DEVELOPMENT

Outline

1. ·       What is development?
2. ·       Different conceptions of development
3. ·       Development as economic growth
4. ·       Human development
5. ·       Freedoms and Capabilities
6. ·       Is development obsolete?
7. ·       What is under development?

What is development?

In human society, at the level of the individual, it implies:

• increased skill and capacity,
• greater freedom,
• creativity,
• self-discipline,
• responsibility and
• material well-being.

Some of these are virtually moral categories and are difficult to evaluate – depending as they do on the age in which one lives, one’s class origins, and one’s personal code of what is right and what is wrong.

At the level of social groups, therefore, development implies an increasing capacity to regulate both internal and external relationships. Much of human history has been a fight for survival against natural hazards and against real and imagined human enemies.

Development in the past has always meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social group and indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others - something that often came about irrespective of the will of the persons within the societies involved.

More often than not, the term ‘development’ is used in an exclusive economic sense – the justification being that the type of economy is itself an index of other social features.

What then is economic development? A society develops economically as its members increase jointly their capacity for dealing with the environment. This capacity for dealing with the environment is dependent on the extent to which they understand the laws of nature (science), on the extent to which they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology), and on the manner in which work is organised.

Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their ability to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of nature.

Every continent independently participated in the early epochs of the extension of man’s control over his environment – which means in effect that every continent can point to a period of economic development.

Africa, being the original home of man, was a major participant in the processes in which human groups displayed an ever increasing capacity to extract a living from the natural environment.

In human society it has always been the case that the expansion of the economy leads eventually to a change in the form of social relations. Karl Marx, writing in the 19th century, was the first writer to appreciate this, and he distinguished within European history several stages of development:

The first major stage following after simple bands of hunters was Communalism where property was collectively owned, work was done in common, and goods were shared out equally.

The second was Slavery, caused by the extension of domineering elements within the family and by some groups being overwhelmed by others. Slaves did a variety of tasks, but their main job was to produce food.

The next was Feudalism where agriculture remained the principal means of making a livelihood, but the land which was necessary for that purpose was in the hands of the few, and they took the lion’s share of the wealth. The workers on the land (now called Serfs) were no longer the personal property of the masters, but they were tied to the land of a particular manor or estate.

    When the manor changed hands, the serfs had to remain there and provide goods for the landlord – just keeping enough to feed themselves. Just as the child of a slave was a slave, so the children of serfs were also serfs.

Then came Capitalism, under which the greatest wealth in the society was produced not in agriculture but by machines – in factories and in mines. Like the preceding phase of feudalism, capitalism was characterised by the concentration in a few hands of ownership of the means of producing wealth and by unequal distribution of the products of human labour.

     The few who dominated were the bourgeoisie who had originated in the merchants and craftsmen of the feudal epoch, and who rose to be industrialists and financiers. Meanwhile, the serfs were declared legally free to leave the land and to go in search of employment in capitalist enterprises. Their labour thereby became a commodity – something to be bought and sold.

It was predicted that there would be a further stage – that of Socialism – in which the principle of economic would be restored, as in communalism. In the present century, the phase of Socialism has indeed emerged in some countries.

Economically, each succeeding stage represented development in the strict sense that there was increased capacity to control the material environment and thereby to create more goods and services for the community. The greater quantity of goods and services were based on greatest skills and human inventiveness.

Man was liberated in the sense of having more opportunities to display and develop his talents. Whether man uplifted himself in a moral sense is open to dispute. The advance in production increased the range of powers which sections of society had over other sections, and it multiplied the violence which was part of the competition for survival and growth among social groups.

One of the most difficult questions to answer is exactly why different peoples developed at different rates when left on their own. Part of the answer lies in the environment in which human groups evolved and part of it lies in the ‘superstructure’ of human society. That is to say, as human beings battled with the material environment, they created forms of social relations, forms of government, patterns of behaviour and systems of belief which together constituted the superstructure-which was never exactly the same in any two societies.

Each element in the superstructure interacted with other elements in the superstructure as well as with the material base. For instance, the political and religious patterns affected each other and were often intertwined.

The religious belief that a certain forest was sacred was the kind of element in the superstructure that affected economic activity, since that forest would not be cleared for cultivation. While in the final analysis the breakthrough to a new stage of human development is dependent upon man’s technical capacity to deal with the environment, it is also to be borne in mind that peculiarities in the superstructure of any given society have a marked impact on the rate of development.

One of the most crucial factors leading to more rapid and consistent expansion of economic capacity under Socialism has been the implementation of planned development.

     Most of the historical processes so far described relate to involuntary and unplanned development. No one planned that at a given stage human beings should cease using stone axes and use iron implements instead; and (to come to more recent times) while individual capitalist firms plan their own expansion, their system is not geared to over-all planning of the economy and the society. The capitalist state intervened only fitfully and partially to supervise capitalist development. The Socialist state has as its prime function the control of the economy on behalf of the working classes.

Different conceptions of development

”Good change” (Chambers 1997)

Making a better life for all – ie meeting basic needs, sufficient food and water to maintain good health, access to affordable services, treated with dignity and respect(Peet and Hartwick, 2009)

Development as progress, growth and modernity?

Immanent (inherent) v/s intentional (Thomas 2001)

Development as economic growth

Development as “a process which enables human beings to realise their full potential, build self confidence and lead lives of dignity and fulfilment. It is a process which frees people from the fear of want and exploitation. It is a movement away from political, economic or social oppression. Through development, political independence acquires its true significance.”

- South Centre, formerly headed by Julius Nyerere-

(The South Centre, an independent intergovernmental think-tank of developing countries, was created to analyze the development problems of the developing countries, encourage them to value and share their common experience and provide intellectual and policy support for them to act collectively and individually, particularly at the international level.)

Human Development

“Human Development is a development paradigm that is about much more than the rise or fall of national incomes. It is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. Development is thus about expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value. And it is thus about much more than economic growth ….”

-Mahbub ul Haq, Founder of the Human Development Report-

Freedoms and Capabilities

    Development as the removal of various types of “unfreedom” that leave people with little opportunity of exercising agency. It is the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy and capabilities or the ability to be to lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value .

– Amartya Sen-

Is development obsolete?

The idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failure and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work (..) development has grown obsolete (Sachs 1992);

Development as expression of US hegemony post WWII; (G. Esteva)

Power of a concept – Two billion people become underdeveloped on one day!

What is under development?

Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of development. It is very much tied to the fact that human social development has been uneven and from a strictly economic view-point some human groups have advanced further by producing more and becoming more wealthy.

Today, our main pre-occupation is with the differences in wealth between on the one hand Europe and North America and on the other hand Africa, Asia and Latin America. In comparison with the first, the second group can be said to be backward or underdeveloped. At all times, therefore, one of the ideas behind underdevelopment is a comparative one.

It is possible to compare the economic conditions at two different periods for the same country and determine whether or not it had developed; and (more importantly) it is possible to compare the economies of any two countries or sets of countries at any given period in time.

A second and even more indispensable component of modern underdevelopment is that it expresses a particular relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country by another. All of the countries named as underdeveloped’ in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now pre-occupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation.

African and Asian societies were developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist powers. When that happened, exploitation increased and the export of surplus ensued, depriving the societies of the benefit of their natural resources and labour. That is an integral part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense.

In some quarters, it has often been thought wise to substitute the term ‘developing’ for ‘underdeveloped’. One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally or in any other respect.

On the economic level, it is best to remain with the word ‘underdeveloped’ rather than ‘developing’, because the latter creates the impression that all the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America are escaping from a state of economic backwardness relative to the industrial nations of the world, and that they are emancipating themselves from the relationship of exploitation.

    That is certainly not true, and many underdeveloped countries in Africa and elsewhere are becoming more underdeveloped in comparison with the world’s great powers, because their exploitation by the metropoles is being intensified in new ways.

Developed economies have certain characteristics which contrast with underdeveloped ones. The developed countries are all industrialized. That is to say, the greater part of their working population is engaged in industry rather than agriculture, and most of their wealth comes out of mines, factories, etc. They have a high output of labour per man in industry because of their advanced technology and skills.

   

This is well known, but it is also striking that the developed countries have a much more advanced agriculture than the rest of the world. Their agriculture has already become an industry, and the agricultural part of the economy produces more although it is small.

The countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America are called agricultural countries because they rely on agriculture and have little or no industry: but their agriculture is unscientific and the yields are far less than those of the developed countries.

The question as to who and what is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent.

Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa.