Marx adopted the conception of ‘economic determinism’ as part of his materialistic explanation of history. It implies that economic and material conditions of human life are basic and primary factors for understanding all the other activities. Economic relations, as they prevail in the context of ownership of the means of production, are the determining factors for other aspects of life, including the political aspect. For Marx, society in a capitalist mode of production is a class society and its politics, a class politics, because there is an irreconcilable class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Emphasis on the economic factor as determinant of political activity (and also ideological, intellectual, legal, cultural, religious and social) is a significant element of Marxian approach to political economy.
Andrew Vincent is of the view that the Marxian theory tends towards political economy and treats the economic activity as the primary concern. The rest of the human activity, including the political, is taken as a result of this primary activity.6 Marxian theory gives primacy to the economic structure of society and considers it as the base or the infrastructure. This consists of forces and relations of production. ‘Infrastructure’ or the ‘base’ determines all other aspects of society, which are termed ‘superstructure’. Political arena, being part of the superstructure and determined by the base or infrastructure, is also an arena of class struggle. For Marx, and for Engels and Lenin, political economy is class economy and distribution of material conditions of life is determined according to the ownership of the means of production. There is antagonist class struggle and political economy is characterized by exploitation of one class by another class. This condition of oppression and exploitation of one class by another is the main element of capitalist political economy.
While classical political economy treated market economy and capitalist society as the mainstay of a new society and free individual, Marx showed the inhuman and exploitative face of the same political economy. Marx felt that no freedom, no moral or intellectual development of the individual was possible in the capitalist economy. It is a class economy, a class politics and it is exploitative, alienating and inhuman.
The framework of exploitative and oppressive relations between those who are dominant and owners of means of production and those who are not has been used by a set of writers to explain the political economy of relations between states. The world economy is understood as arena of capitalist competition and imperialist regime as reflection of the capitalist requirements of market for goods and profitable investment of capital. Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism captured the essence of this argument. Writers, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin, suggested that nation-states were not separate societies but an integrated part of a ‘world-system’. World-system perspective suggests that capitalism provides the basic logic of integration of all nations-states into a single capitalist world-system. This is an approach based on the capitalist world economy concept, which treats all countries as part of one single interdependent system. Understanding of internal social, political and economic aspects of a country are to be done within the context of world-system. How world division of labour is organized, how surplus in one part of the world is being extracted and transferred to other parts within the capitalist world-system and how unequal exchange takes place between different nations. The conclusion is that there are countries that constitute ‘core’ and there are others, which constitute ‘periphery’. While the industrialized countries, with mostly erstwhile colonial record, are associated with ‘core’, the developing and underdeveloped countries, most of them erstwhile colonies, constitute the ‘periphery’.
Countries of the periphery are treated as integrally linked to the economic framework of the core and no possibility of independent economic development is seen in the periphery. The economic agenda of the periphery is decided by the requirements of surplus of the core or countries of the centre. It creates a relationship of dependency between the core/centre and the periphery. Gunder Frank suggests that this relationship results in ‘development and underdevelopment simultaneously’.
Frank’s The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology and On Capitalist Underdevelopment focused on the integration of the world into a single world wide capitalist system. Expansion and growth of the mercantilism in the sixteenth century and subsequently industrial and financial expansion coupled with colonialism–imperialism in the eighteenth to the twentieth century created, what Frank says ‘metropole’ and the ‘periphery’. By ‘metropole’ is meant industrial and financially rich countries, which also became imperialist and colonizers and ‘periphery’ refers to developing, colonized and underdeveloped countries. Frank argues that metropole/core– periphery relationship is characterized by development and underdevelopment at the same time. As all the countries are treated as part of one world capitalist system, countries of the core exploit the countries of the periphery. And while in core it is development, in periphery it is underdevelopment. Franks says, ‘Capitalist development everywhere has been a fundamentally contradictory development based on exploitation and resulting simultaneously in development and underdevelopment.’7 Frank suggests that both development and underdevelopment happen as part of the same process. He concludes that so long as developing countries are linked with the capitalist system they are subject to capitalist–imperialist–colonial exploitation. He finds solution in substitution of capitalism by socialism to escape from underdevelopment. This is known as dependency theory.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Capitalist World Economy presented the ‘world system’ or ‘Capitalist World Economy’ model with a structure of Core, Semi periphery and periphery.8 Samir Amin (Unequal Development) also supported the world system model.
The basic idea behind the dependency and world system model of political economy of the developing countries is that there is unequal exchange between the developed, industrial and capitalist countries and the developing and erstwhile colonial countries. This is global capitalist structure and is analogous to the capitalist relations within a nation-state. This capitalist linkage has been maintained forcefully by imperialist–colonial structure. It is also argued that even after the independence, the decolonized and developing countries remain within the world capitalist system and have no means for independent development. Neo-colonial linkage has been referred to define the emerging relationship between the developed and underdeveloped countries. Particularly, when there are international financial and trade organizations that further enforce the capitalist system.
It may be mentioned that Dadabhai Naoroji in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India and R. C. Dutt in his Economic History of India had analysed and explained the drain of wealth from India to England and had suggested that development of the English cloth industry was partially funded by drain from India. It is not uncommon that in the contemporary global world relationship of the developing countries vis-à-vis, the developed countries is not of equality, be it trade, finance or investment and technical cooperation.
Leave a Reply