Above photo: Juan O’Gorman (Mexico), Mexico City, 1949.
Capitalism confines the Global South to raw extraction and cheap exports.
Democratic planning can break dependence, claim technological control, and turn resources into collective economic power.
For forty years, the countries of the Global South were told that economic planning was an error. The state was to retreat, tariffs were to fall, public firms were to be privatised, and investment was to be entrusted to those who move money across borders at the speed of a keystroke. Development would arrive through comparative advantage: each country should sell what it already had and buy what others had learned to make. The result is visible from Harare to Jakarta. Countries rich in minerals, fertile land, and young workers remain trapped at the least rewarding end of global value chains, exporting raw materials while importing the higher-value goods made from them. Ghana, for example, exports cocoa and imports chocolate, while Venezuela exports crude oil and imports refined fuel. Wealth drains out of the Global South, while debt, informality, and the discipline of austerity deepen.
A progressive industrial policy for the Global South must begin with a refusal of this deal. The ‘economy’ is not a neutral or natural fact but a historical product of colonial intervention, neocolonial restructuring, property regimes, and patterns of access to technology and capital. Growth rates are important, but even more important is the question of what is produced, how it is produced, who controls the process of production, and how the benefits are distributed. The goal of development should not be growth per se but the flourishing of human life.
