Evans and Staveteig
PRELIMINARY DRAFT
1
Marx’s contention that the poor countries of the South could discern their
futures by looking at the past evolution of the rich countries of the North was first
adapted and adopted by Walt Whitman, Rostow, and modernization theory, then
ostensibly abandoned. But one key aspect of this “modernization” view of
development has not in fact been abandoned. Politicians and theorists of
development in the North and in the South continue to cherish the traditional vision
of industrialization as not just necessary but largely sufficient to unleash a series of
social and political changes that produce widespread increases in well-being, more
equitable income distributions, and eventually more democratic politics. This
paper will attempt to challenge development theory’s continued reliance on
industrialization, while at the same time suggesting that abandoning the romance
of industrialization has powerful implications for our analysis of contemporary
development strategies. This is particularly true for countries that might plausibly
pin their hopes on the transformative magic of manufacturing, such as China.
The basic thesis to be advanced here starts from the observation that
manufacturing did indeed absorb a large share of the labor force in the original
industrializers, enabling a broad swath of the population to gain a share of the
dynamic and continuous productivity increases associated with machine-assisted
production. It then goes on to argue that the evolution of the structure of
employment in contemporary developing countries has been and will continue to
be dramatically different. This will have massive impacts on the development
process in the Global South.
Even in China, the 21
st
century analog to Britain’s 19
th
century "workshop of
the world," manufacturing employment seems unlikely to ever absorb more than
about 15% of the workforce. The absolute number of manufacturing jobs in China
fell by 15 million from 1995 to 2002 (The Economist 2005). Worldwide,
manufacturing jobs declined by 22 million during the same period (Baum 2003).
Convention