The Poverty of the Global Order

Abstract

This paper argues that the legitimacy of the global order depends not on economic progress alone, but on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations, through ‘new solutions’ to old problems by states and development agencies. New solutions become methods of social control through which the dominant visions of what count as viable futures are reproduced. We critique efforts to humanize development (e.g., by the World Bank, Amartya Sen) as evidence of development's epistemological crisis. Deploying Karl Polanyi's distinction between formal and substantive economy, we consider examples of substantive economy, which realize equality through strategic sovereignty and representational power, in collective and individual terms. These represent practical and epistemological ‘spaces of hope’ for critique of the crisis of the market epistemology that infects development studies and international relations.

Este documento sostiene que la legitimidad del orden global no depende solamente del progreso económico, sino de la naturalización progresiva de sus fundamentos epistemológicos, a través de ‘nuevas soluciones’ a problemas antiguos mediante estados y agencias del desarrollo. Las nuevas soluciones se convierten en métodos de control social, a través de los cuales se reproducen las visiones dominantes de lo que cuenta como futuros viables. Criticamos los esfuerzos de humanizar al desarrollo (p.e. Banco Mundial, Amartya Sen) como evidencia de la crisis del desarrollo epistemológico. Utilizando la distinción de Kart Polanyi entre economía formal y economía sustancial, consideramos ejemplos de una economía sustancial, la cual realiza la igualdad por medio de una soberanía estratégica y un poder representativo, en términos colectivos e individuales. Estas, entre otras iniciativas, representan ‘espacios de esperanza’ prácticos y epistemológicos para criticar la crisis de la epistemología de mercado que infecta a los estudios de desarrollo y las relaciones internacionales.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge helpful feedback from Rajeev Patel on a previous version of this paper.

Notes

1. Thus in the crisis in Argentina (2001), the coordinator of a worker-run factory claimed, ‘We're demonstrating that success is not profit but the creation of work and social inclusion. … We are not just workers taking back our jobs. What we want is an entirely different model for our country’ (quoted in Garrigues, 2004, p. 8).

2. ‘Market rule’ comes from Arrighi (1982).

3. An example is President Bush's proposal to establish the Millennium Challenge Account, via which his administration would substitute grants for existing loans to Southern states complying with neo-liberal forms of governance (Soederberg, 2004).

4. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, claims: ‘Two hundred years ago the idea that we could potentially achieve the end of extreme poverty would have been unimaginable. Just about everybody was poor, with the exception of a very small minority of rulers and large landowners’ (2005, p. 26; see also Escobar, 1995).

5. For systematic analyses of the World Bank's project of development knowledge monopolization, see Cammack (2004) and Goldman (2005).

6. The idea of asymmetry of representation and meaning derives from Reddy's conceptualization of the disciplinary force in the asymmetry of monetary exchange between rich and poor, where an ‘equal’ transaction generally has more consequence for the poor than the rich (Reddy, 1987, p. 65).

7. Some of the ethnographic detail here is based on research in West Bengal, India (August 2000–August 2001).

8. Asked how many bags a worker had to carry to earn Rs. 120 ($ 1 = Rs. 43 in 2000 at time of interview), Amulya replied:

• There is no fixed rate. The rule with the potato cold storage is that you have to fill up one store in 10–15 days. So one has to work from eight in the morning till 10 at night. So you have to carry these potato bags, each weighing about 60 kg. And climb up these makeshift ladders up to 50 feet high. If any one person falls or slips, all the others also fall. Sometimes while falling, if a leg gets stuck in the ladder, it can even break. I have seen it happen. What happened to me is that I hurt my knee very badly. Even then I continued to work for about four to five days. After that I just could not work. So I stayed back. But there was no-one to look after me, not even to ask me how I am, no-one to help me walk. They all went off to work. I just lay there in pain, crying. Then I decided to come back home. No, they didn't pay me because I had not completed my quota. They gave me my bus fare.