Abstract
This article spells out the significance for Development Theory of the idea of “uneven and combined development.” It argues that the impasse that afflicted materialist theories of international capitalist development in the 1980s was rooted in two fundamental problems: a misreading of Marx’s categories as directly historical; and the lack of an orienting method for deploying those categories to interpret a world of multiple and interacting societies. After reviewing the impact of these problems on the evolution of the main postwar approaches to development, the article undertakes the task of reconstruction in three steps. First, it sets out Marx’s understanding of capitalist modernity, showing how this calls for but does not explicitly provide a historical conceptualization of capitalist development. Second, it shows how Trotsky’s idea of “uneven and combined development” offers such a conceptualization, and how it thereby historicizes the phenomenon of development itself. Finally, it considers the limits of Trotsky’s own formulation of the idea, and suggests how a version released from these limits could better explain the complex spatio-temporality of capitalist development and constructively engage the most consequential challenges posed by ascendant cultural approaches in the field.
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Notes
For early critiques of post-modernism and post-structuralism from a critical materialist standpoint, see Anderson (1983) and Dews (1987). The remarks above do not of course apply to all postmodernist or post-structural perspectives. Some have sought to find a creative synthesis between postmodernism and feminism, see for instance Parpart (1995).
The works of Eric Wolf (1982) and Sidney Mintz (1986), among others, are the classics of an earlier moment in this process. For recent conceptualizations along these lines, see (Mitchell 2002, pp. 244–271; Harvey 2006, pp. 69–116; and Castree 2009). More specifically, this article is part of a wider ongoing discussion on the contemporary relevance of the idea of “uneven and combined development.” See for instance (Allinson and Anievas 2009; Rosenberg 2006, 2010, 2013; Matin 2012; Shilliam 2009).
It was this conviction that allowed so many jet set “development experts” to fly from one Third World country to the next and render planning or technical advice with little or no knowledge of the histories, cultures, languages, or social structures of these societies. It was apparently enough to know their presumed destination—the mass consumer societies of the West—to delineate with confidence the paths they would have to follow.
In the Grundrisse, Marx had similarly argued that, “In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others” (Marx 1973, pp. 106–107).
Feminist critiques have challenged the “productivist bias” in this formulation, arguing instead that centering “social reproduction” would immeasurably extend Marx’s analytic frame (cf. Federici 2004). Similarly, the rise of the environmental movement and ecological critiques of industrial capitalism have forced the need to historicize the metabolic relations with nature in ways that Marx only passingly, if suggestively, intimated (cf. Foster 2000).
Elaborating on this observation, Perry Anderson (1974, pp. 403–404) notes that: “The ‘superstructures’ of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of production in non-capitalist social formations. They intervene directly in the ‘internal’ nexus of surplus extraction, where in capitalist social formations, the first in history to separate the economy as a formally self-contained order, they provide by contrast its ‘external’ preconditions.”
Gender, ethnic, racial, and other forms of inequalities are of course omnipresent in capitalist societies and shape the specific institutional forms of surplus appropriation in critical ways. From the perspective of the tradition of thought derived from Marx, however, these are understood as historically contingent capable of being substantively ameliorated without undermining the mechanisms of surplus appropriation and the capital-wage labor relationship as such. For extended reflections on this problematic, see Wood (1988). For an attempt to overcome the decoupling of a “politics of recognition” from a “politics of redistribution” by conceiving “misrecognition” as a question of social status rather than existential address, see the important work of Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2004).
To take the example of Western Europe, the Old Regime persisted well into the era of the First World War, long after capitalist social relations had become dominant (Mayer 1981). Representative democracy, based on universal suffrage, was likewise generalized in the OECD countries only after the Second World War, largely as a result of popular pressures from below (Therborn 1977; Eley 2002).
Dale Tomich (2004, p. 28) makes the helpful distinction between “theoretical history” and “historical theory”, and argues that historicizing capitalism requires “going against the grain of Marx’s classical theoretical presentation in order to reincorporate into the field of analysis those ‘historical contingencies and disturbing accidents’ that were eliminated in the process of abstraction.
This perspective was also at the root of Marx’s Eurocentric attitude towards the role of British colonialism in India which, despite its brutality, he saw as accelerating the spread of capitalism and thereby establishing the material foundations for a socialist world beyond it. See here Aijaz Ahmad (1994, pp. 221–242).
Kamran Matin (2013, pp. 150–151) has suggested that this statement needs to be qualified insofar as the successive drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich prevaricated on this point.
Michael Burawoy (1989, p. 761) makes the similar point that Trotsky’s research program represents an extension of historical materialism, one that resolves its “anomalies by introducing auxiliary theories that expand the explanatory power of the core postulates”.
Stalin’s iconically Russian nationalist justification of the forced pace of industrialization in the Soviet Union exemplifies the perverse logic generated by the subjective sensation of “backwardness”: “The pace must not be slackened!” he declared, “to slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don’t want to. The history of old … Russia … she was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was beaten by Turkish Beys, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all—for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it or they crush us” (quoted in Deutscher 1967, p. 328).
Rosenberg’s reconceptualization of uneven and combined development not just as “a concrete abstraction of the international impact of capitalist society, but as a general abstraction of the significance of inter-societal co-existence per se” (2006, p. 319) has generated a lively controversy in its own right. See (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008; Ashman 2009; Davidson 2009; Allinson and Anievas 2009).
It should be noted, however, that Trotsky acknowledged the possibility, but not the probability, of “a new epoch of capitalist upswing” following an agonizing and violent restructuring of the international division of labor (Trotsky 1945 [1921], p. 211; 1957, p. 81). For a more detailed discussion, see Mandel (1975, pp. 216–221).
Commenting on the postwar boom, Immanuel Wallerstein (1991, p. 113) has noted that “the absolute expansion of the world-economy—in population, in value produced, in accumulated wealth—has probably been as great as the entire period of 1500–1945.” Similarly, Martin Jacques (2009) remarks that China’s industrialization has been so monumental that the very reckoning of world history might henceforth be recast as simply BC and AC—Before China and After China.
The exchanges between Arrighi et al. (2003) on one side, and Alice Amsden (2003) on the other—the former emphasizing global determinants, the latter national-historical specificities—is a telling illustration of the need for a theory of uneven and combined development capable of systemically relating the two seemingly juxtaposed levels.
According to Eric Hobsbawm, as late as 1750, the difference in the per capita gross national product of the Western and non-Western world were insignificant. By 1880, the industrial revolution had opened up a gap of 2:1. By 1913 this had widened to 3:1; by 1950 5:1 and by 1970, after 200 years of uneven development, it stood at 7:1 (Hobsbawm 1989, p. 15). That gap has today reached unprecedented levels.
For critical reflections on this dimension of the “bourgeois revolutions,” see Anderson (1992, pp. 105–118).
The “precariat,” and various forms of casual labor, have also been expanding in the heartlands of the West over the past couple of decades. See here (Van der Linden 2014). The general thrust of my approach here is succinctly captured by Frederick Cooper, who notes: “if the development of capitalism turns out to be more uneven and complex, and less all-determining than some Marxist interpretations imply, the problem of understanding why and how so many Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans came to depend on wages for their livelihood is not about to go away. Capitalism remains a mega-question” (Cooper 1996, p. 13).
Ironically, Trotsky was one of the few Marxists of his generation to engage in the debates on the long-term cycles of growth and decline in the capitalist world economy, perceptively criticizing Nikolai Kondratiev for not giving due weight to political factors in the alterations from one cycle to the next (Trotsky 1973, pp. 273–280; Day 1976).
For a recuperation and elaboration of Bloch’s concept of non-contemporaneity, via a critique of the “terminal presentism” latent in David Scott’s polemic against post-colonial narratives of emancipation, see the fascinating essay by Natalie Melas (2014). It could nevertheless be argued that Bloch does not provide an adequate theorization of how the multiple temporalities overlap and interlace with each other in all their material connections and hierarchies. What one gets is a sort of parallelogram of uneven social temporalities conjuncturally synchronized by a contingent hegemonic political bloc within a given national formation, without any exploration of its over-determination by the international geo-political and economic constellation.
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Makki, F. Reframing development theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development. Theor Soc 44, 471–497 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9252-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9252-9