Marx and Underdevelopment

Abstract

Apart from the Marx for whom ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ there is a ‘late Marx’ who begins to engage with what we now call underdevelopment. In the section Beyond Stages we show how Marx, in the last decade of his life, engaged closely with events in Russia and broke with his earlier sometimes schematic vision of unilinear development. Marx now fully accepted that there was no unilinear path of human development and that the stages of development could be ‘skipped’ so to speak thus opening the way to a multilinear conception of capitalist development. Overall, we find that it is a question of Politics in Command when Marx and Engels deal with the world beyond Europe, for example in relation to Ireland and Latin America, where political criteria prevail in the way in which they analyse development prospects. The criteria for supporting or not national development paths is still, to a degree bound up with the Hegelian concept of historic and non- historic peoples that Engels, in particular, took up and accepted. Finally, we turn to the way in which Marx sought to account for the dynamics of the global economy, conscious of the fact that he never wrote the planned volume on the World Economy. We thus explore the issue of ‘Unequal Exchange’ between the various regions of the world, developed and underdeveloped as we would say today. We see here a line of continuity between Marx’s incipient theory of the global economy and the contemporary theory of dependency that posits a structural condition of inter-national domination.