Only about 1.5 billion of the world’s about 8 billion people live as comfortably and affluently as we do in rich countries like Australia. Most people are poor and for them life is a constant struggle. Around 800 million are hungry all the time. Why is this? The common answer is because they are “backward” and lack modern skills and technology—they need development.
There are certainly some developments they need, obviously for example those enabling safer drinking water, but what they do not need is capitalist “development”. That is what has gotten them into their appalling state. What they need is a form that involves totally different goals and means compared with conventional (capitalist) development. These must include very little (if any) capital, industrialisation, high tech, globalisation, exporting, transport or IT.
The crucial point here is that the overwhelmingly dominant conventional development theory and practice represent only one conception, or type of model of development, and there are many others. It takes for granted that the goal of development is and can only be moving towards the lifestyles, ways, economies, technologies, values and ideas evident in the richest countries, and that the means to this end is enabling economic growth via markets and mainly private enterprise. This is well-described as the “unidimensional conception of development”, whereby there is only one path of “progress” up the slope from poor and underdeveloped with primitive productive systems to lots of production, affluence and technically complex systems. As the slope is ascended the increasing wealth enables all sorts of benefits to be afforded, such as better health, transport, education, political, legal, etc. systems.
How can this process be got going? How can the amount of production for sale be increased? The conventional answer is:
“Well you need capital don’t you, because it costs a lot to start up factories and plantations and thereby create jobs. You need to get export industries going, so the country can earn income to put into development, and into infrastructures to attract foreign investors. They’ll need ports and railways and power stations so you will have to spend scarce resources building these.”
“But because you are so poor and don’t have much capital you will have to borrow large sums, and you will have to attract foreign investors by keeping wages low, offering tax holidays, and charging low royalties on the logs and minerals you are going to export. You will soon be saddled with impossible levels of debt.”
“But never mind, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will help you with more loans to meet the repayments, on condition that you accept a Structural Adjustment Package. This will include forcing you to make your economy even more open to penetration by foreign corporations, e.g., by giving more freedom for market forces, lowering wages, removing protection and subsidies for the poor, devaluing your currency (making your exports cheaper for us), removing government control over the activities of corporations and gearing your country’s economy more to paying off the debt. This means not much national wealth will be left to attend to the needs of the poor masses. It also means your productive capacity will be largely geared to the benefit of the corporations and rich world supermarket shoppers.”
There is a mountain of literature showing that this is how normal, capitalist development works, and that these measures to “get the economy going” and pay back the debt don’t significantly improve the lot of people in general. They often make them worse.
All this happens primarily because everyone accepts that market forces and the profit motivation of private entrepreneurs should determine what happens. Thus, most of a poor country’s good land will be producing food to export to countries willing to pay most for it despite the fact that most of the people might be malnourished. Most of the country’s labour will go into producing luxuries because those are the most profitable ventures for foreign investors to set up. Most of the world’s resources are produced in poor countries but consumed in rich countries, because that’s inevitable when market forces are allowed to determine who gets them.
As the decades go by the GDP will probably rise and various things will have improved, but the country will still be poor and most of the people will have seen little if any improvement in their conditions. As was noted above, the decrease in global inequality indices have been largely due to improvements in China. The typical poor country cannot escape because it is hopelessly in debt, and if it tried to shift away from the conventional market-driven conception of development then its elite class would block it…with a little help from the CIA.
Meanwhile vast amounts of wealth are being taken out to rich countries every year, all those logs and minerals and fish, and all that labour going into the factories and plantations. It will not have been put into developing much if anything that improves the living standards of most people. Yes, some jobs in the factories will have been created, and the small local elite class sharing in the investment opportunities will have become richer, along with their managers and professional groups. This “comprador” class has a vital interest in preventing change from the conventional development model because they get the junior partner contracts and investment opportunities.
According to UN data there was a net transfer of $US500 billion out of ‘developing’ countries in 2016.
— UNDESA, 2017
“… the Global South contributes about 80% of the labour and resources that go into the global economy. And yet the people who render that labour and those resources receive about 5% of the income that the global economy generates each year.”
— Hickel, 2021
Between 1983 and 2005, unequal trade transferred almost $3 trillion p.a. from poor exporting countries to the rich countries, primarily because wages in the former are about one-fifth those of the latter countries. In 2017 the sum was $2.2 trillion, i.e., capable of buying $2.2 trillion worth of commodities in rich countries.
— Hickel, Sullivan and Zoomkawala, 2021
Hickle’s more recent estimate (2022) is that as much as $10 trillion in value flows from poor countries to rich countries every year.
The global economic system is therefore best described as carrying out systematic, legitimised plunder. Vast amounts of wealth constantly flow out to benefit rich-world corporations and banks and those who shop in rich world supermarkets. In addition, the vast ecological cost of producing the minerals etc. is paid by the poor exporting countries. The Third World has been developed into a state whereby its land and labour benefit the rich, not Third World people. The rich world’s resource-intensive “living standards” could not be anywhere near as high as they are if this was not happening.
What is developed is predominantly what foreign investors want to develop, and that is only that which they think will add more to their profits than any other possible venture in the world. Foreign investors never develop what is most needed. Of course the capitalist way is fiercely supported by the local elite class, often with extreme violence. It benefits them because they are in on the deals and the contracts. If the masses look like rebelling, the elites scream communist subversion or terrorist subversion and call for rich-world support to keep “order”.
The basic answer should be obvious. It is to enable the people to devote the existing, usually abundant, resources of soil, rainfall, plants, labour and skills to developing those mostly simple ways that will do most to improve their quality of life.
What factors are most important for a high quality of life? Here is a list to start with.
Adequate good quality food, shelter and clothing.
Good health.
Friends, soul mates.
Having meaning and purpose, interesting things to do.
Belonging to, and being involved in, a supportive community concerned for the welfare of all.
Being valued, appreciated and respected, especially for making a contribution to one’s community.
Feeling secure from avoidable adversity such as unemployment, poverty, social breakdown.
Freedom from chronic stress, including insufficient income, overwork, isolation and loneliness, depression, unpleasant living places, traffic.
Not having to work hard or struggle; a relaxed pace, time.
Opportunity to do creative things, craft, art, writing, to think, converse, recreate, grow “spiritually”.
Freedom and autonomy over one’s life and work.
Closeness to nature. Living in a beautiful environment.
Having sources of regeneration and “battery charging”, such as gardening, hobbies, convivial company, landscape.
Having a sense of place, a home.
Familiarity and stability; freedom from threat of disruption, especially due to “development” and economic recession.
Pride in one’s family, town, society, institutions, nation; recognition that our ways are basically admirable. We care, we try to minimise competition, selfishness, disadvantage, inequality and winner-take-all ways. The way we think and discuss is rational, respectful and mature.
Peace of mind. Some degree of capacity to feel alright about things, oneself, one’s society, the planet. Reasons to be optimistic.
Apart possibly from health, none of these conditions requires high income, wealth, property or a large GDP. They are all easily ensured for all if there are sensible social arrangements…which consumer-capitalist society thwarts, meaning that most people in even the richest countries do not have a very satisfactory quality of life.
All these factors can be achieved despite very low material “living standards”. The concern need only be to have what is “sufficient”. What is a good-enough house, good-enough clothing? This focus enables adequate material living standards to be achieved very cheaply, easily and quickly. (See “How resource cheaply we could live well.” Trainer, 2022.) In Bhutan the supreme national development goal is not to raise the GDP but to raise the Gross National Happiness.
These goals are easily achieved if the people are able to use the country’s productive resources to build sensible communities. Capitalist development prevents this. It takes from the people the resource access they once had. Even without any assistance from government, miracles can be achieved if the people are able to use the resources around them to build and run the systems that will meet most, if not all, of their basic needs. If you doubt it, consider the Zapatistas, the Rojavan Kurds and the African villages Leahy discusses (Leahy 2009 and Goforth 2018.) Just a little assistance from governments and a little industrialisation and importing would enable all people in even the poorest countries to rise to frugal and humble but very satisfactory conditions in a very short time. (Chapter 10 elaborates on the necessary structures and processes and gives examples of communities pursuing alternatives of this kind.)
The establishment of simple, sufficient and stable lifestyles and systems would make it possible to cease the pursuit of economic growth, thus making the restoration of global ecosystems possible. National governments need only organise that very small amount of exporting and foreign investment that would enable importation of the few things needed by simple local economies.
This alternative conception of development is obviously totally incompatible with capitalism. It involves very little need for investment or for participation in the global economy. Because it involves high levels of local self-sufficiency in the meeting of simple needs, it requires little from the national economy and even less from the international economy. It would put an end to most of the present opportunities for capital to go into trade or foreign investment. Alternative, appropriate development for the Third World would be a total disaster for the rich countries, their consumers and their capitalist class! Third World resources would be benefiting Third World people, not the rich few.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of this massive contradiction. Billions of people struggle to survive in appalling conditions when these could quickly be largely eliminated if people were able to put the resources around them into creating the simple largely cooperative ways that would meet most of their basic needs. Those dreadful conditions have been created by capitalist development. Long ago Gandhi got it right when he said, “The rich must live more simply so that the poor may simply live”, and when he put forward a vision of India made up of self-governing and highly self-sufficient villages.