying like working more or being more productive and you said that after you criticize product in this Marxism that focuses so much on productivity so you can comment on this and the other point is that the other cases like you said forcing the government to make some kind of change and this is again you said it's kind of requesting top down reform or change again so is it about like achieving this checks and balances with the ruling elites on the long term this is how you see for in the front there and then you I'm still not satisfied with what or my answer is still not my question is not yet answered of what we actually mean by development and how actually I think we need to plan it around and think about tea growth which would mean we do not need or want to create or something like that so it's a hand there yep the first point about passive revolution I mean that's one outcome but that's not the objective and I mean that's certainly not the idea that I mean passive revolution probably fit into the framework of kind of labour driven development and the combination of that and pro-labor pressure from below generate transformations from above the point about labour-led development is that it actually delivers material gains to the labouring classes in their communities and potentially leads to broader transformations and creates more space for further transformations so I don't see that as a passive revolution I see that as an active process of transformation whether you want to call it well I come onto the question of whether you call it revolution in the second generation and de-growth I mean I think from what I've read about the de-growth a bit like post-development it's a great idea very attractive identifies many of the problems with capitalism in its ceaseless kind of accumulation but it's not a based in political economy it doesn't have a kind of political economy analysis neither de-growth nor nor the post-development theory and they don't really have an analysis of capitalism I mean Trotsky said you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you and you could say the same thing to the de-growth and post-development you may not be interested in capitalism but capitalism is interested in you it takes over everything like cancer, expands and incorporates everything so in question of de-growth I would reframe it and say there's nothing intrinsically impossible about having a genuinely sustainable world transform nature into things that we need transform whatever we're going to call it that could be considered growth but what it's not is accumulation for the sake of accumulation which I think is the root cause of environmental destruction and exploitation which comes back to the question of surplus generation I think through okay so what I say about prefigurative movements I mean if we just look at them for a moment we see the emergence of I wouldn't say that these are the solutions to world's problems today's solutions for tomorrow's problems I mean they are the potential indicators of what could be if you take a much longer view and show the kind of high level of democratic participation you could see the possibilities of creating surpluses would be generated through much more a higher level of democratic participation decision making resource allocation decisions about what is going to be produced what's not going to be produced I mean you can have you can have local level production where people produce many things that they need for use the production of use values I think you don't necessarily need to have an overriding oppressive state to guarantee surplus generation you can have surplus generation within the concept of more democratic means of organisation I mean I'll write about this in the book in the last chapter I'll draw very much on Michael Liebigitz's work who I find really useful for this I agree a lot of these some of these occupied factories do engage in self exploitation and of course you cannot have an island in the sea of capitalism this can only be the start if this is going to be the future otherwise you'll be rolled back so yes of course that is a likelihood in this scenario but it creates a kind of contradictory situation which can go in many different directions one of which is to further expand into the economy into society into politics and start subjecting more and more of resource production and allocation to democratic control so I see that as potentially progressive so in terms of politics in class consciousness the very first thing is to say I think is that collective actions themselves generate a new realisation of the world throw up new questions and demand new solutions and it's in that process that you do have new forms of energy new human resources if you want to call that are created through collective actions work together debate together whole new range of I mean I was reading Kalpana's piece development and change article from 2015 and you gave an example of some of the Indian I think is a landless communities fighting for land reform and in the process as I understood it highlighting question of gender oppression and the idea of gender justice gender justice as I understood it so that is that parachuted in from the communist Leninist ideologues maybe but it's also generated by collective actions themselves so I can't give you I'm not going to sit here and say this is the manifesto this is the solution but what I can say and when I'm saying this I'm saying it very much in relation to those pessimists who say no no we need elite theory and the idea of gender justice in itself is a generative force it creates new problems and new solutions emerge out of it and that is where these politics will emerge from if they're going to really take hold that's in response to those people who say the masses are just passive and they need to be shoved around it's not a satisfying answer but I think it does work in terms of my role as an academic in development studies making the argument that collective actions are fundamental the anarchism I'll take your point I need to do a lot more reading on that I'm moving in new directions so I'll be engaging in a lot more on that maybe you can recommend some stuff okay more questions yes at the back thank you any other questions you don't have to make a long contribution you can just ask a question speak up a little sorry thank you are you saying that are you also talking to the role of theory and how we utilise theory and that we need to see theories coming from these profiles and if it's not just necessarily a technology you know actually there's a kind of an idea I just wanted to ask do you see the development of the series using their idea of collective bargaining for quite a lot so it's very strict in economic theory that the bargaining is always halfway to conditions I was wondering do you think the development in the set will come from all like spillovers from their own bargaining or whether they will be consciously moving to start consciously looking for community based in a different environment for a few thank you very much for that talk I just wanted to go back to the questions on the state and the periodism because I think you've doubted them a bit but all of the movements you talked about eventually contend with the state so how are we talking about that relationship if we're going to speak about development and how do you see that contention with the state as someone who is studying development or development especially when you see the crushing of what just happened in the Middle East I was just wondering about your take on that Any other questions going once yes great questions I didn't purposely try and dodge that question obviously there's a very good book by John Smith called imperialism in the 21st century I recommend that yes imperialism is a fact it exists how do you oppose it that's difficult the ideas of solidarity are really important understanding how the state is part of a kind of imperial structure is also it comes back to the idea of politics and consciousness and so on this must be part of successful movements I guess this is a slightly paradoxical situation where you give a lecture and you talk about elites versus elite theory and so on but these are the questions that are raised time and again so I see so that I've said lots of words but haven't actually answered your question but I think one of the ways of thinking about it is in terms of theory is to understand trying to think about the world system as the capitalist system not as a sphere of opportunity and a potential freedom but as a coercive building structure and that one is reinforced by imperial powers trying to reproduce their primacy once you understand that then these questions arise in terms of how far can we take our movements that has got to be part of the that question has got to be on the table you can't get away from it what the answers are going to be who knows okay community activism and the question of flexibilization it kind of fits together I read Emmanuel Ness' book Southern Insurgency recently and it's quite good because he gives one example of big strikes in Indian auto production where you've had this process of flexibilization of really over the Suzuki has taken over one of the auto plants and shifted in a relatively short space of time from a large percentage of permanently employed workers to overwhelming I think over 90% of flexible temporary workers and what is inspiring about his account there is that the strikes by permanent workers were on behalf of flexible workers demanding permanent contracts so there is this potential and that is one small part of the answer it's not the whole answer at all but it's one aspect of that we can think further about when we can think in terms of a kind of world that we won we can talk about spreading work and reducing the amount of work which would solve much of the unemployment short working days in any one's manifesto kind of increased leisure time leisure is the idea of being able to do what you want free of constraint that's what Amartya Sen talks about it's absolutely central in terms of role of theory I think it's very important to we do our work we have to engage with the different theorists and understand where we're coming from and why we're saying what we're saying it's a great place to try and learn as much as possible from those who have been excluded and try and do in a way what can we do I see my job in terms of furthering this is to try and create theoretical space for the identification illumination incorporation as generators of progressive kind of thought and action you can't do everything obviously but I think that's something that I can do and I'm trying to do and I think that does contribute to development thinking in some in some way or another Gramsci I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about maybe counter hegemonic blocks and the need to have really I mean if you think about labour and classes and the way labour and classes are fragmented and diverse in the sense that where does labour stop and capital start it's not just the communist manifesto of the world communist manifesto vision of the world we have these big capitalists massive factories and thousands of workers all looking the same and it's a clear class not at all you have all these fragmentations in that sense class analysis is very important and also thinking strategically about class alliances and class collaboration with different sections who maybe in certain situations opposing the extension of capitalist force field of extraction so for example indigenous communities will have class differentiation but there may be a potential for collaboration to stop certain projects and so on and in that process of collaboration new collective endeavors may emerge which could take the movement further forward so I think we have to have our eyes open for these rather than having a kind of a purist conception that has this simplified version of the world which goes back to the caricature of Marx rather than himself