Development, Part 7
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Development is Class Struggle
David Moore’s article (attached; download linked below) “The Brutal Side
of Capitalist Development” appeared in the
now-defunct Johannesburg newspaper “ThisDay” in 2004, as an “op-ed”
feature.
At the time, at the height of the Mbeki Presidency, the article was
remarkable in the mainstream South African media for being frank about the
class struggle. Most of such material one would read at that time, in the
depths of the 1996 Class Project years, was of the one-eyed “Development
Studies” variety.
Moore only had to say how dull and derivative all this other
material had been, to win the case unarguably.
The dispute between “neo-liberal GEARs and social-welfarist RDPs” is a
sterile one, he says. Like a new broom, Moore swept away all the “happy
synergistic tales”, while reminding people of “capitalism’s brutal
genesis” and also its saving grace, the “vibrantly emerging working
classes.”
The document is a nice, short read, though packed with hints and
pointers. Now in 2014, nine years later, there is continuing talk of a
“developmental state” and perhaps an implied assumption that what we already
have is that very “developmental state”. Yet the diverse origins of
“developmentalism” have hardly been re-examined. Hence the other, longer
documents that will be introduced this week, for the sake of completeness. But
this article of David Moore’s will be more than adequate as a discussion text.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto of
1848, meaning that the entire historical development of humanity had been
driven by the dynamic of class struggle. It still is being driven by class struggle.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Brutal Side of
Capitalist Development, Moore.
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