Bush Ray (Ed). Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and reproduction in the global south, (London: Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 237, ISBN: 13 978 0 7453 1960 5 p/b)

✍ Scribed by Clare Newstead

• Book ID: 102348790
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 42 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1658

✦ Synopsis

Ray Bush offers a critically engaged and politically focused analysis of the persistent failure of international institutions and donor agencies to alleviate poverty in the Global South. He suggests international agencies fail because they continue to peddle policies in which capitalism figures as part of the solution to poverty, rather than as its cause. 'Poverty' he argues 'does not emerge because of exclusion, but because of poor people's ''differential incorporation'' into economic and political processes' (1). It is the nature of this uneven incorporation into an 'unjust and unequal system of wealth creation' (xiv), which forms the core of Bush's explanation for the persistence of poverty. While there is genuine scope, and indeed need, for more analyses that interrogate capitalist processes of dispossession as Bush intends, Poverty and Neoliberalism struggles with the theoretical rigour and conceptual clarity required to deliver such an analysis with the force it deserves.

In the first two chapters of Poverty and Neoliberalism, Bush identifies the limits to, and his departure from, what he variously refers to as neoliberal and neoclassical approaches to poverty. Chapter 1 examines dominant 'framings' of poverty in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) while Chapter 2 focuses on the failure of development initiatives, such as the UK government Commission for Africa, to ameliorate the region's development crises. Bush argues for a political economy analysis, which is attentive to historical relations of incorporation into the world economy, the relation between winners and losers, as well as particular local social formations and class struggles. These themes appear to various degrees throughout Chapters 3-6 as he analyses, respectively: international migration; labour supply and immigration policy in Western states; land reform and the politicisation of land; resource-led development and food and famine. Although Bush begins Poverty and Neoliberalism with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, most of the book is concerned with Africa more generally.

The detailed exploration of specific country examples in Chapters 3-6 provides rich illustration of the international and national processes that serve to dispossess Africa and 'undermine the development that donors and policy makers assert is possible' (117). The discussion of land reform in Egypt in Chapter 4, Ghana and Nigeria's 'resource-curse' in Chapter 5, and Sudanese famine in Chapter 6, are all especially illuminating. Bush's alertness in these chapters to the significance of the detail to any meaningful understanding of why poverty persists is one of the strengths of this book and key to his successful illustration of just how contradictory development practice can be. Chapter 7, the final chapter, offers some reflection on local resistance and 'the hope for an alternative to the universal spread of commoditization ' (197).

The political economy framework Bush argues is necessary for examining the persistence of poverty is clearly indebted to historical materialism. Yet, aside from his use of terminology such as 'primitive accumulation', 'accumulation by dispossession', 'class struggle' and imperialism, there is little direct discussion of the theoretical heritage that informs Poverty and Imperialism. For instance, the argument that it is not the lack of capitalist integration but the nature of that integration, which is relevant to understanding poverty, reverberates with the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney, yet there is no discussion of such scholarship. Bush similarly glosses over contemporary theoretical work to which his book relates. He refers frequently, for example, to 'accumulation through dispossession' (xv). David Harvey has recently advanced this particular analytic as part of his