Politics, Geography and Social Stratification by Keith Hoggart Eleonore Kofman

Author:Keith Hoggart, Eleonore Kofman [Keith Hoggart, Eleonore Kofman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780709937845
Google: nUqaAAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Croom Helm
Published: 1986-01-15T05:58:04+00:00

‘Underdevelopment and Substitution’, or ‘Where Did the Power Go?

Don Parson and myself have elaborated the notion of ‘underdevelopment’ (which we derive directly from the work of Harry Cleaver 1977) in a recently published paper (Byrne and Parson 1983). That paper was concerned with ‘change in the form cf the working class which are being forced on that class by the contemporary characters of capitalist production’ (Byrne and Parson 1983, p. 127). It attempted to relate the peripheralisation of production to the ‘marginalisation’ and emmiseration of previously ‘central’ workers (see A. Friedman, 1977). What we generated was a particular version of Cleaver’s discussion:

Development and underdevelopment are understood here neither as the outcome of historical processes (as bourgeois economists recount) nor as the processes themselves (as many Marxists use the terms). They are rather two different strategies by which capital seeks to control the working class…they are always co-existent because hierarchy is the key to capital’s control and development is always accompanied by relative or absolute underdevelopment in order to maintain that hierarchy… By development I mean a strategy in which working class income is raised in exchange for more work… The alternative strategy, in which income is reduced in order to improve the availability for work, I call a strategy for underdevelopment (Cleaver 1977, p. 94).

We therefore interpreted the ‘de-industrialisation’ of U.K. in general, and of their inner cities in particular, as part of a process of underdevelopment. In other words, the logic of capital was forcing an even greater proportion of the working class out of centrality and over the sharp ultra-class divide into marginality. My favourite image of this is a falling off a cliff – easy to do, hard to get back up. The fact is that these people are not falling: they are being pushed.

It is very important to understand that the consequences of this are not just to be found at the point of production. Indeed they are not just to be located in production and reproduction (in the simple sense of the domestic sphere). They pervade the characters of politics and administration and underlie the development of corporatism. In other words, the idea of ‘underdevelopment’ provides an explanation of why the working class have allowed these things to happen.

That action-centred phraseology is very deliberate. The whole basis of the ‘autonomist perspective’ is that the working class is the source of crises in capitalism. Cleaver’s ‘political’ reading of Capital (1979) is essentially an assertion that the working class has to be understood as being ‘…within capital, yet capable of autonomous power to disrupt the accumulation process and thus break out of capital’ (Cleaver 1979, p. 62), coupled with a history of the capitalist mode of production written in terms of ‘the power relations between classes’. It may seem strange to assert ‘autonomy’ in a paper which is a document of ‘defeats’ but, as O’Connor says, it is a matter of ‘…what has been made to happen in history and what can be made to happen in the future’ (1981, p.

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