Libre Magazine

When we thought we had it all figured out, there came along some interesting notes:

‘Raghu’s paper is squarely in that “old” political-economy tradition: it asks why countries do not reform and why underdevelopment persists as a result. His answer is a twist on the traditional story: the problem is not so much a narrow set of elites that want to maintain their rents at the expense of development, but the non-elites who want to maintain theirs. The educated non-elites do not want competition so they veto greater access to education by the non-educated. Meanwhile the non-educated do not want market reforms because this would raise the prices of many of the services they consume (so says Raghu). The result is reform paralysis. Even though Raghu does not say so explicitly, he is obviously thinking of India.’ (Dani Rodrik, 2008)

Further, traditional wisdom tells us that the major chunk of the middle class coupled with bits and pieces of the elite (Bourgeoisie) add human and intellectual power to the rage infuriating to change the status quo in a society, at any given time. However, Walden Bello who was recently crowned the public scholar of the year (2008) notes differently:

‘Among both liberals and progressives, it is common to portray the middle class as an ally of the working class and the lower classes generally and that it is by and large a force for democratization. The thesis showed that contrary to this assumption, the middle classes are not necessarily forces for democratization in developing countries. In fact, when the poorer classes are being mobilized with a revolutionary agenda, the middle classes can become a mass base for counterrevolution, as in Germany and Italy in the 1920’s, when the middle class provided the foot soldiers of the Fascist and Nazi movements. But progressives really have a hard time accepting this characterization of the middle class, and part of the subliminal reason for this is that this is oftentimes the class that they come from.’