Re: Andre Gunar Frank & Marx

At 01:45 AM 10/31/1999 -0500, Jim Blaut wrote:

>Jeffrey, you speak of Warren's "attempt to defend the Leninist  position
>that imperialism has had a positive impact on development in the South,"
>but you've got it all wrong. Lenin was the original source of most modern
>thinking -- dependency, Marxist, and, yes, worldsystemist -- that
>imperialism DID NOT have a "positive impact" on the underdeveloped world. 
>Cheerfully
>
>Jim Blaut
>jblaut@uic.edu   
>
>


Read Warren's _Imperialism:  Pioneer of Capitalism_.  Read Robert Gilpin's _War and Change in World Politics_.  Read just about any of the books I mentioned to George, especially Brewer and Blomstrom and Hettne.  You will find that there is a great deal of complexity in Lenin, and that his position is open to various interpretations.  (Much of the following material occurs in my master's thesis, cited below).  

Warren and other so-called _paleo-Marxists_ take the position I described, namely, that Lenin and other early Marxists saw imperialism as a force for development in the South.  Gilpin's work attributes to both Marx and Lenin the view that "trade and investment between advanced economies and less advanced economies tend to favor and develop the latter" (Gilpin 1981, 142). This is so even though other passages from Lenin's work suggest that he was not unaware of imperialism's negative consequences for developing countries.  See, e.g., Lenin's discussion of the effect of capitalist development on traditional handicraft industries in Russia in _The Development of Capitalism in Russia_ (1899).  Finally, in _Imperialism_ (n.d., 89) Lenin argues that finance capital and trusts dominating international trade were aggravating the differences in the rate of development of different parts of the world economy--developing the colonies and independent and semi-independent states of Asia and America _more_ quickly than was the case in Europe.  In this Lenin followed Marx, who said in a widely cited passage from _Capital_ (1867) that because of the laws of capitalist development "working with iron necessity toward inevitable results. . .[t]he country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future" (McClellan 1977, 416).

Leninist orthodoxy, as interpreted by Communists until the appearance of neo-Marxism in the 1950s, held that countries _must_ proceed through capitalist development before becoming socialist.  Lenin himself insisted on this point in his debate with the Narodniks (Russian agrarian revolutionaries) prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.  Communist parties in the developing world, certainly in Latin America, interpreted this as implying that their task was to support capitalist development as a means of establishing the "objective conditions" for socialist revolution.  Unfortunately for them, this reduced them to political quietism (Blomstrom and Hettne 1984).  Furthermore, neo-Marxists like Baran and Sweezey, along with their close intellectual kin Andre Gunder Frank, analyzed the situation of developing countries in ways that suggested capitalist development could simply not occur because of the integration of developing countries into the capitalist world system.

The upshot?  Neomarxism begat dependency theory which challenged Leninist orthodoxy.  The challenge of dependency theory and its North American offspring, world-system theory provoked Marxists attempts to either defend Leninist orthodoxy (Warren and the paleo-Marxists) or attempts to refine its analysis to explain the empirical situation in which 20th century developing countries found themselves (Kay's work and the "mode of production" school).  

The relationship of world-system theory and other strands of thought alleged by Jim to be "modern" is a controversial question.  There is room for lots of different interpretations of both Lenin and Marx, in no small measure because they both wrote so much over such an extended period of time that their thoughts on any particular issue had plenty of time and ink in which to develop and (gasp!) change.

REFERENCES

Beatty, Jeffrey Lee.  "A kind of revolution:  domestic political consequences of international trade."  Masters thesis, Iowa State University, 1988.

Blomstrom, Magnus, and Bjorn Hettne. Development theory in transition: the dependency debate and beyond: Third World responses. London : Zed ; Totowa, N.J. : US distributor, Biblio Distribution Center, 1984.

Gilpin, Robert.  _War and Change in World Politics_.  Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, and Sydney:  Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Lenin, V.I.  _The Development of Capitalism in Russia_, in _V.I. Lenin: Selected Works in Twelve Volumes_, ed. J. Fineberg, vol. 1, _The Prerequisites of the First Russian Revolution (1894-99)_ (New York:  International Publishers n.d.).

Lenin, V.I. _Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism:  A Popular Outline_, in _V.I. Lenin:  Selected Works in Twelve Volumes_, ed. J. Fineberg, vol. 5, _Imperialism and Imperialist War (1914-1917)_ (New York:  International Publishers, n.d.).

Marx, Karl.  _Capital_, in _Karl Marx:  Selected Writings_, ed. David McLellan (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1977).

Warren, Bill.  _Imperialism:  Pioneer of Capitalism_, ed. John Sender.  London:  NLB, 1980.

--
Jeffrey L. Beatty
Doctoral Student
Department of Political Science
The Ohio State University
2140 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210

(o) 614/292-2880
(h) 614/688-0567
Email:  Beatty.4@osu.edu
_________________________________________
Economists are from Mars, sociologists are
from Venus, political scientists are from
Jupiter.








--
Jeffrey L. Beatty
Doctoral Student
Department of Political Science
The Ohio State University
2140 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210

(o) 614/292-2880
(h) 614/688-0567
Email:  Beatty.4@osu.edu
_________________________________________
Economists are from Mars, sociologists are
from Venus, political scientists are from
Jupiter.