Marxisms, Modernities, and Moralities: Development Praxis and the Claims of Distant Strangers

Development studies have sometimes been presented as a set of social practices which are concerned with helping or changing peoples and places in the Third World—a noble ambition, it used to be thought, but one now widely condemned as elitist, ethnocentric, and dirigiste. Modernisation theories have not been alone in attracting such criticism, Marxist development studies have also reached an impasse, and confidence in their supposed metanarratives has not been improved by the collapse of many socialist economies. In place of these modernist discourses we are now being presented with (amongst other things) a seemingly atheoretical populism—which triumphs a localist activism—and a cacophony of voices from the diverse traditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The project of ‘development’ is being rendered problematical in a way that it rarely was previously in the postcolonial period. In this paper, I explore the impasse in Marxist development studies and welcome the impetus behind many of these new voices (including new voices from the periphery). At the same time, I am concerned to promote a radically modernist post-Marxism in which the deepening logics of time-space compression that bind together the modern world economy are recognised and in which the obligations that some peoples and institutions should hold to distant (and not so distant) strangers are voiced. In this manner, I resist the nihilistic relativism which underpins some aspects of the new ‘antidevelopmentalism’. I also place geography at the centre of an argument for a minimally universalist account of human needs and our responsibilities to them.