The Law of Uneven and Combined Development and Latin America

Abstract

David Romagnolo makes two main criticisms of law of uneven and combined development. First, it supposedly disregards leading principle of historical materialism that mode of production determines nature of a social formation. It thereby bases itself upon superficial peculiarities, exceptional features, of historical development instead of its general and fundamental ones. Second, law of uneven and combined development focuses on exchange rather than productive relations, thus lapsing into errors of vulgar bourgeois economists. Neither contention is factually correct. The law of uneven and combined development proceeds from premise that mode of production, constituted by level of productive forces and corresponding relations of production, is underlying determinant in all social structures and historical processes. Nor does law subordinate relations of productin to exchange relations, although it recognizes that in generalized commodity relations intrinsic to capitalism exchange relations have far greater importance than in pre-capitalist societies where sale and purchase of products is economically marginal. However, these two elementary Marxist principles provide points of departure and serve as guidelines for analyzing historically developed social formations in their full concreteness. With their aid it is necessary to go forward and explain why a particular mode of production manifests itself in such different ways and develops to such disparate degrees under different How is it, as Marx pointed out, that the same economic basis shows infinite variations and gradations of appearance? This can be ascertained, he tells us, only by analysis of empirically given circumstances. In this case we must ask: what empirical circumstances account for variations and gradations of appearance of modes of production in Latin America after its conquest and colonization?