The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism

Abstract

The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the “development of under-development”—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to the Marx of the Manifesto, who envisioned a more or less direct and inevitable process of capitalist expansion: undermining old modes of production, replacing them with capitalist social productive relations and, on this basis, setting off a process of capital accumulation and economic development more or less following the pattern of the original homelands of capitalism. […].