Granted that "the race to the bottom" is an oversimplification (which makes it look like FDI is an unmitigated bad thing), there is a third position between the Washington Consensus and the The Race to the Bottom. And that is that Washington Consensus has been overwhelmingly bad for most of the countries who have tried it, which has been most of the countries in the world. The countries who have grown appreciably in the last 25 years -- China, India, and the various tigers of Asia -- have all been countries that have structured their economies qualitatively differently. There are big differences between the India model, the China model and the Korean model -- but they are all more like each other than they are like the Washington consensus model foisted on everyone else.
So one can be against the "whole development discourse" without being for primitivism if by "development discourse" one means the Washington consensus and various kind of related models prioritized by the World Bank. Being against that discourse could simply be an assertion that developmental models should start from those that have worked best and try to improve them rather than tinkering with one that seems overwhelmingly to have been a failure. All those really-existing growth models have serious flaws that can certainly be improved. But at least there is some basis to improve upon. Brazil on the other, has grown by 1% for the duration of its entire neoliberal experiment.
Lastly, India and China are gigantic exceptions in both senses of the term. The very fact of their size gives them a huge resource no normal sized country can match: a huge internal market that can be used either as a bargaining chip to investors or for developing sheltered homegrown industries with enough room to expand. They may not be replicable models for normal sized countries.
I know none of this is controversial on lbo-talk. I just thought it should be tossed into the mix before we talked ourselves TINA.
Michael