The Third World, by contrast, has from the beginning been extraverted, externally oriented: here the key sectors are export production and import consumption, again dynamically related but perversely so, and with no prospect of debouching into the ‘autocentric’ type.įor Frank, things are simpler: it is just capitalism. footnote 6 This is ‘autocentric’, based on a dynamic relationship between producer goods and consumer goods sectors (Marx’s ‘Departments i & ii’), and fuelled by home market demand. For Amin, the ‘normal’ development of capitalism (as studied, and formally stated, by Marx in Capital) is but one variant-even if in some sense the ‘true’ one. footnote 5 Others go further: the ‘blocked transition’ becomes ‘peripheral capitalism’-a reality sui generis. This I take to be the sense of Kay’s dictum that ‘capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough’-a fact which he attributes to the unduly prolonged dominance in the Third World of merchant capital, unable as it is to revolutionize the mode of production. Still with affinities (especially methodological) to the ‘classical’ view, there is the conception of underdevelopment as a transition blocked, a (‘normal’) process incomplete. But even here there is considerable variety. footnote 4 They are en route, even if the journey will be long and painful.Īgainst, this, of course, the great bulk of recent Marxist writing takes as its very point of departure the Third World’s not being en route, or at least not on that route. footnote 3 Warren, for instance, argues that the ‘Third World’ today is at an early stage (or various stages) of industrialization and the development of capitalism, precisely as we know these processes from the experience of ‘developed’ countries. A few (following Marx himself) continue radically to reject this problematic as such. We can illustrate this briefly by looking at a range of recent Marxist attempts to grapple with what must be the most basic question for all such writers: namely, the proper characterization of ‘underdevelopment’ itself. footnote 2 Today the observer is more likely to be struck by the controversies and debates going on between participants who would probably all claim to be in some sense Marxists, but who appear deeply and perhaps increasingly divided over fundamental issues. footnote 1 A few years ago it seemed appropriate to sketch out the distinctive features of a Marxist perspective as such, in comparison with other approaches. footnote * Indeed, the growth of this new (or rediscovered) paradigm has been such that there seems to be almost as much variety of opinion and analysis within it as could be found among the bourgeois development theories that Marxists so trenchantly criticized. The term can be simply and picturesquely described in an agrarian society as the soil and the shovel in an industrial society, the mines and the factories and in a knowledge economy, offices and computers.M arxist writing on development and underdevelopment, which barely a decade ago was largely confined to the shrill critiques of a few voices crying in the wilderness, seems well and truly now to have ‘taken off’. When used in the broad sense, the "means of production" includes the "means of distribution" which includes stores, banks, the internet and railroads. If creating a good, people operate on the subjects of labour, using the instruments of labour, to create a product or, stated another way, labour acting on the means of production creates a good. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour and subjects of labour. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital. Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production-the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth - along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. Freebase (0.00 / 0 votes) Rate this definition:
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