By Ray Bush; London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007; pp. 237. £19.99 (pb). ISBN 139780745319602. Reviewed by Bob Sutcliffe. ©Bob Sutcliffe, 2008.
Mainstream development theory argues that countries develop through their own actions: freeing trade and investment, establishing legal institutions conducive to private investment, liberalising markets, educating in a particular way, eliminating wasteful state spending and improving governance. The history of developed countries is cited as an appropriate template. Poor countries wishing to catch up are advised to immerse themselves in the fair and benign international economy.
Ray Bush's Poverty and Liberalism is a blistering, heterodox critique of each item of this current orthodoxy. Poverty arises, he maintains, not from the failure of countries and groups to incorporate themselves in the world economy but from the fact that they are incorporated in it, but in an unequal and misshapen way. Poverty ‘is not about being left behind but about being actively excluded from an unjust and unequal system of wealth creation’. This system, especially in the countries where poverty is most persistent, predominantly takes the form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – David Harvey's useful renaming of Marx's primitive or primary accumulation, so strongly emphasised by Rosa Luxemburg. The progressive commoditisation of a growing number of human activities frequently, as Bush explains, results in the accumulation of poverty. History, far from being a template for the future, explains how the globalisation of capitalist accumulation produced and produces some convergence but also much polarisation.
After an initial chapter setting out this theoretical perspective and discussing the interconnection between African impoverishment and the post-1980 neoliberal tsunami, Bush uses the ideas as the backbone of a well-structured set of chapters, each on one crucial issue in the study of development. The first is about international aid – in particular Tony Blair's and the G8's plans to ‘rescue’ Africa (in which another frequent theme – the egregious hypocrisy of donors – rightly receives several mentions). This is followed by chapters on migration, land, mining and resources (including the ‘resource curse’), and food and famine. Each of these attacks mainstream approaches and counters with an analysis based on the guiding idea of the book – that the problem is not simple andquantitative (how much integration in the system?) but complex and qualitative (what kind of integration and what kind of system?). His conclusion about the land question is typical of others: ‘the problem is not weak tenure or that producers are insufficiently integrated or are part of imperfect markets: the problem is the market itself and the commoditization of everyday life’.
All this is helpfully illustrated with historical and contemporary empirical material about debt cancellation, migrants’ remittances, land reform in Egypt and Zimbabwe, mining in Africa – themes which all echo Rosa Luxemburg writing a century ago – as well as a narrative about the relationship between the development of the oil industry, land struggles and sectarian conflicts in Sudan. Telling instances are also taken from the experience of Middle East and North African countries which the author has particularly studied.
In the final chapter Bush sets out many ideas around which resistance to persistent poverty might be organised. Here are mentions or echoes of Marx, Luxemburg, the narodniks, anarchism, feminism, the defence of indigenous peoples and the importance of ‘infrapolitics’ – the everyday resistance of ordinaryindividuals, households and neighbourhoods. Ray Bush's conviction that this spirit of resistance is not extinct means that a gloomy story does not lead to a pessimistic prognosis. Some readers might view this chapter as insufficiently programmatic but I found it refreshingly eclectic. It also contains a needed broadside against the neoliberal ‘governance’ formula (transparency, reducing corruption by lowering the importance of the state and more ‘civil society’, conceived as a proliferation of NGOs).
Late 2007 should be a good moment for the publication of this book. Neoliberalism is being discredited by poor results, especially in Africa, and morally weakened by the grotesque hypocrisy with which it is applied (the same Western governments which increase protection for agriculture or cover up bribery in selling arms to Saudi Arabia preach free trade and anti-corruption to African countries). Its high priests are losing their nerve, fearing that the increasing inequality it generates will destroy political support. Financial liberalisation is causing chaos in the markets and threatening more economic damage; the October 2007 IMF annual meetings were summarised by a New York Times headline as ‘The tables turned: Poor countries wag fingers at rich countries'; and the OECD recently admitted that the facts suggest that ‘globalisation is creating opportunities for a small elite of workers and investors to pull away from everyone else’. While neoliberals advise yet more of the same, the left has to go beyond its own clichés and provide a coherent answer to the scandal of persistent mass poverty in a rich world. Ray Bush's clear, thoughtful and provocative contribution to that task is a valuable resource for those concerned with poverty and development, especially in Africa.