Towards a New Development Theory for the Global South



Tricontinental

Around the world, progressive governments have taken office, yet they do not have a clear strategy to rebuild their societies from the detritus of neoliberalism. These governments, in countries such as Honduras, Senegal, and Sri Lanka, articulate clear critiques of the International Monetary Fund’s debt-austerity regime, but they often lack a concrete policy programme capable of decisively moving beyond it. Unable to develop a policy that fully breaks from neoliberalism, many of these progressive governments slip back into neoliberal immobility.

Over the past fifty years, during the height of the Washington Consensus, most of the poorer nations slumped into cycles of debt and austerity, high rates of poverty, and deep despair. China, however, has been able to break through the ‘development of underdevelopment’ since the 1949 revolution and move from high levels of poverty to a society that has eradicated absolute poverty and emerged as a major economic power.41 What distinguishes China from other countries is that the balance of political power is not in the hands of the capitalist class (certainly not with MNCs) and that the Chinese government, ruled by the Communist Party of China, has developed a planning process that allocates resources both for growth and social betterment in a dialectical balance. Any robust and pragmatic Marxist development theory must engage with the breakthroughs made in China.

China’s rapid economic growth and rising living standards since the 1949 revolution cannot be explained by conventional development theories. However, they can be explained by the high rate of NFI prioritised by the Communist Party of China. Consider, for instance, the massive investment and mobilisation of people required to build China’s high-speed railway system – the largest in the world. This is in no way a novel idea. Though there are disagreements as to how investment can be mobilised in conditions of semi-feudalism and imperialist encirclement, the Marxist-Leninist tradition has always emphasised that large-scale industry is the material basis for socialism. In 1920, Vladimir Lenin pithily summarised communist development as ‘Soviet power plus electrification for the whole country’.45 Half a century later, the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral taught us that the goal of national liberation is ‘the freeing of the process of development of the national productive forces’.46 Therefore, the formulation of a new development theory for the Global South is also a return to the source of our struggles for freedom from imperialism and neocolonialism. With it, we will chart the path for the Promethean aspirations of the darker nations.

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