Abstract
Substantively, the broad disagreements between the NWG and W. Arthur Lewis reflected technical rather than fundamental differences, as the main disagreements were internal to neoclassical economic theory. Lewis was aware that imperialism (1870-1945) retarded and/or constrained the space for capital accumulation in the colonies and that it produced and/or intensified economic inequality and limited social transformation in most colonies; however, this was not an original insight. Lewis said, the “backwardness of the less developed countries of 1870 could be changed only by people prepared to alter certain customs, laws, and institutions, and to shift the balance of political and economic power away from the old landowning and aristocratic classes.” He stressed that “the imperial powers ... allied themselves with the existing power blocs. They were especially hostile to educated young people whom, by means of a color bar, they usually kept out of positions where administrative experience might be gained, whether in the public service or in private business…. One result of this was to divert into a long and bitter anti-colonial struggles much brilliant talent which could have been used creatively in development sectors” (Lewis 1978: 214, quoted in Frieden 2006:91; see Girvan 2005; Boulding 1951: 216).
Highlights
The subjectivity of the West Indian military service men, who were represented among the British military and immigrant workers, made their labor power interchangeable units of universal human labor, while their racial-ethnic identity was overwhelmed by the racial identity that British racial Anglo-Saxonism imposed on them. One consequence of this contradictory location within the British proletariat was that their role as defenders of the Empire and as sources of surplus labor they contributed to capital accumulation in Britain and their remittances to the BWI/CARICOM societies seemed like epiphenomena in relation to the contradictory processes of international capitalism
NWG thought was of a piece with strands of liberal thought in relation to modernization— decolonization, nationalism, independence, development, and sovereignty
It is difficult to sustain the assertion that NWG was innovative and rejected “metropolitan intellectual and political hegemony.”
Summary
Unlimited supplies of labor developed through primitive accumulation mediated by extra-economic compulsion Lewis produced his USL theory after the anti-colonial rebellion in the BWI in the 1930s that led to the introduction of containment measures of decolonization in conjunction with the modernization of parliamentary government to direct the class struggle into channels that made the deconstruction of European imperialism manageable. Lewis’ approach emphasized the modernization of agriculture through a broader industrialization strategy to develop the productive forces of industry and labor to give the BWI capitalists, workers and small farmers a modest industrial base within the international “capitalist nucleus.” His theoretical project and recommendations stressed regional economic integration as an absolute necessity to connect small populations living in very small and scattered islands with limited resources that depended on a largely semi-industrial economic foundation.
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