Capitalism, uneven and combined development and the transhistoric

Abstract

What is the status of Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development within Marxist theory and how might it be fruitfully employed by Marxists in international relations? Is uneven and combined development a transhistoric general abstraction or does it need rooting in the relations, processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies of a particular mode of production? This article rejects Justin Rosenberg's recently drawn conclusion that uneven and combined development is usefully understood as a transhistoric general abstraction that potentially offers the basis of a transhistoric theory of the international. Instead it questions the value of transhistoric categories for Marxist theory and pursues the argument that uneven and combined development is best understood within the relations, processes and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that capitalist social relations and political forms are historically unique in their capacity to generate both combination and unevenness.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Alex Anievas, Ben Fine and anonymous peer reviewers for their very helpful comments.

² Regrettably many of the issues raised in both the exchange of letters and the special section on ‘Global Capitalism and the States System’ have been left to one side for lack of space.

³ I do not intend to dwell on Rosenberg's ‘value analogy’ (because I read it as an intellectual flight of fancy and not as a serious analysis of Capital) except to say I consider it thoroughly mistaken to see the simple form of value as a general (ie transhistoric) abstraction. Wealth is a transhistoric general abstraction, value a determinate one specific, in its most developed form, to capitalist social relations; use value is a general abstraction, exchange value a determinate one. See Murray (1988) for a useful discussion of both the difference and the importance of the difference between the two categories.

⁴ Wood is in part concerned to reject Marx's metaphor of base and superstructure and the separation and enclosure of spheres she sees as inherent within it. This dimension of her argument is put aside in order to concentrate on what is most relevant for present purposes. A useful discussion can be found in Barker (1997). A similar argument to Wood's is found in the state derivation debate where Holloway and Picciotto (1991) argued that the state should be seen as fetishized form of the capital relation. The existence of the state implies a ‘constant process of separating off’ certain aspects of social life, defining them as ‘political’ and hence as separate or in opposition to the ‘economic’, a strong part of the depoliticizing (and legitimating) discourse of economic management associated with neo-liberalism (Holloway 1995, 121; Burnham 2000).

⁵ This is not to argue that extra-economic coercion does not exist under capitalism but that the system as a whole is based on free wage labour. See Banaji (1977; 2003) and Barker (1997).

⁶ This is not to argue that capital is ‘aspatial’ once determinations at a lower level of abstraction are introduced. Capitalist development is spatially highly contradictory, producing tendencies to both geographical expansion and dispersal but also to unevenness and concentration (Weeks 2001).

⁷ Teschke and Lacher (2007, 579) thus seem mistaken to suggest that the unevenness of capitalist development does not arise as a consequence of its own nature but arises from the combination of the capitalist and the non-capitalist whilst combination arises at the geopolitical level. The combination of uneven and combined development is much deeper than just combination at the geopolitical level, as we come on to argue, whilst competition between capitals systematically generates its own unevenness.

⁸ The term is borrowed loosely from Pomeranz (2000) but for an important Marxist critique of Pomeranz see Brenner and Isett (2002).

⁹ For an example of the latter approach see Collier (2007), and for a critique see Grove (2008).

¹⁰ Needless to say, Gerschenkron's analysis is stripped of all the radical content to be found in Trotsky. Van der Linden (2007) points to how Gerschenkron was an Austro-Marxist and critical supporter of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. So it is highly likely he was familiar with Trotsky's work, especially as The history of the Russian Revolution was published in German in the early 1930s—though Gerschenkron did not refer to his left-wing past during his later life as an émigré in the US.

¹¹ Murray (1988) argues that the distinction is clearly present in Marx's Paris Manuscripts and the German ideology in addition to the Grundrisse and Capital.

¹² The metaphor is not employed in relation to Poulantzas but is apt for present purposes.

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Notes on contributors

Sam Ashman

 1  1 I am grateful to Alex Anievas, Ben Fine and anonymous peer reviewers for their very helpful comments.