Marxism and development sociology: Interpreting the impasse

WorldDevelopment Vol.

13, NO. 7. pp. 761-787.

1985 0

Printed in Great Britain

0305-7sox/xs $3.00 + 0.00 1985 Pergamon Press Ltd.

Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse DAVID

BOOTH*

University of Hull, UK Summary.

development - There is an increasing sense that the ‘new’ Marxist-influenced sociology which emerged in the early 1970s has reached some kind of impasse. This paper suggests that there are good reasons for this sense of unease; that the weaknesses and lacunae in

current sociological development research cannot be attributed entirely to the influence of any particular radical perspective (e.g. dependency theory); and that understanding the impasse requires standing back from the theoretical controversies of the past decade and a half to examine some underlying commonalities of approach. A key problem, it is argued. is Marxism’s metatheoretical commitment to demonstrating the ‘necessity’ of economic and social patterns, as distinct

from

explaining

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and exploring

how they may be changed.

tion (Leys, 1977; Phillips, 1977; Bernstein, 1979a, 1982). On the other hand, there has been a general reluctance to explore ways in which the current impasse might be related to more generic and less tractable difficulties in the inheritance of radical social theory such as those that have been drawn to our attention in different ways by Hindess and Hirst (1977); Cutler e/ al., (197778), Cohen (1978) and Giddens (1981). This is the issue I wish to broach in this paper. What follows does not pretend to be even a rapid survey of the contribution of Marxism to recent sociological development literature. The paper begins by reviewing a number of muchdiscussed topics: the debate about dependency and ‘transitive underdevelopment’ approaches; Bill Warren’s defence of the ‘classical’ view of capitalist development; the ‘modes of production’ literature; and some of the general shortcomings of current research in the sociology of development. It then goes on to propose a new way of looking at these familiar problems,

After more than a decade of vigorous growth, the ‘new,’ Marxist-influenced sociology of development’ has reached something of an impasse. At the theoretical level the most influential positions of the past are now strenuously rejected by many of their former adherents, few of whom pretend to see a clear way forward. Bold and heterodox proposals have not been lacking, but they have failed to establish themselves as a widely accepted alternative, showing an equal and in some ways parallel inability to generate theoretically informed research on fundamental issues of Third World development. Apparently promising discussions about basic concepts have proved inconclusive, with related empirical work becoming increasingly arid and repetitive. Large areas remain under-researched and untheorized; and even the strongest sections of the literature lack the cumulative quality that one expects of a healthy field of enquiry in the social sciences. If this is true - and I think the above expresses in its essentials a wide and growing consensus among those working in the field it is obviously a serious matter. However, beyond the general feeling that something has gone wrong somewhere, there is little agreement as to how the various deficiencies of the new development sociology relate to each other and to the classical core of Marxist theory. There have been a number of useful attempts to analyze the weaknesses of the field in terms of the mistaken assumptions and methodology of specific radical perspectives on Third World development, most of them implying the potential superiority of a more rigorous approach within the Marxist tradi-

*For helpful comments on drafts of this paper. 1 am grateful to ‘Ted Benton, Colin Creighton, David Lehmann, Michael Redclift, Martin Shaw, seminar participants at East Anglia, Hull and Leeds, members of the DSA/BSA study group on Urban Poverty and the Labour Process, and an anonymous referee for this journal. I am particularly indebted to Aidan FosterCarter for stimulating discussions over many years without which the paper would not have been written. Since I have certainly failed to do justice to some of their best suggestions. those mentioned are more than usually innocent of any responsibility for the views expressed.

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adapting and applying recent insights not specifically concerned with development studies from a variety of sources. The burden of the concluding argument is that in a number of respects it is the intellectual framework of Marxism as such, and not the shortcomings of this or that particular perspective, that IS to blame for the stagnation and lacunae in current sociological development research.

1. DEPENDENCY THEORY AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT: FlFl-EEN YEARS AFTER The dominant feature on the horizon of radical development theory today is undoubtedly the decline and threatened, but never quite realized, disappearance of the dependency perspective as a widely accepted approach. I refer here to the general belief, influential in research on a nunber of parts of the world, that the development problems and hence the social structures and politics of less developed countries are to be understood primarily in terms of the particular nature of their insertion into the international capitalist system - rather than in terms of largely domestic considerations. Different writers in the dependency tradition have, of course, assigned different weights to the several constituent properties of ‘dependent’ or ‘peripheral’ status, emphasizing respectively trade, finance, ownership of productive assets, technology or ideology and culture. There have also been sharp disagreements about what precisely dependency theory is supposed to explain. Cutting across these differences, however, is a shared conviction that in the analysis of underdevelopment and patterns of change in Third World social formations, external relations determine the role of ‘domestic’ structural properties, not vice versa.’ Although perhaps they were never as generally influential as some of us once imagined, dependency and ‘transitive underdevelopment” conceptions of Third World reality have todayquite rightly, lost much of their pull. The views of Frank, Amin and Wallerstein. and to a lesser extent Sunkel, Cardoso and Quijano. have been vigorously criticized from a number of angles over many years. It is now commonplace to observe that radical development theory has generated rather less cumulative empirical research and more sterile controversy than might have been hoped, and it is increasingly usual to lay this at the door of the dependency perspective. I was comparatively slow to come around to this point of view but would now go somewhat further than most in drawing a balance sheet of

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the dependency phase of the new development sociology. It is now reasonab!y. clear. I would argue, that the dependency posItIon is vitiated by a variable combination of circular reasoning, fallacious inferences from empirical observation and a weak base in deductive theory. The circular logic of crucial arguments in the dependency armoury was recognized at an early date but hasperhaps never been given sufficient The dependency view of developprominence. ment is in fact fatally flawed on logical grounds at precisely the point where it seems strongest empirically for example. in Frank’s early (1966. 1967) historical sketch of the economic history of Latin America. Over the years Frank’s early studies have been much maligned as representing an unusually vulgar or simplistic variant of the dependency position; yet they contain one of the very few attempts in the primary dependency literature to formulate a theory in the sense of a logically interrelated set of general propositions, and to derive and test empirical generalizations on the basis of research. Thus it is not perverse to take as a leading case in point here Frank’s 1066 validation of the dependency position, the more so since in broad terms it exemplifies perfectly a form of argument still in common use. Frank’s main theoretical proposition asserted: ‘contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now developed metropolitan countries.’ This generated the hypothesis that ‘the satellites experience their greatest economic development and especially their most classically cupitulist industriul de~dopnwnt if and when their ties to their metropolis are weakest.‘5 Several sorts of historical and comparative evidence were invoked in support of this proposition. Today there are grounds for questioning some of the factual elements in Frank’s proof, notably improved evidence on the timing of the first stages of industrialization in some of the larger Latin American economies.h Nevertheless the crucial flaw remains the definition of ‘development’ (and hence ‘underdevelopment’) that was smuggled into the statement of the hypothesis, with the result that the proposition becomes tautologically true. rendering the historical material illustrative rather than corroborative. In the hypothesis and the accompanying text, satisfactory development is idcntific,d as ‘selfsustaining’ or ‘autonomous’ and (hence’?) industrial growth; this is the meaning attached to ‘classically capitalist’ development. Hut this amounts to saying that it is non-satellite (or to

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use the language subsequently adopted, nondependent) development. Hence the empirical demonstration that in historical fact satisfactory development occurs only to the extent that metropolis-satellite, or dependency, links are broken or weakened, is nothing of the kind, but an exercise in tautology.’ This argument or something rather similar has been forcefully advanced by Smith (1980, p. 13) with reference to the work of Samir Amin,x and Warren (1980, pp. 160, 165166) has pointed to the element of logical circularity in DOS Santos’s famous attempt to define ‘dependence.’ The basic critique applies well to Rodney’s (1972) essay on African underdevelopment and to several other influential studies of dependency and alternative development paths for Third World regions.” Circular, that is tautological. reasoning is central to dependency theory and to those variants of Marxist development theory which operate within a dependency framework; but it is perhaps not an intrinsic characteristic, and at any rate there is more to the tradition than circular nonautonomous and about arguments autonomous economic growth. Many Latin American dependency writers were concerned not with structural the beginning from underdevelopment or dependency conceived in these broad and problematic terms, but with more specific economic and social problems held to be characteristic of the latest phase in Latin international with relations America’s Focusing on the one hand on capitalism.“’ patterns of deteriorating income distribution, social ‘marginalization’ and authoritarian politics, and on the other on the role of multinationtechnology and/or cultural als, inappropriate alienation, this type of dependency proposition lends itself less readily to tautologous presentation. At least in principle, it is capable of being formulated as a set of substantive hypotheses linking proposed causal factors to independently identified effects. To recognize the existence of such hypotheses is. however, by no means to accept them. There remains the very live issue of whether they can be validated empirically, that is whether marginalization and related processes can be shown to be the result of factors of ‘dependence’ such as the colonization of the most dynamic sectors of the economy by transnational capital. as opposed to other factors suggested by other kinds of development thinking. In the original dependency literature (e.g. in the work of Cardoso, Sunkel and Quijano) the answer to this question tended to be presented as self-evident on the basis of a small range of broadly similar national experiences, frequently those of the larger Latin

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American countries. In other words no systematic effort was made to distinguish the effects to transnationalization per se from those of the local social and political context, the revailing economic policy regime and so on. F: More recently there has been a trend towards the use of crossnational statistical testing to vindicate dependency propositions. However, despite protestations to the contrary the bulk of this work has not escaped the empiricism of the original dependency formulations, so that the conditions for drawing valid causal inferences from statistical analyses have not usually been met.” Systematic and theoretically informed comparative analysis has in contrast, seldom been employed by those most sympathetic to the dependency viewpoint, and the results of such exercises have typically proved unfavorable to the standard dependency claims.” The required evidence is of course patchy. Nevertheless the essays by Lall (1975) and Weisskopf (1976) have made effective use of comparative analysis to distinguish the effects of dependence (variously defined) from those of capitalism in general and/or from those of particular policy patterns or institutional arrangements.lJ Drawing on a very wide range of empirical sources, Morawetz (1977, pp.4(!-41) has concluded that ‘fast-growing, marketoriented countries,’ that is successful ‘dependent developers.’ include hoOr cases where the income share of the poorest has declined urn1 a group of countries (conspicuously excluding Latin American ones) whose record by this criterion has not been at all bad. Morawetz suggests the working hypothesis (which would seem to be strongly supported by the historical record of certain East Asian countries) that what determines the trend is the degree of inequality at the outset.‘” Dependency Marxism would seem, then. to be logically flawed where it appears at first sight to be supported by important historical evidence. and incapable of withstanding serious comparative analysis even where it is logically sound. This ought not to be surprising, because, additionally. writers in the dependency tradition have typically worked from an extraordinarily weak base in deductive economic theory. A number of critics (Leys, 1977; Phillips, 1977; Bernstein, lY7Ya; Taylor, 1979; Weeks, lY81) have made much of the fact that dependency and underdevelopment theory is not rooted in a rigorous application of Marxist economic theory, but unless one lives in a thoroughly Manichean world of proletarian truth and bourgeois error, the point is surely that it is not rooted in my rigorous body of deductivetype theory. This IS not to say there are no economic ideas behind dependency theory. but

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dependency writers tend to be either almost literally the slaves of defunct economists or amateurish and uncritical consumers of economic literature. Dependency theory was the child of its time in both a passive and an active sense. Dependency writers assumed unquestioningly either one or both of the theories influential for a short time in the 1960s to the effect that participation in world trade was likely to be secularly impoverishing for less developed countries (qua primary producers, or as low-wage areas). This remained the case even after these theories were subjected to devastating criticism and academic support for them in their original form was reduced to a rump inside certain international bureaucracies. ” Other concepts which passed rapidly out of vogue after the mid-1960s but were permanently absorbed into the dependency lexicon, include the target notion of ‘rapid and self-sustaining growth’ and the belief that shortages of local savings and capital (or ‘surplus’) are among the critical obstacles to development in the typical Third World country.‘7 Dependency also took over and transformed in a more active way the trend in nationalist thinking - not only in Latin America - in the late 1950s and the lY6Os towards the view that the causes of the apparently multiplying difficulties of the national development process were located ‘outside’ rather than ‘inside’ the national society. The crucial juncture came with the realization. first in Latin America and East Asia. later that industrialization by import elsewhere, substitution was deepening rather than resolving serious social inequities and balance-of-payments problems. Careful studies of various theoretical and ideological complexions were eventually to that documented analytically and appear empirically the ways in which these problems could be seen to be inherent in the ISI policy package.” These studies agreed in indicting ISI policies. or their more extreme manifestations. as sufficient causes of the regressive incomedistribution trends and external vulnerability (and in this special sense dependency) observed in many semi-industrialized countries. The odd unusually sophisticated defender of the dependency approach (e.g. Seers. lY77) has tried. not very convincingly. to show that dependency theory can subsume such insights. But there really is not much doubt that mainstream 1960s dependency theorists were taken in by a perfectly ordinary spurious correlation. Advanced import substitution was associated with an invasion of manufacturing multinationals, growing external vulnerability and regressive trends in employment and income distribution. Plausibly but

wrongly the last two things were laid at the door of the first.” For a variety of reasons this was a mistake most easily committed in Latin America, and later easily transported to Africa. We may reasonably say. in sum, that the dependency position has been shown to be untenable on a combination of logical, analytical and theoretical grounds.*” Something of the kind is increasingly recognized even, and in some respects particularly, among scholars who contributed significantly to the dependency inspired critiques of the older development literature. Vigorous rebuttals of the dependency approach have come from scholars whose previous work placed them squarely within that tradition. And yet the change in the intellectual scene is in some ways more apparent than real. Too often, I would argue. dependency views have been renounced on the basis of superficial critiques directed at particular authors; Frank has been the butt of many such attacks. Other critics. moved by an undcrstandablc. but to my mind spurious, dcsirc not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, have contented themselves with partial, incomplete accounts of what is wrong with dependency theory even though the full picture is agreed and understood. I have in mind here the tendency to rely on conceptual critiques when only a combination of arguments of the type outlined above will lay to rest the more serious claims of the depcndcncy point of view. I interpret this as the product partly of a lingering Althusserian theoreticism, and partly of a wish not to concede that dependency’s traditional critics from the intellectual and political right have been in sonic sense vindicated. Either way. the effect is that for all their insight on particular aspects. thcsc critiques stop short of the point of no return.” The same critic\ and others I-rave made strenuous efforts to theorize away the relationship between dependency-type thinking and the main tradition of twentieth-century Marxism, and this too has helped to weaken the impact of their arguments.‘While even on a reasonably inclusivc definition the ‘dependency perspcctivc’ is obviously at variance with the thcorctical cor(’ of classical Marxism, it has clearly had a certain place in Marxist thought not just since Lenin but since Marx himself. There is ;,ow a good deal of published argument to this ettcct.” Mori (IY78) has point4 out on the basis of a valuable rereading of Marx’s writings on India. Ireland and Poland, that Marx did not just abandon his much-quoted early views on the destructive-butalso-rcgcncr~itive consequences of British free trade. but Iate in life tunic to adopt an almost diametrically opposed position. albeit still in

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relation to particular countries. Other recent literature suggests that the ambiguity in Lenin’s formulations on the impact of imperialism on the productive forces in the colonies was cleared up. and in a way which clearly anticipated contemporary theoretical developments. at a relatively early stage in the history of the Third International.-’ Dependency-type positions thus have a long history within the Marxist tradition. Such theories have also had their Marxist critics but. to be blunt. if there is a case to be made for the view that dependency theory represents merely an intrusion of bourgeois nationalism into Marxist thought, then some weighty figures have to be held co-responsible along with Amin, Cardoso and Frank. Granted this, framing a critique of dependency theory in terms of a simple opposition between the latter and Marxism has two unfortunate effects. One is that to the unwary it can easily seem that the criticisms only affect a rather narrow circle of mainly Latin American writers specifically identified with the concept of depetdenciu, so that essentially similar ideas framed in terms of concepts such as imperialism, neocolonialism or ‘the international law of value’ remain perfectly acceptable. Second and perhaps more importantly. the current stress on the un-Marxist character of dependency theory makes it difficult to pursue what is surely now the most important question: why, if empirically wrong and theoretically wrongheaded, the dependency perspective has such an enduring presence in the broad Marxist tradition. Altogether the critics have been far stronger at detecting the weaknesses in dependency reasoning than in explaining !row these mistakes came to be made; hence they have generally failed to indicate how we should proceed if we are to avoid fallng into similar traps again. One reason is that with significantly partial exceptions (Warren and Phillips)” they have been unprepared to grasp the nettle of Marxism’s political, and especially its tnetatheoretical, interest in theoretical constructions of a certain kind - the issue taken up later in this paper. Whether because of these limitations of the theoretical debate or for more powerful reasons of the kind discussed below, dependency-type assumptions have a strong ongoing presence in the radical development literature. The journals that have sponsored the leading work in the new development sociology continue to publish a steady flow of (often factually informative) concrete studies of the supposed results of imperialism/dependence in particular areas of the Third World, which effectively swamp the occa sional unmuddled anti-dependency piece.‘”

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Major foci of empirical work in the sociology of development such as the formation of national bourgeoisies and working classes have continued to be dominated by false problems and schematic tendencies derived from dependency Marxism, as is now beginning to be recognized.‘7 In alliance with a form of Marxian state theory that scarcely anybody now defends, dependency assumptions are a pervasive influence on studies of politics - including the politics of meaningful reform in major developing countries, contributing to the obfuscation of real political choices in a number of areas.‘x These contradictions between the ground that has been covered in theory and the actual practice of development sociology is a striking and disturbing feature of the present state of the field.

2. WARREN’S CHALLENGE: STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES Similarly unsatisfactory is the way the literature has responded, or failed to respond, to the revival of radically anti-dependent Marxism in the work of Bill Warren and others. Y‘Warren has provided what is arguably the most thorough and courageous critique of the dependency Marxist viewpoint. He also goes some way towards identifying the political ‘uses’ of dependency Marxism and thus explaining in part its persistent attractions in some quarters.“’ But although his position is beginning to be accorded a grudging respect on this basis, the full implications are far from having been grasped. This should not be interpreted as an endorsement of Warren’s approach. On the contrary I think there are solid reasons why even those like myself who think Warren’s main theses are supported by the evidence, should be unenthusiastic about embracing them as an alternative framework. Interest here focuses on the arguments in the second half of Warren’s book regarding the effects of colonialism and of the post-colonial international system on the development of the productive forces in Third World countries. These are summarized as follows: (i) ‘Contrary to current Marxist views, empirical evidence suggests that the prospects for successful capitalist development in many underdeveloped countries are quite favourable .’ (ii) ‘[T]he period since the end of the Second World War has witnessed a major surge in capitalist social relations and productive forces in the Third World.’ (iii) ‘Direct colonialism, far from having retarded or distorted indigenous capitalist develop-

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ment that might otherwise have occurred, acted as a powerful engine of progressive social change .’ (iv) ‘Insofar as there are obstacles to [capitalist] development. they originate not in current relationships between imperialism and the Third World, but in the internal contradictions of the Third World itself.’ (v) ‘The overall. net effect of the policy of ‘imperialist’ countries and the general economic relations of these countries with the underdeveloped countries actually favours the industrialization and general economic development of the latter.’ (vi) ‘Within a context of growing economic interdependence, the ties of ‘de~~~z~lcnce’ (or subordination) binding the Third World and the imperialist world have been and are hcing markedly loosened with the rise of indigenous capitalisms ..’ (Warren, lYX0, pp. Y%lO) 1 do not suggest that these propositions, even when elaborated as they are in the original text, are unproblematic. However. Warren’s main assertions arc well informed and well supported, and not open to the kinds of objections that have been most commonly raised?’ Although perhaps propositions (iii) and (iv) remain controversial, much of what Warren has to say is rather standard stuff in development economics. and the fact that it was necessary to insist so much on these points says something about the way left-tending social scientists and activists have seen fit to close their minds to pertinent mainstream literature. Overall, it would not be easy to establish that any of his carefully worded propositions are actually wrong. Even while stressing this aspect, however, it is hard not to be struck by a certain perversity in the way Warren’s theses organize the evidence, and it is difficult to dismiss the feeling that while what he has said is true, it is in a certain sense not the whole truth. Specifically, I would argue. his views on the current prospects and problems of Third World development are subject to important non-dependency objections centering on the level and mode of abstraction employed. The basic feature is a single-minded and unremitting concentration on the general, intrinsic and mainly economic qualities and effects of development understood as the unfolding or diffusion of the capitalist mode of production. This theoretically determined approach has several consequences or corollaries. First, in examining the postwar economic experience of the less developed world. Warren frequently acknowledges variations in the general pattern of development progress, but consistently downplays them. There is an almost

explicit theoretical denial of the possibility of important systematic variations within the general pattern.‘* The book does not claim that the surge in the forces of production since the War has affected all areas of the Third World equally. and prospects are said to be favorable only in ‘many’ underdeveloped countries. This is probably correct. but certainly insufficient. The past performance of different regions and countries of the less developed world has been notoriously uneven. and by and large the poorest countries have done least well. It is tragically the case that the prospects for the next decades vary between countries from excellent (maintenance of GDP growth rates of X-12’% per year) to disastrous (negative growth in per capita if not absolute terms). Warren’s method of argument takes us from the indiscriminate pessimism of the dependency view of the world to a barely less misleading generalized optimism. Worse, It distracts attention from some of the most deplorable aspects of the contemporary situation. and hence from the exploration of the underlying causes.” As a rule, secondly, specific national policy regimes and institutional arrangements get cxtremely short shrift in Warren’s treatment of the variations in performance between countries. This is a feature of his discussion of income distribution (the interesting experience of postwar Taiwan in mentioned only to subsume it within a general vision in which institutions and policies are entirely subordinate to the stage of the development process that has been reached). and it is also true more generally. Obviously. there are various both positive and negative features of the Third World development experience that can be said to be inherent in capitalist (if not all) development. But equally clearly. there are achievements and failures that must be laid squarely at the door of governments and their policies. Warren recognizes this but is most unwilling to accept its implications. On the last three pages of the book, he tells us of ‘major policy blunders’ that resulted in a ’ squandering of many of the benefits of Third World postwar economic development;’ a different set of policies ‘would have permitted the promotion of a more efficient and humane capitalist development’ than actually occurred. But this, we are assured, ‘has failed to halt the gathering momentum of capitalist advance,’ so the discussion of policy errors appears merely as a gloss on the main theme, an illustration of the silliness of failing to recognize capitalist development when it occurs (1080. pp. 253-235; cf. pp. 177. 236). Warren’s approach, 1 am suggesting, is unhelpful on the role of national policy regimes and institutional arrangements. For related reasons,

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thirdly and fourthly. it has difficulty dealing with direct colonialism and its aftermath, and generates a very unsatisfactory treatment of nationalism and ‘the national question.’ In both areas, the problems arise from the attempt to understand the development of national social formations relying entirely on a general concept of capitalism and its dynamics. An unsentimental re-examination of the effects of capitalist colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was certainly called for, and in the context of the book Warren was no doubt right to emphasize the various ways in which the changes effected by colonialism were necessary conditions for what has been achieved since. Yet, in the book, colonialism is presented in such a way as to make one wonder why independence movements should have arisen at all; and when decolonization comes under discussion, the benefits of this ‘stage’ are emphasized in a way which could not have been anticipated from the discussion of colonialism.“” The trouble with Warren’s account is not that in the everyday sense it lacks ‘balance’ but that it is one-dimensional in a way which eventually generates incoherence. The appreciations about colonialism may not be grosso modo mistaken but they are overgeneralized and economistic. The fixation on capitalist development, conceived as a unitary process,” leads to a neglect of features which were less than general but nonetheless rather significant aspects of the process (the dispossession of African peasantries, forced labor, racial segregation and so on) and of causal factors ranging from colonial development policies to the social and cultural backgrounds of the different national groups involved. The same kind of economism is behind Warren’s position on the national question. Apart from his oddly inconsistent admiration for the way post-Independence regimes have used their bargaining power to promote national capitalisms. Warren is wholly and unreservedly opposed to nationalism and, apparently. to the right of nations of self-determination. In his analysis; such a position seems to be a necessary counterpart of a critique of ‘anti-imperialism’ as this term has been understood in Marxist circles since the 1920s. But this is a mistake. One source of the confusion is the fact that historically the ‘Leninist world view,’ the notion that imperialism/ dependency is responsible for backwardness in the less developed world, entered Marxist discussions ‘through’ the national question: the concept of the (mainly political and cultural) oppression of nations by other nations was in effect extended to include the idea c,f a specifically economic oppression inherent in capitalist colonialism and/

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or the world market? But to question the latter does not necessarily mean abandoning the whole idea of national oppression here Warren throws out the baby with the bathwater. which unfortunately weakens his case against those other Marxists who are slaves to dependency mythology but have correctly grasped the progressive thrust of certain nationalisms. In sum, Warren’s approach is limiting in a series of connected ways. not because the authors and positions he criticizes are after all right, but because of the nature of the theoretical framework he offers in their place. The capitalist mode of production and its dynamics (including ‘uneven development’) are offered as sufficiently explaining both the ugly and the attractive faces of development in the Third World today and in the recent past: both aspects are simply a function of normal capitalist development. But important variations within the general pattern are certainly not sufficiently explained by differences in the evolution or spread of capitalist social relations. Moreover. there is much that is of interest and importance in the contemporary experience of the less developed countries which escapes the attention of this framework more or less entire1y.j’ This makes it virtually unuseable as a framework for social science research. let alone politics or policy formation. In light of the above comments. the fact that the demise of dependency theory has not led to the emergence of a flourishing Warrenite or ‘classical-Marxist’ development sociology:‘” is neither surprising nor particularly regrettable. What is to be regretted is that we have not yet entered a post-Warren era in sociological development research. There is a widespread sense of the futility of pursuing the dependency-Warren debate any further. Yet one feels the sources of Warren’s ‘extremism’ have not been properly grasped or the implications thought through; rather as in the previously considered case of the critique of dependency theory, the response to Warren has been in the first place overpersonalized and then stronger on perceiving theoretical weaknesses than on grasping the nettle of metatheory - the reasons why a given intellectual tradition articulates problems for theory in the way that it does. In summary. while the need to move on from the type of generalized controversy represented by Warren KS. dependency is now obvious and widely accepted. there is as yet little real understanding of what this might entail.

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3. THE MODE OF PRODUCTION DEBATE: IMPASSE WITHIN AN IMPASSE It may well be thought that the necessary theoretical basis for a development sociology which cuts across the simplistic polarities of the 1970s already exists in the form of the large and now quite diverse literature on subordinate modes of production, ‘forms of exploitation’ and the formal subsumption of labor under capital? After all it has been over a decade since the debate prompted by Laclau’s (1971) seminal article on ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America,’ which was itself widely regarded as an important step beyond the dependency problematic. Since then, research on subordinate forms of production has been one of the most vigorous areas of work in the sociology of transitive development. Arguably Frank’s Warren’s underdevelopment theory and evolutionary mode of production theory are unrepresentative polar positions about which it is no longer necessary to concern ourselves. There is some truth in this, in my view, but as a comment on the empirical strengths of the work in this area, not on its theoretical basis. The growing aridity and final inconclusiveness of the ‘mode of production debate’ is now widely acknowledged. Careful observers (e.g., FosterCarter, 1978; Goodman and Redclift. 1981) also admit that the attempt to resuscitate the concept of mode of production and its associated categories has produced a crop of seemingly unreaolvable conceptual problems. What the debate has served to establish most sharply, I would argue, however, is the impossibility of steering a middle course between dependency and the so-called ‘classical’ (Warren) position using the concepts of theoretical Marxism. From a theoretical point of view, there have been three outstanding contributions to the mode of production debate, each of which has contributed important clarifications. so that the level of general understanding of the issues involved is now very high by the standards of the recent past. Each presents a facet of the truth about the rigorous application of classical Marxist concepts to the purposes of development theory. But because the positions adopted have also proved to be mutually exclusive, the controversy has not led to a progressive resolution of the outstanding issues. What has been established instead is that the concept of mode of production is subject to multiple and in practice contradictory theoretical requirements which make it incapable of conaistcnt application to the task of illuminating world development since the sixteenth century. Laclau ( 1971) argued convincingly that the

‘world capitalist system’ of Frank’s early studies confused the realms of production and exchange, giving in effect causal primacy to the latter. This was not only at variance with Marx’s method in which circulation is subordinate to the process of but it produced a theory of production, underdevelopment that could not account for certain important aspects of modern world history, and was in a general sense lacking in explanatory power. Recognizing that capitalism and feudalism are distinguished by their different relations of production, rather than in the sphere of exchange, we can admit the fundamental concept that the world economic system has been marked since the seventeenth century (not the sixteenth) by the combination (or as later writers were to say, articulation) of elements belonging to different modes of production - with precapitalist social relations of production being restructured but not eliminated by the intrusion of merchant capital. La&u’s analysis, however. was quite weak where its claims were boldest. The propensity of capitalist expansion in certain times and places to promote the reinforcement and even restoration of precapitalist relations in agriculture was attributed not to such factors as the local dynamics of labor supply and class struggle. but to the needs of capital in the metropolitan countries understood in terms of a variant of the MarxiBukharini Lenin theory of capital exports to backward regions (pp. X-37). Leaving aside the scientific status of the parts of Marx’s economic theory to which the latter belongs,“’ this account was subject to the well-worn objection that it did not and probably could not specify the mechanisms by which what capital ‘needed’ was translated into reality at the local level. In this sense, the explanatory power of the alternative theory of undcrdevelopment rested largely on bluff. The claim that the theory was rooted in production understood in terms of groups of relations, producers and non-producers and their struggles. was also illusory. On the other hand. Laclau undoubtedly detected a major theme in Marx and drew attention once again to the point made in the 1950s by Dobb (Swcezy PI rrl.. lY76) that comparative economic and social history provides many suggestions as to the correctness of a ‘productionist’ approach to conceptualizing transitions to capitalism. In opposition to this view, there remain a few Marxist scholars who take an unrepentantly ‘circulationist’ position in the tradition of Sweezy’s 1950s contributions (ihid.). In general, however. the basic point has been well taken. and what has drawn the attention of critics ha\ been the ~formalism of Laclau’s

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critique of Frank, and his only partial grasp of Marx’s theory of modes of production and the transitions between them. The writings of Alavi (1975, lYX2) and Banaji (1972, 1977) in particular have drawn attention to another aspect of the role of capitalism in the periphery, and to another major theme in Marx. The common starting point in this second stage of the debate is that it is formalistic and wrong to characterize the social relations resulting from colonial imposition in Asia. Latin America and elsewhere as feudal, and in this sense noncapitalist. In Marx, it is argued, the feudal mode of production is a system of localized production and appropriation with a specific place in a whole epoch of European history. This is in contrast with the experiences of areas like north-eastern Europe in the sixteenth century and after. and parts of Latin America in the late nineteenth century, where feudal-type tenancies were introduced in response to the stimulus of longdistance trade. The latter forms are typical of what happened in the territories of direct colonialism. which represents a distinct epochal reality (Alavi, 1075; Banaji. 1972; also C.F.S. Cardoso, 1076). What makes it impossible to dismiss this argument as a simple resurgence of un-Marxist ‘circulationism’ is the accompanying critique of Laclau’s understanding of the concept of mode of production. Alavi (1975. p. 182) stresses ‘the inadequacy of any conception of the “mode of production” that is premised narrowly on sets of relationships that are arbitrarily assigned to the “structure” ignoring the totality’; for Marx the totality was fundamental. To put it another way. in Marx the capitalist mode of production (the only mode about which he wrote extensively) was not just ‘an articulated combination of relations and forces of production,“’ but also, or instead. ‘a definite totality of historical laws of motion.‘ This being the case, ‘relations of production become a frtrrctiotz of the giver1 mode of’prodlccrim. ‘The character of any definite type of production relations, is impossible to determine until these laws of motion are themselves determined’ (Banaji. lY77. p. 10). This accounts for some references in Marx and in subsequent Marxist analysis to the presence ot various ‘relations of exploitation’ other than wage labor in production systems dominated by capital. It also explains why Marx leaves us in no doubt that crises of the transition apart. only O,KJ mode of production can prevail in any one place at any single time. To the extent that this interpretation is correct. it becomes absurd to talk about combinations of (plural) ~~rode.s of production as a permanent

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feature of Third World social formations. The issue becomes a double one: first, which are the forms of exploitation of labor that are being employed; and second and above all. what are the laws of motion under which these are subsumed? Most of the writers who have posed the matter in this way have had recourse, at least in the first instance. to a ‘colonial mode of a construction designed to admit production.’ both that a variety of relations other than that of wage-labor typified the periphery in the colonial era urrn that these ‘forms of exploitation’ had their raison d’Ctrr in a totality embracing the metropolitan economy. However, the colonial mode idea was short-lived.‘” The authors of the concept were among the first to admit that even at a common-sense level it is full of holes. Alavi concedes that there is a ‘highly problematic area’ relating to whether the ‘colonial mode of production’ leaves any room for capitalism proper, since on the criteria established by this literature the metropolitan economy cannot be involved in both. An additional question-mark hangs over whether and why a new (post- or neo-colonial) mode should he said to intervene as a consequence of the achievement of administrative Independence by ex-colonial territories (Alavi. lY75. pp. lYtblY3; Foster-Carter, 1978, p. 72). At a more fundamental level, the colonial mode concept has proved unstable. Despite the strong emphasis placed on the specification of laws of motion as the means of conceptualizing a what the ‘laws’ of the mode of production. colonial mode are. and what if anything distinguishes them from the ‘laws’ established by Marx for capitalism, has not been explained beyond the assertion that whereas the latter rapidly expand the forces of production, the former do not (Banaji, 1972. p. 2500; Alavi. IY7S. p. 187). At the same time it has been impossible to ignore two aspects of Marx’s method in this area: on the one hand, the insistence on the necessity of uncovering laws of motion; and. on the other hand. the belief that the laws of motion of a specific mode arise from and are in some sense determined by the character of the prevailing combination of relations and forces of production. In this regard. different authors have moved in different. and indeed opposite. directions. Alavi represents a tendency to allow a strict understanding of these terms to go by the board in favor of the empirical investigation of the circuits of capital and forms of labor recruitment of what comes to be called colonial capitalism or peripheral capitalism. This tendency now occupies the murky middle-ground between classical Frank and Laclau. and is barely distinguishable

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in theoretical terms from what is today the position of Frank himself and Samir Amin.‘” In this literature Marx’s now famous distinction (lY76. pp. IOlYff.) between the merely formal subsumption of the labor process under capital and the ‘real’ subsumption characteristic of ‘the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form’ is increasingly used to buttress the concept of peripheral capitalism. But this idea, too. is unstable; it is also applied (following Marx literally) in a more evolutionary spirit, so that formal subsumption represents a more or less extended moment in the transition to capitalism.44 Some have interpreted this sort of conceptual indeterminacy as a manifestation of the ‘ideological’ character of dependency/underdevelopment theory (Bernstein, 197Ya. p. 88). At least in part, however, this is to confuse cause and conscquence. I believe Alavi and company have cast themselves back into the arms of Frank, so to speak. because only one other step seems conceptually allowable: it is either this or take the course apparently preferred by Banaji and revert to the conception of the capitalist mode of production and its relation to pre-capitalism that is expressed with different emphases and on different terrains by Warren and Brenner. Brenner’s article (1977) is deservedly famous not only for its fascinating demolition of the circulationist interpretation of the history of uneven development in the early modern world. but also for its lucid exposition of the Marxian view of capitalism. The link between the cmergence of a system of free wage labor and competition between capitals on the one hand, and the dynamic transformative characteristics of modern capitalism on the other, is well explained and convincingly supported on the broad canvas of modern world history. There is much to be said for this ‘classic’ view of matters. But for all its brilliance, Brenner’s essay does not give us what many people have looked for in the mode of production literature, namely. a genuine third in the debate over colonial and position contemporary development in the Third World. Brenner’s theory is limited in one rather obvious way: it tells us nothing about the contemporary. post-lndependcnce Third World. or indeed about anything much subsequent to the decline of feudalism and slaver? (the dating of which is in any case unclear). ’ The vision of capitalist development, once that process is under way. is broadly optimistic. at least as far as the forces of production and the improvement of the productivity of human Iahor arc concerned. but it is also highly unspecific.“’ In this scnsc. it dots not by itself offer a comprehensive alterna-

tive to dependency and colonial-mode theories. Brenner’s contribution is best treated as an interesting, and across a narrow historical field, thoroughly convincing footnote to the only real alternative to dependency within Marxism: the one espoused by Warren.” To sum up the discussion in this section. it has not proved possible to bring the mode of production controversy to a satisfactory close. Wolpe’s perceptive article (lY80) notwithstanding. the obstacles to an adequate theory of articulation are not so insubstantial as to yield to some simple conceptual innovation (such as the distinction between ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ concepts of mode of production) useful as such things may be for expositional purposes. The truth of the matter is that the debate has defined several positions which are for different reztsons irreconcilable with Marxist theoretical norms, and none which are genuinely independent of the theoretical poles of dependency and Warrenism. All roads lead to one or other of the basic variants of Marxist development theory. and the mode of production concept as such is no guarantee against either.

4. PEASANTS AND TtIE POOR: TRANSITION, ARTICULATION. SUBSUMPTION Is this assessment borne out by ;I consideration of the empirical work and the ‘middle-range theoretical literature in the same tradition? I think so. My argument here is that the attempt to transcend both ‘classical’ Marxism and dependency via the focus on subordinate modes of of exploitation/degrees of production/forms subsumption of labor under capital has generated - or at any rate has been associated with more and better empirical research. Much of this work is of lasting interest: quantitatively it is far more significant than what was produced in direct response to the dependency 'boom of the early 1970s and in sophistication it compares favorably with the earlier modernization/ acculturation literature of the lY5Os and IYhOs. the specifically Marxist theoretical However, input has not been a source of strength for this branch of the new development sociology., For, even leaving aside the implications of the modes debate proper, the research-based articulation literature has produced its own crop of unncccssary theoretical tangles. Articulation-of-modes and related concepts have been influential in two major empirical fields, the study of peasants and trends in rural

social

structure.

and research

on the ‘informal

MARXISM

AND

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sector’ and its relations with large-scale enterprise in urban centers. In the former field, attention has focused on explaining the incompleteness of the agrarian ‘transition’ expected by classical Marxist writers and the variety of ways in which peasant enterprise survives within a global capitalist context.4s In urban settings, the main effort has been directed towards a theoretical renewal of the concept of petty commodity production with a view to providing an adequate explanation of the persistence of non-traditional small-scale economic activities in the ‘informal sector.“” While taking their initial bearings from La&u, researchers in these fields have also incorporated elements of theory derived from Marx through Meillassoux, Rey and others. This has permitted them to dispense with the rather cumbersome apparatus of export-of-capital theory, and to employ the seemingly simpler and more attractive language of production and reproduction. Thus, in the literature on ‘peasantization’ a central notion has been that the capitalist mode of production in the periphery is endowed with the capacity to sustain partially transformed pre-capitalist relations of production or forms of labor process which ensure a supply of labor power to the former sector at less than its value. that is less than its full cost of reproduction. Here the theorization of the persistence of peasant enterprise involves a notion of exploitation through unequal exchange (in value terms) between sectors comprising different scales and types of enterprise. A more general thesis, spanning both the rural and the urban research, has been that small-scale enterprises supply products (goods or services) to the capitalist sector at less than their value. In either case, the contention is that the pattern of small-enterprise development is explained in a more satisfactory and satisfying way by an approach which reveals such mechanisms than by more conventional types of analysis which do not.“’ One difficulty in assessing the proposition that the peasant or informal sector ‘subsidizes’ the formal sector via output and other prices is that it is often expressed in an eclectic language that moves between two theoretically very different conceptualizations of the exploitative relationship at issue. The one is neoclassical, involving the yardstick of perfect competition and centering on allocative efficiency and unequal market power. The other involves Marxian values and prices. It is. however, on the validity of the second type of concept. stripped of ‘common-sense reformulations derived from the first. that the usefulness of this theoretical framework must be ,judged.i’ To the extent this is

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so. there would seem to be three major problems. The first and perhaps the most important has to do with a certain theorc~ticcd ctrhitrwirress in the specification of the mechanism of superexploitation or unequal exchange. What, we may legitimately ask, is the yardstick of equivalent exchange against which exchanges between the small-scale and capitalist sectors are judged to be unequal‘? Take the case where the former supplies labor power to the latter. Here the wages paid to. say, migrant laborers from areas of peasant agriculture are deemed to be below the value of the labor power supplied on the implicit or explicit basis that its cost of reproduction is given by what it wottld have cost to reproduce it wholly within the capitalist sector. or under pure capitalism. In other words, exchanges within social formations with combinations of modes or forms of production are judged against an ideal type of purely capitalist exchange representing (it might be argued) the future historical pattern in the social formation in question. This offends one’s sense of history and does not seem to have any warrant within Marxist theory. An identical arbitrariness is involved when products rather than labor power are said to be supplied below their value. The goods or services of the small-scale sector sell for less than their it is maintained. the ‘wages’ value because, imputed to the members of the enterprise or household are below what they would earn producing the same output under capitalist conditions. The appeal to an abstract standard of equivalence representing a more ‘advanced’ pattern is, again, unwarranted.” In addition to being arbitrary. however. the hypothesis that small-scale enterprise subsidizes the capitalist sector through unequal exchange is also logidly ir~.s~rfficicwt to explain what it is supposed to explain - that is the persistence of pre- or non-capitalist production relations in social formations where the capitalist mode is indisputably dominant. The functionalist logic of Laclau’s presentation is retained without significant modification. The empirical literature has taken no more seriously than the original theoretical work the necessity of specifying the ‘feedback’ mechanisms whose existencc is asserted. To this extent the aura of explanatory significance that tends to surround statements about the contribution of petty commodity production to capital accumulation is based on bluff.‘3 Finally, such arguments are also superfhtms. If it were the case that important facts about small-scale economic activities in the Third World could not bc satisfactorily accounted for in

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any other way. there might be grounds for overlooking a measure of theoretical arbitrariness or logical insufficiency. IIowever. this is not the case. Researchers on the ground generally have no difficulty in explaining why particular activities remain the preserve of small-scale enterprise and others are largely taken over by large capitalist organisations. It is increasingly clear that these patterns arc highly sector-specific and non-generalizable. and that the topic would repay a tot more detailed empirical research (see for example, Schmitz, 1982); nevertheless once a pattern has been detected. cxt~taining it would seem to be conceptually quite straightforward: cntcrprises of different types move in and out of particular activities in tine with expectations of profit and risk. given the prevailing structure of costs, the importance of scale economics and so on.” The possibility of super-exploitation in the sense discussed here does not enter into any of these decisions. and for the purposes of exptaining actual behavior we have no need of so complicated a hypothesis. The empirical articut~ltion-of-modes literature, then. contains nothing fresh and vigorous in theoretical terms. The new attention focused on relations of production has ted to some useful research with a cumulative impact at certain levels. but to regard the theoretical underpinnings of this work as the foundation of a viable alternative position in the radical devctopmcnt debate seems a little sanguine. In the final analysis. articulation theory would seem to represent a somewhat desperate effort to give substance in Marxist terms to the essential dependencv claim that dcvctopment in the Third World is not and cannot be ‘normal’ capitalist development, whereas related concepts such as ‘subsumption’ would seem to inhabit an area that is capable of either dependency or ‘classical-Marxist’ interpretations. These unpromising options, it is worth emphasizing. have been pursued at the expense of other, logically unproblematic and empirically challenging. research strategies. As a result. we know less about a number of critical questions to do with small-scale enterprises and the people who work in them than we might.5’ Yet so far only a few specialists have been prepared to admit this. and ;I widespread tendency in the literature consists in reproducing the same essential combination of vulgar value theory and functionalism in superficially novel conceptual tanguagcs.

5. THE UNFULFILLED RADICAL POLITICAL The

situation

just

PROMISE OF ECONOMY

described

is particularly

deplorable because the research stimulated by the modes debate has been in spite of everything one of the most fruitful areas of the new development sociology. There are many other special arcas that have progressed little if at all under the influence of the dominant theoretical perspectives of the past decade and a half. These include notably ;I number of topics that are cognate to major debates which have occupied development economists over the same period. and which, however one looks at it. are of outstanding policy or praxotogical relevance. Surprising as it may seem. the cociotogv of ~ILISSin LDCs is quite poorly developed.” band the complex forces responsible for the tendencies in public policy-making in less developed COLIIItries summed up by such terms as ‘urban bias’ have been barely studied by anyone apart from the economists who identified the problems in the first ptace.57 Another example of an opportunity missed would be the noncontroversy about the concept of ‘redistribution with growth’ developed by World Bank and IDS staff in the mid-1970s (Chenery et cd.. 1974). Many of the issues posed (including questions begged) by the RwG concept. as later by the ‘basic needs’ discussion, were social and pohticat rather than economic. Yet sociologists and potitical scientists were in the main conspicuous by their absence from the modest discussion that took tk~ce.‘~ This was the cast not only in rcspcct of the Bank’s direct sphere of influence. where perhaps such ‘soft’ concci-ns are not rated as highly important, but ;IISO elsewhere. suggesting that tack of interest on the part of independent researcher\ was at least as much to blame. The most telling independent contributions on the sociopolitical dimensions of the RwG and basic needs issues wcrc made by the more institutionally minded devetopmcnt economists (for example. Stewart and Streeten, 1976; Streetcn c’t (11..1981). And this. unfortunately, is rather typical. For all the new sociology’s enphasis on doing ‘political economy’ topics which involve rubbing shoulders and sharing concerns with dcvctopment economists and other speciatists have been downgraded in practice in favor of single-disciplinary topics conccrncd. preferably at the micro level. with .production.“” It is smatt wonder perhaps that sociotggicat devetopmcnt research has seldom exei-ciscd more than a modest influence on the making and imptemcntation of development policy. either directly. within developing countries. or indirectly through the work of multilateral agencies and national aid prograiiis.“” Things arc far from w~ctt. then. in the fictd of Marxist-influenced develot~ment sociology. But

MARXISM why? In the remainder suggest some elements

6. INTERPRETING

AND

of the paper of an answer.

DEVELOPMENT

I try to

THE IMPASSE

Until now, the development debate as it has affected sociology has taken the form, almost exclusively, of exchanges between different poles of opinion within Marxism: circulationism vs ‘productionism,’ dependence (in its Marxist or marxisant versions) vs ‘classical Marxism,’ and so forth. I would argue that it is now time to stand back a bit from the controversy and allow the light of scrutiny to fall on some features which are common to all of the major contributions. We also need to move on from purely theoretical to metutheoretical considerations of a certain type. While previous writers (Leys, 1978; Bienefeld, 1980; Bernstein, 1982; Browett, 1983) have in different degrees indicated an awareness that, for example, the positions of Frank and Warren mirror one another’s weaknesses, this insight has not been taken very far. To my mind it ought to be pressed further, so that we are asking not just in what senses both Frank et al. and Warren were wrong but also, in a deeper sense, why they were wrong - what it was that led them to advance and persist in false or theoretically limiting positions. This type of questioning, which can be applied also to the theoretical and empirical modes-of-production/ subsumption-under-capital literatures, should also shed light on the inability of the standard critiques to prevent the reproduction of the old errors in new guises. The conclusion I have reached is that there is a basic problem with Marxist theory as an input to development sociology that transcends the particular forms in which it has been manifested. This is its metatheoretical commitment to demonstrating that what happens in societies in the era of capitalism is not only explicable. but also in some stronger sense necessary. This is what is most fundamentally wrong about the ‘dependency debate’ as it has usually been conducted over the last decade; it is because they share this underlying commitment that both sides in the debate are in different degrees myopic and one-dimensional. The same urge to establish that prevailing patterns of exploitation are not only explicable but necessary also accounts for the ardity and repetition in the modes/subsumption literature. Overall, this is what explains the inability of the radical literature genuinely to go beyond itself even years after the need for some decisive advance has been recognized.

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The Marxist commitment to the ‘necessity’ of socio-economic patterns under capitalism is expressed in two main forms in the development literature. The first operates through the way in which it is usual to conceive of the relation between the theoretical concept of the capitalist mode of production and the national or international economies, polities, and social formations under analysis. The other - if anything more persistent and fundamental - involves a form of system teleology or functionalism. As components of Marxist theory in general, both forms have been usefully discussed by a number of recent writers, the most important of whom are Hindess and Hirst and their collaborators (Hindess and Hirst, 1977; Cutler et al., 1977-78). However, the implications of the new critical insights for development studies in particular have not been delineated. Let us consider the argument in more detail. Hindess et al. maintain that Marxist theory systematically neglects certain kinds of issues because of a belief derived from the methodology of Marx’s Capital that the significant characteristics of national economies and social formations may be ‘read off’ from the characteristics, especially the ‘laws of motion,’ of the capitalist mode of production. They object to the conception of mode of production ‘as a totality which has inscribed in its structure certain necessary effects,’ and they question the way the concept ‘records an ontological privilege, that is, the necessary and universal primacy of a certain order of causes.’ The logic of Marx’s position, that the concept of the capitalist mode is ‘directly “mappable” on to concrete capitalist social formation,’ is ‘refused, qualified and contradicted’ within Marx’s own discourse, but these refusals and contradictions do not eliminate the initial conception (Cutler et al., 1977-78, Vol. 2. pp. 244, 241; Vol. 1, pp. 121-124, 133-134).h’ This seems to me to be a concise and accurate appreciation of one of the main problems affecting Marxist-influenced development sociology today. It encapsulates most effectively the limitations of Warren’s contribution as an optic on Third World development issues: its blindness to systematic variation in development experience between countries, its evolutionist prejudices and its economic reductionism. None of these things are personal quirks or excesses; they are the result, as I have argued, of a single-minded concentration on the general, intrinsic and mainly economic qualities and effects of capitalist development. Warren is wrong because it is not in fact possible to grasp everything that is of interest and importance in the contemporary

774

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experience of the less developed countries by deduction from the dynamics and differential impact of the capitalist mode of production. To put it another way. in Warren .[T]he specific structures of capitalist national economies are suppressed as objects of theorization, being considered 21s exemplars of capitalisni-asgenerality and of its “laws”’ (Cutler et ~1.. 1Y7778, Vol. 1, p. 3). Warren’s work would seem to represent the purest. perhaps indeed the most classical, instance in the development field of what Hindess and his collaborators are concerned about. Nevertheless, a critique along similar lines has been applied by Sheila Smith (1980, pp. IX-1Y) in a useful reexamination of the work of the dependency Marxist Samir Amin. It is perhaps significant in this context that Amin of all dependency theorists is the one who does most to cast his argument in the language of classical Marxism, retracing the historical steps taken by Lenin and his successors by conceiving ‘dependence’ strictly as imperialism viewed from the periphery, and imperialism as capitalist accumulation on a world scale. Amin’s theory is unhelpful because in the real world the development problems of individual developing countries cannot be ‘read off’ from the structure of the in.ternational capitalist system: the room for maneuver and scope for differential performance by national governments and power groups deserve to be taken far more seriously than this approach allows (Smith, lY80). The theoretical abstraction from which the analysis starts is not quite the capitalist mode of production analysed by Marx and Warren, but the method and its shortcomings are identical. This critique can be taken a little further in respect of the dependency wing of Marxist development theorizing, although there is some danger of taking it too far.“’ In some (but only some) hands ‘dependence’ has functioned ;IS an abstract category of the same order as ‘the capitalist mode of production,“‘3 and in this case the limitations of the approach are conveyed well by the concept of ‘reading off.’ In an early critique, Lall (1975) wrote of the dependency approach that what it does is to ‘pick off some salient features of modern capitalism as it affects some LDCs and put them into a distinct category of “dependence” (p. 806). We might now agree and argue that picking off and lumping together reprehensible features of different types and stages of capitalist growth is not far removed, metatheoretically speaking. from the Warrenite or ‘classical-Marxist’ procedure of lumping together various characteristics of different national economies and conceiving them as

aspects or results of some ‘law’ or other of the unfolding of capitalism. The more general-theoretical part of the mode of production controversy’ can also be made sense of in these terms. It was argued above that the modes debate threw up a number of seemingly unresolvable conceptual tangles. These, we may add, can fruitfully be read as a commentary on the attempt to theorize the status of a group of national social formations each with distinct economic. political and social histories employing only the abstract and universal ‘laws’ of the capitalist mode of production, or some alternative framework of (metathcoretically) the same type. Reality has shown itself too rich to be captured by the simple terms of a concept of relations of production with corresponding ‘laws and relations of production with of motion.’ wholly non-corresponding laws of motion are a theoretical nonsense. These arguments, however, relate only to the first of the two forms of the metatheoretical commitment alluded to above, and there remains a very substantial body of dependency and articulation/subsumption work which is conducted at a humbler level of abstraction and whose characteristic theoretical weaknesses are better seen in other terms. IIere there is no theoretical construction of the laws-of-motion type and no implication that observed patterns of development arc necessary in the sense of being derivable from an abstract totality governed by a privileged causality. Two kinds of thing arc asserted: that the development problems and hence the social structure and politics of less developed countries are explained by the particular (essentially static or essentially changing) nature of their insertion into the international system of capitalism: or that given socioeconomic processes in the Third World persist and take the particular form that they do because of the way contribute to the process of capital they accumulation in the wider system. I have argued that both these typical claims have to be rejected, but both have acquired a certain life of their own: they are repeated and constantly reappear in new guises, their evident weaknesses notwithstanding. Why? The weight of intellectual tradition apart. I think the main factor is the>eductive attraction exercised in the social sciences by certain forms of system teleology. 1 use the latter term in its usual. that is non-Althusserian, sense, so that it is equivalent to a form of functionalism.” The suggestion is that dependency and articulation analysis is very often inspired in and gains much of its attraction from a functionalist-type conviction that ordinary causal analyses do not ‘really’

MARXISM

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explain, do not get to the bottom of, Third World reality. The interest in discovering a ‘deeper’ effectively more teleological - set of reasons for the way the world is, is what lies behind the persistence in analyzing development problems in certain kinds of ways even when they can be explained well or better in other terms. In addition to any attraction that such approaches may have (as suggested for example by Stansfield, 1974, p. Y, and Dore. 1977, p. 4) on account of the class position or human sensitivities of the observer, they offer the promise of a form of explanation that is intdlectually peculiarly satisfying - at least, given certain strategic assumptions about the way the world works. There has been an important convergence of opinion in the last few years to the effect that the major propositions of historical materialism are best understood as functional, rather than simply causal, statements.“5 I find this common thesis convincing and tend to agree with Hindess and Hirst and Giddens (1981) - in effect against Cohen (1978) who makes a vigorous defence of Marxism-as-functionalism”” - that this conclusion is damaging to Marxism’s intellectual standing. In sociology it is wrong to pretend that functional claims are explanatory - that they are in fact, not just can be in principle - whether this takes the form of Parsonian-type structuralfunctionalism or is expressed in the seemingly very different language of Marxism. It has not been established, and there are strong reasons for doubting that it ever will. that there are ‘feedback’ mechanisms in the social order of the type whose existence is necessarily presupposed by a strictly functional statement which purports to be an explanation. Given this, to persist in advancing such statements is not only unscientific but pernicious. In different but equivalent ways, both structural-functional theory and Marxism reify social institutions of a given type, placing them by metatheoretical fiat further beyond human control than they can be shown empirically to be. This is socially and politically corrupting. Unfortunately. to point this out does not do away with the strong attractions which generic functionalism has exercised at least since the nineteenth century. As philosophers have shown. when functional explanations are reduced to a casual form. they do turn out to be richer than ordinary causal explanations.“’ Functionalism is seductive for related reasons. Theorizing of a functionalist type has the immediate appearance of possessing great potential explanatory power. and whole traditions of theorizing (of which the most current is Marxism) conspire to maintain this appearance. This, I am suggesting. is one of the attractions

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to sociological development researchers of working in a dependency framework. ff‘the world is such that functional statements are explanatory (that is. if mechanisms of feedback exist). then an approach to the analysis of the institutions of less developed countries which uncovers or explains the changing nature of their ‘contribution’ to some wider system represents an irresistible challenge. Despite the significant variations noted earlier, the dependency movement as a whole can be said to have been a response to this challenge; and this is what accounts for its peculiar magnetism.“” I think it also explains why critiques of dependency from within Marxism tend to be such half-hearted affairs, and why so many theoretical debates eventually end up with formulations which barely differ from those whose limitations were the initial point of disagreement. Generic functionalism is in the same way both a source of attraction and the main cause of intellectual stagnation in the more empirical articulation/subsumption literature. The urge to prove the (functionalist-type) ‘necessity’ of actual patterns of small-scale enterprise development is a crucial element of continuity ignored by those who view the transition from ‘circulation’ to ‘production’ as a critical step forward in radical development research. It is what lends an apparent justification to the dubious excursions into value/price theory which. we have seen, characterize this work. And because of the way the insidious though false scientific pretensions of functionalism influence the importance attached to different sorts of questions. it is what accounts for the repetitive, non-cumulative character of this literature, and its failure to explore systematically some of the more urgent kinds of empirical issues. As a whole. the foregoing takes us some way towards understanding why the sociological development field has the particular unevenness and lacunae that it does. A set of metatheoretical preoccupations not wholly restricted to Marxism but largely represented by it since the late IY6Os. has forced theorizing along certain rather restricted lines. The distance in substantive terms between the different perspectives on offer has concealed the underlying homogeneity of the field, a homogeneity which has tended to limit the questions asked and to weaken the impact of damaging criticisms of particular theories. In consequence. empirical work on middle-range topics has remained geared to the false problems generated by refuted but still influential theoretical perspectives, while areas of empirical enquiry about which these perspectives have little to say have been simply neglected. The failure to realize the promise of a ‘political

776

WORLD

economy

approach

context.

As

I

interdisciplinary might

work

have been.

political

but

economy

works

against

between opment

can

he

understood

\uggestcd

been

rarer

in fact the very

as it has tended

a fully

economists

collaborative and sociologists

this

genuinely

above.

has

in

DEVELOPMENI

than

it

concept

of

Warren’s theory is systematically limiting: the complex and challenging issues of dcvclopment in the Third grasped

to be used

spread

relationship

theoretical

in the devel-

the

field.

To the latter it has tended to signify not so much the crossing of real boundaries between subjects as presently constituted. as doing the sort of work that establishes the necessity of socioeconomic patterns under capitalism in the sense explained in this paper. with the aid. if possible, of concepts borrowed from classical political economy. Real contact with what actual living economists (with few exceptions neoclassic&i of various stripes) arc concerned about has therebv been made cxtraordinarily difficult. This ‘in turn helps to explain the failure of sociological work to respond adequately to the wider debates about development policy and practice.

World

in terms

of the capitalist primacy.

perhaps the

the

occupy

paradigms

rc-examination does

middle

position.

concepts

dependency expounded

tion

theory.

application studies.

the

‘classical‘

altcrnativc

recent

sociological

development

research.

At this

level,

suggest

the

urban

The

reasons

have for

for

argued, the

in various spired

ways the radical

to weaken

dependency continuing work serious

the

impact

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in the field

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on logical.

of this

has much

attack.

refused of the

contributing

body of cumulative

analyt-

But partly because literature has con-

research

to

the die.

published

to the lack of ;I in such area\

;I\ the sociology of class. On the other hand. no significant ‘Warrenite‘ de~~elopment sociology has emerged in respon\c to the crisis of tlefor the good l-c;I\~~Il that pcndcncy Marxism.

the

central

consistent

literature

level

of

positions

old

has

research

-

on

-

peasaintries

spots

development and

general

‘read

system of

reading

significant dimcn4onal

the

guises.

is

lies

in off‘

matter

a

distinctive

of

prcoccupa of the

;I

new

metathcoret-

that the struc-

wc

find

only

in

the

cxplicablc

less but

capitalism. covers

entail4

character

of

theory. xc‘111

the

that to

appreciation of

national capitalist another.

laws: and

functlon~llisiii.

would our

its

the insist-

can be derived

concept

and

Marx’s

variants:

of capitalist

formations

the

or

two

by the Marxian

features

from

to

theoretically reproduction

not

formula

teleology

I

accounts

or

that

production

also inspired

what

repeated

there

and social off’

of

false

the

are

of necessitv

mode

limitations.

but

to demonstrating

under

economies

It has

and contradictions

world

necessary

or

in

processes

developed This

serious

sociology

ical commitment tures

these

Behind

blind

despite

theory.

and the in new

fallacies

mctatheory. tions,

but

;I con-

of development

from

persistence

limiting

ence that the &ient

criticism

of

matter

are theoretical.

been fatally

grounds.

that

is any such the

empirical

poor.

of the input

type

damaging

there that

capable

at a certain

my contention has been that the impasse is indeed ;I general one: not the product of the weaknesses of one particular theoretical pcrspective (dependency) or cvcn of :I mutually contradictory pair ot perspectives (dependency vs Warren) but the result of ;I $enuralizcd theoretical disorientation affecting III different degrees alI of the main positions in the radical dcvelopment debate. The once-dominant dependency approach, I argued. has been subjected to what ought to have ical and theoretical

that

useful

research

llowever.

modes/subsumption

some

persists

of

of production

or cindeed are

still

between

I97Os.

mode

of

has not

concepts

ground

to the subject

The

notion

the

is lies

rather than also left some notable lacunae. Although committed to a political economy approach. the new development sociology has tended to shun actual collahoration with economists and has failed to contribute to the extent that one might have hoped to the illumination of current development issues.

by

Bill Warren. the mode of producand high and low points in controversy.

not

involved

because

This paper has sought to explain the nature examine the causes of the current impasse in the ‘new,’ Marxist-influenced development sociology. The bulk of the discussion has been devoted to familiar themes the demise of

of

of the

troversy

what

limitations

Marxist

middle

of

of

much

but

avenues

fundamental

cumulative

and

the

promising

a sort

polarized

and

to be accepted.

because

are

employing

This

theoretical

the

hallmnrk

and Warrenite view\ very far until now.

been explored This is partly there

differential

is the

approach.

respective

dependency

that

be sufficiently and

of production.

of which

beginning

h~/zi~/

cannot

mode

‘classical-Marxist’

produced

7. CONCLUSlON

today

of the dynamics

Warren‘s

involves

The

add of

sonicthing the

oncand start&l by

theory

inconclusiveness of the debate on the analysis of modes ot production. On the other hand the tli\cus\ion of functionalLaclau

a

criticluc

MARXISM

AND

DEVELOPMENT

ism seems to cast light on the persistent weaknesses. and the persistence in weakness. of those forms of dependency and articulation analysis less directly descended from the Marxism of Cupitd. Jointly, I suggest, the two modes of necessitist metatheoretical commitment constitute the basic underlying cause of the current impasse of the new development sociology and the main obstacle to be removed if we are to do better in the future. It would not be appropriate for this paper to conclude with an attempt to map out in detail the problems of research and analysis to which development sociology should turn its attention during the later lY8Os and beyond. The paper has tried to uncover the causes of a general malaise in a certain broad field of enquiry; it has not attempted the sort of survey that can result in the construction of a new research agenda. Substantive problems and new lines of theoretical advance will no doubt emerge from the usual encounter between the crises and sufferings of the world and the intellectual creativity of us all. What is more uncertain is how far this enterprise will continue to be dogged by the sorts of problems discussed at length in the paper. A final clarification is in order. If the analysis presented here is correct, the main idea to be taken on board is not that a particular tradition of theory, Marxism. has proved to contain some central difficulties and needs to be looked at in a

SOCIOLOGY

177

more critical light in the future. This is certainly an implication of what has been said, but the essential point is in one sense more specific. and in another more general. First, the objection is not to the Marxist tradition as a whole (either in the name of some alternative tradition or on empiricist grounds), but to theoretical formulations of a particular type that are central to Marxism and happen to have been influential in recent years primarily in a Marxist form. Development sociology does not need to be purged wholesale of questions and lower-order concepts derived from Marx, but specifically of abstract entities conceived as having ‘necessary effects inscribed in their structure’ or as being endowed with the capacity to shape socio-economic relations in accordance with their ‘needs.’ Curiosity about why the world is the way it is, and how it may be changed. must be freed not from Marxism but from Marxism’s ulterior interest in proving that within given limits the world /KU to be the way it is. The second important idea is that there is a case for a relative (and hopefully temporary) shift of emphasis in the sociological development debate from theory to metatheory. Along with a revitalized interest in the real-world problems of development policy and practice. an enhanced sensitivity to questions of this type seems essential if we are to get out, and stay out. of the impasse discussed in this paper.

NOTES 1. I refer here and throughout the paper to the broad current of discussion and research which emerged during the first half of the 1970s under the influence of Marxist and ‘neo-Marxist’ critiques of earlier literature in the ‘modernization’ tradition. Influential early compilations include Chilcote and Edefstein (1974). Oxaal. Barnett and Booth (1975). and Gutkind and Wallcrstein (1976). 2. There are numerous critical surveys of dependency writing. two of the most recent and useful of which are Palma (1981). and Gereffi (1983). Chapter I. In addition to the differences mentioned. it has been argued that there is a major gulf between those dependency writers who have sought to advance a formal theory of development and underdevelopment. and those. notably Fernando Henrique Cardoso. for whom the dependency perspective is more ‘a methodfor analysing concrete situations of ology underdevelopment’ (Palma. 197X. taking up the view expressed in various places by Cardoso himself). However, this influential view seems to me thoroughly confused. for four reasons: (I) certain of Cardoso’s writings (e.g., Cardoso. 1972) are devoted entirely to expounding a substantive thesis (if not perhaps a

formal theory’) about Latin American development in opposition to the substantive views of other dependency theorists: (2) in works such as L)q~e’rrletlc_v trrrtl Developmertf itr Lurid Amrriccr (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) substantive assumptions about the causes of Latin American development problems exercise an implicit but significant influence on the categories used to analyse the economic changes and sociopolitical cleavages which are the focus of attention: (3) this book and others inspired by Cardoso (e.g.. Evans. 1979) arc of undeniable interest. but it is questionable whether what makes them important is the same as what makes them examples, of dependency analysis; and (4) the contention that dependency is only a ‘methodology’ seems to rest on a quite improper identification of the term ‘theory’ with a particular approach to the empirical validation of theoretical propositions, namely, cross-national statistical testing (on this, see in particular Cardoso. 1977a). 3. That is, in which not just as a process something which is formation by others. (1977).

‘underdevelopment’ is conceived rather than a condition. but as done IO certain sorts of social The expression is Ronald Dorc‘s

77X

WORLD

4. See for example O’Brien (lY75). p. X(X).

(1975).

DEVELOPMENT

p. 24. and LaII

5. Frank (106h), pp. 4. ‘)_lO. 1(&13, emphasis added (page references arc to the rcprintcd version in Frank. lY6Y). 6. See for cxamplc Kirsch and Salazar (19X4), Chapter

(1077). X.

Ortega

(19X1).

7. Phillips and Bernstein have usefully drawn attcntion to the way dependency arguments draw on ‘a contrast between development in the [underdeveloped countries] and an ideal&d process of development an ideal type of “normal capitalist dcvclopment” which serves as a measure by means of which we can recognise underdcvclopmcnt, an ideal type which does not correspond to the actual process of development in most of the advanced capitalist countries’ (Phillips, 1977. p. II; cf. Bcmstcin, lY7Ya, pp. X5%7). However, they do not rest their case either on the historical arbitrariness of the norm of nationally autonomous development or on the logical circularity stressed in this paper. hut on less compelling ohjcctions. They argue that depcndcncy reasoning is caught within an ‘ideological problematic.’ meaning (I) the questions asked arc not those posed by a materialist analysis but arc horrowcd from bourgeois nationalist and (2) the dcpendcncy or development theory. underdcvclopmcnt perspective ‘replicates [the] essential circularity characteristic of an ideological discourse in the theoretical sense. that is, a discourse which is unable to prohlenrurize its ohjcct in order to carry out the tasks of investigation ncccssarv to any scicncc‘ (Bernstein, lY7Ya. pp. Y4. X3). ‘ihe first contention is true but rather weak as an objection on its own. since the shortcomings of nationalist devclopmcnt theory are not spelled out. On the other hand, the appeal to the Althusserian distinction bctwccn theory and ideology, focusing attention on a kind 01 ‘circularity’ which appears to involve littlc more than what would ordinarily be called intcllcctual conslstcncy. is positively unhelpful, queering the pitch for more decisive critiques relating to errors of logic. X. Amin‘s dcploymcnt of the contrast between ‘extravcrtcd’ and ‘autocentric’ dcvclopmcnt is open to further objections to do with its consistency with other parts of the theory of accumulation on a world scale (see Bernstein. lY7Ya. p. (92). For example, Cockcroft CI ul. (1972). pp. xvi. 76; Y. Chilcotc and Edelstcin (lY74). p. 27; Thomas (lY74). p. I23 pcrssim; and Scnghaas (IYXI). At a certain level this type of criticism stems to me to apply even to works of and historical scholarship on the xcalc of l‘horp Bertram’s study of Peru (lY7X). particularly pp. 37-l327. IO. In this particular respect one c:m agree with the protcsts of Cardoso (1977~1). p. IX. echoed hy. among others. Duvall(lY7X). p. 5X. and Ilcnfrcy (19X1). p. 27. Il.

See, for cxnmplc,

DOS Santox (IY6Y).

pp.

I ItL

112; Cardoso and Falctto (1Y7Y). C‘haptcr 0; Girting (lY73); Sunkel (lY73). pp. 1.36145; and Arrighi and Saul (1973). Chapter 3. 12. The argument hcrc is not the usual one that the ‘testers’ have set up grossly oversimplified dcpcndency propositions as straw men to be knocked down with the most advanced quantitative techniques. On the contrary, the quantitative literature has hecomc increasingly adept at operntion~~lizing the more sophisticated dependency theses. and the balance of declared finding< IS overwhelmingly favorable to some important dcpendency claims; the ohjcction is that most atudics arc rcstrictcd to evaluating the statistical support for dcpcndcncy theory. and no attention is given to the possibility that the relationships detected might equally be consistent with altcrnativc interpretations, the obvious candidates being those suggested by ncoclassical and mainstream-institutionalist development cconomics. See particularly Bornschier. Chase-Dunn and Kubinson (15)7X), Mahlcr (1080). and Jackson CI ul. (IYXI). The approach followed by McGowan and Smith ( 197X) seems more promising in thi\ regard. 13. Khys Jcnkins’a study of the Latin American auto industry (lY77) might seem to he an exception on both counts; hut both the conclusion, that thcrc arc important long-run. dynamic benefits from rctnining dome\tic ownership and control, and the analysis. which considers foreign ownership in the context of several other explanatory factors. place this book more in the reputable tradition of Latin American structuralism or altcrnativcly in a ‘post-dcpcndency. poat-neoclasaical‘ phase - than in the dcpcndency tradition as conaidered in this paper. A rcccnt work of somewhat similar scope by II sociologist (Gcrcffi, lYX3) contain5 home particularly lucid rcmarhs about what is wrong with standard dcpendcncy cvatuations of the impacr 01 trananational~ (c,g.. pp. h(U>t) and would similarly seem to qualify as something other than dependency analysis. I-1. Thcrc is also telling argument along similar tincs from economists of various schools in Cohen ( 1Y71). Chapter 6; Bath and Jamca (1076): Lipton (tY77). Chapter 3; the contribution5 of Albert Fishlow and Carlos Diaz-Alciundro in Fishlow (11 trl. (197X): and Little (19X2). C’haptcr 12. IS. The particular concept of /ccl~~~olo~:i~r/depcndencc has sometimes been deployed in a way which escapes this kind of objection. expressing the more subtle. growth-related COIICCI-IVof ccrtatn economists. but cvcn in thi\ form - not at all typical of ‘dependency theory’ - the concept is incrcaaingly qucstioncd in the specialist literature (see Soetc, IYXI; Fransman. 1085). IO. This raters to the ‘Prcbihch thesis‘ and the original, neo-Marxist formulation of unequal exchange theory by Arghiri Emmanuel (lY72). When dcpendency theorists explain that what was novel about their contribution in the late IY)hO\ was not a \trcxa on ‘cxtcrniil’ factorb but ihe co~1cc~~ttl;lliZ;~t1011 01 dependcncc in terms of the internal structure ol hocletic\ (e.g..

MARXISM

AND

DEVELOPMENT

779

SOCIOLOGY

Cardoso. 1977a. pp. 12-13. or Ouijano, 1977. pp. 9%103) they implicitly underline this uncritical assimilation of the ECLA/UNCTAD view of international trade. Cardoso (lY77b) illustrates the point in another way. Immanucl Wallerstein has to my knowledge never explained the theory of unequal trade on which his enormously influential world-system concept (Wallerstcin. 1974, 1979. lY80) crucially depends. For an up-to-date professional view on the Prcbisch thesis, see Spraos (19X3).

Lcys, Bernatcin and Taylor. Taylor ( IY7Y) says some suhstantivcly rather d[,/~e,lt/cr2/itrrrthings (imperialism promotes a restricted development. etc.) in those parts of the book not devoted to conceptual critique.

17. On the transiency (19X1).

23. Including 1081). Shanin

of such concerns.

see Streeten

18. Hirschman (1968); Little, Scitovsky and Scott (1970); Balassa and Associates (1971); various contributions in Baer and Samuelson (lY77): and. in a rather special way, Lipton (1977). 19. Taking this view of what dependency theory is ultimately about does not commit one, it seems to mc, to any particular position on complicated issues such as how far and at what stage trade regimes should bc liberalized; the degree to which ‘imported tcchnologv’ is a real and intractable problem; under what cond-itions transnationals compound the problems caused by the politics of states (either by their husincss decisions, or hccausc they add sociopolitical clout to the local support for the status quo); and whether opcnncss to foreign capital and trade can prevent the solution of other. dynamic problems of a type not considered by dependency writers any more than by traditional neoclassical analysis (for an excellent survey of home ol these issues. see Fransman. 10X5). In other words. depcndcncy theory cannot defend itself. except in company which is wholly ignorant of the economics literature. by posing as the only alternative to a neolihcral. neoclassical. pro-TNC view of the world. Space does not permit the citation of litcraturc rclcvant to all aspects of this point; however. it is worth saying that at Icast some of the analyses of TNC impacts that tend to be cited in support of the dependency viewpoint (e.g., in the Review of Africun Political Ecomrny’s ‘Kenya Debate’ - Kaplinsky, Henley and Leys, 1980) do not seem incompatible with the prehcnt critique. even If they contradict a particular anti-dependency writer’s view on a particular country (e.g.. Colin Lcy’s on Kenya). Examples would include Langdon (lY7Y). Godfrey and Langdon (197Y) and Jenkins (I%+). lUS4).

20. If

it is acccptcd that it has all three kinds 01 weakness it heems a little pervcrsc to keep insisting on the virtues of the ‘questions raised’ (as opposed to some of the answers suggcstcd) by the dependency school (Godfrey. 1YXO; Biencfcld. IYXO). Manfred Biencfcld is led hy this concern to give a very non-specific account of what a dependency approach involves (p. 10) and elsewhere (IYSI. pp. Y(!-YI) to credit ‘the basic premises of dependency’ with a series of cmphascs which wcrc never dclcnded by anyone closely associatcd with that tradition. though they arc very properly the stuff of the non-ncolibcral wmg of dcvelopmcnt economics today. 21.

The rdcrcncc

ih again to the writings of Phillips.

22. Foster-Carter (lY7Y-X0) has made a telling criticlue of the philosophical principles underlying thcsc efforts to draw a line between Marxist and dependency thinking. though from a position more sympathetic to dependency ideas than the one taken here. Palma’s already cited (1984) is also rclcvant.

articles

(lY78.

Warren (1980). Chapters 3 and 4. is good on this 23. phase despite his rather one-sided reading of Marx (and terse dismissal of Mori’s argument, p. lS3n), but see also Communist International (lY77). p. 117. Degras (1956), p. 3X4, and especially Day (lY77). III retrospect it seems clear the Aidan Foster-Carter (1974) overrated the consistency of ‘pa&o-Marxism‘ in rcspcct of such questions, and that my own essay on Frank (Booth. lY7S) may have helped to give the false impression that dependency theory was the result of the first-cvcr major encounter hetwecn Marxist theory and Third World nationalism. Warren argues that in ‘reversing’ Marx’s view 01 25. the leaders of the Russian capitalist imperialism, Revolution were motivated in part by the political need to find allies against the central capitalist states. and that the burgeoning of Third World nationalism in the period following the Second World War made new ‘Leninist world-view‘ politically versions of the convcnicnt as well as psychologically satisfying to Marxists and other radicals. It is unclear. however. why he is so sure that Marx and Engcls wcrc immune to viv-&1,/s Irish patriots and such temptations (e.g., Russian Narodniks) in the world of the 1870s and IXXOs. Phillips (IY77) somewhat similarly has sonic good ideas about the political sources of the ‘ncoMarxist’ fashions of the late 1960s and early 70s but inexplicably absolves earlier Marxisms from a ‘moralistic thesis of the contradiction between capitalism as a whole and the needs of mankind’ (p. 15). One of the editors of one such journal has said as 26. much (Ronald Chilcote in his introduction to the issue of Lulin Americurr Perspecrives devoted to ‘Dcpcndcncy and Marxism’ (Chilcote, 19X1). It is also the case that some of the hcst undergraduate tcxtbookx 111 development sociology incorporate rather uncritical summaries of the dependency view of industrialization -particularly Sandbrook ( 19X2). pp. 49-5X. Countless books of lcsscr quality incorporating a similar pcrapective (the language of ‘imperialism tends to bc prcfcrred) arc published throughout the world every year. 27. See for example Swainson (IYXO); Wils (lY7Y): Cohn Ley’s contributions to the ‘Kenya dcbatc’ (Leys. 1978: Kaplinsky. Hcnlcy and Lcys. 19X(I); Bechcr (lY83); Sorj (10X3). pp. IYJ-XY: Sofcr ( IYXO): Roxborough (lYX1): Henfrcy (IYSI), pp. 47-49; and Be&cl (19X2). It is often argued that because of its emphasis on ‘external‘ exchange relationships. the dcpcndcncy

7x0

WORLD

DEVELOPMEN’I

approach has cngendercd better worh on dominant than on subordinate classes; however. this w~ould scan quite a relative diffcrcncc in the light of Lcy’s critique. 2X. A ‘reprcsent;ltionaI‘ Marxist vtcw 01 politics and the state is often taken as intrinsic to the depcndcncy perspective (e.g. Fagcn, 1977. pp. Y-i 1). although 01 course there is a range of more and less ‘instrumcntalist‘ applications. Beyond this state theory aspect. which can man trrl 110~.and contradictory policy mcasurcs arc graced with analysis as part of some socially-rooted ‘project’ or ‘model of accumulation.’ the main way dependency obscures Third World political realitie\ ia by hugely cxaggcrating the underlying intercst conflict between export-oricntcd domcstic-marketand oriented social forces. The already cited worhs 01 Cardoso and Faletto ( 197’)). DOS Santos ( 1960). Quijano (1977) and Chilcotc and Edelstein (1974) exemplify the tendency. I have discusLed both aspects in a partial way in Booth (19X2. 10X3). Warren (IYXO). anticipated by Warren (lY73) 2’). followed in certain respects by Mandle (IYXO) Kitching (IYX?. lYX3).

and and

31. The reaction to Warren‘s original (IY73) statement is well assessed in Bernstein (IYX2). pp. 226230. The tone and substance of more recent critiques has tended to bc less elevated (c.g.. Lipietz. lYX2; Ahmnd. lY83), though Ronaldo Munck‘s review article (IYXI) makci fair and pertinent criticisms. 32. Warren (19X0). Chapter X. Compare pp. IXY. 20&220. 212-216. 243-244 on the one hand with pp. IYS-109. 200. 204, 216-224. 231-235, 24Y-25.3 on the other. The ‘uneven development’ said to be characteristic of capitalism and perhaps of human progress in general (p. 252) provides an apparent theoretical rationale for ignoring such questions. 33. An important instance is the treatment of trends in income distribution. Major variations in country performarice. including between countries with similar rates of economic growth. arc first acknowledged and then set aside in the interests of the general argument. Warren also commits the textbook fallacy of moving directly from current cross-section data to conclusions about the March of Progress. espousing an evolutionary view of the relation of inequality to growth that was fashionable among development economists twenty or more years ago hut has lost ground for very good reasons in recent times (pp. IYY-211). 34. Post-independence regimes are credited (pp. l7tb 174) with a longish list of achicvcments resulting from a diversification of market outlets and grcatcr control over foreign-owned firms. neither of which appeared as possible desiderata in the previous chapter; investments in health and education are held to have been an essential contribution of the colonial ‘stage‘ to subsequent economic progress, yet the recent ‘basic needs’ approach is disparaged as ‘curtailing growth to improve income distribution’ (p. 206).

35.

For reasons which will bccomc apparent. 1 mahc for using the phrase Henry Bcrnstcin coins in his critique of Franh/Amin un~lcr~lcvclopment theory.

no apology

36.

See the references

in notes 23 and 24.

37. This seems to bring us close to the statement in Ley’s opening contribution to the ‘Kenya debate’: ‘all of these positions [those of Frank, Warren and Emmanuel (in his lY74 critique of Warren)] are mistaken insofar as they propose tendencies inherent in “capitaeach of them may. on the ism in general”; whereas other hand. be correct and illuminating in particular historical circumbt;mccs (Lcys. 107X. p. IXY). Unfortunately Leys has not pursued the thcoretical implications for Marxists of challenging ‘inherent tendencic~,’ and the dchatc has rem;lincd a facinatinp cast-study in post-dependency but non-Warrcnitc clas\ analysis. 3s. Mueller’s work on ‘I‘anranian tobacco farming (1981) is the exception that confirms the rule. Kitching’a Inrgc and excellent hook on Kenya ( IYXO) does not qualify, since despite the unashamedly evolutionary Marxism hc espouses and vigorously anti-‘populist’ elsewhere (see note 2Y) he favor\ ‘unpacking‘ the concept of mode of production into a number ol lower-level concepts for the purposes of analysing particular societies (p. 5). a view not unlike the one tahen here. 3Y. The more theoretical contributions arc extremely well surveyed and discussed, with varied anphases. by Foster-Carter (197X). Harriss (1979). Wolpe (1980). and Goodman and Redclift (19X1), Chapters 2 and 3. JO. Viz. the search for factors offsetting the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall;’ for critiques. scc Steedman (1977). Chapter Y. and Cutler Ed cl/. (lY77-7X). Vol. I. Chapters 4 and 6. II. Hindesa and Hirst (1975). p. Y; or ‘an integrated complex of social productive forces and relations linked to a determinate type of ownership of the means of production’ (Laclau, lY71. p. 33. citing Oscar Lange). 42. Both Alavi and Banaji distance themselves from it in the more recent articles cited in the text. 43. Alavi (1982) and Alavi (197X) and Amin (1976).

(‘I 01. (lYX2):

cf. Frank

34. Dependency-type interpretations arc suggested hy Fine (197X) and Alavi (19X2). pp. IXS-IYI: the ‘transition’ view is taken in a strong form. in a historical context. by Kay (1982) and in a perhaps more ambiguous form by Bernstein (197Yh). 45. Brcnner does not go into the concrete transition from economic formations that remain backward becaust: of their non-capitalist class structure. to capitalist economies that experience productivity growth hut remain (in the ordinary sense) underdevclopcd by comparison with advanced industrial economics. The

MARXISM

AND

DEVELOPMENT

SOCIOLOGY

7x1

same in true of an article which to some cxtcnt anticipated Brenner‘s thesis. Mandlc (1972). but Wcaver, whose contribution (1976) complements Brcnncr’s. does fill in some ol’ the gaps.

49. The best introduction is still Moser (lY7X). Victor Tokman’s article in the same collection (lY78) puts thih literature into a wider context of research and perapectives.

46. To this extent one sympathizes behind Fine’s paper (197X).

SO. Rural researchers are divided between (1) those who see petty producers as involved in a distinct mode which ‘articulates’ with capitalism, and (2) those who argue that they are subsumed under the laws of motion of peripheral capitalism or capitalism proper, becoming at the limit. ‘disguised proletarians.’ The thesis under discussion is important to both groups. For examples. see: (I) Wolpe (1972). Boesen (lY7Y). Schcjtman (19X0): and (2) Bernstein (lY7Yb). and Wcrlhof and Neuhoff (lYX2). Examples from urban research include Godfrey (lY77): Portes and Walton (19X1). Chapter 3; Sandbrook (19X2).pp. 63-6X; and Cockcroft (19X3).

with the intention

47. The relevance of Brenner’s thesis is actually even narrower. and its critical impact on dcpcndency/worldsystems work weaker, than appears at first sig.ht: Brenner barely discusses the phenomenon of colomalism. The issue is taken to be between those who emphasize external. trade-related causes of development and underdevelopment, and those who see that the decisive determinants are internal social relations, class struggles and systems of power. In fact, ol course. the case for viewing underdevelopment as an externally imposed condition rests in part on a particular view of the effects of direct colonialism and other noneconomic relations between nations and territories. In &is context. it is often perfectly correct to see domestic class structure as derivative of inter-societal relations: colonial powers dramatically transformed the social and economic fabrics of the places they colonized, and where in conformity with Brenner’s thesis. mere commerce proved insufficient to break down precapitalist social relations. they took whatever other steps were ncccssary. To the extent that they have been among those drawing attention to this aspect of the history of the Third World, dependency thcoriats can hardly be accused of economic determinism and ‘neo-Smithianism:‘ in fact. the boot of economiam would seem to bc on the other foot - in a sense which recalls our discussion of Warren above. Thus. Brenner’s critique seems to be doubly limited, to a particular historical period. and to the historically rather special cast of pure trade. 4X. The best synthesis of this litcraturc is Goodman and Rcdclift (19X1); Harriss (19X2) has relevant readings in Part 2. but is of wider scope. For the purpose of one part of my argument (that which relates to the ‘classical’ conception of the capitalist mode of production and the transition to it). perhaps the most striking fcaturc of the new rural studies is the sheer empirical diversity of patterns and trends detected: rural class relations do not seem to be converging along ;I single path. and in some cases even the directionality of what we persist in calling rllc transition is in some doubt; all of this raises the question of the soundness and ultimate theoretical foundations of our initial expectations. Goodman and Redclift ( IYXl). pp. h&67. rccognizc this problem, whence the plural transitions in the title of their book. David Lehmann has been led by comparative Latin American evidence from dihtinguishing alternative ‘paths of tr;ln~lormation.‘ including some which arc on the l’acc of it rcvcrse transitions (lY76). to calling for ’ ;I modcbt differentiation of the concept of capitalist development itself‘applying not just to diffcrcnccs between center and periphery countries but to contra$ts between countrich. and bctwecn regions. wjithin the periphery (19x2. p. 260).

51. Thus the term ‘subsidy’ ought probably not to be used. even in quotation marks. 52. The variety of moods and tenses employed, or the seemingly casual omission of a verb, is symptomatic of the problem. Thus we have the labor power or products of small-scale enterprises being supplied ‘below their value (under capitalist conditions)’ (Boesen, 1979. p. 1.57, italics removed); ‘at prices lower than those which a capitalist producer would require’ (Schejtman. 1980, p. 128); at prices ‘enabling [the wages or “wages” of enterprise members] to be lower than they would otherwise need to be’ (Godfrey. 1977. p. 67); and ‘lower than they might have to be in the absence of the marginal pole’ (Sandbrook, 1982. p. 67). Criticisms in a broadly similar vein have been made by Friedmann (1980). p. 173; Kitching (1980). Appendix; and Moser and Young (19X1), p. 53. 53. As has been suggested in different ways by Mouzelis (1976). p. 390; Goodman and Redclift (19x1). pp. 60-62: and Moser and Young (1081). p. 54. S-1. Mann and Dickinson (lY7X) have suggested that it is possihle to use Marxist concepts in this kind of way. 55. See the section on ‘Necessary New Perspectives and Directions for Research,’ pp. 249-265 in Kannappan (19X3) which calls inrcr rrlitr for more worh by sociologists or anthropologists. 56. Excellent work in this general field i> of course appearing. and has been citedcin thcsc pages. but much of the literature is either loose and overgeneralized. as Lehmann (IY7Y). p. 5. and Roxborouph (1071)). pp. ix-x have complained, or else so focused as to make it unreasonable to hope for an eventual synthc\is. Notwithstanding my earlier suggestion that the analysis of class haa been particularly hampered by depcndcncy ideas. economistic or lormalist tcndencics common to horll of the main traditions of radical dcvelol~n~cnt theory have undoubtedly played their part. as argued by Henfrey (19X1). pp. 3X-47. and Johnson (IYXI, 19X3).

782

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57. Exception5 include Bates (IWI, part. Harri\s and Moore ( IW3).

DEVELOPMENT

IOX3) and,

in

Colin Lcys. hy training a political scientist. rcprcscnta lhc only 4gnificant cxccption with hi\ contribution to the IL1.S Hu//(,/irl issue on ‘Redi~tl-ihb tion with Growth’!’ (lY75).

5s.

9. My impression i\ that those working in multidisciplinary dcvclopmcnt or area \tudie\ ccntcrs have hcen Icss guilty on this \corc than the rest of us. if only hccausc the notion that locusing on ‘relations 01 production is i/,.so +rc/o doin? political economy is harder to sustain in such an cnvil-onmcnt. 60. This is ;I casual, outsidcl-‘s impression of cOursc: 1 should hc pleased to he contradicted hy anyone who knows hcttcr. 61. They also argue that this conceptlon generates a view of the economic role of the state in which state policy is rcduccd to a mechanism offsetting the basic underlying tcndcncics of capitalism, such that the ‘cl~/@e/~/itr/ cffcct of the policies of states on the conditions of economic performance tends to bc neglected (h/d.. Vol. 2. p. 250). 62. Some ol the most influential work in the dcpendcncy tradition is. I would accept. not usefully discussed in thcsc term>. 63. Theotonio Dos Santos, Ruy Mauro Marini and Vania Bamhirra have all maintained that ‘dependent capitalism’ is characterized hy specific laws of motion (set Ilcnfrcy. IYSI. pp. 23-24. and Gereffi. IYX3, pp 37-3X). and other\ have skctchcd a theory of ‘dcpendent reproduction‘ (see Munck, IYSI. p. 171). 64. I agree with Mouzcli?, (IYXO) that the Althusserian critique of ‘teleology. ’ applied to the dcvelol~mcnt field by Bernstein and Taylor among others, dcbascs the concept in II serious way. Tclcology will rcfcr here to a form of c,,r&rrrc~io,r hy relcrcnce to ‘ends, 01 which explanations that invohc the ‘ends’ of non-purposive \elf-&gulating systems arc one type. 65. Discussion has focused quitu properly on the two central ideas set out in Marx’s ‘1XSY Preface’ the forces of pr~)duction/rel;lti~~n~ of production couple. and the basc/supcrstructurc image and thesis that the economy is determinant in the last instance. The contention is that these arc to he construed as statcmcnts about functional relations hctwccn different kinds of structures. As Cohen (lY7X) puts it: (I) ‘. the character of the forces functionally explains the character of the relations [T]he production relations are of a kind R at time t because relations of kind R arc suitable to the use and development of the

productive forces at t, given the level of development 01 the latter at t’ (p. 160, italics removed). and (2) ‘. property relations arc. in turn. functionally explained by production relations: legal structures rlsc and fat1 according as they promote or frustrate forms of economy favored by the productive forces. Property relations have the character they do because production relations require that they have it’ (p. 2.10). In the Ianguagc of Cutler el crl. (lY77-7X): ‘Rather than the limited position that specific social relations presuppose definite conditions of existence these theses maintain that certain types of social relations are capable ol securing their own conditions of existence’ (Vol. I. p. 209). I agree with these (otherwise divergent) contributions in being unconvinced by the contention that the propositions in the ‘Preface’ arc nothing more than ‘research hypotheses’ or diagnostic aids, as argued most recently by Terre11 Carver (lY82). Even if it is not accepted that Marx’s theory of the broad sweep ol history is functionalist, it is fairly obvious that his co,,ccption of the ‘reserve army of labour’ and the various Marxian and post-Marxian theses about factors offsetting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall have to be construed in this way (cf. Giddens. 1981, p. IX). 66. Cohen maintains that WC rationally hyI>otheslle functional explanations cvcn when we lack the ‘cla horations‘ required to show ‘how the explanations work;’ \uch hypotheaca, he argues. raise useful qucstions for future research (lY7X. Chapter IO). 67.

See for example

Ryan

(lY70).

pp.

lX2?1Y4.

hS. I do not wish to ovcraimplify. On the one hand dependency-type statcmcnts whose there arc functionalism is explicit (though not necessarily sellconscious) DOS Santoa’s ( 1070) account of uncvcn development as a ‘necc55ary and structural fcaturc 01 the world economy.‘ Amin (1976) on ‘the functions 01 ( lY7Y) on ‘the reproductive the periphery. ’ Taylor rcquircmcnts of imperialist pcnctration,’ and so forth. At the other extrcmc. writer\ such ;IC Cardoso (lY73. for example) arc conccrncd to distance thcmsclvcs from specific functionalist-type claims which they find untenable (such as Marini’s that the development ol in the center ‘rcquirca’ the supcrcapitalism exploitation of Iabor in the periphery). Neverthclcss. Cardoso’s own account (in Cardoso, lY73. and C’ardoso and Faletto. lY7Y). gains much of its poignancy from an implicit negative functionalism: the needs of intcrnational capital. ulld horcc the possibilities for transformation in the Third World, are no lonpcr quite what they used to be. Finally. thcrc are writers such as Wallerstein (lY74. 1070. IYSO) whose explanations are richly tclcological in both :L functionalist and B nonfunctionalist sense (see Skocpol. 1’977) whence in part their enormous hut rather rcgrettahlc influence.

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