ABSTRACT
In his analysis of human well-being, Huntington followed a highly Eurocentric line on modernity where, with its assumptions as the globally prescribed main development platform, it advances efficient resource management systems that were not only good for Western progress, but were to be adopted by everyone else in the world. To his thinking, the dichotomy between modern man[/woman] and traditional man[/woman] was a divide created by the efficiency with which the former exploits the time/space/resource triads that are accorded to him[/her], and the absence of such efficiency in the lands of backward populations. Rostow, on the other hand, advanced in his book, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1990), an escalator-like progression of economic development that, as implicated in his sub-title, should be completely de-socialized and de-communalized. What both of these men didn’t extensively discuss is how modernist schemes of development are actually achieved via expansive practices of exploitation where poverty is actually deliberately manufactured via the delinking of whole populations who supposedly reside in countries certified as modern (the United States, Canada, Western Europe), but are pauperized by low wages and the absence of any escape from ongoing inter-generational economic alienations. Here, we can talk about the so-called underclass, the unemployed and the working poor, who, as was indicated above, should be close to or even above the 100 million mark in the United States alone. Add the hundreds of millions who have been economically thrown overboard by the current modernity-produced recession in Western Europe where in some countries such as Spain youth unemployment is over 50 percent, with modernist economists telling us to see these extensively deprived humanscapes as the new normal. In reality, with the inception of the relatively new neoliberal globalizations which more than all other previous globalizations are distinguished by their intensities and extensities (Held and McGrew, 2004), the situation is so much worse in many places. For experiential privilege, let us consider the example of Africa, where modernist development importations didn’t develop anybody (Ake, 1996), but actually led to what I may call the double jeopardy of socioeconomic and political mal-being. Let me start with the latter; the political mal-being was an outcome of Africa’s loss of sovereign public policy making via the draconian loan conditionalities that were imposed by Western IFIs, and with that came the socio-economic problems, where the disjuncture between people’s communal ways of living and the perforce individualistic economization of life was in full vigor. This has resulted in what we habitually see today as Africa’s celebrated status as the world’s perennial poor zone. Looking at the history of how this happened, though, one can clearly and actually follow the lines of how this reality was under construction in the past few decades, culminating in a situation where those described as poor are estimated to be around 80 percent of the continent’s people. With Africa now incorporated into the hegemonic numericalizations of the global paradigm of poverty, the inescapable numbers are very bad and do not bode well for Africans. Indeed, while we speak about the problem of a 7.6 percent unemployment rate in the United States (surely it is for those affected by this), the numbers in many post-Western development, postneoliberal globalization countries in Africa are, for all pragmatic undertakings, tragic. The case is especially so in these post-facto times where this ancient continent is so incorporated into the global capitalist system it cannot, even if it wanted (which is most unlikely), withdraw from
the heavily numericalized realities and relationships of global privilege or lack thereof. Quickly looking through available data, one finds some unemployment rates that are not at first look believable, including an unemployment rate of 51 percent in Namibia, 48 percent in Senegal, and 40 percent in Kenya. For those of us who have worked and researched in these contexts, the numbers are not actually surprising and one need not read this chapter to get them. In most urban centers in Africa today (say Nairobi in Kenya or Dakar in Senegal), one can simply walk the streets and see the sea of young people who are either unemployed or involved in what is euphemistically called the informal market, generally meaning that youth and many middle-aged people are selling anything they can find to earn their daily bread and soup, and nothing more. Indeed, when one hears the now Western media popularized expression that 80 percent of the population lives on less than one U.S. dollar per day, the story is again about the post-numericalization of poverty where, this time, the psychology of believing in such realities and numbers has been implanted, the need has been created, and the numbers are, per system imperatives, believed and acted upon. Certainly, the conceptual constructions as well as the discursive operationalizations of the one U.S. dollar per day story are at least interesting. Here again, the numbers reign supreme and actually represent a higher analytical status in the minds of external agents than what directly affects the lives of people. Usually the simple question of what U.S.$1/day means in the lives of the concerned people is hardly raised. If and when it is ever raised, the hegemonic calculations usually minimize the real impacts of the situation, with the modernist dichotomies kicking in with the false claims that, over there, that should be enough. Actually, it is not enough, but with no recourse, people have precariously adjusted to the number-based rules of global plutocrats, who have freely decided to label the systematically constructed conditions of the world’s poor as the global precariat. To very briefly explain the post-facto point I have deployed a few times above, I only need to say that with the historical, psycho-cultural, and by extension socio-economic deconstructions of so-called developing countries, and their perforce incorporation into global systems where they lack the primary industrial or financial capacities to compete in free zone globalizations, their value as nations, more or less, becomes a source of raw materials and cheap labor when and if those are needed. This is fully complemented by the information technology-conveyed possibilities of overseas lifestyles in the developed world that are not attainable, but must be strived for, and from there, everything is measured on artificial numericalizations that are perceived (quite problematically) as either helping or hindering such possibilities. Needless to add that the promise of development which usually derides simple and locally sustainable forms of subsistent living (Rahnema, 1997) that might not descriptively be based on countable categories of poverty, as instances of underdevelopment that should be shunned by all, practically represents a shallow misreading of effective livelihood contexts that have a unique and respected place in many simple living world communities.
