Can We Articulate ‘Articulation’?

Abstract

Marxists² writing on development and underdevelopment, which barely a decade ago was largely confined to the shrill critiques of a few voices crying in the wilderness, seems well and truly now to have ‘taken off’. Indeed, the growth of this new (or rediscovered) paradigms³ has been such that there seems to be almost as much variety of opinion and analysis within it as could be found among the bourgeois development theories that Marxists so trenchantly criticised. So whereas a few years ago it seemed appropriate to sketch out the distinctive features of a Marxist perspective as such, in comparison with other approaches,⁴ today the observer is more likely to be struck by the controversies and debates going on between participants who would probably all claim to be in some sense Marxists, but who appear deeply and perhaps increasingly divided over fundamental issues.

Earlier versions of this paper (which has been an unconscionably long time in the making) were presented to seminars in Leeds in April 1976, Binghampton in April 1977, and the BSA Development group in London in June 1977. I am grateful for these invitations, especially to Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues at SUNY — Binghampton for a stimulating session which put the paper into something like its present form, and to Doug McEachern in Leeds for critical comments which I have found very useful even when I have not used them. Neither of them, however, will agree with what follows. Finally, thanks are due to John Clammer for his surpassing patience.