The Ideology of Development - C. Douglas Lummis

The ideology of development has been immensely succesful, not in actually raising the poor people of the world to the level of “ultimate prosperity” but in convincing milions that this is what capitalist activities in the Third World are intended to do. Under this ideology was launched the most massive systematic project of human exploitation, and the most massive assault on culture and nature which history has ever known. It was the extraordinary achievement of the development ideology to render the imperialism of the countries and corporations carrying out this project an arguable question. It has enabled development economists to write about all of this without using any of the old vocabulary of colonialism and imperialism, as if they not only no longer exist but never did, or if they did, didn’t matter.

C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy, Cornell University Press, 1996, p.60