A Southern Perspective on Development Studies Carlos Mallorquin Carlos Contents

ISBN: 978-956-6095-09-5 A Southern Perspective DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4338468 on Development Studies Carlos Mallorquin A Southern Perspective on Development Studies Carlos Mallorquin Carlos Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1 A Southern Perspective on Development Studies: 21 Contributions from Latin America Chapter 2 The Unfamiliar Raúl Prebisch (1943-1949) 53 Chapter 3 Celso Furtado and Development: A Brief Outline 99 (1950-2004) Chapter 4 Theoretical Misrecognitions as the Source of 123 Development Theory Déjà Vu A Southern Perspective on Development Studies Chapter 5 How Economics Forgot Power 149 Carlos Mallorquin Chapter 6 All That Is Solid Does Not Necessarily Melt Into Air 181 Research Professor, Autonomous University of Zacatecas (Zacatecas, Mexico) 2021 References 235 ISBN 978-956-6095-09-5 DOI 10.5281/zenodo.4338468 Francisco Osorio (Editor) Published by Ariadna Ediciones (Santiago of Chile) using a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. Also available to download from www.ariadnaediciones.cl Book Cover is Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map where America appears for the first time to Europeans as a separate continent. Introduction Question everything and everyone. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. Be a poet, not a huckster. Don’t cater, don’t pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, editors, or publishers. Come out of your closet. It’s dark in there. Raise the blinds, throw open your shuttered windows, raise the roof, unscrew the locks from the doors, but don’t throw away the screws. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic. Challenges to Young Poets by Lawrence Ferlinghetti pisodes in the history of Latin American social sciences and the various Ediscursive formations communicated by means of a Western-centric1 language might be especially uncomfortable or intractable to the reader, if the narrative that follows aims to reveal a whole set of misapprehensions by the Western-centric tradition. Starting with the misrecognition of the existence of an autochthonous regional discourse on economics, which requires re- examination. Hopefully, the narrative will become “uncomfortable”, which means that the account has a tale to tell! The following narrative points towards several historical circumstances, which enabled the theories developed within Latin America vis-à-vis the then dominant orthodox economics tradition, both regionally and worldwide in the 1940s. Chapter 1 A Southern Perspective on Development Studies: Contributions from Latin America offers a sketch of the “Southern” theoretical problematic and historical context that can be examined with more detail in the following chapters of the book. Hence, Chapter 2 The Unfamiliar Raúl Prebisch (1943-1949) aims to exhibit a relatively unknown phase of the theoretical transition in the vast work of Prebisch (1901-1986), which in part got curtailed in 1949 given the responsibilities he was to undertake when he was the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC).2 Next, in Chapter 3, there is a summary of the work and 1 Anglo-Saxon and/or Eurocentric discourses. 2 Since its first day, the creation of ECLAC sought after Prebisch as the ideal candidate to be Executive Secretary, a post he rejected in July 1948, which was then occupied by the Mexican Gustavo Mar- tinez Cabañas. After much “pleading”, Prebisch accepted a three month consultancy post in 1949, which after the appearance of the famous text (Latin American “Manifesto”), generated a further negotiation and discussion culminating in his acceptance of the Executive Secretary in question; it is worthwhile to examine the wording of the emissary sent from the UN to talk to Prebisch on the issue. Adolfo Dorfman, in a letter to Victor Urquidi (who had equally rejected the post), conveys to him the sad news of Prebisch’s negative answer, “various reasons were wielded, but anyway, important is… that he offered advice and sporadic collaboration,which is something” (Dorfman 1948, my emphasis). 5 struggles of Celso Furtado (1918-2004) Celso Furtado and Development: A After the Bombing of Hiroshima Brief Outline (1950-2004). Chapter 4 Theoretical Misrecognitions as the Source After World War II, the diffusion of Western-centric governmentality of Development Theory Déjà Vu assesses the figure and work of Albert O. discourse (government and governed), was transmuted into a three-layer Hirschman (1915-2012), during the 1950s and early 1960s. He was Furtado’s governmentality: “households and firms,” “self-governing units” (“people- contemporary in most theoretical details of the period. goods”), and national governments, in charge of the latter’s surveillance, The book then changes its “geographical” direction. Two chapters which are in turn “gazed” upon by top layer “international organizations” examine and evaluate How Economics Forgot Power and All That Is Solid Does (Danby 2017: 78). Governments “gained” “new powers” by means of national Not Necessarily Melt Into Air in the scope of two brave and recent critiques of accounting statistics: surveillance and surveying make “government” mainstream economics as portrayed in the Western-centric academic circles. instantaneously more visible (ibid.) and vulnerable. However, examined from a “Southern” or Latin American Structuralism International organizations after WWII and governments amplified perspective, our story emphasizes mainly the theoretical aspects of those their field of action and the “nation” became an object of the multilateral books that stopped short of the “full nine yards”.3 organizations and international purview: the hitherto race civilization divide The resolution to focus on certain Latin American theorists as the main took on a distinct new form, superseded by a new “scale-making project.” contenders of the story about “development” is related, paradoxically, to (Danby 2017: 79). The “developed/underdeveloped” economy or society their recent upsurge within Western-centric discourses, in which the names couple implied: of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado appear prominently. I believe it is time to A rhetoric of discipline and punishment (for disordered people, recover the central themes and terminology of their ideas, which have been families, and nations) structured: the merging world and international “domesticated” as it were, or read through a vocabulary that was precisely institutions (…) [the] difference worked differently: on the one hand their objective to question. rigorously standardized categories of nation, government, household, There are two central themes implicit or explicit in the argument of the business, and citizen promised formal equality. On the other hand, the book, namely: (a) the process of a theoretical reconstruction; and (b) the world could be divided into those who lived up to and enacted these status of the notion of power: categories, and those who fell short and therefore required tutelage (1) it assumes, on the one hand, that the Latin American critique of the and discipline. (Danby 2017: 78-79) ethnocentric characteristics of the discourse implied the construction In fact, the Keynesian national income accounting was to “conquer the of a set of new objects and categories, but which, on the other, meant world.” The “choice” meant highlighting the household/business split, a simultaneously problematizing the adequacy of those categories product of “modernist ideology” (Danby 2017: 63). The productive process to explain those economies from which they were apparently their was divided into “two categories” distinguished by “the state of mind of “image”; the people doing that activity” (ibid.), monetary spending, households (2) the theoretical reconfiguration pivots on a long well-established and businessmen/government, which alternatively can be differentiated by tradition, from Marx onward, in which the power asymmetry regrouping into one single flow “of disparate ‘real’ goods and services” (ibid.), among and between agents and the social relations in question with money as the underlying “unit”, or neglecting the “real” products and are paramount, but Latin American Structuralism critique of services, and “treat money as important in itself, as a financial asset with its Western-centric discourse embraces the idea that it has surpassed own properties” (ibid.). (“superseding” in Hegelian terms), in a very important sense, The Keynesian theoretical victory of national income accounting certain of Marx’s notions. displaced questions that Kuznets addressed, regarding “measuring” well- being and “flow of life-improving benefits to households” (Danby 2017: 64). The potentially warring historical characteristics of WWII and the changing 3 Originally, the book was composed with the aim to include the work of Enrique Leff on the process of economic representation, with the rise of the new international “environment” and the sustainable development in the Periphery, which also represents a institutions: the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), regional autochthonous perspective, but I was not given permission to incorporate the text: and the United Nations; the IMF and the World Bank, all of which display “The Sustainable Development Labyrinth” (Mallorquin 2017a), which was originally published in the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, 8(1). Its publisher, the data gathering momentum, dwarfing the conundrum of the “welfarist” “Inderscience,” seems to own the copyright on behalf of

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