Rethinking Development

Perhaps there has never been a better historical moment to interrogate development. The fog of market fundamentalism and the neoliberal consensus has lifted a bit in the wake of the financial meltdown and the lingering and almost global economic crisis. Bond market vigilantes are turning even governments in the Global North into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of the global oligarchy of finance capital; a fate until now reserved for the Global South. The purported link between capitalism and democracy appears stained if not severed as states in the Global North resort to declaring Financial Martial Laws. “Capitalism with Asian characteristics” complements “Socialism with American characteristics” – read public bailouts of finance capital. Technocratic governance displaces political government. While the welfare state follows the fate of the development state towards shrinkage and oblivion, the coercive capacity of the state, the capacity and willingness to wage war both within and without, grows unabated. Ubiquitous austerity measures and structural adjustments are yet again transferring wealth from the poor to the rich both within and across states. All this unmistakably underscores that mythologies of the “free market” notwithstanding, the concert of the hidden hand of the market and the iron fist of the state is indispensible for capitalism, and that accumulation by dispossession is a basic ontological condition of capitalism, rather than just its historical pre-condition. The only growth industry today, besides privatized prisons, is the production of liminal spaces and subjects at the margins of legal orders and formal economies – “the other side of universality – the moral and legal no man’s land, where universality, yet again, finds its spatial limit.”