Key quotes on development

“Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific
advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped
areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their
food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant.
Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the
first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these
people. The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and
scientific techniques. […] Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their
own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more
mechanical power to lighten their burdens. […] With the cooperation of business, private capital,
agriculture, and labor in this country, this program can greatly increase the industrial activity in
other nations and can raise substantially their standards of living. Such new economic
developments must be devised and controlled to the benefit of the peoples of the areas in which
they are established. Guarantees to the investor must be balanced by guarantees in the interest of
the people whose resources and whose labor go into these developments. The old imperialism-
exploitation for foreign profit-has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of
development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. […] Greater production is the
key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous
application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.” (Harry Truman Inaugural Speech,
January 1949)

“And indeed, do you not see how ostentatiously these gentlemen have just unfurled the banner
of anti-colonialism? "Aid to the disinherited countries," says Truman. "The time of the old
colonialism has passed." That's also Truman. Which means that American high finance considers
that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. So, dear friends, here you have to be
careful! I know that some of you, disgusted with Europe, with all that hideous mess which you
did not witness by choice, are turning - oh! in no great numbers - toward America and getting
used to looking upon that country as a possible liberator. "What a godsend" you think. "The
bulldozers! The massive investments of capital! The roads! The ports!" "But American racism!"
"So what? European racism in the colonies has inured us to it!" And there we are, ready to run
the great Yankee risk. So, once again, be careful! American domination - the only domination
from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred. And since
you are talking about factories and industries, do you not see the tremendous factory hysterically
spitting out its cinders in the heart of our forests or deep in the bush, the factory for the
production of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man;
the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our
human spirit has still managed to preserve; the machine, yes, have you never seen it, the machine
for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples? So that the danger is immense” (Aimé Césaire
Discourse on Colonialism, 1950)

‘In contrast with the surging growth of the countries in our socialist camp and the development
taking place, albeit much more slowly, in the majority of the capitalist countries, is the
unquestionable fact that a large proportion of the so-called underdeveloped countries are in total
stagnation, and that in some of them the rate of economic growth is lower than that of
population increase. These characteristics are not fortuitous; they correspond strictly to the
nature of the capitalist system in full expansion, which transfers to the dependent countries the
most abusive and barefaced forms of exploitation. It must be clearly understood that the only
way to solve the questions now besetting mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of
dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that this
implies” (Che Guevara, “On Development” 1964)

“Poverty on a global scale was a discovery of the post-World War II period […] Thus poverty
became an organizing concept and the object of a new problematization. As in the case of any
problematization, that of poverty brought into existence new discourses [developmentalism] and
practices that shaped the reality to which they referred. That the essential trait of the Third
World was its poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-
evidence, necessary, and universal truths” (Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making
and Unmaking of the Third World, 1994, 22-24)

“Development fostered a way of conceived of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of

rational decision and management to be entrusted to that group of people – the development
professionals – whose specialized knowledge allegedly qualified them for the task. Instead of
seeing change as a process rooted in the interpretation of each society’s history and cultural
tradition – as a number of intellectuals in various parts of the Third World had attempted to do
in the 1920s and 1930 (Gandhi being the best known of them) – these professionals sought to
devise mechanisms and procedures to make societies fit a pre-existing model that embodied the
structures and functions of modernity. Like sorcerers’ apprentices, the development
professionals awakened once again the dream of reason that, in their hands, as in earlier
instances, produced a troubling reality” (Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and
Unmaking of the Third World, 52)

“It might be tempting to think of development as little more than warmed-over colonialism,
given its role in managing a crisis in capitalist production; or to think of it as a complete break
from colonialism, given its putative claim to deliver on liberal democracy’s promise of liberty and
prosperity for all. However, it is important to see development’s difference from colonialism, rooted
in its action as a vehicle for facilitation decolonization, and its links to colonialism, rooted in its
redeployment of colonialism’s logics and structures […] Even as development emerged in
concert with the universal right to national self-determination, it nonetheless carried within it the
traces of imperial reason, of an evolutionary hierarchy and racialized subordination. Thus, on
one hand, development reformulates a racialized theory of human perfectability and progress.
Even as it dispenses with references to the ‘lower races’ and genetically determined indolence,
the traces of these categories remain in its concept of ‘less developed countries’ with impaired
productive capacities. Perhaps more significant, though, what lingers almost imperceptibly is the
religious ordained nature of the civilizing mission. […] On the other hand, however,
developmentalism far exceeds the scope of colonialism, bringing the entire world under the
surveillance of a few international agencies. Indeed, colonialism is rendered anachronistic by
development. It is precisely the marriage of development and decolonization that discursively
legitimates the extraction of resources and productive capacity in a way the civilizing mission of
colonialism never could. The extraction of resources and productive capacity is ordained as the
principal course of action for a decolonized nation to achieve and maintain sovereignty. Even as
development articulates the liberatory promise of delivering colonized nations from need, it
simultaneously re-creates it by recognizing the ‘less developed countries’ as being in need of
assistance to carry out this dual process of extraction. In this manner, development aid and
agencies insinuate themselves everywhere” (María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, 2003, 20-23)
Questions:
• How does Truman represent developmentalism? Why is developmentalism necessary
and how does it work?
• What were the critiques of developmentalism articulated by third world leaders (c.f. Aimé
Césaire and Che Guevara)?
• How do Escobar and Saldaña-Portillo explain developmentalism?
o What is developmentalism?
o What were the factors that led to developmentalism?
o What does it mean the developmentalism is both a set of policies and a
discourse?
o How is development like and unlike colonialism?

“In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border
in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths
smashing into it when I heard the footsteps from the darkness and beyond, and lo, a tall old man
with flowing white hair came coming by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he
passed, he said, ‘Go moan for man,’ and comped back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at
last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to
New York” (Jack Kerouac On the Road 303)

“The man’s face was indistinct in the shadows; I could only see what seemed like the spark of his
eyes and the gleam of his four front teeth […] After exchanging a few meaningless words and
platitudes […] he let out an idiosyncratic, childlike laugh, highlighting the asymmetry of his four
front incisors: ‘The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take
power, here and in every country […] You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how
useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you’ […] I now knew…I knew that when
the guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people […]
I feel my nostrils dilate, savouring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, of the enemy’s death;
I steel my body, ready to do battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the
bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope” (Ernest
Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries, 163-5)