The Struggle for Development:
National Strategies in an International Context
Edited by M. Bienefeld and M. Godfrey
© 1982 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction
MANFRED BIENEFELD and MARTIN GODFREY
The central question addressed by this volume is: 'What are the prospects of development
in the currently less developed economies and to what extent do these prospects depend on
the effective implementation of national development strategies which take cognizance of
the dominant trends in the international economy?' More specifically we are interested in
the circumstances under which these economies could achieve a full-fledged
industrialization, or other form of development, which would allow them to: develop their
forces of production progressively; eventually mount a genuine competitive challenge to
existing producers in various areas of production; and gradually spread the benefits of
this development to the broad mass of their population.
In discussing the determination of the limits on this process for such economies the
emphasis of this volume is on the relative weight to be given to external and internal
variables, on the identification of possibly significant differences between nationally
and internationally 'rational' choices, and on the interaction between these various
spheres. Differences in opinion about the relative importance to be attached to each of
these derive in part from different analytical perceptions of how variables are connected
within a social system, and in part from differences in the concrete cases which are used
as the basis for judgements. This volume does not attempt to develop a particular
perspective but rather attempts to sharpen our understanding of these differences by
bringing a variety of analytical perspectives to bear upon these issues with reference to
selected country cases, in order to document the interaction between analytical perception
and material circumstance and in order to improve our understanding of just how and why
different theoretical approaches diverge on these issues. The basic premise of our
approach is that the various theoretical approaches which do exist are not mutually
exclusive, totally distinct spheres, but are rather deeply intertwined and have many
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
common points of reference. That does not, of course, imply that their conclusions may not
be utterly incompatible or different in terms of the interests they serve in the first
instance. But unfortunately the nature, or fervour, of any set of conclusions does not
validate an analysis, as is all too evident when one looks at the range of strategic
choices which can be espoused from a Marxist or neo-classical perspective, each claiming
to represent the interests of the population as a whole.
Analytical Perceptions
As far as analytical perceptions are concerned, the possibility of a conflicting
rationality between the national and the international spheres was denied by the
longstanding view, largely derived from classical and neo-classical trade theory, that
integration into the international capitalist system is always beneficial for any national
economy, developed or less developed. This view was first challenged by economists like
List and Carey, looking at the world from the point of view of nation states like Germany
and the United States seeking to industrialize in a world where British producers
dominated the markets for manufactures. The post-Second World War challenge came initially
from the development economists of the 1950s. Singer, Prebisch, Lewis, Mandelbaum,
Rosenstein-Rodan and Nurkse, among others, were important in this respect in their
prescription of disengagement from the international capitalist system-at least to the
extent of planned, capitalist, import-substituting industrialization behind a tariff or
quota wall. The crux of their argument was that the developing countries had a set of
characteristics which in the modern world would not allow them to achieve full employment
in the context of an open market. Once that was admitted one had established the case for
a new discipline called 'development economies'. This discipline concerned itself with the
ways and means by which the resources thus left idle could be mobilized.
Parts of their theories survive more or less intact among more recent dependency and
underdevelopment theorists. For instance, the Emmanuel-Amin theory of unequal exchange
could be regarded as a restatement in Marxist language of the Prebisch-Singer-Lewis
analysis of the differing effects of productivity increases at centre and periphery
arising from the differing degrees of competition in their product and labour markets.
But, unlike the later dependency school, most development economists operated with a
Harrod-Domar type of growth model and looked favourably on foreign investment and aid as a
means of easing the capital constraint, since it would increase capital goods imports,
improve the balance of payments, reduce inflationary pressures and transfer technology. In
effect capital was understood as physical machinery, or even as finance, but not as a
social relation embodying certain central and certain internationally defined objectives. |
INTRODUCTION
3
Nurkse anticipated some ambiguities from the use of foreign capital, although he did not
raise these to the level of elaborating conflicting objectives. Nevertheless he was one of
the few early development economists to anticipate the dependency emphasis on problems
arising from non-trade contracts between central and peripheral countries. He pointed to
the international demonstration effect arising from the spread of knowledge in
underdeveloped countries of the consumption standards of rich countries. Drawing a
parallel with Duesenberry's work on the interdependence of individual consumption
functions, Nurkse suggested that 'the presence or the mere knowledge of new goods and new
methods of consumption tends to raise the general propensity to consume' and that 'the
temptation to copy American consumption patterns tends to limit the supply of investible
funds by inhibiting the willingness to save'. There is an obvious affinity here with the
later emphasis on consumption patterns of, say Sunkel or Furtado, but there is a
difference. Nurkse was still operating within a Harrod-Domar framework and thus
emphasizing the demonstration effect only on the rate of saving and hence on the rate of
growth. He recognised that disengagement from the international economy was logically
implied by his analysis but regarded this as a 'defeatist solution', preferring to try to
raise the rate of saving by a compulsory savings scheme, backed up by foreign investment
and aid.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that the development economists who seem to get closest to
the dependency position and who lay the foundations for defining a specific, and separate,
national rationality for capital are those who question the Harrod-Domar emphasis on
capital as the sole constraint and emphasize rather the inadequacy of the inducement to
invest. For example, Myrdal (whose 'circular-causation' challenge to equilibrium economics
is an unacknowledged influence on dependency and 'uneven development' theory) drew
attention to the fact that the need for capital in underdeveloped countries
does not represent an effective demand in the capital market. Rather, if there were no
exchange controls and if, at the same time, there were no elements in their national
development policies securing high profits for capital-i.e. if the forces in the capital
market were given unhampered play -capitalists in underdeveloped countries would be
exporting capital. (Myrdal, 1957:53)
If the problem is seen to be on the side of the inducement to invest rather than of the
supply of capital, then the logic of inviting an inflow of foreign capital is
called into question, because capital is no longer a homogeneous concept responding to an
undifferentiated global logic. Hirschman (1971:227) posed this question more explicitly:
'Could the inflow of foreign capital stunt what might otherwise be vigorous local
development of the so-called missing or scarce factors of production?' His view was that
it could -sometimes in an absolute sense, for instance through the foreign takeover of
local banks or businesses, more often in relation to what might have happened in the
absence |
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
of the foreign investment. His evidence for this was the fact that during wars,
depressions, national expropriations and international sanctions, the domestic supply of
entrepreneurs, managers, technology and saving seems to he 'far more elastic than is ever
suspected under business-as-usual conditions'. His conclusion that 'a policy of selective
liquidation and withdrawal of foreign private investment' would be in the best interests
of Latin America would be endorsed by most dependency authors.
Where members of the dependency school part company from 'global law of value' Marxism and
from development economists (often their earlier selves) is in their rejection of an
undifferentiated conception of the 'historically progressive' role of capitalism, or of
modernization theory and in their emphasis on the nation state, but not in isolation,
rather set in the context of the global evolution of capitalism. From the development
economists they differed further because of their incorporation of a strong historical
dimension into their analysis; their endogenization of the state as 'the crucial
battleground between the different social groups' (Sunkel, 1979:29); and their use of a
dialectical rather than an equilibrium mode of analysis. This difference in approach is
reflected in the different set of questions addressed by them. The most important of these
questions, assumed away by 'modernization' development economists and by many orthodox
Marxists, is one of those raised by this volume: 'What are the special obstacles which
peripheral status, or relative technological backwardness, places in the way of the
generation of a cumulative' dynamic nationally focused process of capitalist
accumulation?*
The typical dependency answer to this question is, as already indicated, a gloomy one.
None is more gloomy than Gunder Frank, perhaps unfortunately the author who has come to
symbolize the dependency approach for readers outside Latin America. As Booth has pointed
out (Oxaal et al. 1975) Frank's analysis is less mechanistic and metropole-oriented
than is usually supposed, emphasizing 'the impregnation of the satellite's domestic
economy with the same capitalist structure and its fundamental contradictions' as more
important than 'the drain of economic surplus' from satellite to metropolis with which he
is usually associated (Frank, 1967:10). However, he remains strongly insistent on the
impossibility of capitalist development at the periphery: the
economic basis of a developmentalist national bourgeois class ... has been entirely
eliminated or prevented from forming at all, thus precluding further or future development
under capitalism .. short of socialist revolution, (Frank, 1978:10)
While critical of Frank, most of the more radical dependency authors
share his scepticism about the prospects for capitalist development at the periphery. For
*The question was never perhaps directly addressed at this level of
generality by the dependentisras. Much of their work was geographically localized and
historically circumscribed, but this is the general question implicit in that work. |
INTRODUCTION
5
example, Dos Santos (1973) would put more emphasis than does Frank on the elements within
a nation which determine the effects of international situations upon national reality and
on the assimilation of the national bourgeoisie by foreign capital in the role of
'dominated dominators' and less on the surplus drain. He also emphasizes the inability of
peripheral societies to develop a capital goods sector as a defining characteristic.
However, he would agree that capitalist development or at least 'autonomous' capitalist
development is not possible and that a socialist path offers the only escape for
peripheral societies.
Similar conclusions are reached via a different route by those who analyse the plight of
the periphery largely in terms of 'unequal exchange'. Thus Amin (1978) describes his
'peripheral model', based on low-wage exports and (in the consequent absence of an
internal mass market) on the production of luxury goods for internal demand, with 'new'
mechanisms of domination by transnational corporations superimposed; and regards it as a
'dead end' with no possibility of transition to a 'self-centred' system based on
production of mass-consumption and capital goods. He sees self-reliance, therefore, as a
necessary strategy for transition to socialism. Marini (1972:14) extends a similar
analysis to 'subimperialism' ( 'the form which dependent capitalism assumes upon reaching
the stage of monopolies and finance capital') in Brazil. In this case the low-wage exports
are of manufactured goods and the state takes an increasingly important role (in
conjunction with foreign capital), but the whole system is crucially dependent on the
superexploitation of labour. The successful pursuit of wage demands by urban and rural
workers would close all exits for capitalist development in Brazil'.
Perhaps the gloomiest vision belongs to the 'marginality' writers within the dependency
school, such as Quijano (1974) and Nun (1969). In their view, the new 'hegemonic'
monopolistic sectors are grafted on to, but not integrated with, the Latin American
production matrix, bringing it permanently to the verge of breakdown. They suggest that
competitive and monopoly capitalism are crucially different from each other, as far as
labour absorption possibilities are concerned. Under competitive capitalism, technical
change causes a fall in product price, which leads to a rise in demand for the product,
which leads in turn to a rise in the demand for labour. Under monopoly capitalism, on the
other hand, technical change does not result in a fall in price but partly in an increase
in profits, partly in an increase in wages, which encourages stagnation in the demand for
labour. Moreover, the fact that the labour force in the hegemonic sector is a
non-competing group breaks the link with wage determination. So surplus population, on
this analysis, is not a reserve but an excluded (and permanently excluded) labour force.
This 'marginalized' labour force or 'marginal mass' is a non-functional surplus
population-over and above what is necessary to perform a Marxian industrial-reserve-army
role. This is a profoundly pessimistic, even catastrophic, vision, not only questioning
the employment-generating performance of peripheral capitalism, but also |
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT denying its capacity to create a socially
and politically viable mode of production. The Caribbean dependency school is on the
whole less pessimistic about the possibilities of capitalist development, as long as the
plantation economy model is replaced by a localized or 'people's' capitalism which is able
to improve a national focus on accumulation. A notable exception is Thomas (1974) who
points to the divergence in the economic rationality of the colonial power and that of the
colony so that colonialism led to a separation of the pattern and growth of domestic
resource use from the pattern and growth of domestic demand; and to divergence between
domestic demand and the needs of the broad mass of the population. Even in the case of the
most successful small capitalist economies at the periphery, he sees no real possibility
of development ,beyond misleading rises in per capita income or indeed of even sustaining
such advances on a long-term basis... unless a comprehensive socialist strategy is
developed' (Thomas, 1974:106). He recognizes, however, in 'some of the larger economies'
the possibility of a national capitalist development of productive forces as a genuine
alternative to socialism.
Perhaps the most complex member of the dependency school, so critical in his more recent
writing of most of its conclusions as almost to place himself outside it, is Cardoso. Like
other dependentistas, he emphasizes the absence of capital goods and national
financial sectors, the partial and slow import of technology and penetration by foreign
enterprises as characteristics of dependency, which he defines as the situation 'when the
accumulation and expansion of capital cannot find its essential dynamic component within
the systems' (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979:xx). However, he sees the relationship between
national and international forces as forming
a complex whole whose structural links are not based on mere
external forms of exploitation and coercion, but are rooted in coincidences of interests
between local dominant classes and international ones and, on the other side, are
challenged by local dominated groups and classes. (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979:xvi)
Most important in the context of this volume, he therefore refuses to
place theoretical limits on national capitalist development at the periphery. He sees
dependent capitalism as capable of growth and of transforming social relations of
production, although not of resolving the employment and poverty problems of the majority
of the population. He insists, however, on the need to analyse particular situations
rather than to develop general theories:
We do not try to place theoretical limits on the probable course of
future events. These will depend, not on academic predictions, but on collective action
guided by political wills that make work what is structurally barely possible. (Cardoso
and Faletto: 175)
Sharing some of Cardoso's views but not his aversion to grand theory is
the |
INTRODUCTION
7
most influential Marxist' critic of the dependency approach, Bill Warren. Warren turns
Frankism on its head and suggests on the basis of 'empirical observations' that
the prospects for successful capitalist development implying industrialization, of a
significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good; that substantial
progress in capitalist industrialisation has already been achieved; that the period since
the Second World War has been marked by a major upsurge in capitalist social relations and
productive forces (especially industrialization) in the Third World; that in so far as
there are obstacles to this development, they originate not in current imperialist-Third
World relationships, but almost entirely from the internal contradictions of the Third
World itself; that the imperialist countries' policies and their overall impact on the
Third World actually favour its industrialisation; and that the ties of dependence binding
the Third World to the imperialist countries have been, and are being, markedly loosened,
with the consequence that the distribution of power within the capitalist world is
becoming less uneven. (Warren, 1973:3)
Among the 'internal contradictions' of underdeveloped countries which cause 'serious
problems' for their capitalist industrialization, Warren emphasizes, along with
agricultural stagnation, excessive urbanization and growing unemployment, the
"premature spread of socialism prior to the development of industrial capitalism'
(Warren, 1973:42).
Meanwhile a neo-classical backlash against the interventionist-protectionist approach to
development and industrialization has denied any validity to the 'special subject' of
development economics. The new conventional wisdom, found first in its purest form in
Little, Scitovsky and Scott (1970) and underlying most recent IMF and World Bank diagnoses
of 'what is wrong with country X', asserts the applicability of equilibrium economics and
centres on the evils of protectionism, which violates the principle of comparative
advantage and gives rise to distortions in domestic factor and product markets. 'Getting
factor prices right' is the central policy prescription of this school, which usually
means reducing the price of labour, raising that of capital and reducing the price of
domestic currency in terms of foreign currencies, along with a reduction in tariff rates
to a low and uniform level and a removal of quantitative import restrictions. In its more
sophisticated version, that of McKinnon (1973), an increase in the price of capital, as
part of a package of monetary, fiscal and trade liberalization policies, is seen as
opening up investment opportunities in 'fragmented economies', previously hidden by
indivisibilities in the pre-capitalist sector.
These are the debates which provide the context for this book's discussion-a discussion
which does not set out to establish or to defend a particular argument, or to justify a
particular strategy. It sets out to illustrate how different theoretical approaches
dealing with different concrete situations confront the problem of reconciling the
internal and the external, the national and the international as well as the economic and
the political spheres of reality. |
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
The unifying theme of the book is the focus on these questions, rather than on the
development of a common approach to them. The various theoretical approaches to
development must ultimately confront a common and a concrete problem, namely that of
accelerating the development of the material forces of production in today's developing
countries in a manner which is socially and politically beneficial to their populations,
and especially to the poorest 60 per cent.
The only purpose in studying these processes of social change is to allow them to be
influenced and shaped by people as social and political beings. Furthermore it is because
political intervention in the social process continues to be primarily determined at a
national level, that this must occupy a central position in our analysis. At the same time
the global system of material production and reproduction has now reached such a degree of
international complexity through ownership, commodity trade and technological and
financial links, that in so far as these political processes are determined, influenced or
constrained by the form of the material process of production, the possibility of
formulating or implementing a nationally defined set of policies is effectively
constrained. The task of development studies is to define the extent and the significance
of such constraints arising from different types and degrees of economic links with the
external world.
If the discussions which follow convey a message it is that an answer to such a question
can be given only in the particular since it depends crucially on three sets of
conditions: the physical and material circumstances of the country, including the size,
resources, location and climate; the social and political situation, including the way in
which productive ends are served and controlled, incomes are distributed and non-consumed
resources are allocated, and the form of state, the political process, and the ideological
perceptions of its population; and finally the nature of international economic and
political circumstances and their changes over time.
The case studies which follow are selected to cover a wide range of illustrative cases,
including some where the conflict between a national or an international rationality has
been virtually negligible over much of the 1970s (Ireland, Costa Rica); to others where
capitalist development, with extensive state involvement, has created the strongest basis
for an effective national bourgeois strategy (Japan, South Korea, Brazil); to yet others
where a similar market-oriented strategy led by a much weaker state, holds out little
promise of creating such a possibility in the foreseeable future (Kenya, India). At the
other end of the spectrum there are cases which have chosen to pursue a broadly socialist
strategy, providing for less room for the private ownership of productive assets. Their
degree of material success has varied largely with their capacity to mobilize their people
politically, and thence economically. They too have had to take continuing risks in
deciding first what levels and degrees of involvement with the international economy they
could accept or forgo, and |
INTRODUCTION
9
to pay a price for misjudging their capacity to sustain any particular set of links
without compromising the fundamental elements of their national policies.
But the issue which provides the critical background to these discussions concerns the
trends at the international level in the availability of finance and markets to different
types of economies. In this repect it may well be the case that the experience of the
1970s will be a bad guide to the 1980s because these conditions may well change
significantly. Already many developing countries have suffered major reverses in their
real levels of consumption per head; in many real wages have fallen dramatically and GDP
growth has simply come to mean increasing production for export in a desperate and often
futile bid to close a widening trade gap.
In the coming decade the question of whether or not a nation has built a substantial
nationally based economic and political structure may come to be of the greatest
significance, because the choice will often polarize into one where a shrinking minority
may try to defend its old standards of living by an increasingly repressive exploitation
of the few internationally saleable commodities over which they have control, or in which
they maybe moved to a more self-reliant' and nationally-oriented strategy by the realities
of the international market but at the cost of a significant reduction in the living
standards of those in the modern sector.
In short, whatever lessons one may draw from the experience analysed in the
following chapters, it must be recognized that these reflect the 1970s and not the 1980s.
These are likely to provide a much harsher environment where the need for national
strategies will increase dramatically as far as the poorest 60 per cent are concerned, but
where at the same time the possibility of such national strategies is likely to decline
-if necessary through armed intervention if recent signals are to be believed.
It seems to us as a result at least unwise and probably disastrous to extrapolate certain
excessively optimistic interpretations of the experience of certain developing countries
in the 1970s into the 1980s, and to put central emphasis on export promotion drives. Even
though a very few might still have this option, their numbers are currently shrinking, and
some who think they have already succeeded via this role may well face a rude awakening in
the coming decade. In the final analysis capitalism's ability to disperse material
benefits to the spatial and social fringes of society is centrally related to its capacity
to create conditions of full employment, and it is just that capacity which has been
called into question in the 1970s and which is most unlikely to be restored in the 1980s,
Japan, South Korea and Singapore serving merely as the exceptions which prove the rule.
Under these circumstances an effective national policy is one which is able to integrate
the internationally competitive part of its economy into the international market in a
manner which does not impede politically or economically its capacity simultaneously to
create a national economic context |
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
which allows the full mobilization of all remaining productive resources according to the
principles of comparative advantage, as nationally applied. Since such a process will have
an impact on the pattern of imports it must be combined with a degree of trade management
which effectively recognizes the current and prospective impossibility of achieving full
employment on the theoretically optimal basis of achieving international competitive
states for all available resources. Under these circumstances the importance of effective
and strong state control over central parts of the material base of the economy, including
finance and industry, emerges as a critical requirement for the formulation of such
policies. The only exceptions are a few, very small economies which can exploit locational
and other advantages to a sufficient degree. Such a strategy is necessarily precarious and
extremely 'dependent'; it may nevertheless objectively be the best available option.
Of course such national and state control may be a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for the pursuit of a policy to serve the long-term interests of its population.
That will finally depend on the political situation and on the extent to which choices
made at the political level can be effectively implemented at the material base of the
society. Country Cases
In effect, the relevance of this book's chapters to these debates rests
not in any appeal to ideological first principles, nor in an exploration of the inner
logic of the competing theories, nor in the marshalling of cross-sectional data from a
wide range of countries. The attempt, rather, is to learn from the historical experience
of political economies of various types at different stages in their industrialization
process, against the background of the evolving international context. To try to derive
generalizable conclusions from such case studies is, we recognize, to cross a
methodological minefield, but to reach such conclusions without an analysis of country
experience and prospects is even more dangerous.
Before considering the recent experiences of different types of developing countries, the
chapters which follow give some thought to the way in which these issues presented
themselves in an earlier and essentially different historical context. Hence the chapter
on Britain's early industrialization provides an introduction to and summary of the
extensive and often heated debate about the relative importance of foreign trade in
Britain's rapid growth from the mid-eighteenth century. It illustrates rightly the
importance both of Britain's access to global markets, as a means of releasing
bottlenecks, and of freeing the rhythm of expansion from its otherwise inexorable links
with agricultural growth, as the physiocrats so eloquently demonstrated. It also provided
a stimulus for investment and for a relatively greater degree of specialization than would
otherwise have been possible.
At the same time it places these things firmly in perspective by emphasizing |
INTRODUCTION
11
that for Britain these things were factors which ecouraged and stimulated a nationally
based process of growth and investment. The state, having established a unified market and
a liberal domestic investment climate, having provided an infrastructure in transport and
finance, and having established various central industries, especially in textiles,
through extremely nationalistic and protectionist measures, soon found itself in a
position where its technological capabilities no longer required such assistance, a point
of which it was finally convinced when the industrialization of the newly independent
United States, made possible by its new and widely used freedom to protect its industries,
created a boom in Great Britain, and not the disaster so widely feared and predicted.
The implication which arises from this should warn against the common pedantic discussions
of whether the industrialization of Britain was caused by its access to external markets,
or in a slightly amended version whether Britain's imperial dominance consisted of access
to markets, or capital export as some other specific objective. But such questions are
aimed at unreasonable straw men for the real issue is to consider the extent to which the
external environment provided a complement and a stimulus to the internal process of
accumulation, so that imperialism refers to an unequal relationship in which a dominant
power can manipulate (to a degree) the terms of a relationship to suit its ever-changing
and politically defined requirements. In this sense Britain's ability to gain access to
raw material imports, to markets and to finance by virtue of its growing maritime
dominance emerges clearly enough.
But Thomson's chapter also points to the undeniable fact that these advantages are seized
by a process which is nationally based and which is in turn transformed by this
connection, it also emphasizes the limits imposed on Britain's use of that advantage, and
suggests that in this sense 'the nature of Britain's industrialisation... was unique and
thus provides little basis for direct comparison's for currently industrializing countries
because Britain's problem in its relationship with the external world at that time was the
exact opposite of that facing underdeveloped countries today. If theirs derives from the
extent to which they lag behind already industrialized nations, Britain's lay in
the extent to which it was ahead of other economies, so that the limited extent of
external technological development eventually constrained the growth of the British
economy. In sharp contrast later industrializers are faced with a bewildering array of
technologies the relative capital intensity of which fosters the generation of surplus
labour, which is less readily eased by the possibility of massive permanent emigration
like that from Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century although international labour
flows have increased in the past decade. The really crucial difference however, is rightly
emphasized by Thomson, which is that Britain's problem in overseas trade lay in the high
price and limited availability of imports, whereas underdeveloped countries today
face enormous difficulty in developing internationally competitive exports, |
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THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT which would provide them access to the technology they need
to attain that competitiveness. Thus Britain's industrialization was unique for two
reasons: ' the fact that the means for achieving economic growth were so restricted-this
was the basic cause of Britain's industrialisation being gradual and widely-based; and the
fact that Britain's advance was so solitary'.
Perhaps more often than Britain and other early industrializers Japan is taken as
a point of reference by those concerned with underdeveloped countries today. Not
unnaturally they raise the question of whether others can emulate Japan hecause,as
Bronfenbrenner puts it at the beginning of Chapter 3, 'Japan remains the outstanding if
not the only case of sustained economic growth under capitalism by a non-European country
without European colonization, and without unhealthy or paralytic dependence on the West'.
Bronfenbrenner is sceptical about the relevance of Japan's early industrialization
experience for Third World development strategists today. He bases this scepticism not on
arguments that 'the Japanese are different' but on four main differences in circumstances:
(i) the advantage of domestically-maintained peace and tranquillity, enjoyed by Meiji
Japan, is not shared by today's developing countries; (ii) Japan, he suggests had freer
access to the most important Northern and Western markets; (iii) Japan did not suffer from
'the revolution of rising expectations' which leads to a refusal to accept increasing
inequality in internal income distribution as the price of growth, and finally (iv) the
influence of various development theories has not yet led ruling groups in the Third World
to blame their countries' plight on imperialism and colonialism and to seek
'quasi-reparations' in the form of aid and concessionary loans from the West to finance
levels of wages, technologies and social welfare institutions in advance of levels of
development.
One could, of course, interpret these same points in a somewhat different manner. First,
one might say that most of these conditions seem to have been reproduced in South Korea.
Second one might stress that the validity of the belief in trickle down and hence the
value of a willingness to forgo 'rising expectations', and the likelihood that 'peace and
tranquillity' can be maintained depends on whether or not an effective, national process
of accumulation and growth is set in motion as a result. Finally, while it may be true
that the early Japanese leaders did not entertain foolish hopes with respect to the
benefits they might obtain from Western charity, they were inordinately and acutely aware
of the damage which they thought that imperialism and colonialism had done to other,
neighbouring states which led them to formulate policies from such a singularly
single-minded and coherent national perspective. Indeed this emerges clearly in the rest
of Bronfenbrenner's discussion of the particular features of Japanese policy. One might
add that many of these features have survived to the present day, so that even today Japan
is characterized by a marked nationalism in its financial structure, its trade patterns,
its investment policies and its treatment of direct foreign investment. |
INTRODUCTION
13
Bronfenbrenner's scepticism about the value of the Japanese experience as a model seems to
us to be overdone. The 'six basic decisions' that he identifies as a necessary condition
of Japan's success are at least of interest to later industrializers. These are the
decisions: (i) to centralize the Japanese government and economy; (ii) to transform the samurai
into a class of businessmen and financiers to act as managers and entrepreneurs in
conjunction with an activist state; which (iii) pursued a single-minded and effective
programme of acquiring existing foreign technologies by, among other things, setting up
pilot plants; and (iv) financing investment in industrial enterprises; (v) to build up an
extensive national education system, including a network of technical schools and
colleges; and (vi) the postponement of military adventures, though it must be said that
developments after the turn of the century would suggest that this may have been purely an
acceptance of relative weakness.
Particularly interesting in the context of our preoccupation with the interaction between
the national and the international is Bronfenbrenner's stress on the care with which the
Japanese state made use of inputs from abroad. Thus, the Meiji state selected
and hired foreign experts on short-term bases and always subordinate to native Japanese
executives. They selected ... Japanese students for foreign training, and financed this
training themselves. They imported capital equipment, either to be used as imported for
production or as models for modification.
This, combined with its hostility to Western imperialism and its
minimal use of foreign loans, also emphasized by Bronfenhrenner, suggests that the answer
to his final rhetorical question may not be as straightforward as he implies. Certainly,
the fact that Japan was not extensively colonized would have prevented Meiji statesmen
claiming that 'they are rich because we are poor' but their actions indicate
absolutely clearly that they believed Japan would remain poor amid weak if it allowed its
pattern of development to be determined by 'them'. This does not, of course, make Japan a
'model' for mechanical application, but it illustrates the importance which was, and is,
attached by Japan to the establishment of political and economic conditions which would
allow the formulation and implementation of a national development strategy. That lesson
seems to retain considerable relevance, though the possibilities of heeding it vary widely
over time and space, and the desirability of heeding it in its Japanese political form
must be judged not merely in terms of the material wealth it produced, but also in terms
of its potential for conflict.
The very different experience of China before 1949 is useful for
putting the lessons of Japanese experience' in perspective. White argues in Chapter 4 that
the Kuomintang state (in contrast to that of Meiji Japan) was too weak -'poli |
14
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
tically divided, administratively incompetent and socio-economically regressive' -to
enable China to follow the Japanese path to capitalist development. Given this weakness,
exacerbated by international intervention, his view is that capitalist development in
China would have taken a dependent and distorted form, with foreign dominance of key
sectors, an uneasy coexistence of an urban bourgeoisie and a conservative landed class, an
enclave pattern of unevenly distributed industrialization resulting in massive migration,
rural stagnation and urban overcrowding, massive inequality and exploitation, and
pervasive corruption.
Underlying this conclusion is the fact that White, like the Meiji rulers of Japan,
attaches great importance to external factors as a constraint on earlier Chinese
development. He points out that after a hundred years of foreign economic penetration
China had little of the substance of economic development; that such pockets of economic
progress as did exist were dominated by foreign economic concerns and directed towards
foreign interests; and that the political impact of foreign domination has been
particularly debilitating. The only 'positive' contribution of imperialism was a
dialectical one-
to start a process in China which culminated in its own destruction-it changed the
constellation of social, economic and political forces within the country and instilled
the faith among Chinese across a wide political spectrum that the only way to achieve
national regeneration was to create a counter-state capable of destroying foreign
dominance.
White's counterfactual picture of what Chinese capitalism would have looked like in the
absence of the 1949 revolution finds echoes in Byres' description of actual capitalist
development in India, whose 'crisis of accumulation' he relates more to its
historical roots and to the internal processes of class formation, in town and country,
than to current external pressures. Nevertheless he echoes Bronfenbrenner when he suggests
that the crisis is exacerbated by aid, which takes pressure off the state to mobilize
resources domestically, and by private foreign investment, which has contributed to an
upsurge of growth in luxury industries-presumably to meet the 'rising expectations' of
certain classes at least-and in the process has imparted an excessive degree of
capital-intensity to industry, thus reducing employment creation and intensifying the
'structural stasis' of the Indian economy.
Some readers may question the use of terms such as 'crisis' and 'stasis' to describe an
industrial sector which has grown at an annual average rate of around 6 per cent since
1947 and which contains a wide range of basic and capital goods industries, sophisticated
by most Third World standards. Byres' case rests on the slowing down in the rate of
industrial growth since 1965 (to around 4 per cent per year) and on the 'inadequate
development' of the capital-goods (particularly machine tools) and oil industries.
Comparing India |
INTRODUCTION
15
unfavourably with China, he suggests that 'she continues to labour under the constraint
upon her industrial growth imposed by her inability to manufacture her own machinery and
equipment' and quotes Dasgupta's verdict that the oil 'exploration programme has always
been half-hearted, unimaginative and lopsided'. He points out also that India's industrial
growth has had no impact on the structure of the working population and that the
proportion of the male labour force in agriculture was the same in 1971 as it had been in
1881.
With regard to internal processes of class formation Byres suggests an ascendancy of the
commercial over the manufacturing bourgeoisie and of a domination of medium/smaller scale
capital by a monopoly capital which veers towards financial manipulation rather than
productive performance. In this context, he argues, the state has not been successful in
playing the catalytic role in industrialization assigned to it by an urban bourgeoisie
conscious of its own weakness and suggests that it is its failure to generate rapid
accumulation by major investments in capital goods industries which is of greater
significance than the existing narrowness of the home market.
The experience and trajectory of the Brazilian economy is of particular interest
for our discussion because in this case a large economy which had built a substantial
industrial base through a nationalist import substitution strategy, shifted sharply
towards a more internationally oriented strategy, though with continuing extensive state
participation in the economy. In Chapter 6 Andrade analyses this process of
internationalization of the economy which was accompanied by rapid growth. He finds it
difficult to give an unambiguous answer to the crucial question of the medium-term
viability of this process. He lists the pressures building up in the Brazilian
economy-monopolization, the absence of research and development, foreign indebtedness,
income concentration, maintenance of traditional structures in rural areas, mushrooming
cities etc-and recognizes them as liabilities'. He also realizes clearly that for the
poorest 50 per cent of the population the rapid growth which was achieved produced few if
any benefits. But at the same time he points out that, from the point of view of capital
accumulation,
these liabilities can be turned into assets. Deep internationalization can mean that
returns to foreign capital become more and more dependent upon the expansion of the
internal market. Heavy unemployment or semi-employment can keep wages low and unions weak.
Traditional agriculture can be a source of cheap food. Income concentration can soothe the
middle classes. Heavy external indebtedness can trigger off big new investment projects
which otherwise would not be considered, and so on.
As for the future, Andrade foresees a five-pronged survival strategy for Brazil's 'savage
capitalism': the capitalization of the primary sector, both in agriculture and mining,
with the heavy participation of MNCs; the development of energy, armaments, roads and
communications programmes; the consolidation of the motor-vehicle industry; the
substitution of alcohol for oil |
16
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
as a source of fuel; and an expansion of commercial relations with other Latin American,
African and socialist countries. He concludes by suggesting that Brazil may be entering a
new phase in which external factors become relatively more important, owing to foreign
control of oil and technology and to the growing importance of investment decisions
related to multinational strategies rather than to the internal market. He points to
growing social and political strains which suggest that, while capitalist expansion may
continue, it will be accompanied by continued political and economic instability.
In the context of our general discussion, Brazil illustrates the extent to which an
internationally oriented capitalism can under certain national and international
circumstances produce extremely rapid growth while yielding few if any benefits to the
poorest half of the population and while having a most ambiguous effect on the economic
and the political bases required to formulate and implement those strategies required to
establish the longer term strength and competitiveness of the country. It is not hard to
show that the policies of the past fifteen years have not served the interests of the
poorest half of the population. Whether they will serve their interests in future, as
trickle-down theories would suggest, must he deemed highly uncertain in view both of
internal and of international developments.
If our underlying question is posed in terms of emulating Japan, many would choose South
Korea as the capitalist peripheral economy with the best chance of success in this
respect. In Chapter 7 Michell asks whether, indeed, Korea can be regarded as a vision of
the future for labour surplus economies. He questions the conventional view of the
overwhelming importance of manufactured exports to Korea's success, allied with a
responsive government strongly committed to growth, a highly educated and well-motivated
labour force-and little else. Certainly the Korean experience shows how a densely
populated country, with little agricultural potential, few natural resources except its
well-disciplined population and a close relationship with Japan and the US, more than
tripled its income per head in seventeen years, to $776 in 1978, growing rapidly in the
easy circumstances of the international economy before 1973 and continuing to do so in the
less easy circumstances thereafter, at least until 1979.
However, Michell suggests that anyone seeking to use the Korean experience as an easily
applicable general model should consider the following questions.
Would a government be prepared to risk a high rate of inflation through the type of
financial policies used in Korea? Indeed, was the controllability of this inflation
dependent on the underlying stability of international raw material prices during the
1960s? Could a country with a banking system in private hands achieve the sort of
investment required in Korea? How could a docile labour force evolve in a society without
neo-confucian traditions? Would the labour force accept a generation of sacrifice in order
to achieve growth? Given that Koreans only adopted the export of |
INTRODUCTION
17
manufactures faute de mieux could other countries be persuaded to adapt to the
realities of export-led growth? Is not the Korean achievement to have walked the line
precisely between the Scylla of autarchy and the Charybdis of multinational domination?
Moreover, for all its success so far, Michell emphasizes the difficult transition faced by
Korea in the 1980s -from cheap-labour-based to technology-based industrialization. He
points to the danger, for an economy as large as Korea, of a 'medium-level equilibrium
trap'. When citizens demand better houses, their cars require better roads and everyone
needs better education, can a country such as Korea sustain the levels of investment
needed to satisfy all these areas when ICORs in industry also need to rise fast? As he
says, confrontation with this question will ensure continued interest in Korea's
experience during the 1980s.
In general it is the cohesiveness, the pervasiveness, the effectiveness and the
deep-rooted nationalism of the Korean state's economic involvement, as expressed in its
policies on direct foreign investment, technology or investment which is evocative of the
Japanese experience. It is further its capacity to push this process of state capitalist
accumulation to the point of labour scarcity and the consequent diffusion of material
benefits throughout most of the society which made it analytically and politically so
important. For South Korea the question is whether under changing international conditions
and with rising real wages it can sustain that dynamism. If it can then the social and
political benefits which a full employment capitalism can deliver will be feasible. If it
cannot, it may well generate dangerous and explosive social and political conflict.
At this point the discussion turns to the very small economies' attempts to find a small
niche in the international economy. Rodriguez argues in Chapter 8 that Costa Rica, given
its particular circumstances, has not done badly out of its dependent integration as a
tiny primary producer into the international capitalist system. He argues that this was
probably the most progressive option available in that an attempt at socialist
transformation would have entailed higher costs for labour, given the smallholder
production of export crops, the liberal/democratic nature of the state, the relative
absence of repression as a means of political control, and the degree of external
opposition which any socialist struggle would have confronted. However, he recognizes that
Costa Rica is at a crossroads. The current recession is emphasizing the vulnerability of a
small economy dependent on a few primary products for its foreign exchange, while the
investment opportunities arising from the easy stage of import substitution are exhausted.
Under these circumstances he identifies three political options, broadly corresponding to
some of the competing theories discussed above. Costa Rican 'liberals' are promoting the
neo-classical prescription of 'getting factor prices right'; the radicals argue that
disengagement from the international capitalist system is a necessary basis for a
transition |
18
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
to socialism; while the social democrats, in the spirit of the old development economists,
emphasize the need to increase state intervention to maintain accumulation and to generate
employment. If the 1980s really do turn out to be a period of greater conflict and
uncertainty the integrationist alternative is likely to be more problematic and more
risky, and the effective democratic social control of the country's resources is likely to
be more desirable than ever. The trouble is that what is desirable may not be attainable,
but the answer to what is attainable is not a matter for academic analysis, but for
political struggle by those directly concerned. Ireland may
seem to be in a rather different category from the other peripheral economies considered
in this book, because of its membership of the EEC, its social characteristics and its
level of income per head. However, as Coughlan's Chapter 9 makes clear, it faces problems
which are similar to those faced by other peripheral economies relying on foreign capital
and manufactured exports as the motor for economic growth. In Ireland, too, these
outward-looking policies have produced growth and a substantial industrial base, and
although it is questionable whether Ireland could have done better with any alternative,
and feasible, strategy, it is equally true that future uncertainty is increased by its
consequent crucial dependence on continuing capital injections by foreign-owned firms; on
the state's capacity to carry the debts it has assumed in implementing its present
policies; and on its ability to make the transition from an industrialization strategy
based largely on relatively cheap labour to one based on higher technology and skills. In
its favour are its political stability, its widely respected and efficient Industrial
Development Authority and its location within the EEC. Against it are its relatively
feeble efforts at establishing a stronger technical base in key sectors, the world
recession and intensified competition in the markets for manufactured exports, the
enlargement of the EEC to include Greece, Spain and Portugal, and the relatively limited
impact of the very rapid export-led growth of the 1960s and 1970s on Irish employment and
income per head. In the final analysis the external dependence of an
economy like Ireland's is unavoidable, but the form and the degree of it is nevertheless
of great importance if only because it largely determines the way in which the country is
able to respond to future economic changes, even though there is no way it could avoid
being strongly affected by these.
In Chapter 10 Godfrey explores the controversy about the role of the
national bourgeoisie in Kenya. Is that bourgeoisie, with its roots in the
pre-colonial past, moving increasingly into manufacturing, as some claim, and defining a
nationally oriented strategy separate from that of international capital? Or is it a class
essentially in alliance with foreign capital and no serious threat to it? While it is true
that the number of Kenyan capitalists is increasing and that they are continually moving
into new sectors of activity, it is unlikely that this group represents a 'national
bourgeoisie' with a 'progressive' role. |
INTRODUCTION
19
Hence, the real political question for Kenya's people in the 1980s is: 'Is an alternative
pattern historically possible which would expand Kenyan productive forces faster, with
lesser costs in terms of the current living standards of the masses?' This question in
turn reduces to one partly of the prospects for Kenyan capitalism and partly of the nature
of the alternative. Prospects, crucially dependent on the success of the new strategy of
export-led manufacturing growth (Kenya, unlike Costa Rica, is no longer at a crossroads),
are judged to be poor. 'Costs in terms of the current living standards of the masses' of
the existing pattern of Kenyan development are not regarded as negligible. And Leys'
suggestion that the likely alternative is a strategy 'labelled socialist, put
forward by the petty bourgeoisie, involving 'state socialism' in industry and trade along
lines already broadly charted in Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania' is judged to be neither as
self-evident as Leys assumes nor as self-evidently less preferable. The populism of the
current Kenyan government is seen as having its limits, but the crucial question of
whether it represents the limit of what is 'historically possible' as an alternative to
the existing pattern has hardly been touched on in the Kenyan development debate so far.
In some sense the Tanzanian case raises a similar question to that of Kenya. Is
there a realistic alternative to the current policy, or alternatively can the present
state sustain a process of accumulation sufficiently dynamic to combine growth with
equity, while coping with the massive current fluctuations in the international economy?
The chapter on Tanzania shows that country's mass-based ruling Party moving towards a
self-reliance strategy, in response to the contradictions and limits of an initial
market-oriented strategy. This response was designed to increase its effective control
over the nation's material and political affairs, and it was consolidated by blocking the
various avenues by which private capital sought to exercise direct and indirect political
influence. However, the attempt to stimulate a more dynamic and coherent resource
mobilization under difficult political and economic circumstances bureaucratized the Party
and eroded its political base in a dangerous manner.
Even though the general performance of the economy has been far from disastrous, a major
foreign exchange crisis has, from the mid-1970s, deepened the system's political and
economic contradictions. Hence in spite of the fact that in some respects the leadership
has demonstrated considerable flexibility and responsibility in its response to these
developments, the combined drought, war, and administrative and political weakness have
produced a very deep crisis in 1980/81. Even so the chapter concludes that the problems
and shortcomings of Tanzania's efforts at greater self-reliance are neither such that they
totally invalidate the strategy, nor can they be ignored by believers in such alternatives
by the simple expedient of denying the existence of such a strategy in Tanzania. Rather, a
sympathetic evaluation of the experience must accept |
| 20
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT that in many respects the problems
experienced represent central contradiclions associated with such strategies, though
naturally to varying degrees. This still permits the conclusion that a more self-reliant
strategy has much to recommend it for countries like Tanzania, and indeed that it may be
the best realistically available alternative for most Tanzanians, particularly in the
international circumstances most likely to prevail in the coming decade. Unfortunately the
difficulties encountered over the past six years may by now have created political
conditions which may have undermined the political foundations of the policy to such a
degree that it has itself ceased to be a feasible alternative. In that event, whatever
some leftists may dream of, the forces that will exert power will be those that
effectively represent international capital's interests.
Finally the book turns to North Korea, the case with the most
comprehensive and nationalist state involvement in its economy. Elsewhere Foster-Carter
has elaborated the point made by White in Chapter 12 that North Korean Juche corresponds
closely to the strategy proposed for the transition to socialism by the radical Caribbean
dependency economist, Clive Thomas (1974), which aims at 'converging resource use and
demand' and 'converging needs with demand'. White judges that the North Koreans have done
a 'creditable job' in combining rapid development with a high degree of autonomy, while
avoiding being tied to the international political economies of socialism or capitalism
but trying to use the opportunities offered by each. As he says, 'these are remarkable
achievements for a small country confronted by a hostile or suspicious West and a divided
East'. At the same time he emphasizes the problems and costs of that process: the negative
side of the intense political mobilization; and, in the economy, the planning rigidities,
microeconomic inefficiences and waste, and problems with quality, incentives and meeting
consumer demands. The difficulties involved in attempting to expand links with the
capitalist world market, which was deemed necessary towards the end of the 1970s, are also
underlined. Once again this case draws attention to the importance of a strong state and a
united nation; to the importance of emphasizing domestic demand and dynamic comparative
advantage as the bases of economic strategy, and to the need for the careful and skilful
use of external resources to boost self-reliant development, without undermining the
coherence of national policy. There are clear parallels here with the points that he makes
about post-revolution China in Chapter 4, parallels which extend to the fact that in both
the North Korean and Chinese cases the early very high degrees of national self-reliance
have emerged as temporary phases leading to a reopening of contacts with the international
economy at later stages, but from positions of greater relative strength from which to
control the forms and the consequences of that interaction. |
INTRODUCTION
21
By Way of a Conclusion To policy-makers and to those responsible
for making effective decisions about the allocation of material resources it may seem
banal and obvious to conclude such a discussion by stressing the absence of general
solutions, and their specificity as to time, place and class or social group. But this
does not mean that each case is unique, or that simple commonsense at the project level is
a sufficient basis for decisions. Indeed there is nothing more subject to universalistic
fashions than the prevailing commonsense about some current problem, and in any case an
advance in our understanding does not lie in asserting one level of reality over another,
or one level of abstraction over another, but rather in uniting these in a fruitful and
effective manner. Indeed as social and economic structures become more complex and more
independent the need to understand any particular concrete case within its broader social,
economic and political context become ever greater. Hence the problem of changing any
specific concrete reality must be addressed at many levels simultaneously and frequently
appropriate choices at every level will be a necessary condition for success, even though
no one of them will be sufficient for success.
In focusing on the national/international connection we have not therefore asserted it
above all others in importance. We do suggest that it is an increasingly important issue
as the complexity of the international economy grows and thereby calls into question the
modern nation state as the effective political sphere within which the terms and
conditions of social and economic relationships are primarily defined, It is our
contention that the extent to which that change proceeds is itself a willing or unwilling
result of the choices made within particular nation states by various actors, and that the
future economic and political consequences of these choices are of the greatest importance
because they will fundamentally affect the degree of effective social and political
control which can in future be exerted over the material process of production by those in
control of a particular state. Unfortunately the choice is as complex as it is important.
Given the inevitable uncertainty of the future, the basic objective of any national policy
aiming at the long-term standard of living of the mass of the population must be to
increase its productive capacity and its flexibility by raising levels of skills and by
strengthening the society's technological base. At the same time it must create the
material and the political conditions which allow such policies to continue to he
formulated and implemented.
The dilemma lies in the difficulty of reconciling the acquisition and use of external
finance and technology with these objectives and here the net balance swings one way or
the other in accordance with changes in a number of critical factors. The importance of a
specific nationalist policy changes with: the size of |
22
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
the economy and hence the extent of the external and dynamic economies to be attained; the
coherence and administrative capacity of the state, which will determine the likelihood
that any such potential will actually be realized; the degree of external hostility with
which such efforts are met; and finally, the intensity of competitive pressure existing in
the international markets for technology and machinery, and hence the volume and terms of
the availability of international finance.
The effective pursuit of such a national policy should eventually actually increase rather
than decrease the rate at which external technologies and finance are effectively
acquired, while complementing and accelerating the domestic development of such
capabilities.
Such nationalist policies can he combined with different forms of ownership of the means
of production but they do necessarily require an inhibition of the freedom of individuals
to use their resources as they wish in the international sphere so that attempts to pursue
such strategies in the context of the extensive private ownership of resources must
include some effective controls over international capital flows (and the political basis
for sustaining these against the potential opposition of private capitalists). In addition
the state must either have the capacity directly to implement major strategic long-term
infrastructural industrial and technological/educational projects and have a degree of
control over 'private capitalists' to induce them to act in the spirit of such a
nationalist policy or, to put it differently, to induce them to define their own long-term
interests as national capitalists, even if their actual activities should extend beyond
the nation's borders. In this sense the case studies reflect the degree
to which the objective material benefits to be derived from 'nationalist' policies will
vary over space and time. Beyond this, political correlates of these choices are more
complex than is often supposed. Hence a state controlled effectively by private capitalist
interests may under highly restricted circumstances (strategic importance in terms of raw
materials or labour or both, strategic, favourable international circumstances) generate a
pattern and a pace of accumulation which generates effective labour scarcity and leads to
a diffusion of material benefits and may even allow for some liberalization of the
political process because it does represent the material interests of the mass of the
population to a significant and possibly in the short term even to the best possible
extent. In very small economies this may happen even if this private capital operates
effectively from an international perspective. In larger economies it requires a strong
state capable of imposing a national focus on this process of accumulation.
It would also appear, however, that the conditions which allow such a reconciliation of
the material interests of capital and labour are unstable and impermanent. As the
conditions for sustaining full employment are eroded social polarization, political
repression and international conflicts emerge which will normally combine to transform
that mutuality of interests into a |
INTRODUCTION
23
fundamental antagonism. In the relatively stronger economies this may actually reinforce
the nationalism of capital, although in the absence of full employment it is more likely
to be associated with fascism. In the weaker economies it is more likely to lead to 'save
himself who can', involving the abandonment of all effective efforts to build a national
base of accumulation and the escape of individual capitals into closer co-operation with,
or subservience to, various dominant international capitals.
In any event most such forms of
development, even under favourable conditions, produce a type of growth which is not in
the material interests of the mass of the population, though clearly in the interests of
certain dominant classes or groups, which often include some sections of skilled labour.
Furthermore, in most of these the promise that trickle down will eventually justify the
suffering involved for the bottom 60 per cent is as empty as it is cynical.
Unfortunately, when a state comes to free itself from the domination of private capitalist
interest as exercised through control of the ideological or the political spheres and
backed up by control of the material means of production, there is no guarantee that such
a state will represent the interest of its population as a whole. There is unfortunately
no self-evident set of practices which serve some homogeneous interest of 'workers and
peasants', quite apart from the issue of a separate bureaucratic interest which may or may
not come to dominate in such a situation. In such a context the
questions of what risks should be taken with respect to foreign involvement, or
urban/rural relations, of the commensuration of effort and reward, of sustaining a common
commitment while also eliciting individual effort and initiative, of achieving a level of
current restraint in consumption which permits a rapid rate of accumulation without
thereby undermining the political foundations of the policy, provide plenty of scope for
conflict and even for failure.
For all that, the record of such strategies in the developing world is such that for the
poorest 60 per cent the struggle for control of the state must still be a priority. The
hope that global full employment will diffuse material benefits to them automatically is
more forlorn now than it has been for some time. On the other hand the idea that gaining
political control of the state is to open the door to unambiguous policies emerging from
some permanent consensus emanating from the total political involvement of the masses in a
sort of perpetual cultural revolution is an unrealistic picture produced by the
hyperactive imaginations of people who have not had a great deal of responsibility for
co-ordinating complex processes of production, requiring a vital concrete and measurable
output at a time when it is needed for further reproduction. Such systems must work with a
degree of hierarchy, a degree of direction, a degree of compulsion even. These are things
to be traded off against a different set of costs and benefits, differently distributed
among social classes under different forms of |
24
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
social and economic organization. It is for people to make such choices. It is for
analysis to provide as clear an idea as is possible concerning their most likely
implications and consequences. We hope this volume contributes to that task. References
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