Abstract
It has long been a point of controversy amongst Marxists whether Marx formulated, or even meant to formulate, a stage-like theory of human social evolution, as was the fashion amongst the liberal thinkers, and as indeed it became official Soviet ideology from Stalin’s time. According to this Soviet interpretation, Marx was supposed to have delineated five progressive stages of human socio-economic formations: the ‘classless’ primitive community, the slave-based society of classical times, the feudal society based on serfdom, the modern bourgeois society based on capitalism, and lastly the advanced ‘classless’ society of the future, i.e. communist society. This unilinear schema was thought to be not only a logical but also a chronological progression of human social life. When applied to the now underdeveloped world, it permitted the Soviets to adopt an ‘interventionist’ view of social change in these societies, uncannily similar to that of the bourgeois modernisation theorists. Both Soviet and bourgeois theorists believed that the laws and generalisations derived from the past experience of the nations now affluent could serve as a lesson for the present and the future of those who were still poor.
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Notes and References
V. Pavlov Vlyanovsky, Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal’s Concept (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973) p. 156.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 52.
See especially David Booth, ‘André Gunder Frank: An Introduction and Appreciation’, and Phillip J. O’Brien, ‘A Critique of Latin American Theories of Dependency’, both in I. Oxaal et al., Beyond the Sociology of Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
John Taylor, From Modernisation to Modes of Production (London: Macmillan, 1979) p. 101.
L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading ‘Capital’ (London: New Left Books, 1970). Balibar’s section is especially relevant to us. For the link between the new orthodoxy and the dependency theorists, see John Clammer, ‘Economic Anthropology and the Sociology of Development: Liberal Anthropology and its French Critics’, in Oxaal et al., Beyond the Sociology of Development.
Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, edited and introduced by E. Hobsbawm (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964) pp. 19–20.
This section is particularly indebted to three works; Hobsbawm’s edition of Marx and Engels, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations; Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975);
and Umberto Melotti, Marx and the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1977).
This, for instance, is the comment made by Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 25.
For this view of capitalism, see Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy; and A. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
This is the position taken by Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1946); and more recently by E. Laclau, ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, New Left Review, May 1971.
Cf. D. K. Fieldhouse, The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism (London: Longman, 1967) Introduction.
See, for example, J. A. Schumpeter, ‘The Sociology of Imperialism’, in Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1916);
and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1902).
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968).
Of all writers on dependency and the dependency debate, Gabriel Palma most clearly places the debate within the Marxist tradition of writings on imperialism: Gabriel Palma, ‘Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?’, World Development, vol. 6, 1978, pp. 881–924.
See, for instance, Colin Leys, ‘Underdevelopment and Development: Critical Notes’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 7, no. 1, 1977, pp. 82–115;
Alejandro Portes, ‘On the Sociology of National Development: Theories and Issues’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 82, no. 1, 1976–7, pp. 55–63;
and J. Samuel Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela, ‘Modernization and Dependence: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment’, in J. Villamil (ed.), Transnational Corporations and Transnational Culture (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979).
This was the central point made by André Gunder Frank in his original formulation of dependency in The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology (London: Pluto Press, 1967).
Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). (Originally published in Spanish in 1957).
A. G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
James A. Caporoso, ‘Dependence and Dependency in the Global System’, International Organization, vol. 32, no. 1, January 1978, p. 2.
Probably the best review and methodological critique of the Baran-Frank dependency theory is Palma, ‘Dependency’. Useful criticisms of dependency theory from the point of view of the ‘empirical’ usability of the concept can be found in Christopher Case-Dunn, ‘The Effects of International Economic Dependence on Development and Inequality: a Cross-National Study’, American Sociological Review, December 1975; and the contribution by P. J. McGowan and D. L. Smith, ‘Economic Dependency in Black Africa’, International Organization, vol. 32, no. 1, 1978, pp. 179–235. This whole issue of International Organization was devoted to a critical assessment of ‘Dependence and Dependency in the Global System’.
I am referring here to R. Prebisch’s seminal paper, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (New York: Economic Commission for Latin America, 1950).
A. G. Frank, Lumpenbourgeoisie, Lumpendevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
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© 1982 Ankie M. M. Hoogvelt
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Hoogvelt, A.M.M. (1982). Theories of Social Evolution and Development: The Marxist Tradition. In: The Third World in Global Development. The Sociology of Developing Societies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16777-7_6
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