Complexity... indeed. This word is certainly the best shorthand that I can come up with in order to capture the ever unravelling dynamic of social, economic and political phenomena we're faced with in an attempt to alter an unjust world.
Just last night I watched a documentary entitled "Life and Debt". It's intention is to shed light on how, since the '73 oil crisis, the IMF has used conditionalities to bankrupt and cripple the Jamaican state and in turn its society.
A refreshing aspect of the film was the juxtapositioning of a high level IMF offical justifiying IMF policies and a former Jamaican Prime Minister shedding light on the back room machavellian machinations of the loan agreements. In their own way, both sounded equally reasonable. (The IMF official looking worse for wear by the end - inevitably, if not justifiably.) I figure the reason the IMF official could sound reasonable to my ears is either due to a healthy serving of the dodgy educational koolaid served at the bastion of African neoliberal education (read: UCT) or simply that there may an empirical case to be made in favour of certain classical neoliberal policies - my qualification being: "under certain circumstances and with certain complimentary policies."
For example, ensuring that a state reduce subsidies or tariffs in order to boost exports may not be so reprehensible a condition. Say for instance, if due attention is paid to the sequencing of tariff reductions within the context of a broader scheme for boosting productive capacity or if the welfare gain for the rest of society as a result of lower prices on basic imported goods will allow the poor to stretch their incomes further.
The catch here though is the underlying motivation behind the condition to reduce subsidies or tariffs. That is, so long as the intention behind such action is to actually strengthen the long term developmental prospects of a nation, such a policy could be reasonable.
However, the documentary did a sterling job in exposing the real underlying motivations of the IMF. Which of course aren't really "underlying" at all if one understands the governance structure of the IMF and the World Bank.
This then led me to question the usefulness of a global trade and financial system where the perversity of unbridled competition, which is restrained within sovereign nations through various policy measures, is left to flourish and run rough shod over the weak(ly competitive). This is hardly a new insight. But what was different for me was to then really question the usefulness of the implicit value system of competition i.e. winners, losers, us and them, and even the values underpinning the supposed fruits of competition i.e. more innovation, more technology, more comfort and convenience, more consumer choice, more consumption,... Which seems all just a recipe for more, more, more, more, and more...
These are just a few tentative paths for inquiry that surfaced. And so somehow, a film about debt in Jamaica led me to pull, however gently, at the seams of an entire paradigm that defines and reproduces our current understanding of socioeconomic value.
And so even if a coherent theory of how to possibly get the downtrodden out of the gutter and finally deliver deserved justice emerges from these few strands of enquiry, an explanation is ultimately still just an explanation. The prescriptions and recommendations it might make, if any, will inevitably generate a new set of unknown and unpredictable social, political and economic phenomena to frustrate or aid the problematique. So finally, what is already and always has been complex will remain just as complex as ever. And ever amen.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Developing Thoughts on Development
Now that I’ve completed the first term of my masters degree, I think I’ve earned my reflection stripes. The very nature of my studies leads me to conclude that my life, studies and the general project of building a better world are very complex topics. Yes, after 12 years of school, 3 years of undergrad, 1 year of honours and 3 months of masters, the best I can offer is a sophisticated appreciation of how monstrous the problems are. Of course as an HIV research fellow was quick to point out to me, complexity is not the same thing as complication. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to say whether my particular strain of complexity disorder is the complicated or simple kind. To my mind, it’s bad enough dealing with the fact that it’s complex in the first place! As I see it, true delusion is the very attempt to offer a solution. Breathe.
The complexity I speak of is primarily comprised of the following words/terms/theories: development; developing world; positionality; discourse; hegemony; science and Africa. This concoction is sure to motivate the most determined of individuals to stay in bed for eternity or alternatively, to jump in front of the gautrain and end it all (assuming the gautrain happens in our lifetimes). It only stands to reason that I had a burning desire to find myself in this quandary given that I left the security, warmth and comfort of South Africa to pursue a degree in development studies in grey England. But how was a well-intentioned 23 year old dedicated to the stability and prosperity of her country and continent supposed to know what was lurking on the other side of a thing as harmless and virtuous as postgraduate study?
You would think that earlier experiences would have taught me something. I went to UCT thinking that studying economics would imply understanding economic history and philosophy. I thought I would walk away with the ability to enlighten the masses about the macro economy over lunch. Instead, I graduated uncertain of Marx’s real contribution to economic thought: was it that workers would be separate from the products of their labour? Was such a concept really enough to spark a whole school of thought and the Soviet project? I’m also technically inept- I couldn’t construct a lagrangian function if you paid me- okay, depends on the price. Is it about maximising utility or productivity given certain supply side constraints…? Sounds right-ish. And then there was politics, the other component of my undergraduate studies. Again I thought I’d learn about important political developments that lead up to this moment in history. Quite honestly, I remember learning mostly about systems of governance and voter patterns. I could never have an informed debate about the failure of African sates in the post-colonial era without resorting to rhetoric about structural adjustment programmes and ‘colonisation of the mind’ ala Fanon. I won’t even mention what I got from my one philosophy course which stands loud and proud as a whole major on my degree certificate. The point of this is that I left UCT after 3 years with a respectable degree and not much in the way of coherent, cohesive knowledge. I used to excuse this by saying that my degree was about learning to think critically rather than learning a specific skill. In retrospect, I think I learnt to recognise terminology not necessarily to engage with its implications in a very critical way.
So I did what most insecure graduates do, I pursued an honours degree. This time, I was going to leave the mainstream enclave of UCT and head for student-rioting, radical WITS. Anyone who’s made the unlikely leap will agree that WITS offers a more critical and theoretically sound politics education. We considered the state as both a system and an ideological construct. South Africa’s liberation was assessed in terms of geopolitics and the internal political economy. For the first time, the social sciences became dynamic- I was learning to locate political ideas in the broad intellectual expanse, spanning as far as linguistics. On the dodgy side, I went from being a very ordinary student at UCT to graduating with distinction at WITS. Now I’m not downplaying my effort but something seemed slightly amiss…
I took a break from studying to engage in the most banal of human activities: a 9-5 job. 18 months was all I could handle and off I was, on a new mission to feed my insecurities. As I write, I’ve just completed my first term of a masters degree in science, society and development. The reason I chose to pursue this degree was to investigate the politics of knowledge. And herein come all the words/terms/theories that leave me in complexity paralysis.
My ‘positionality’ can be explained in terms of my background: my family, where I grew up, what I chose to study, my ambitions etc. Before embarking on the latest study adventure, I interpreted my past as one of extreme fortune. Although far from wealthy, I had the privilege of attending a good school, which set me on a different trajectory to my peers growing up in the same neighbourhood as me in Daveyton. Living in two worlds, one of deprivation and another, of global opportunity and abundance convinced me that there was deep injustice in the world. And so I set about to make things right.
The first port of call was a ménage à trois with Foucault and Gramsci. They were going to give me the language of modern political enquiry. I was going to prove that indeed, certain rules govern the production of knowledge and that even more scandalously; that some rules dominate others. In other words, I would prove that the current way of understanding the world is simply a reflection of the dominant or ‘hegemonic discourse’. Of course, I was equating discourse dominance with economic dominance. It’s kind of like equating globalisation to Americanisation. If only I could make this case emphatically, I thought, I would be able to prove that the African way of understanding was present and valid but hard to decipher under the current knowledge system. Eureka. But then, to what end? How would this contribute to Africa’s development? Would more children be rid of the insecurity that comes from perpetual war? Would less people die from lack of access to curable or manageable diseases? Would South Africa’s society become less unequal? How would the recognition and dare I say, definition of this African knowledge system make the lived reality of the homogenised African any better? I don’t know.
What I can say is that these issues are complex. Just because we can recognise that knowledge comes out of a context, doesn’t mean that context is singular or exclusive and non-dynamic. This means that there is nothing to say that what we consider to be the scientism of the West today is not the result of knowledge gathered from colonial conquests all over the world. An error I commonly make is ‘otherising’ ideas, people and cultures that I view as problematic. The struggle therefore becomes one for liberation, justice and humanism in the broad sense, but more personally, a struggle to continually purge myself of those very problematic traits that I assign to The West, Power, Global Capital, Malema et al. Not quite the ending I envisaged for this juvenile memoir, but it does signify the beginning…
The complexity I speak of is primarily comprised of the following words/terms/theories: development; developing world; positionality; discourse; hegemony; science and Africa. This concoction is sure to motivate the most determined of individuals to stay in bed for eternity or alternatively, to jump in front of the gautrain and end it all (assuming the gautrain happens in our lifetimes). It only stands to reason that I had a burning desire to find myself in this quandary given that I left the security, warmth and comfort of South Africa to pursue a degree in development studies in grey England. But how was a well-intentioned 23 year old dedicated to the stability and prosperity of her country and continent supposed to know what was lurking on the other side of a thing as harmless and virtuous as postgraduate study?
You would think that earlier experiences would have taught me something. I went to UCT thinking that studying economics would imply understanding economic history and philosophy. I thought I would walk away with the ability to enlighten the masses about the macro economy over lunch. Instead, I graduated uncertain of Marx’s real contribution to economic thought: was it that workers would be separate from the products of their labour? Was such a concept really enough to spark a whole school of thought and the Soviet project? I’m also technically inept- I couldn’t construct a lagrangian function if you paid me- okay, depends on the price. Is it about maximising utility or productivity given certain supply side constraints…? Sounds right-ish. And then there was politics, the other component of my undergraduate studies. Again I thought I’d learn about important political developments that lead up to this moment in history. Quite honestly, I remember learning mostly about systems of governance and voter patterns. I could never have an informed debate about the failure of African sates in the post-colonial era without resorting to rhetoric about structural adjustment programmes and ‘colonisation of the mind’ ala Fanon. I won’t even mention what I got from my one philosophy course which stands loud and proud as a whole major on my degree certificate. The point of this is that I left UCT after 3 years with a respectable degree and not much in the way of coherent, cohesive knowledge. I used to excuse this by saying that my degree was about learning to think critically rather than learning a specific skill. In retrospect, I think I learnt to recognise terminology not necessarily to engage with its implications in a very critical way.
So I did what most insecure graduates do, I pursued an honours degree. This time, I was going to leave the mainstream enclave of UCT and head for student-rioting, radical WITS. Anyone who’s made the unlikely leap will agree that WITS offers a more critical and theoretically sound politics education. We considered the state as both a system and an ideological construct. South Africa’s liberation was assessed in terms of geopolitics and the internal political economy. For the first time, the social sciences became dynamic- I was learning to locate political ideas in the broad intellectual expanse, spanning as far as linguistics. On the dodgy side, I went from being a very ordinary student at UCT to graduating with distinction at WITS. Now I’m not downplaying my effort but something seemed slightly amiss…
I took a break from studying to engage in the most banal of human activities: a 9-5 job. 18 months was all I could handle and off I was, on a new mission to feed my insecurities. As I write, I’ve just completed my first term of a masters degree in science, society and development. The reason I chose to pursue this degree was to investigate the politics of knowledge. And herein come all the words/terms/theories that leave me in complexity paralysis.
My ‘positionality’ can be explained in terms of my background: my family, where I grew up, what I chose to study, my ambitions etc. Before embarking on the latest study adventure, I interpreted my past as one of extreme fortune. Although far from wealthy, I had the privilege of attending a good school, which set me on a different trajectory to my peers growing up in the same neighbourhood as me in Daveyton. Living in two worlds, one of deprivation and another, of global opportunity and abundance convinced me that there was deep injustice in the world. And so I set about to make things right.
The first port of call was a ménage à trois with Foucault and Gramsci. They were going to give me the language of modern political enquiry. I was going to prove that indeed, certain rules govern the production of knowledge and that even more scandalously; that some rules dominate others. In other words, I would prove that the current way of understanding the world is simply a reflection of the dominant or ‘hegemonic discourse’. Of course, I was equating discourse dominance with economic dominance. It’s kind of like equating globalisation to Americanisation. If only I could make this case emphatically, I thought, I would be able to prove that the African way of understanding was present and valid but hard to decipher under the current knowledge system. Eureka. But then, to what end? How would this contribute to Africa’s development? Would more children be rid of the insecurity that comes from perpetual war? Would less people die from lack of access to curable or manageable diseases? Would South Africa’s society become less unequal? How would the recognition and dare I say, definition of this African knowledge system make the lived reality of the homogenised African any better? I don’t know.
What I can say is that these issues are complex. Just because we can recognise that knowledge comes out of a context, doesn’t mean that context is singular or exclusive and non-dynamic. This means that there is nothing to say that what we consider to be the scientism of the West today is not the result of knowledge gathered from colonial conquests all over the world. An error I commonly make is ‘otherising’ ideas, people and cultures that I view as problematic. The struggle therefore becomes one for liberation, justice and humanism in the broad sense, but more personally, a struggle to continually purge myself of those very problematic traits that I assign to The West, Power, Global Capital, Malema et al. Not quite the ending I envisaged for this juvenile memoir, but it does signify the beginning…
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