A popular misconception is that everything is now made by cheap labour in China and India or somewhere in Africa. What this in part represents is recognition of the gigantic expansion of the global labouring classes in the last 40 years; that is, those who directly and indirectly rely on selling their labour power to survive. However, this making of a truly global working class has profoundly disparate outcomes. Despite much talk and hype of emerging economies and ‘Africa rising’ (a review of a critical new book of the same title is forthcoming), inequality is one of the major political questions of our age and its importance comes at a time when the old certainties about the centrality of capitalist markets are in disarray. Despite this, no new theory has yet emerged to displace liberal ideology and belief in the sanctity of capitalist development. Taking the global paradox of unprecedented levels of wealth coexisting alongside mass poverty, Ben Selwyn's book distinctly contributes to the search in the field of Development Studies and Development Economics for theoretical explanations and begins to sketch out practical alternatives.
In a very clear and concise introductory chapter, Selwyn sets out the key premises of his case in which he does not doubt that markets and states can generate economic growth, but seeks to fundamentally show why this process is inherently highly unequal and uneven across time and space; how in development discourse, capitalism as a social and economic set of relationships is effectively not studied and so markets (and particularly the labour market) are portrayed as natural and neutral spaces for pursuing development. According to Selwyn, what remains hidden is the systemic exploitation of the world's labouring majority by those who employ (capitalists) and govern them (states).
Exploitation is a much used and misunderstood concept. While development economists, non-governmental organisations and pro-labour organisations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) highlight specific forms of exploitation (for example sweatshops in the south and zero hours in the north), their ending would not abolish exploitation. This is because exploitation is conceptualised by Selwyn as a much deeper, underlying, process based on ‘capital's ability to pay workers a “fair” wage in the labour market, but then use workers’ labour power in the sphere of production to generate greater value (surplus value) than the price of the original wage' (5).
But what has this seemingly narrow focus on labour and work got to do with development? Moreover, when the ILO reports in 2015 that global unemployment will top 212 million by 2019 (ILO 2015), it suggests the problem is not that people are exploited but that there are not enough in work to be exploited. But the ILO also notes that global income inequalities will continue to rise, resulting in social unrest. What Selwyn argues is that these processes are interdependent and if we want to change this we need to understand how the relationship between labour and capital creates unparalleled amounts of wealth, often utilising astounding levels of technology creating an abundance of food while generating a mismatch between wealth and poverty. Nonetheless, this process, tied to a limited form of democracy restricted to narrow electoral choice and a vision of freedom promoted as the freedom to consume in the marketplace, encapsulates and drives much of (neo)liberal and mainstream views of development. This results in the national and global inequalities that are the centre of much political discourse and the target of anti-austerity movements and campaigners across the world.
Yet the exploitation of the labouring classes and the attendant social, economic and sociological relationships that encompass the public and private spheres are not central to Development Studies, and for Selwyn this is the weakness of much development and development theory. How to change this and consequently development practice is, as Selwyn rightly notes, the key question that critical political economy must address. In the remainder of the book the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ components of the question are addressed by Selwyn in an original and thought-provoking way. He does this by presenting the key ideas of a broad range of non-liberal political economists, such as the statist political economists Friedrich List and Alexander Gerschenkron and others like Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi and Amartya Sen. What he does very effectively is to show the strengths of their ideas, what we can take from them and the ways in which many contemporary development writers draw on them. Using Marxist political economy he then submits the writers' ideas and their alternative development visions to a critical evaluation of how they treat or ignore the vital role of the labouring classes in the development process. At best, Polanyi and Sen have a more radical view of development as human development with the aim of generating mutual respect and an expansion of freedoms that is not prefigured as economic growth. While Schumpeter helps us understand why the global economy is dominated by a small number of firms, he incredibly ignores the capital–labour relationship in the process. What they all share, according to Selwyn, is a failure to recognise the ‘unfreedom’ and exploitation at the very heart of all forms of capitalist development and how this creates uneven development within and between states, how some classes benefit from this, but only those who have no choice but to sell their labour can potentially change it.
The outcome of this critical survey for Selwyn is to argue for a recasting of what we think development is, and in a period of rising inequality and growing scepticism about the hyperbole surrounding the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa group) now is a as good a time as any to do so. In progressive development terms, in the light of market failure signified by the global economc crisis that began in 2007, this often serves as the justification to call in the development cavalry in the guise of the developmental state. Although this leaves the debate mired in a binary opposition of states versus markets, Selwyn does not suggest we ignore this. His work points us towards a more nuanced reading of political economy in which states and markets are so intertwined that trying to separate them into opposing forces is far too simplistic and that states and markets do more than influence each other – they constitute each other. To get out of this bind Selwyn asks us to reorient our focus away from a state- and market (capital)- centred view of development to ‘a labour-centred (re)conception of human development’ (21) – in which the agency of labouring classes is conceived as developmental when through their actions they practically effect material change (such as improved income or recultivating unused land) and obtain democratic freedoms (such as constitutional rights).
The ‘how’ question is conceived as an act of self-realisation by those who have no choice but to sell their labour, and is not the act of well-meaning politicians, technocrats or others ‘from above’, most of whom largely uncritically accept the centrality of the capitalist state and markets. Consequently, the final chapter aims to show what an alternative development practice and vision could be like through real examples of existing alternative practices from across the world. However, while this chapter offers some tantalising examples it only scratches the surface of how labour can transcend capital to forge its own development agenda. Selwyn does direct our attention to his other works but it would have been good to see them included here in more detail as one often feels short-changed by radical critiques that cut short alternatives on the time-worn premise of not offering blueprints. One other omission is how Selwyn's conceptions of development relate to our environmental crisis and the role of labour in responding to this in the process of forging alternatives. Nonetheless, what this book does is to help us recognise that in Development Studies such unfashionable discourses of labour, capital and exploitation have to be brought back into the centre of curricula and rehabilitated as vital areas of research and study.