Renewing Socialist Development in the Third World

Abstract

Current global economic trends have rekindled interest in development alternatives. Competing socialist and green proposals for these development alternatives raise important questions about crafting institutional vehicles for the simultaneous realisation of popular empowerment, sustainability and poverty alleviation development goals. Much of the debate is about economic scale and the re-localising of production and consumption sundered by globalisation. Yet socialists and greens are fuzzy on principles of economy necessary to achieve their desired goals. To help sort out these issues this article introduces the concept of “socio-material communication” as a way of differentiating among available economic forms. It then offers a design for socialist development that is progressive, sustainable and realisable under current “really existing” conditions. It is concluded that realisation of socialist and green development goals for future human betterment requires the combining of modes of socio-material communication to meet specific development challenges, rather than seeking to impose one mode, such as economic planning or society-wide market operation, indiscriminately.

Key Words:

• Economic development
• socialism
• eco-sustainability
• third world
• local exchange and trading systems

Notes

This term draws upon Soviet era debates over agriculture. Stalin used a “scissors” pricing policy to extract wealth from the countryside and channel it to the proletariat in cities. Park Chung Hee in South Korea and Chaing Kai Shek (when in Taiwan) used pricing as a tool to enrich agriculture which then provided a market for urban goods. This was a particularly important development strategy in a milieu where rural-based revolutionary movements were challenging the capitalist order.

Socio-material betterment involves progressive change in structures of motivation for work, economic empowerment and quality of human material life in all its multidimensionality.

For a Marxist exemplar, see Kovel (2002). Compare, for example, to central chapters in Korten (2009).

On the Marxist position, see Kovel (2002) and Löwy (2005). Green positions on re-localization and community are presented in McKibben (2007).

The emergent field of environmental economics, lauded by some green theorists, stumbles over precisely this conflation of meanings of exchange in mainstream economics, as it seeks ways to reflect the “right price” for environmental destruction (see, for example, Speth, 2008).

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism as belaboured across several thousand pages of Marx's monumental Capital is that between value and use-value. Use-value is the transhistorical foundation of all human existence. Value is the historically delimited principle of capital. Use-value is qualitative and heterogeneous. Value is quantitative and homogenising. In Capital, Marx tracks the way value overcomes use-value obstacles or contradictions to form a historical society. Capital constitutes a dialectical thought system that unfolds all the categories of capital and their immanent interconnections. To achieve its goal in clearly defining what capital in its most fundamental incarnation is Marx allows value in theory to have its way with use-value. Outside the theoretical purview of Capital, in the rough and tumble world of history, use-values in their manifest heterogeneity resist the homogenizing thrust of value to varying extents.

In capitalist societies, the fact that human labour power is available for a certain price renders it like other commodities – an input to be converted to a particular given output. Yet, labour power is in a very fundamental fashion not just another commodity. Unlike other inputs in the production process, labour power cannot be capitalistically produced. Unlike other commodity inputs, it is impossible to adjust its supply to fit demand. Under conditions of ongoing accumulation, capital tends to absorb the industrial reserve army, precipitating a superabundance or over-accumulation of capital in relation to the size of the working population. As wages rise and profits fall, businesses close while capital turns to speculative endeavours. In the ensuing depression and devaluation of capital, surviving capitalists introduce new technologies, raising the organic composition of capital and reconstituting the industrial reserve army to spur but another bout of capital accumulation. Hence the contradiction between value and use-value in the very maintenance of capitalist relations of production is resolved in the capitalist business cycle by capital revolutionising the forces of production (see Westra, 2009: 30-3).

Polanyi never answers questions as to what causes the economy to suddenly “dis-embed” from the social or why, if the economy as he studied it across its varying historical forms always existed, have we only with the rise of capitalism recognised this and attempted a disciplined study of “economics?” Marx, on the other hand, answers these questions in his understanding of capitalism as an upside-down reified economy. That is, in “objectifying” relations of production by converting them into relations between things, capital renders economic life “transparent” for the first time in human history and, therefore, amenable to theorising. Marx's recognition of capitalist reification is the basis of Marxian economics' claim to science. Because mainstream economics, from classical to neo-classical, never interrogates the historicity of its discipline, its claims can amount to no more than ideology.

If social resources, most particularly human labour, are shifted to the production of iron while mass society is clamouring for grain, the future of such an order will be put in question. Human history is littered with examples where chronic misallocation of social resources led to such demises.

As Marx famously illustrated it, Robinson Crusoe's daily work time ensuring his survival on his island, including “extra” time he chose to work to put something away for a rainy day, constituted his necessary labour. Only if a few roving pirates stumbled upon Robinson's island and forced Robinson to work to sustain them while they drank and sunbathed instead of working, would Robinson have to perform surplus labour. Social class relations of production where the direct producers – slaves, peasants or proletarians – receive only part of the product of their labour (that, at minimum, necessary for their survival to work another day) may be viewed in this light.

The “labour theory of value” explains how the law of value operates to mediate between the specifically capitalist organisation of economic life and the production of use-values, which is the foundation of all material existence. As argued elsewhere, Marxists have devoted much attention to the exploitative, class-dividing nature of capitalism, but very little analytical work has shown how such an order, which converts interpersonal relations of production into economic relations between things, is able to exist in the first place. For those interested in pursuing the complex economic mechanics of the law of value in both the micro-economic and macro-economic context of the capitalist business cycle, see the discussion in Westra (2009: 24-38).

Broad and Cavanagh (2009: 83-4) point out that among the billions living below the UN-designated US$1.25/day poverty line are over 300 hundred million indigenous peoples who live in relatively (until very recently) isolated communities. These indigenous peoples avail themselves of natural resources and engage in reciprocal/primitive communistic modalities of socio-material communication. Though they are “poor” in the technical sense, their quality of life is arguably far better than many of their peasant counterparts who, unable to continue engaging in subsistence farming, often end up in urban slums.

There is not any historically “even” or “pure” model representing this change. Nevertheless, accounting for temporal variation and development sequencing, from the commencement of the twentieth century to the 1970s, the proportion of the labour force employed in industry in what are generally considered developed capitalist economies, was 40-50%. The proportion employed in agriculture plummeted to below 30% by 1950 and to around 12% by 1971 (Feinstein, 1999). Global South societies at the close of the twentieth century had more than 50% of their populations tied to agriculture.

See, for example, the La Via Campesina statement to the UN General Assembly meeting on 6 April 2009 on the global food crisis, http://www.un.org/ga/president/63/interactive/programmeglobalfoodcrisis.shtml and http://www.nffc.net/Farmers%20Worldwide/Right%20To%20Food%20-%20Saragih.pdf (both downloaded 14 June 2010).

LETS proponents maintain websites pointing to its geographical spread and extolling its virtues. An e-journal has sprung up on the subject. See, for example, http://www.personal.u-net.com/∼gmlets/resources/; and the e-journal http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/ijccr/links.html.