Abstract
There was a pervasive belief in classical Marxism that despite the destructive and exploitative nature of colonial capitalism, it would nevertheless, historically, fulfill a regenerative role for colonized societies. It would break down the old precapitalist social order and generate new social forces, setting in motion the dynamics (and contradictions) of capital accumulation and development in the colony. Among Marxists such a view still survives as a minority view.1 Taken onesidedly, the optimistic aspect of that complex vision was, on the other hand, the prognosis and self-justification of colonialist ideology, a notion that continues to inform the theory and practice of “modernization” and developmentalism. The actual experience of peripheral capitalist societies belies such expectations.
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Notes
See, for example, Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” reprinted in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: 1960).
For a contemporary argument on those lines see Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980).
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 949. See also Capital, vol. III (Moscow: 1971), pp. 321–37.
Charles Bettelheim, “Theoretical Comments” in appendix I to Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 297–98.
Claude Meillassoux, “From Reproduction to Production,” Economy and Society 1, no. 1 (February 1972): 103.
Ernesto Laclau, “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America,” New Left Review 67 (May–June 1971).
For a lucid exposition of the theory see Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964).
See Hamza Alavi, “India: Transition from Feudalism to Colonial Capitalism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 10, no. 4 (1980).
Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Moghul India (London: 1963);
and Nurul Hasan, “The Position of Zamindars in the Moghul Empire,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 1, no. 4 (1964).
A list of references to contributions in the debate is given in Hamza Alavi, “India and the Colonial Mode of Production,” in R. Miliband and J. Saville, eds., Socialist Register 1975 (London: Merlin Press, 1975), n. 1.
V. I. Lenin, Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: 1956), p. 174.
V. I. Lenin, “Report on Work in the Countryside” for the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), March 1919.
Henry Bernstein, “Notes on Capital and Peasantry,” Review of African Political Economy 10 (September–December 1977).
Lionel Cliffe, “Rural Class Formation in East Africa,” Journal of Peasant Studies 4, no. 2 (January 1977); see chap. 21 of this volume.
Karl Kautsky, Die Agrarfrage, “Summary of Selected Parts,” trans. by J. Banajee, Economy and Society 5, no. 1 (February 1976): 4.
See Teodor Shanin, “Defining Peasants: Conceptualizations and Deconceptualizations—Old and New in a Marxist Debate,” Peasant Studies 8, no. 4 (Fall 1979);
Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966);
Boguslaw Galeski, Basic Concepts in Rural Sociology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972).
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Alavi, H. (1982). The Structure of Peripheral Capitalism. In: Alavi, H., Shanin, T. (eds) Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16847-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16847-7_14
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