Jan Breman, New Left Review
Up till the 1970s, the notion that the Rest would follow in
the footsteps of the West was intrinsic to the dominant development paradigm.
[1] Through industrialization and urbanization, the ‘underdeveloped world’
would replicate the experience of the advanced economies in the nineteenth
century: growing employment in manufacturing, rising living standards, mass
consumption. If there were not, as yet, many industrial jobs available for the
land-poor migrants who began flocking to the cities of Latin America, Africa,
the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, where land reform had been
negligible, the consensus was that urban life itself would help them in their
search for employment. For the time being they had to make do with whatever
low-paid work was accessible to them, as waged hands or self-employed, living
in makeshift shelters on the city outskirts or on vacant land. The burgeoning
informal sector was at first seen as a zone of transition, a buffer that would
disappear as labour was absorbed by the dynamics of industrialization into a
growing formal economy. This upward mobility turned out to be a rare
occurrence, however, and millions remained stuck in the informal economy that
they had helped to build, or drifting back and forth between the slums of the
urban periphery and the impoverished rural hinterland, forming a vast stratum
of precarious labour.
