Industrial Capital and Underdevelopment

Abstract

The collapse of primary commodity prices during the depression of the 1930s brought all the pressures bearing on merchant capital to a head. The savagely reduced prices it was forced to pay producers in a desperate attempt to protect its profits carried the crisis into the underdeveloped world, which responded with nationalist opposition to the whole political and economic order established in the nineteenth century. This marked the beginning of the end for the phase of underdevelopment in which merchant capital had mediated between the capitalist and non-capitalist worlds and productive capital had scarcely strayed from its homelands.