ABSTRACT
My argument in this chapter is that capitalism produces a distorted form of development globally, where it produces any sort of development at all. In the Third World the distortions tend to be different from those produced in the First World. The ‘developmental successes’ of capitalism in the Third World, therefore, mainly consist of partially solving Third World problems (like absolute material deprivations) and replacing them with First World problems (like new diseases, some gross forms of environmental degradation and ennui). My conclusion is that global capitalism cannot develop the Third World, even in terms of the relatively limited sense in which capitalists use the concept ‘development’. To signal this point throughout the text I use ‘development’ to denote ‘capitalist or distorted development’ and development (without the inverted commas) to denote a different form of non-capitalist (in fact, anti-capitalist) development.1 This is based on specific concepts of the global capitalist system and of capitalist ‘development’. It is implicit in my approach that such issues as these can best be tackled within a ‘globalization’ framework.
