Exploring Decolonizing of Mind in Post-Development Context

This essay delves into the critical concept of decolonizing the mind within a post-colonial context, exploring the lasting influence of colonial ideologies on individual and societal identities. It examines how the post-development framework challenges traditional notions of progress, considering the impact of sociological, economic, and political factors. The essay analyzes development and post-development theories, including perspectives on capitalism, poverty, and inclusive growth, while also discussing the works of scholars like Jason Moore, Ivan Illich, and Arturo Escobar. Furthermore, it explores the ideas of Polanyi, Sen, and Nussbaum on topics such as economic solidarity, human rights, capacity, and justice, along with critiques of market-based power disparities. The essay concludes by examining the connection between Marx and equity, and the rise of post-development as a response to the limitations of both socialism and capitalism.

Running head: DECOLONIZING OF MIND
“The fundamental problem for thinking about post development is de-colonising your own
mind.” Discuss
Decolonizing of Mind
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
Introduction
In the post-colonial scenario, the decolonization of the mind takes into account the
freedom of the mind form the shackles of the long imbibed colonist ideologies. One of the major
questions portrayed by the postcolonial thinking is the relativism of the identity of the human
mind. The identity is one of the most important question of the post-colonial studies. The
identification of self by a person in a given sense of identity or within a certain ideology is one of
the major causes relating to different states of being of the human mind. The idea of being
colonized or being under the influence of the foreign ideology is a subjective perspective based
in the fact that the overall ideology of the person identifying himself with the various
sociological aspects in the country. The different sociological factors are affected by the different
ideologies of the person being affected in the different aspects in the society. The political and
the social scenarios affect the overall thinking of the human mind. The various aspects of the
mind is affected by the different ideological apparatuses.
The mind is deeply accultured in the society due to the number of changes that have been
affected or influenced by a number of socio economic factors of the society. The economy of the
country or a society depends of the various factors that affect the psyche of the people in context
to their acculturating within the society. The definition of the various sociological aspects varies
along with the society. For example, poverty is a very subjective opinion of the individual
correlated to the society they live in. The different aspects of the society that the individual
resides in is affected by the different aspects of the socio cultural and the economic scenario
making a situation where the concept of poverty depends among societies. The different aspects
of the society varying between the different individualistic perspectives shows the variance in the

2
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
ideological differences related to the different perspectives of the human mind such as poverty
and economic instability. What may be considered to be poor in one country may not be the
same in another. Hence, the ideology of poverty is extremely subjective and dependent on the
different sociological factors.
Development and Post Development
Development and Post development are the two theories to understand the different
changes in the society needed for the achievement of the sustainable development in the society.
The Development theory is the understanding of a set of theories to understand the best ways to
achieve desirable outcomes from the society. They are based on the sociological understandings
of the best ways to understand the changes taking place in the society. The different theories of
development include modernization and structuralism1. The Post Development Theories study
the different aspects of the various changes in the development theory to ascertain a number of
changes needed in the society from an ecological and economic perspective. The post
developmental theory takes into account the developmental theory in the light of the political and
the ecological scenarios. The ecological and the socio-political development takes into account a
number of different aspects of society and environment. Jason Moore’s view of ecology is based
on the different aspects of ecology and the importance of the influence of capitalism on the
environment. The different aspects of the capitalistic society affect the different social and the
cultural differences leading to the different problems in the environment. In short, in the
1 The Making and Unmaking of the Third World through Development - Arturo Escobar/ Development as Planned
poverty - Ivan Illich. Both in: The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), edited by Majid Rahnema
with Victoria Bawtree

3
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
capitalistic society the extra focus on the economic development leads to lack in the focus on
ecological sustainability2.
Ilich’s planned poverty is a topic that delves on the support given by the developed
economies to the developing economies. In turn, they forget to focus on the poverty issues within
their country leading to state or poverty known as planned poverty. The different aspects of the
planned poverty focus on the various aspects of the socio-cultural aspects of the poverty3.
Escobar’s unmaking of the third world takes into perspective the third world societies of the
world and attributes it to the inequality based on the different factors in the society. Unmaking
the third world means to go over this divide of inequality and ascertain a balance between the
different parts of the society. Inclusive Growth is the general term for the overall economic
opportunities being provided to all the people in the society irrespective of their background. The
different aspects of the development in the inclusive growth depends on the inclusion of all the
classes in the society into the environmental growth paradigm4.
The Great Transformation
The investigation of how economies are initiated should begin, as indicated by Polanyi,
from how the economy obtains solidarity and soundness, i.e., how the association and repeat of
its parts come to be secured5. He concentrated in such manner on fundamental auxiliary rules that
may give such solidarity and security as opposed to on conceivable key or rambling wellsprings
2 Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso, 2015), pp.1-74.
3 Benjamin Selwyn, The Global Development Crisis (London: Polity, 2014), Chapters1 and 2
4 Alfredo Saad-Filho, Growth, Poverty and Inequality: From Washington Consensus to Inclusive Growth at
http://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2010/wp100_2010.pdf
5 Polanyi M, Society, Economics, And Philosophy (Routledge 2017)

4
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
of reconciliation6. Also, given his enthusiasm for both installed and disembedded economies, he
concentrated on the prevailing guideline of dispersion of 'need fulfilling material means'. Polanyi
distinguished three such standards related with socially installed economies. Firstly, the
symmetry of correspondence among comparably orchestrated or composed groupings (example:
segmented connection gatherings). Secondly the group of people with centralized administrative
responsibilities for social welfare. The last is the group of house holding in view of generation
for one's own needs in a to a great extent independent unit, for example, the family, settlement,
or estate . These standards can be appeared differently in relation to the turmoil of trade by
means of value making markets in a disembedded and conceivably automatic economy. No
general public can exist without an arrangement or some likeness thereof which guarantees
arrange in the generation and conveyance of products7.
In any case, that does not suggest the presence of particular financial foundations;
typically, the monetary request is simply a component of the social request. Nineteenth-century
society, in which financial movement was detached and attributed to a particular monetary
thought process, was a solitary take-off. The dissociation of the economy from the market size is
known as economistic fallacy8. NEF’s The Great Transition greatly echoed of the ideas of
Polayni and its implications in the modern context and their achievability considering the
different aspects of the society. The idea is the use of the environmental resources sustainably in
6 Karl Polanyi, The Economistic Fallacy, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer, 1977), pp. 9-18
7 Chris Hahn and Keith Hart, Unequal Development, from Economic Anthropology (London: Polity, 2011).
8 David Barkin, Wealth, Poverty and Sustainable Development at https://books.google.co.uk/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=CwEe9SVExsEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA77&dq=poverty+and+sustainable+development&ots=rK7pIETTI
f&sig=bbRHewXpuBUKZHnnhuz1nInZUsM#v=onepage&q=poverty%20and%20sustainable
%20development&f=false

5
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
the modern environment. The theory of Polayni greatly takes into account the different aspects of
the sustainable economic development of the different aspects of the society9.
Human Rights, Capacity and Poverty
Opportunity, Sen says, is a standard determinant of individual activity and social
viability; it is great principally on the grounds that it upgrades the capacity of people to help
themselves. This is a property that Sen depicts as the 'organization aspect' of the individual.
Social capacities are result of the cohesion of singular ones which according to Sen are building
blocks of economy. It is just to brace singular flexibilities that might be smothered by defects of
private enterprise that emerge from wrong-went to advancement10. In reverberating the political
financial expert Adam Smith, Sen sees social organizations as having a constrained part as one
cannot supplant singular obligation by social direction: 'there is not a viable alternative for
singular duty'. Joblessness is terrible due to its 'expansive weakening consequences for singular
flexibility, activity, and abilities'. The core of Nussbaum's liberal hypothesis of equity and human
rights is Amartya Sen's idea of generous opportunities or capacities. Before making astute
statements about just disseminations, one needs to settle on a measurement whose relative
esteem is imperative.
In connection to human advancement, particularly, neediness, the inquiry is to know
unequivocally what we ought to choose to increase. Inclination utilitarianism is one of the strong
methodology used by the organizers today. This approach advocated the intention of social
organizers to augment the fulfilment of inclinations that people have before connection of social
9 See also The New Economics Foundation, The Great Transition,
http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/the-great-transition
10 Amartya Sen, The Ends and Means of Development and Poverty as Capability Deprivation, from Development as
Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

6
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
strategies to them. The capacity approach rejects the choice of inclination standard as chosen
standard of what is socially important. Nussbaum calls attention to that inclinations might be
affected, A slave or a lady who had been a victim of violence in the long run may be persuaded
that a decently agreeable abuse is all the better she can do and not choose to focus on more
prominent opportunity. There may not be universal ideas or values in the human mind as they are
greatly influenced by the different aspects of the moral and the social values which may depend
on societies and their local norms mores or customs11.
The concept of the human being the post developmental concept helps in the evolution of
the human being as the amalgamation of the different factors affecting the human life. Selwyn
contends that Sen's perspective of opportunity in industrialist markets is near-sighted as the
market is an organized unfreedom. He declares that Sen agrees to Adam Smith's comprehension
of the market as a field of decision and "does not propose radical, distributive, formative
approaches and practices". Despite the fact that Sen's approach appears to be radical from
multiple points of view, as far as business sectors it doesn't challenge the norm, sitting above the
adverse exploitative influence that the market can have on poor people. In the present setting
market-based power disparities should be averted, Sen disregards this by utilizing both Smith
and Marx to help his case, Sen's work has numerous logical inconsistencies. His work on
starvations is at fluctuation with his liberal origination of the industrialist markets.
According to Charusheela, postcolonial thought unequivocally tries to investigate the
points of confinement of innovation as well as of relativism and nativism, in cutting out its
11 Martha Nussbaum, Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism, Political
Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 202-246

7
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
viewpoint on social power in its philosophy and morals12. On account of its refusal to see
inquiries of social examination as settled, and due to its refusal to respect the glorified pioneer
foundations of political radicalism as past the domain of alternative understanding. Rather than
being a relativist the post-colonial study scrutinizes the responsibilities of liberating skills and
not developmental innovation13.
Justice, Development and its Discontents
Marx's works, offers an elucidation of the connection amongst Marx and equity, which is
in the meantime both non-relativistic and considers Marx's speculations of history and
philosophy. The principle printed reason for this section is Marx's work The German Ideology,
yet other literary references are likewise suggested. The part rejects the cases of both the
individuals who translate Marx as an ethical relativist and of the individuals who consider him to
be contending from an ageless, trans-recorded hypothesis of equity14. This record contends that
for Marx ethical quality is to be sure reliant on the monetary structure of a specific culture at a
specific time. In any case, there is a wonder such as this a genuine profound quality. This rises
with the presence of the low class in late free enterprise. ―True ethical quality is nothing else
except for the profound quality of the working class. However, when conditions for the usage of
ordinary ethical quality as social arrangement without a doubt come to fruition, with the comrade
insurgency, a general public of full plenitude shows up and equity is not any more important.
However, this does not make lowly equity not as much as the genuine hypothesis of equity. The
12 S. Charusheela, “Social Analysis and the Capabilities Approach: A Limit to Martha Nussbaum’s Universalist
Ethics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 33, No. 6, 2009.
13 Benjamin Selwyn, The Global Development Crisis (London: Polity, 2014), Chapter 7
14 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, available at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/sw/course/mscp.pdf

8
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
crumple of socialism has relatively disparaged most left-wing belief systems, while free
enterprise has been seen as not satisfying its guarantees. These occasions opened a plenty of new
ideas and thoughts which thusly offered ascend to another worldview of advancement now
known as post-improvement. Spearheaded by as semblance of Sachs, Escobar, and Esteva, post-
improvement took its prompt from crafted by French rationalist Michel Foucault15. Post-
advancement researchers have utilized Foucauldian ideas to at last reject the thought of
improvement; it is seen, in a Foucauldian sense, as a 'specific talk which does not reflect but
rather really develops reality'. Besides, post-improvement masterminds see advancement,
particularly the Western model, as a globalized bureaucratic power unequivocally entrepreneur
in plan, utilized by the worldwide North to propagate the worldwide South's reliance towards
them. The labour in the postmodern sense is anyone working for the different parts of the
society. The different aspects of the society help in the understanding the meaning of labour in
the modern context. For Fanon, social cognizance was more vital than patriotism, and new types
of class arrangements and smaller scale personalities stand a superior opportunity to upstage
bourgeoisie and elitist interests than overreliance on a patriot motivation16. In South Africa at
present, there is confirm that the decision world class has detached itself from the majority in a
major manner. These elites, have condemned their history, and have chosen not to see on the
financial conditions under which the majority of their kin live. Now and again, the political
world class has gone the extent that redirecting the assets of the state for their own particular
childish interests, utilizing all way of traps in the law to legitimize their activities and choices. A
vital key idea in this is liberation. It is the liberty and freedom from harsh relations in the society,
15 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1 at
http://www.msu.ac.zw/elearning/material/1335344125freire_pedagogy_of_the_oppresed.pdf
16 Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence, available at http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm

9
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
on which the basic teaching methods lay their focus. Social change is prompted by social study.
With this method of investigation more literature is required to see obviously that marvels like
imbalance are a bit much, but rather emerged in a specific chronicled setting that has been built
up and created by man-made social procedures.
Poverty and Justice
While Marx did not say it, present day Marxists consider another factor that decreased
the dealing energy of the labourers. This is called "deskilling". Business people lessened the
requirement for the aptitudes of the craftsperson. Rather, they made machines and employment
forms that required a low level of expertise with respect to the specialists. One labourer winds up
tradable with another, losing any power that could be accomplished by pulling back work from
the business. Peter Townsend, specifically, spearheaded a relative hardship way to deal with
neediness that secured an extensive variety of parts of expectations for everyday comforts, both
material and social. Measures of hardship are not the same as measures of wage – they identify
with how individuals live17. Hardship is the outcome of an absence of wage and different assets,
which in total can be viewed as living in neediness.
The relative hardship way to deal with neediness inspects the markers of hardship, which
are then related back to salary levels and assets. Illich utilizes "convivial" as 'a specialized term
to assign a cutting-edge society of capably restricted devices'. He connected the expression
"convivial" to devices as opposed to individuals, he stated, in the expectation of thwarting
perplexity. The word 'convivial' has a prompt interest for some teachers and amateurs in that in
regular utilization it looks to energy and being social (appreciating individuals' conversation).
17 Peter Townsend, The International Analysis of Poverty from The Townsend Reader (London: Routledge, 2010)

10
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
Notwithstanding, while at the same time carry worried about individual cooperation, Ivan Illich
was likewise keen on foundations and 'devices' – physical gadgets, mental develops and social
structures. He contended for the formation of convivial, instead of manipulative foundations and
considered conviviality to be assigning the inverse of mechanical efficiency. Conviviality, Ivan
Illich contended, includes 'self-sufficient and inventive intercourse among people, and the
intercourse of people with their condition'. He considers this to be being 'interestingly with the
adapted reaction of people to the requests made upon them by others, and by a man-made
condition'18.
Labour and Development
In the chance that mechanization assumes control a greater amount of assembling in
high-wage nations, there will be less interest for such work in developing markets. This is
particularly troubling in the time of high joblessness, especially for youth. The world economy
should make about 600 million new employments in the following 15 years—a large portion of
them in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. India and China alone will have about half billion
youngsters joining the workforce in the following 15 years, and 11 million youthful Africans are
required to join the work advertise each year for the following decade. Fortunately, while new
innovation may cause the imaginative devastation of a few occupations, it will likewise make
numerous new employments, some of which we can't envision today. Before, innovation has
wound up making a bigger number of employments than it wipes out. For example, PCs have
supplanted employments, for example, those done by typists, however they have additionally
expanded the interest for PC based work and made new occupations identified with creating,
18 Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, available at:
www.mom.arq.ufmg.br/mom/arq_interface/3a.../illich_tools_for_conviviality.pdf

11
DECOLONIZING OF MIND
working, and programming PCs. The degree of these open doors couldn't have been anticipated a
few decades prior. Denning's view of the start of the wage-work economy, wage less life has
been a cataclysm for those whose lands were seized and the apparatus of their sustenance were
lost. Removed from work, the wage less likewise ended up imperceptible to science: political
economy, as Marx noted in the soonest definitions of his study of the train, 'does not perceive the
jobless labourer': 'The rapscallion, swindler, bum, the jobless, the starving, pathetic and criminal
workingman—these are figures who don't exist for political economy however just for different
eyes, those of the specialist, the judge, the undertaker, and bum-bailiff, and so on; such figures
are apparitions outside its area19. Understandings based upon wage work can't, it is told to the
people to represent the truth lived by the most various and pitiable of the total populace: those
without compensation, those surely without even the expectation of wages. Uncovered life,
squandered life, expendable life, and unstable life, unnecessary life: these are among the terms
used to portray the occupants of a planet of ghettos. It isn't the tyke in the sweatshop that is our
most trademark figure, however the kid in the lanes, on the other hand predator and prey of
'wage less life.' This article portrays how twentieth-century social vote-based system and state
associations set up the breadwinner as the default, the standard, in this way transforming by far
most of individuals worldwide into an oddity that is imperceptible to society's view of the regular
workers, including the labourer’s development. This article turns around this standardization of
work, and re-centres those individuals who are not formally utilized. It portrays how the creation
of the "jobless" happened during the time spent formalizing work into a particular frame that is
unmistakable to the state. The model of wage work that held influence amid the mechanical time
—in which a specialist abandons a level of flexibility in return for a specific measure of security
19 Michael Denning, Wageless Life, NLR 66 2010, 79-97