Way Down South

What is the impact of right wing libertarian ideology on the real societies of the Global South?

The Global South is a term that has been emerging in transnational and postcolonial studies to refer to what may also be called the "Third World" (i.e., Africa, Latin America, and the developing countries in Asia), "developing countries," "less developed countries," and "less developed regions."

 

During the Cold War, the use of the term Third World referred to the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the nations not aligned with either the First World or the Second World. This usage has become relatively rare due to the ending of the Cold War.

 









World map showing the modern definition of the North-South divide

The Global South can also include poorer "southern" regions of wealthy "northern" countries. The Global South is more than the extension of a "metaphor for underdeveloped countries."

In general, it refers to these countries';

"interconnected histories of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained."

Dados, Nour; Connell, Raewyn (2012-01-01). "The Global South". Contexts. 11 (1): 12–13. JSTOR 41960738

Samir Amin in his book Eurocentrism, and in other ongoing work, applies the term "peripheries" to his analysis of the reasons for the large inequalities, across the board, between the "North" and the "South". Obviously a "periphery" has a relationship to a "centre", and Amin's take on both these terms acknowledges that while centres are clearly a positive product of history, the language associated with peripheries usually employs a negative terminology.

India, geographically speaking, is a sub-continent (negative terminology?) situated in the northern hemisphere of the planet, and yet nominally part of the "Global South" for the very positive reasons that the term Global South has been increasingly used, as the development of the term "highlights the uncomfortable reality of previous terms."

The Law of Worldwide Value (an update)

Samir Amin died on 12 August 2018, and following this sad news there were a number of obituaries that have found there way onto the world wide web. I have selected the quotation below from the In Memoriam by Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar, that identifies this particular aspect of his work: 

Over his career Samir Amin creatively applied the Marxist method to understand what Marx had inadequately investigated in his incomplete life’s work—the mechanisms that ensured that development in the metropolitan centres of capitalism had as its counterpart the underdevelopment of the periphery, making generalised catch-up or convergence under capitalism an impossibility. To unravel those mechanisms he chose to extract the theory of value from a model of an abstract capitalist economy, and apply it to the concrete conditions of accumulation on a world scale. That led to the development-underdevelopment dichotomy. The Law of Worldwide Value, as one of his books was titled, was one which took account of the phenomenon of unequal exchange, deriving in the final analysis from the fact that a unit of (otherwise similar) labour power was valued less in the periphery then in the core advanced countries. That is, surplus extracted from Third World workers emerged not only because they contributed more to the value of the product they produced than the value of labour power itself, but because similar labour was valued less in the periphery than in the core. When that was taken into account, an explanation of why capitalist accumulation leads to development at the core and underdevelopment in the periphery emerges. Even those of Leftist persuasion who felt this formulation was not nuanced enough, had to accept that this was an idea that was potent, given historical experience and persisting international inequality. The burden of Amin’s argument was that historically evolved exploitative structures continue to reproduce this anomaly. Unless poor countries detached themselves from those structures, or the global system in which those structures were embedded was transcended, the development project within an integrated world economy was doomed to failure.

Debates over terminology

Most scholars generally see the term Global South more favorably than its predecessors "Third World" or "Developing countries." Leigh Anne Duck, the coeditor of the journal Global South, has argued that the term is better suited to "resist hegemonic forces that threaten the autonomy and development of these countries." Other critics and scholars like Alvaro Mendez (co-founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science's Global South Unit) have applauded the "empowering aspects of the term," "the unprecedented upward trajectory of its usage," and its ability to "encourage a reconsideration of developed countries' relationship to the Global South." Finally, the growth in popularity of the term "marks a shift from a central focus on development and cultural difference" within the Global South and instead recognizes the importance of their geopolitical relations.

The first use of Global South in a contemporary political sense came about in 1969. Carl Oglesby writing the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal in a special issue on the Vietnam War, argued that;

“centuries of US dominance over the global south… have converged … to produce an intolerable social order.”

Oglesby, Carl (1969). "Vietnamism has failed . . . The revolution can only be mauled, not defeated,". Commonweal. 90.
 
The term continued to gain traction and appeal throughout the second half of the 20th century. It appeared in less than two dozen publications in 2004, but in hundreds of publications by 2013. The emergence of the term is the result of a complex;

"historical and social process, that illustrates how the term has been charged with various shades of meanings."

"Introduction: Concepts of the Global South | GSSC". 

Amin's terminology has analytic advantages though . . .

A paragraph in Amin's preface to the updated publication of Eurocentrism says that:

Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The specific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capitalism leads to a growing inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe and Japan. in turn, this distortion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form at the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asymmetric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former.

(pages 7-8)

So, when "the powers that be" make universalist claims . . .
 . . . don't you believe them!