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A Left Approach to Development

Tue, 2010-08-03 11:29 | Prabhat Patnaik

Against the “means-based approach” to development that the bourgeoisie projects, the left must project a “rights-based approach”. Since “rights” are guarantors of welfare gains, every winning of rights likewise strengthens them. The acquisition of rights on the part of the people, including rights to minimum bundles of goods, services and security, amounts therefore to winning crucial battles in the class war for the transcendence of capitalism. If the left were to put on its agenda a struggle for people’s rights and adopt a rights-based approach to development as opposed to the means-based approach of the bourgeois formations, it would not constitute a retreat into abstract humanism but would be an integral part of the dialectics of subversion of the logic of capital. Prabhat Patnaik writes in the Economic and Political Weekly

Source: 
http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/188540/

DEMOCRACY: (Thinking of it) as a Socialist Project

Sun, 2009-03-22 21:47 | Javeed Alam

The need for the incorporation of elementary forms of democracy minus their assumption developed by liberal-democratic theory is more, and not less, in the period of post-revolutionary transition. Javed Alam argues that the concept of Rights along with the sources of negative liberty and arbitrariness are important in the post-revolutionary transition to a social formation in which power as possession mutually recognized loses ground to the mutual recognition of the primacy of human needs; that is, a re-appropriation of social essence not bound in power relationship. This can then, among other conditions, provide the basis for the beginning of the “withering away” of State as a coercive presence.