VC

I think it’s going to look very different. The path that European late developers took was one in which they transformed their agriculture. As a result, peasants, either who had left their home regions or had been thrown out of them, came to cities and were sucked up into industry.

From 1870 to 1920 you had this enormous wave of industrialization in the first generation of late-developing countries. Here we’re talking about Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan — it was this industrialization that gave birth to the modern labor movement.

What is happening now, and what has been happening for the past thirty years is something interesting. First of all, the late-developing countries today, which is one hundred years after the initial generation, were already different in that in these countries the service sector and the informal sector have played a much larger role in the growth process than it did in the earlier generation of late developers, where industry rapidly expanded to become the most vital sector of the economy.

This has not been the case in Latin America or in South Asia or the Middle East. Services and informal sector work — by which we mean temporary work in very small shops, which is often times done by migrant laborers — has played a much more important role, which has already made the kind of development they’ve experienced different than the first generation of late-developing countries.

Something else is happening now, which is much more remarkable, which is that it’s not just that industry has been less prominent in these countries, it’s that over the past twenty years a process of deindustrialization has set in. Industry is actually shrinking in terms of the employment that it commands in the economy — it’s the informal sector that’s now getting bigger and bigger. This makes their developmental path much different from the earlier generation, and there’s no reason to think that at some point it will veer back towards industrialization, so you’re going to get growth, but it’s going to be growth of a very different kind.

One corollary to this: in some of the countries, like India, the ballooning of the informal sector is bound up with a persistence of agriculture and peasantry because what’s happening is that employment growth in manufacturing has been very slow, so instead of seeing urban jobs as a magnet for themselves, for which they will leave their villages and come to the cities, what peasants and rural proletarians have learned is that urban employment is insecure and unreliable. What they end up doing, as a result, is instead of leaving their land to come to the cities, they hold onto small patches of land and then go back and forth between there and the cities.

It’s not that agriculture in these countries are still not capitalist — they are capitalist — but it’s a capitalism in which agriculture is drawn into commodity production but remains a strong part of the economy because peasants use it as an insurance policy against the infirmities of urban employment. This has an important economic impact, since it means that the kind of rapid industrialization we saw in 1880 to 1920, and then again from 1940 to 1970, doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the Global South.

Secondly, it means that the political consequences of development are going to be different, too. One consequence of rapid industrialization was bringing huge numbers of former peasants together into new factories where they rapidly got absorbed into trade unions and were quickly radicalized. But now since workers don’t stick around in the factory long enough to be politicized, to be drawn into organizations, it means that economic development and urbanization isn’t bringing with it a kind of radicalized working class the way you saw in the past.

What you’re getting is an itinerant working class, which is much harder to organize. This means that for radicals on the Left in these countries, organizing strategies are also going to have to be very different. All this is to say that countries from the Global South are now developing, they are in some ways modernizing, but the kind of modernization we’re seeing is very different from what we did one hundred years ago and will continue to be very different, which means that looking at past experiences is important to put the current era into perspective, but we shouldn’t expect it to be a blueprint for what’s going to come.