The Struggle for Development by Benjamin Selwyn (review)

Benjamin Selwyn has two stated aims in The Struggle for Development: (1) theorize development from a bottom-up perspective and (2) demonstrate that collective action by the masses can generate development. The author aims to achieve this through the elaboration of a labour-centered theory of development, which is a direct response to the dominant paradigms in economic development, all deemed to be capital-centric. Overall, the book has several interesting elements and it is hard to disagree with much of the argument, but its main fault is that it stays at a relatively basic level, leaving the reader with the impression that while there is potential in labour-centred development, most of it remains to be worked out.

The first four chapters of the book are largely devoted to a critique of a wide range of approaches in development, including liberal and progressive perspectives, as well as a demonstration that much of what has been tried in the 20th century and beyond has failed to deliver the promised poverty alleviation and general human development. Amongst the reasons brought forward to explain this are that these theories were largely centred on capital accumulation, with policies designed by an elite which tended to disregard the input of workers and subsume their needs to that of capital. Within a capitalist framework and with or without important state involvement, this generated exploitative relations that failed to provide development for the majority, even when the goals of capital accumulation were achieved.

These critiques are well-taken. It is true that much of development theory is obsessed with growth in general, and capital accumulation in particular, and that policymaking elites are given an inordinate place. The point is especially useful when theories typically seen as progressive are analysed, such as some variants of modernization Marxism or the developmental state. It is certainly also true that the developmental results have been dismal for the mass of people, despite some claims to the contrary, and that even when there has been some economic growth, it has tended to occur on the backs of the very people it was supposed to help. Globalization has been good for capital but much less for workers, by virtue of the capitalist logic that was driving it.

However, beyond the point about the problems associated with a focus on capital accumulation and a disenfran-chisement of workers in decision-making processes, there is little novelty here and the overall analysis remains relatively basic. For example, in Chapter 2, the author provides a simple class analytical framework of the functioning of capitalism from a Marxist standpoint, with some elements of intersectionality thrown in, none of which will be new to readers used to a critical perspective on development. The exposition is pedagogical and some chapters could be useful in the classroom, but otherwise the pace is very slow and the first four chapters could easily have been condensed in less than half of the hundred pages they occupy, to leave more space to what constitutes the original contribution of the book: the theory of labour-led development.

Chapter 5 provides the contours of such a theory … in six pages or so, with the rest of the chapter devoted to the recounting of various examples. Predictably, the author cannot go in much depth with respect to the theory in so few pages and as a result, the examples are thrown in as a hodgepodge of illustrations without much of a guiding analytical thread. Taken from different continents, the stories deal with workers taking their destiny in their own hands, of self-management, of collective action by the underclass. They are certainly stirring and show how good things can happen when workers have agency, but it would have been useful to submit these situation to a thorough analysis. For example, does it matter which groups of people - blue collar workers, small scale farmers, the unemployed, etc. - unite and struggle together? What are the important constraints and possibilities in their actions? In this vein, it would perhaps have been useful to...