According to Peet, the pathways of change stem primarily from the organization of the people for the pursuit of an egalitarian society. The people who have no interest and are, in fact, abused by the status quo are the ones who will have the sufficient determination, strength, and cause to change the global hierarchy. The alternative theory Peet presents is a conglomeration of the strengths of Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism melted together to form a new theory of critical modernism working towards the achievement of communities of radical democracy.
The Marxist aspects seek to rescue modernity and give the control of the means of production to the people in order to expand the economic capacities of the poor and marginalized. Public control, collectivism, and democratic reasoning are the strengths of Marxism integrated into Peet’s approach. The poststructural aspects of Peet’s critical modernism focus primarily on examining power relations reproduced through knowledge control and ideologies of reason, science, and progress. By deconstructing the assumptions (informed by capitalism) that make developmentalism universalist, Eurocentric, and detrimental, the path can be cleared for local peoples to express their needs and meet said needs. The feminist aspect of Peet’s approach integrates women’s needs into the development discipline.
Using these theories, Peet desires to create locally-based communities, democratically self-governed and motivated by common compassion, reason, and ethics. The value of developmentalism in this is the transfer of the means of production and reproduction into the hands of the people; chiefly, that economic growth, with reproduction, must be perpetuated and promoted, merely regulated by locals rather than the state or multinationals. Modernity can be used to aid, and not to harm, the people of the earth. Developmentalism redefined as meeting universal needs locally defined by spreading power and access throughout the globe is an invaluable entity. Development is the act of giving people the means to reproduce life.
As far as what is to be done: In reading PDR’s pleas for recognition of the forgotten local peoples, in reading Peet’s cry for a radical democratic compassionate collective, and in reading all of our materials advocating for decentralization and redistribution of power, I am continually taken back to the teachings of Catholic justice workers and Martin Luther King’s rhetoric. Catholic social teaching, especially the teaching of Pope John Paul II, calls not only for social justice, but for social love—the equivalent of social justice motivated by an unconditional compassion for other humans. King’s theories call this unconditional social love “agape,” a love that flows unmotivated, spontaneous, and without expecting anything in return. While uniting a community out of necessity to overcome an abuse or gain justice is powerful, once the need is met, the danger always stands that the community may return to its previous stratified, scattered state. If community collectivism and distributism are motivated by social agape love, it is possible that Peet’s radically democratic collectives may be created and even sustained.
The power of love in uniting people despite their differences and in bringing about equality and selflessness is visible in King’s achievements in the fight against racism, in the base communities of Latin America started by liberation theologians, and in many brands of communes around the world. This social love, however, cannot be imposed from the top down. Taking a compassionate stance on economics and equality is the prerogative of the people; structural change will follow social movements from the grassroots. As elites, our role is to help the people to organize themselves through providing education and basic needs, by building genuine relationships with the faces behind the issues of poverty and inequity, by acting as a medium for their voices so that structural changes may follow the expression of their needs and agendas, and by always treating everyone with unconditional respect and compassion, whether they may be a Chinese peasant or a World Bank economist.
As to my role in these social movements and the empowerment of the people, to be perfectly honest, I do not necessarily see myself being involved in an organization directly challenging capitalism’s injustices. However, I do plan to work in an environment that indirectly challenges it by addressing issues of inequality and vulnerability through some sort of community organization: rather than organizing unions, working in a therapeutic or educational setting designed to allow people to express themselves, to be heard, and to heal.
Though, as the director of Kenya’s USAID education branch said, organizations often “waste” the majority of their money on the populations hardest to reach rather than targeting accessible and economically productive populations, my desire is to work with marginalized individuals who have been hurt by the modern world and forgotten by the system, whether through trauma due to private histories of domestic and sexual violence, or through more public problems like homelessness, poverty, and warfare. In my mind there are two avenues by which to address the problems present in modernity: attacking the causes of problems or treating the effects. I often feel guilty, as if the only valid way to initiate change is by attempting to directly eliminate structural violence by taking preventative measures and reforming the structure itself, but I also believe that working with the brokenness caused by structural violence is equally important in the battle for its elimination.
Challenging structural violence means addressing both the causes and working with those affected. Naturally, the two are not mutually exclusive; working as an art therapist with street children or teaching confessional writing in a high school for traumatized youth is not a separate task from working with welfare policies or social work. Working for humanitarian change at any level or sector means addressing issues at all levels of every sector, for all are interrelated and interdependent. While I may want to work directly with people in need of healing and love, others may want to work in policy or trade or agriculture to address the issues of structural neglect and suffering found there.
With every paragraph this becomes less of an essay and more of a reflective catalogue of Erin’s dreams for the future, but though I do not necessarily have specific plans to organize collectives of people for the purpose of empowering said populations, I do hope to always live in community. My desire would be to always live cooperatively, on compounds or in shared houses, with a group of people dedicated to spreading love and justice and beauty, whether through art or education or activism or community organization, whether they come from the elite class or the most destitute level of society, whether they come from a Western culture or another. I do not know where or with whom I want to work, although I know that I have never anywhere felt as immediate and deep a connection as I did in Rwanda, Kenya, and Kosovo—but surprisingly enough, I felt nearly the same love for south Yonkers when I began volunteering with Hispanic immigrants down near the projects.
I suppose my answer then is that I desire to work with individuals in need of love and healing, individuals that will compose a society of people finding wholeness and continuing the cycle of service and love they became a part of.
