The second age of the Third World: from primitive accumulation to global public goods?

Abstract

The post-cold war era of neoliberal globalisation is the ‘Second Age of the Third World’. No longer defined by comparisons with advanced capitalism and state socialism, or by attempts to chart a non-aligned path between liberal and Marxist utopias, which characterised the ‘First Age of the Third World’, the Third World's identity is now constituted by its re-entry into the protracted process of primitive accumulation. Neoliberalism simultaneously accelerates and aggravates the uneven, destructive and creative route towards proletarianisation and private property. This prospect throws contemporary development theory into disarray, especially when confronted with the ever-present but usually hidden role of the increasingly internationalised state. The idea of global public goods has arisen out of this impasse. This article discusses primitive accumulation and global public goods, offering ‘public accumulation’ as an alternative.

Notes

David Moore is in the Economic History and Development Studies Programme at the University of Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa. Email: moored:@nu.ac.za.

Thanks to Mark Berger (again) for comments, extraordinary patience, encouragement and tolerance; and also to Brett Bowden for comments.

This very abstract article has its empirical base primarily in Africa, where primitive accumulation is more protracted than in other parts of the Third World. D Moore, ‘Neoliberal globalisation and the triple crisis of “modernisation” in Africa: Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 22 (6), 2001, pp 909–929; Moore, ‘Zimbabwe: twists on the tale of primitive accumulation’, in M Smith (ed), Globalizing Africa, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Nevertheless, there are many other Third World, socioeconomic spaces where the tasks of primitive accumulation are not yet complete.

For a reminder that classical methods of primitive accumulation required much state activity, and that it was kept secret, see M Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 2000.

For example, Arrighi notes that until 1975 African growth was impressive. G Arrighi, ‘The African crisis: world systemic and regional effects’, New Left Review, 2 (15), 2002, pp 1–32.

M Cowan & R Shenton, Doctrines of Development, London: Routledge, 1996.

Mainstream development theory seldom mentions ‘states’ and never mentions ‘primitive accumulation’.

The ‘primitive’ forms of accumulation demonstrated by Third World elites, including corruption, are frequently not productive because the wealth gained in these processes is not attachable to ‘freed’ labour, or employable labour, or available means of production. For Marx, ‘what enables moneywealth to become capital is the encounter, on one side, with free workers; and on the other side, with the necessaries and materials, etc, which previously were in one way or another the property of the masses who have now become object-less, and are also free and purchasable’. K Marx, ‘The Grundrisse’, in R Tucker (ed), The Marx–Engels Reader, New York: Norton, 1978, p 269.

W Robinson, ‘Social theory and globalization: the rise of a transnational state’, Theory and Society, 30 (2), 2001, pp 157–200.

On state–society complexes, see RW Cox, ‘Social forces, states, and world orders: beyond international relations theory’, in RW Cox with T Sinclair, Approaches to World Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 85–123.

J Townsend, CB Macpherson and the Problem of Liberal Democracy, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000.

For Hardt and Negri capital's innovations—even global expansion—are forced on it from below. M Hardt & A Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

JK Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

In the USA government employees exceed those in manufacturing by 5 129 000. ‘Harper’s Index', Harper's, July 2003, p 11.

Some former Second World countries—especially Central European—were mainly capitalist before becoming part of the ‘Soviet bloc’. They should not be considered part of today's Second World. Perhaps China should, in spite of its split with the USSR and later attempts to lead/join the Third World.

JS Saul, ‘Globalization, imperialism, development: false binaries and radical resolutions’, in L Panitch & C Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2004: Imperialism, London: Merlin Press, 2003.

D Harvey, ‘The new imperialism’, in Panitch & Leys, Socialist Register 2004.

S MacWilliam, ‘Plenty of poverty: the development of the World Bank’, in D Moore (ed), Banking for Hegemony: Critical Essays on the World Bank, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, forthcoming.

BJ Silver & G Arrighi, ‘Polanyi’s “double movement”: the belles e´poques of British and US hegemony compared', Politics and Society, 31 (2), 2003, pp 325–355.

P Bond, ‘Potentials for African anti-capitalism: uneven development and popular resistance’, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Policy Paper, Johannesburg, 1, 2003.

Dominant development discourse confuses the ‘yeoman’ stage of transition with ‘full’ capitalism. Marx's primitive accumulation account allows ‘free peasant proprietors’ to exist under many forms of feudal title. His teleology suggests, however, that eventually they will disappear under the pressure of agrarian capitalists. K Marx, Capital, Vol 2, London: JM Dent, 1930, p 794.

Brett Bowden notes in correspondence that armies soak up many ‘new entrants’ to the labour market, as in the classical age of primitive accumulation. Think, also, of child soldiers in many Third World wars.

B Teschke, ‘Theorizing the Westphalian system of states: international relations from absolutism to capitalism’, European Journal of International Relations, 8 (1), pp 5–48. Teshke's analysis of changing modes of production in Europe and war has applicability to contemporary Zimbabwean international primitive accumulation. See M Nest, ‘Ambitions, profits and loss: Zimbabwean economic involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ African Affairs, 100 (400), 2001, pp 469–490.

A Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, 1971.

F Block & M Somers, ‘In the shadow of Speenhamland: social policy and the old poor law’, Politics and Society, 31 (2), 2003, pp 283–322.

To exercise hegemony, ‘the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic–corporate kind … in the decisive nucleus of economic activity … the development and expansion of the particular [ruling] group [must be ] conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the “national” energies’. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp 161, 182. Hegemony is not made through culture and ideology alone.

I Kaul, I Grundberg & M Stern (eds), Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalisation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 3, 8 on public goods, conditions and bads.

L Sklair, ‘Social movements for global capitalism: the transnational capitalist class in action’, Review of International Political Economy, 4 (3), 1997, pp 514–538.

See D Moore, ‘The World Bank and global hegemony: the Gramsci effect’, in Moore, Banking for Hegemony, on the World Bank as part of an emerging global state.

Midnight Notes Collective, ‘The new enclosures’, The Commoner, September 2001, pp 1–15.

W Bonefeld, ‘History and social constitution: primitive accumulation is not primitive’, The Commoner, March 2002, pp 1–8; Bonefeld, ‘The permanence of primitive accumulation: notes on social constitution’, 2001, at www.rcci.net/globalizacion/2001/fg176.htm; and C von Werlhof, ‘Globalization and the “permanent” process of primitive accumulation: the example of the mai, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment’, Journal of World Systems Research, 7 (3), 2000, pp 728–747. Cf P Zarembka, ‘Primitive accumulation in marxism: historical or trans-historical separation from the means of production?’, The Commoner, March 2002, pp 1–9.

D Rueschemeyer, E Stephens & J Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

See J Bell & T Sekine, ‘The disintegration of capitalism: a phase of ex-capitalist transition’, in R Albritton, M Itoh, R Westra & A Zuege (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations, London: Palgrave, 2001, pp 44–46 for the specificities added to ‘capitalism in general’ by petroleum since the 1920s—and consider one of the reasons the USA invaded Iraq.

JK Boyce & L Ndikumana, ‘Is Africa a net creditor? New estimates of capital flight from severely indebted Sub-Saharan African countries’, Journal of Development Studies, 38 (2), 2001, pp 27–56.

DF Bryceson & V Jamal, Farewell to Farms: De-agarianisation and Employment in Africa, Aldershot: Avebury, 1997.

D Moore, ‘Hardt and Negri’s Empire, real empire, and the “Third World” after 9/11', Acme, 2003, forthcoming.

M Burawoy, ‘For a sociological marxism: the complementary convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’, Politics and Society, 31 (2), 2003, p 219, quoting K Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1957, pp 163, 182–183; and Silver & Arrighi, ‘Polanyi’s “double movement” ', p 328, quoting Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp 182–183, 207–208.

J-F Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London: Longman, 1993.

Silver & Arrighi, ‘Polanyi’s “double movement” ', p 329. American and other ‘free-world’ support for such processes was often condemned as imperialistic and supportive of dictators. Later, Foucauldians criticised the development industry in totality as but an apparatus of power. One cannot disagree with either perspective, but an empirical look at rates of growth, industrialisation and welfare before and after the age of neoliberalism can ascertain whether the age of Keynesianism or Hayekianism has been more beneficial for the material lives of most people in the Third World, and thus more conducive to the construction of critical human capabilities—presumably a basis for postmodern sensibilities.

M Hardt, ‘Today’s Bandung?', New Left Review, 2 (14), pp 112–118.

M Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed, 2001; and J Macrae, Aiding Recovery: The Crisis of Aid in Chronic Political Emergencies, London: Zed, 2001.

B Warren, Imperialism: The Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980.

S MacWilliam, ‘Plenty of poverty’.

United Nations, Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN Security Council, S/2001/357, 12 April 2001.

He indicated that capitalism's benefits would never reach all the way into the Third World until its ‘productive powers’ were appropriated ‘by the people’. In India this would not be until the ‘Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether’. Is this populist or nationalist support for productive Third World bourgeoisies? Marx, ‘The future results of British rule in India’, in Tucker, The Marx–Engels Reader, p 662.

R Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique’, New Left Review, 1 (104), 1977, pp 45–92.

Marx, ‘Grundrisse,’ p 269.

Hardt & Negri, Empire, p 258.

Ibid, p 403.

Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp 137–146, and 118–120, agree with Marx that ‘capitalism can … be a force of enlightenment’ but they criticise his failure to note alternatives and forms of resistance within pre-colonial Indian society. They fail to specify what he has missed. On the local and the global, see pp 44–46, 362, where the former is seen as being potentially ‘regressive and even fascistic’ when isolated and ‘pure’.

Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp 258–259.

D Moore, ‘Africa: the black hole at the middle of empire?’, Rethinking Marxism, 13 (3–4), 2001, pp 100–118.

Marx, ‘Grundrisse’, pp 271–274.

See Marx, Capital, Vol 2, pp 799, 801–802, 804–813 for details of expropriation from communal lands in England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany; and pp 813–822 for laws against vagrancy and crime because ‘it was impossible that those who had been thus hunted off the land could be absorbed by the rising system of manufacture as quickly as they were “set free”. Nor could [they] … be expected, all in a moment, to submit themselves to the discipline of their new condition’.

A Sen. Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 7, 113.

Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp 115, 257.

Ibid, p 256.

Ibid, p 257.

Ibid, p 257, quoting Marx, Capital, Vol 1, London: Vintage, 1976, p 918.

Ibid, p 115.

Ibid, pp 258–259.

Ibid, pp 255–256.

Hardt and Negri contend an ‘international or multinational proletariat’ moved towards unity in ‘one common attack against the capitalist disciplinary regime’ during the 1960s and 1970s, which ‘decreed the end of the division between First and Third Worlds and the potential political integration of the entire global proletariat … Third Worldist perspectives … were now completely useless … blind to the real convergence of struggles across the world’. Ibid, pp 262–264.

For the Bank, ‘private property’ now includes renting. K Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, Oxford: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003, pp xxx–xxxvi, xlv.

H de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, London: Bantam, 2000; and Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction.

De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, p 168.

Ibid, p 163.

Ibid, p 198.

H Bernstein, ‘The “peasantry” in global capitalism: who, where and why?’, in C Leys & L Panitch (eds), Socialist Register 2001: Working Classes, Global Realities, London: 2001.

De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, pp 1, 58, quoting F Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, New York: Harper and Row, 1982, p 248.

See Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, for extracts from Wakefield and Rae on the USA and Canada, pp 326–329, 340, 349–351.

De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, p 165.

Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, pp xxi, xxiii, xxv.

Ibid, p xxx.

Ibid, p xxvi.

Ibid, pp xxx, xxxi. Many references to the integration of ‘traditional’ forms of tenure (eg pp 62–65) suggest a desire to preserve aspects of pre-capitalism compatible with either permanent or accelerated primitive accumulation. For an indication of problems raised by these issues in South Africa, see B Cousins, ‘Labour pains plague land reform’s laatlammetjie', Mail and Guardian, 13–19 June 2003, pp 28–29; and L Ntsebeza, ‘Traditional authorities and rural development’, in JK Coetzee, J Graaff, F Hendricks & G Wood (eds), Development: Theory, Policy, and Practice, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp 317–329. More generally, see J W Bruce, ‘African tenure models at the turn of the century’, Land Reform, 1, 2000, pp 17–27.

Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, pp xviii, xxiv. Perhaps the Bank wishes such predictions into self-fulfilment: its 1997 World Development Report, while ‘bringing the state back in’, advises technocrats to implement reforms during times of external threat or economic crisis—‘when the normal rules of the game are in flux’—or during a new regime's honeymoon. World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 144, quoted in D Moore, ‘“Sail on, O ship of state”: neoliberalism, globalisation and the governance of Africa’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27 (1), 1999, pp 61–96.

Deininger, p 15. He also notes that often only large asset holders get credit for their titles, p 50.

The term ‘nonrival’ means ‘one person’s enjoyment will not reduce others' ability to benefit from the system'. Deininger does note that establishment of property rights ‘exclude[s] some individuals or groups from access to these benefits’. Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, pp 23, 24.

Ibid, pp xxii, 22–25.

Ibid, p 28.

Ibid, p 35.

De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, is this religion's bible, preached fervently and cited profusely by those who mean ‘good governance’ to be the construction of private property rights.

Marx, ‘Grundisse’, p 269.

P Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State, London: Verso, 1974.

P Bond (ed), Fanon's Warning: A Civil Society Reader on the New Partnership for African Development, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002; and B Bowden, ‘Reinventing imperialism in the wake of September 11’, Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations, 1 (2), 202, pp 28–46.

R Kanbur, ‘ifi’s and ipg's: Operational implications for the World Bank,' paper presented at the G24 Technical Group Meeting, Beirut, 1–2 March 2002.

See B Fine, C Lapavitsas & J Pincus (eds), Development Policy in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond the post-Washington Consensus, London: Routledge, 2003, for critical analyses.

See D Moore ‘Development discourse as hegemony: towards an ideological history, 1945–1995’, in D Moore & G Schmitz (eds), Debating Development Discourse: Institutional and Popular Perspectives, London: Macmillan, 1995, pp 1–53 for an effort inspired by the co-option of sustainable development discourse. See also T Wanner, ‘The power of greenspeak and the power of knowledge: the World Bank and sustaindevelopment’, in Moore, Banking for Hegemony.

M Desai, ‘Public goods: a historical perspective’, in Kaul, Grundberg & Stern, Providing Global Public Goods, p 68.

T Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?, New York: Knopf, 2000, pp 244–246, 326, 358.

L Mehta, ‘Problems of publicness and access rights: perspectives from the water domain’, in Kaul, Grundberg & Stern, Providing Global Public Goods, pp 556–575; and F Lumsden & A Loftus, ‘Inanda’s struggle for water through pipes and tunnels: exploring state–civil society relations in a post-apartheid informal settlement', Centre for Civil Society Research Report, Durban: University of Natal, 2003. On the essential notion of basic needs decommodification, see P Bond, Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, imf and International Finance, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001.

A de Waal, ‘How will hiv/aids transform African governance?’, African Affairs, 102 (402), pp 1–23.

The International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect: International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty, Ottawa, 2001, expands on security, the classic gpg.

A Sen, Development as Freedom: Human Security Now, New York: Commission on Human Security, 2003. Sadako Ogata is the commission's co-chair. Her former post as UN High Commissioner for Refugees indicates the ‘band-aid’ roots of human security discourse. South Africa's Speaker of Parliament, Frene Ginwala, is another commissioner. The Deputy Director and project co-ordinator for the report's ‘development’ half (‘conflict’ was the other) was Viviene Taylor, chair of South Africa's Taylor Report on the Basic Income Grant (big). The South African government's hesitation to implement a 100 Rand monthly big, fearing the creation of ‘dependency’, illustrates the contradictions of human security discourse.

L Hamilton, ‘A theory of true interests in the work of Amartya Sen’, Government and Opposition, 14 (4), 1999, pp 516–546.

Sen, Development as Freedom, 1999, p 269.

B Fine, ‘The developmental state is dead–long live social capital?’, Development and Change, 30 (1), pp 1–21.

South African Poverty Network, ‘What good are global public goods?’, Poverty Briefing 3, October 2002, p 3.

J Nef, Human Security and Mutual Vulnerability: The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999.

MT Berger, ‘The rise and demise of national development and the origins of post-cold war capitalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30 (2), 2001, pp 211–234.

B Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism. ‘Imperialism and capitalist industrialisation’, New Left Review, 81, 1973, pp 3–45, on which the book was based, was published just before opec's and neoliberalism's effects were felt. For reconsidered optimism on Kenyan capitalism triggered by recent global trends, see C Leys, ‘Learning from the Kenya debate’, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, London: James Currey, 1996, pp 143–163; and JS Saul, ‘Afro-pessimism/optimism: the antinomies of Colin Leys’, in AB Bakan & E Macdonald (eds), Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left, Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2002, pp 94–112. For Sender, Warren's Marxism is not ‘Chicago Marxism’, ie supporting neoclassical policies and condemning state intervention. J Sender, ‘Reassessing the role of the World Bank in sub-Saharan Africa’, in JR Pincus & JA Winters (eds), Reinventing the World Bank, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp 185–202.

I Wallerstein, ‘America and the world: the twin towers as metaphor’, After September 11, New York: Social Science Research Council, 2001, at www.scrc.org/sept11/essays; and R Greenhill & A Pettifor, The United States as a hipc —How the Poor are Financing the Rich, London: Jubilee Research and the New Economics Foundation, 2002.