Benjamin Selwyn is a professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Struggle for Development (2017), The Global Development Crisis (2014), and Workers, State and Development in Brazil (2012).
Defenders of capitalism argue that cooperation is undermined by individuals’ tendency to take more from society than they contribute. The economist Elinor Ostrom refuted this idea, but without identifying capitalism as the real cause of exploitation.
The economist Alice Amsden’s work unmasked the dirty secret underlying capitalist development: it relied on states breaking all the rules of the free market. But her work also showed that industrialization required corporate discipline, not welfare.
Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow’s advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.
Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen’s own analytical framework doesn’t go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.
Apologists for capitalist globalization claim that global value chains spread prosperity around the world. In reality, they allow firms like Apple to maximize labor exploitation while keeping workers chained to poverty.
Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang is a brilliant, best-selling critic of neoliberal orthodoxy. But Chang stops far short of taking the necessary next step: questioning the capitalist system itself.