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Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and

modes of production
a
Jairus Banaji
a
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Published online: 02 May 2008.
To cite this article: Jairus Banaji (1973) Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and modes of production, Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 3:4, 393-413
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472337308566901
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393
Articles
Backward Capitalism, Primitive Acc-
umulation and Modes of Production
Jairus Banaji
"Marxism takes its point o f departure from world economy, not as a sum o f national
parts but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the inter-
Downloaded by [Moskow State Univ Bibliote] at 16:04 11 December 2013
national division o f labour and the world market, and which in our epoch imperiously
dominates the national markets"
Trotsky, The Permanent Re v ol ut i on
"Historic belatedness and the subjection or-China by the imperialists deprived the
Chinese bourgeoisie o f that progressive role which had been played by its European
forerunners in the bourgeois revolutions o f the West"
Trotsky, 'The War in the Far East and the Revolutionary Perspectives'
"What can the most demagogic petty bourgeoisie set against capitalist penetration?
Mere words; nothing more. They can offer no more than a temporary nationalist
orgy . . . Our mission is to explain and show the masses how only the socialist revo-
lution can present a real and effective barrier to the advance or imperialism"
Jose Carlos Mariategui, 'The Anti-imperialist Perspective'
" T h e nationalist model could be negated only by one o f two radical means: socialist
revolution or reintegration into world capitalim"
Octavia lanoi, Crisis in Brazil
To the bourgeoisie in the imperialist as well as in the dependent countries it is
axiomatic that given certain conditions, backward capitalism can sooner or later
achieve a rate of industrialization sufficiently rapid to absorb the mass of redundant
peasant labour in the villages. I For over sixty years now revolutionary marxists have
argued the opposite position: that in the conditions which characterise backward
capitalism development can at best assume a purely sporadic and combined charac-
ter, with a relative and partial industrialization superimposing itself on a disintegrat-
ing peasant economy which it cannot reintegrate rapidly enough. Whatever its
specific stature or the degree of its relative autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism, and re-
gardless of its political and ideological past, the bourgeoisie of the backward count-
ries cannot carry through the tasks associated historically with the bourgeois revo-
lutions in Europe and Japan. In particular, it has no final solution to the agrarian
problem, which remains an enormous burden to backward capitalism and an aid to
the revolutionary party. 2 In this historic sense "the democratic tasks of the back-
ward bourgeois nations lead directly in our epoch to the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat", that is, to socialist revolution. 3
1. Combined Development in WorldEconomy

In the epoch of colonial imperialism the formation of a unified international
]aims Banaji teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

394 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORAR Y ASIA
market transfigured world economy as the old system of scattered national modes
of production disintegrated under its impulse. Behind the characteristic figures of
this epoch - early industrialization, expansion of trade, acquisition of colonies and
the migrations of labour and capital - lies the essential,fact that the national com-
ponents of world economy were increasingly bound together through a hierarchy
of forms of dependence and domination into a unified international structure. The
unity of world economy, hence the relative dependence of the 'parts' of world
economy on the 'whole', is the necessary point of departure in any discussion of
imperialism and economic backwardness.
But this unity acquired a specific historical expression in the fact that within
world economy capitalism coexisted with non-capitalist modes of production both

nationally and internationally, and while capitalist development overcame this un-
evenness in some sectors of world economy, in world economy as a whole it greatly
intensified it. The combined character of world economic development, which was
the essential reflection of i t s unevenness, was an internal and necessary characteristic
of capitalist expansion on a world scale. "By drawing the countries ecorlomically
closer to one another and levelling out their stages of development, capitalism
operates by methods of its own, that is to say, by anarchistic methods which con-
stantly undermine its own work, set one country against another, and one branch
of industry against another, developh~g some parts o f world economy while hamper-
h~g and throwblg back the development of.others': hnperialism unified world
economy, but "by such antagonistic methods, such tigerleaps and such raids upon
backward countries and areas that the unification and levelling of world economy"
which it effected was upset by it "even more violently and convulsively than in the
preceding epochs". 4
Following Lenin we could describe the major historical forms of capitalist expan-
sion as firstly "the development of capitalism in depth, ie, the further growth of
capitalist agriculture and industry in the given, definite and enclosed territory, and
- secondly - the development of capitalism in breadth, ie, the extension of the
sphere of the capitalist domination to new territory", s Elsewhere Lenin wrote that
such a division "would include the whole process of the historical development of
capitalism: on the one hand, its development in the old countries, where for cen-
turies the forms of capitalist relations up to and including large-scale machine indus-
try have been built up: on the other hand, the mighty drive of developed capitalism
to expand to other territories, to populate and plough up new parts of the world,
to set up colonies... ,,.6 But while both colonisation and colonialism were the
effects of a certain 'horizontal' development of capitalism, its development "in
breadth", the historic tendencies which they embodied were quite different, in the
colonies which capitalism subjugated as opposed to the others which it merely popu-
lated, the extension of the sphere of capitalist domination assumed a complex and
indirect aspect. In these colonies unlike the others capitalism did not eradicate tribal
modes of production and fill the vacant spaces with industries and markets. The
populations it encountered consisted largely of peasants and far from uprooting their
existing forms of production through their expropriation and conversion into wage-
labourers, so as to lay the foundations for an internal expansion of its own mode of
production, capitalism imparted a certain solidity to those forms and even extended
BACKWARD CAPITALISM 395
them to new territories not previously inhabited.

By the closing decades of the last century the unevenly developed world economy
comprised - apart from the areas of established capitalist development concentrated
in northern Europe - on the one hand, areas of nascent capitalist development and
on the other, areas in which there were no signs of capitalist development due to the
complete preponderance within them of a colonial mode of production.*
2. Primitive A ecumulation and Forms of Developmeltt

As we know, Marx described the initial mechanism of capitalist expansion as
'primitive accumulation'. He did not, however, construct a concept of primitive ac-
cumulation so much as describe a particular historical form of it, the distinctive
feature of which was a wholesale expropriation of the peasantry and its conversion
into a class of outlawed proletarians. Against the persistent later confusion of these
levels of analysis his own indications make it clear that primitive accumulation in
the specific form charactedsing capitalist development in England is not a general-
ized model of capitalist industrialization valid for all sectors of world economy:
the chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace
the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged
from the womb of the feudal order of economy. It therefore describes the his-
torical movements which by divorcing the producers from their means of pro-
duction converts them into wage-workers.., while it converts those who possess
the means of production into capitalists... Now what application to Russia
could my critic make Of this historical sketch. Only this: if Russia is tending to
become a capitalist nation after the example of the teestcrt~ Europear~ c'o~c,tries
she will not succeed without having first transformed a good.part of her
. . .
peasants into proletarians |

In the first place, then, the historic process of primitive accumulation, the pro-
cess as it appears from the standpoint of world economy, has never assumed the
abstract and fictitious form of a repetition of the earlier forms of development
by different nations, but the true form of a combination of the stages of develop-
* A. Gunder Frank breaks with bourgeois theories o f backwardness in approaching the pheno-
menon historically, and moreover from a marxist standpoint, but his system of concepts remains
crude and confused, and no specific theory o f backwardness is prolx~sed beyond the simple as-
sertion that backward economies have historically formed part o f the capitalist world market.
The chief expression of the inadequacy of F'rank's work is that he refuses to explore concretely
the forms in which imperialism achieved this integration; in other words, the relationship be-
tween 'development' and 'underdevelopmenl' is not structured so much as merely asserted. "thus
Frank constantly confuses the concepts o f integration into the capitalist world economy and ex-
pansion o f capitalist production relations within the integrated unit. The point is made brilliantly
by E.C. Laclau (7) whose own position, like the positions o f those who mediate the relationship
between imperialism and the colonies in terms o f a specific mode of production (8) embodies a
more rigorous marxist understanding. Elements o f this half-formed and still unelaborated theory
were already present at various points in the work o f Lenin and Trotsky. eg in the distinction
Lenin drew between invo|vement in capitalist exchange relations and involvement in capitalist
production relations, or in Trotsky's view that in China o f the 1920s the social relations o f serf-
dom and semi-serfdom were not merely historical residues but in part constituted a "new for-
mation, that is, the regeneration o f the past on the basis o f the retarded development of the
productive forces, surplus agrarian population, the activities of merchants' and userers' capilal".(9)
That is, to Trotsky such relations were partly the effects o f imperialism's domination o f the
Chinese economy, a domination which, as Trotsky maintained elsewhere, kept the country's pro-
ductive forces in a political straitjacket.
396 J O U R N A L OF CONT"EMPORA R Y A S I A
ment, of interdependent and mutually conditioning processes of primitive accumu-

lation defined by their own specific methods and rhythm o f accumulation. Thus
the different modes of primitive accumulation which were distributed chronologic-
ally across the histories of Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, arrived in
England at the end of the 17th century
at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the
modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system I l
Secondly, as Preobrazhensky insisted, 12 any process of primitive accumulation
implies an articulation of modes of production. The early phases of the process
of expanded reproduction derive their dynamism from certain relationships between

the nascent capitalist mode of production and an established capitalist or pre-capital-
ist mode of production. Historically the dominant form of these relationships was
the subordination of pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalism, though it
would be wrong to see in this a simple process of outright destruction, for the latter
was only one of the historical forms of the former.
On the contrary, as Bettelheim notes in a brilliant debate with Emmanuel 13
capitalism's subordination of non-capitalist modes of production tended not only
to dissolve them but also to conserve them. in social formations wher.e capitalism
was already the dominant mode of production, this "conservation-dissolution" of
non-capitalist modes of production was a secondary historical tendency. On the
other hand, inside social formations in which capitalism was not directly predomin-
ant but which were subordinated to capitalism through the world market, this dual
process emerged as the main tendency. In these social formations, mainly tile colo-
nies and semi-colonies, capitalist subordination of the traditional modes of produc-
tion required a certain restructuring of the latter, which by its very nature led to
the disintegration of certain of their characteristic forms and to the conservation
and intenslfication of others. We can thus define the colonial modes of production as
the historical effects of a worldwide process of subordination of pre-capitalist modes
of production to capitalism, that is, of an epoch of primitive accumulation, but
where subordination itself least assumed the simple aspect of a destruction.
If we pose the question of colonial social formations in these terms, we are
compelled to draw one further conclusion. The modes of production which came
to predominate in these formations were not autonomous modes of production in
the sense that they grew organically out of the contradictions of some former mode
and with laws of development determined independently of world economy. Thus
they were not 'non-capitalist' in the specific sense that their internal laws of de-
velopment remained identical with those defining earlier modes of production. On
the contrary, their character as dependent modes of production was expressed
chiefly in the fact that the laws which governed their reproduction derived from
their subordination to imperialism. The restructuring of former modes of production
through which this process of subordination was accomplished imposed on them
new laws of development which were basically determined by the fact that the
colonial peasantdes were drawn into the sphere of world commodity circulation
on pre-capitalist foundations - servile or feudal relations of exploitation, backward
technique and low levels of productivity.
3. Primitive Accumulation and the Sectors of Nascent Capitalist Development

To grasp the real peculiarities of backward capitalism or the type of capitalism
which came to characterize the colonial and semi-colonial social formations, we
need to carry the analysis forward on two levels. Firstly, to analyse the mechanisms
which stifled capitalist development in the period of the colonial modes of produc-
tion. Secondly, to determine the concrete forms which the process of primitive ac-
cumulation assumed in different sectors of world economy and on this basis estab-
lish the differences between backward capitalism and earlier forms of development.
A. Late Capitalist Development

As we know, in those sectors of world economy in which industrialization was

a relatively late phenomenon and, perhaps for this reason, one largely dominated
by the State, eg. Italy, Japan and, to some extent, Germany, the bourgeois revolution
acquired and retained a semi-abortive character due to the fact that in them the pro-
cess of primitive accumulation required a compromise between the capitalists and
the feudal elements, one of the chief foundations of which was an enhanced rate of
exploitation of the peasantry and agricultural proletariat, t 4 ! n both Japan and Italy
primitive accumulation was directly linked to sharp increases in agricultural produc-
tivity which were absorbed in rents and profits and which the State channelled into
industrial expansion through fiscal mechanisms. In Germany the alliance between the
landowners and industrialists which Bismarck cemented through the policy of pro-
tective tariffs set the framework for a period of rapid intensified accumulation charac-
terised by the growth of monopoly and a concentrated banking system. Japan's capi-
talist development was closer to that of Germany in that due to its belated character
and the relative backwardness of its bourgeoisie, the leading personnel of the State
came to be constituted by elements of the old feudal classes, and the capitalist indus-
trialisation thus preserved a certain bureaucratic and semi-feudal integument. Js Here
capitalism had to be erected on the basis of fusion rather than conflict with abso-
lutism, t 6
Against this background Russian capitalism showed two specific peculiarities. In
sharp contrast to both Germany and Japan, the indigenous bourgeoisie of Russia was
overwhelmed by a massive inflow of foreign capital into its national-economic terrain.
By 1900 foreign investments had come to represent about one half ofjointstock
company investment in Russia and were concentrated precisely in tire sectors which
spearheaded primitive accumulation in this period. 17 Here the chief basis of abso-
lutism was not the alliance of native capitalists with the old feudal elements, but
this relative preponderance of European capital. "German and French money is roll-
ing to Petersburgh to feed a regime tha't would long ago have breathed its last with-
out this life-giving juice", wrote Rosa Luxemburg in 1915. "Russian czarism is today
no longer the product of Russian conditions; its root lies in the capitalist conditions
of Western Europe". Is But secondly, in Russia far more than either in Italy or in
Japan and certainly more so than in Germany, France and Britain, the process of
primitive accumulation took on a protracted but discontinuous and recurrent charac-
ter. Phases of intensified primitive accumulation were followed by periods of relative
stagnation and decline. Together these peculiarities of Russia's capitalist develop-
ment made the objective conditions for a proletarian revolution far riper here than
398 J O U R N A L OF CONTEMPORAR Y ASIA
in Germany or Britain - a weak and compromising bourgeoisie, a working class

built up in concentrated units of production by the foreign investment boom, a
fiercely repressive comprador autocracy and a peasantry crushed by the fiscal poli-
cies of primitive accumulation.*
In the sectors of world economy which lacked any domestic economic base for
such a process in the form of a peasantry subjugated by non-capitalist or semi-capit-
alist modes of exploitation, primitive accumulation was characterized chiefly by
advantageous exchanges on the capitalist world market and by the intensified immi-
gration of capital and labour. Here the early industrial upsurge was coincident with
export booms induced by sudden favourable shifts in the terms of trade, eg. Den-
mark in the 1850's and 1860s, Sweden in the 1870s or Canada and Argentina in
the 1900s. The accumulations originating in these booms were sustained on an
expanding scale within and outside the export sector through the operation of
linkage effects, while the accelerated expansion of the home market which the lat-
ter determined tended to displace the economic centre of gravity to industries
producing primarily for this market. 2t Moreover, the periods of rapid primitive ac-
cumulation derived additional impulses from the influx of capital and labour which
the booms attracted from the countries of developed or nascent capitalism, the
latter mainly from those countries of Europe, such as I taly, in which capitalist in-
dustry had still to reintegrate the labour exuded by the disintegrating modes of
production in the towns and countryside. (One expression of the close interdepen-
dence of economic processes under world capitalism is the fact that such migrations
were an important source of primitive accumulation for the home country in the
form.of emigrants' remittances. For example, in Italy in 1901-1913, against a com-
mercial deficit of 10,230 million lire, invisible items showed a credit of 12,291 mil-
lion, over half of which derived from emigrants' savings. 22) The rapid expansion of
Argentine, Canadian or Swedish exports occurred within the framework of a capital-
ist economy, and moreover of a capitalist social formation in which the persistence
of pre-capitalist modes of production was of little or no importance even as a secon-
dary tendency - a fact distinguishing these formations from others which were ex-
periencing nascent capitalist development in that period. On the other hand, in the
export-dependent colonial and semi-colonial social formations such 'as Egypt, Burma
or lndochina sharp increases in production for the world market' throughout this
period were made possible and sustained on the foundations of pre-capitalist eco-
nomy, and within the framework of modes of production whose laws of develop-
ment were determined entirely by the subordination of those territories to imperial-
ism. That the rising curves of commodity production for the world market failed
to finance primitive capitalist accumulation in the colonies and semi-colonies appears
* The process which Peter the Great initiated early in the I 8th century within the framework
of mercantilist policies (19) was onJy finally accomplished two centuries later by the primitive
capitalist accumulation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Through tile programme of coUectivisation
an embryonic state bourgeoisie under Stalin's leadership subordinated and totally destroyed the
forms o f production coexisting among the peasantry. As nettelheim writes, "'within the space of
eight years the great mass of Soviet peasants were uprooted.from their former conditions o f
e x i s t e n c e . . . " But in the particular conjuncture in which the bureaucracy found itself primitive
capitalist accumulation also required certain political conditions: a wholesale depoliticisation o f
the working class and rapid destruction of the forces inside party and state which still fought for
a proletarian class programme, mainly the Left Opposition.(20)
B A C K W A R D CAPITALISM 399
problematic 23 only as long as we misrecognize the structure of world economy an0

imagine its fundamental constituents to be countries rather than modes of produc-
tion mutually linked in relations of hierarchy, subordination and dependence.
4. ColonialStagnation
The colonial modes of production 24 assumed several historical forms whose pe-
culiarities were determined in general by whether imperialism restructured the for-
mer modes of production in a given territory or h~stalled a mode of production
where none existed, and in particular by the specific form of restructuring of the
previous mode of production. The most important of these forms of restructuring
the given mode of production were (a) incorporation of the peasantry into big es-
tates such as those prevailing in the Andes, Mexico, Cochin China, Central Luzon
or parts of India, 2s (b) tile peasant's rapid integration into the world market and
subjugation to the dominance of merchant and usurer capital, as in Egypt, Burma
or Cambodia, 26 and (c) rapid destruction of the productivity of the traditional
mode of production by economic and legal mechanisms as part of an internal pro-
cess of primitive capitalist accumulation, eg. Rhodesia. 2"7 The installed mode of
production invariably assumed a servile or semi-servile form, that is. it was based
chiefly on servile relations of exploitation, in most cases forcibly importing its
labour from outside the given territory. 2s On the other hand, where incorporation
of the peasantry into large estates was the dominant mechanism of imperialist re-
structuring of the traditional mode of production, the colonial mode assumed a
distinctly semi-feudal character. Where the basis of imperialist exploitation was
the peasant's relation to the world market and where this relation was structured
and sustained mainly outside the economic and juridical framework of big property
through the peasant's bondage to local merchant and usurer capital, the colonial
mode of production took on the character of a semi-cohmialism. As the exah~ple of
Egypt suggests, direct installation of a colonial state apparatus was not, in these in-
stances, essential to the process of exploitation. Finally, in the settler colonies in
Africa the colonial mode of production emerged as a purely transitional and sub-
ordinate phenomenon, fuelling an internal expansion of the capitalist mode of pro-
dt, ction.
Due to its peculiarities the slave-based colonial mode of production requires a
separate and specific analysis of the mechanisms retarding primitive capitalist accu-
mulation 29 and for this reason the semi-feudal and semi-colonial forms of colonial
production are the only objects of analysis here. To begin with, behind the retarded
primitive capitalist acct, mt, lation of territories subjected to these specific forms of
imperialist exploitation lay the retarded expansion of their home markets. Such ex-
pansion required not primarily a sufficient level of personal consumption, as the
Narodniks argued when assessing the prospects of capitalist development in Russia,
but advances in the sphere of productive consumption or investment, as Lenin em-
phatically pointed out. Therefore it would be wrong to argue that the continuous
impoverishment of the colonial peasantries or the deterioration of their prodl,ctive
capacities made industrialization in the colonies and semi-colonies "impossible".
In Lenin's early writings on the market question two spheres of expansion of
the home market are isolated. "On the problem of interest to us, that of the home
400 J O U R N A L OF C O N T E M P O R A R Y A S I A
market, the main conclusion from Marx's theory of realisation is the following:
capitalist production, and, consequently, the home market, grow not so much on
account of articles of consumption as on account of means of p r o d u c t i o n . . . For
capitalism, therefore, the growth of the home market is to a certain extent 'indepen-
dent' of the growth of personal consumption". 3 Again, "production does indeed
create a market for itself: production needs means of p r o d u c t i o n . . , to expand
that department of social production which manufactures means of production, it
is necessary to draw into it workers who immediately present a demand for articles
of consumption". 31 On the other hand, "the 'impoverishment of the masses of the
people' not only does not hinder the development of capitalism, but on the contrary,
is the expression of that development, is a condition of capitalism and strengthens

i t . . . the 'impoverished' peasant who formerly lived by his own farming now lives
by 'earnings', ie. by the,sale of his labour power; he now has to purchase essential
articles of consumption . 32 Despite their apparent equivalence, however, these ten-
dencies are of unequal weight in determining the expansion of the home market for
capitalism: in the first place, the extent to which differentiation of the peasantry
creates a home market for capitalism depends fundamentally on the specific form
which the process of differentiation assumes: (i) on tile character of the social for-
mation as a whole - colonial or transitional to capitalism? (ii) on the particular type
of bourgeois revolution which differentiation signifies in social formations of the
latter type - landlord-bourgeois or peasant-bourgeois revolution? 33 Secondly, the
growth of a ru'ral market for capitalism depends as much on the formation of a
peasant bourgeoisie and its demand for means of production as on the peasant's
conversion into a proletarian; the degree to which this tendency predominates is
determined mainly by the mode of transition to capitalism in agriculture, ie. by
whether peasant capitalism develops autonomously or is compelled to grow within
the constricting framework of a landlord-bourgeois revolution.
Nevertheless, even if we confine ourselves to proletarianisation, it is clear that
the specific colonial form of differentiation of the peasantry could lead at best to a
sporadic and purely relative expansion of the market for articles of consumption. In
the colonial and semi-colonial social formations the separation of the peasantry from
its former means of production, ie. its expropriation, did not signify a transition
from simple commodity production to capitalist production. The mass of colonial
peasants were not transformed into a class of allotment-holding wage-workers, and
even where a purely proletarian peasantry tended to predominate the special charac-
teristics of its class situation, eg. the low level of wages, the relative preponderance
of payment in kind and the,retention 01' its links with peasant economy ruled out
a rapid expansion of the rural market for foodgrains.
In fact, as long as the process of accumulation atrophied, the disintegration of col-
lective forms of property before the expansionist tendencies of the colonial latifun-
dia, the numerous episodes of an abrupt expropriation of the lower peasantry by
usurer capital or by an embryonic class of big landowners as well as the tendencies
which intensified the fragmentation of its means of subsistence could lead at most to
a semt-proletarianisation of the peasantry, that is, its conversion into a class still
partially in possession of the means of production. Thus the tree role of the colonial
process of differentiation in thwarting the expansion of the market for capitalism be-
comes apparent only when we consider its effects on the dominant forms of that ex-
pansion, ie. on the process of accumulation itself. Among the many 'factors' retard-
ing the expansion of the market in Russia Lenin gave special importance to "the
retention of obsolete institutions which hh~der the det~elopment of agricultural
capitalism", a4 In the colonies and semi-colonies capitalism failed to penetrate agri-
cultural production on any significant scale either in the form of a landlord-bourgeois
revolution or through the capitalist differentiation of the peasantry. For the lower
strata of the colonial peasantry, both middle and semi-proletarian, the mechanisms
which imperialism utilised in restructuring the former modes of production (the in-
stallation of big property and the enforced dominance of merchant and usurer
capital) drained away the surplus which might have revolutionised the conditions
of production. In most Asian colonies few tenants-at-will appear to have been in a
position ofdirect relation to the market, as the majority of those engaged in com-
modity production were compelled to contract loans on the 'advance system', that
is, according to agreements binding tile peasant to sell the produce of his crop to
the lender at a price fixed in advance and "invariably below that obtaining in the
open market", as On the other hand, the well-to-do strata which were economically
in a position to resist the encroachments of usurer capital and of rent exploitation,
on the whole tended to reinvest the profits of commodity production in pre-capital-
ist modes of exploitation or to hoard them or to convert them into gold. These ten.
dencies of colonial rural economy imparted to the process of differentiation its main
peculiarity, namely, that the pauperisation of the peasantry and its conversion into a
semi-proletarian class was an expression of factors which retarded its differentiation
along capitalist lines and which, in general, blocked other possible modes of tran-
sition to capitalism in agriculture.
In the final analysis, however, the atrophy of accumulation on the plane of
hzdustry played a far more decisive role in constricting the expansion of the home
market and shaping the mechanism of colonial stagnation. In contrast to earlier
processes of primitive capitalist accumulation, the relative lateness of Russian, Ger-
man and Japanese industrialization determined the special importance of the State
in starting and accelerating the process of expanded reproduction. That is to say, in
certain social formations of late capitalist development capitalism was "an offspring
of the State". 36 On the other hand, the condition on which the possibility of this
type of intervention and hence of the whole process of primitive accumulation rested,
namely, the national autonomy of the State, was historically absent in the colonies,
and semi-colonies. In social formations of the latter type the State was either directly
controlled and dominated by imperialism, as in India or Indochina, or indirectly
dominated by it through more distant mechanisms of control, mainly financial and
diplomatic, as in Egypt before the British Occupation or in Peru after Independence.
In the formations directly subjugated by imperialism, the latter's refusal to grant pro-
tection or formulate policies to encourage accumulation decisively delayed the emer-
gence of a colonial bourgeoisie by several decades, while in the semi-colonies where
domination assumed an indirect aspect, the class alliance between imperialism and
the agrarian interests producing for the world market and dependent on the export-
import house controlled by foreigners 37 crippled the early development of bourgeois
nationalism. Though it would be wrong to ignore a certain ideological overdeter-
402 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORA R Y ASIA
mination by theories of free trade, notions about international division of labour,

racialism and so on, in the last instance it was the relative contradiction between the
class interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie and any future colonial bourgeoisie
which compelled imperialism to stifle the process of primitive capitalist accumu-
lation.
To sum up, we can say that the expansion of the market for colonial capitalism
was doubly constricted, firstly, by the continuing predominance of pre-capitalist
forms of exploitation in the countryside, by the fact that differentiation of the
peasantry did not reflect changes in productive organization or the formation of a
peasant bourgeoisie;secondly, by the very fact of imperialist domination which
consciously maintained tile colonies in a position of iridustrial backwardness

through direct and indirect mechanisms of control.*
5. Import Substitution and the Colonial Bourgeoisie
In contrast to earlier forms of development, primitive capitalist accumulation
in the major colonies and semi-colonies derived its main impulse from consecutive
crises in world economy which, by interrupting the flow of commodities to and
from the metropolis, simultaneously shattered the base of the landowners producing
for the world market and loosened the grip of foreign capital on the economy. As
long as the conditions of world economy had remained stable, the colonial bour-
geoisie had no room to manouevre agaiust either of these forces, and the small
* The e x a m p l e o f E g y p t is o f c o n s i d e r a b l e i n t e r e s t in this r e s p e c t , for u n d e r M u h a m m a d All
early in the 19th century,the State made a conscious attempt to engage in primitive accumulation.
This was both before Egypt had become a major cotton producer, ie. before her wholesale inte-
gration into the w o r l d market in a subordinate colonial position, and befoke imperialism had
established any decisive relation o f domination over the Egyptian State. Like Peter the Great
a century earlier, Muhammad All made the peasantry shoulder the burden o f financing his in-
dustrial schemes and providing manpower for his factories. Exploitation o f the peasantry
through heavy taxation and the fixing o f monopoly prices for agricultural produce led to a
progressive shrinkage o f Ali's fiscal base as more and more peasants fell into arrears or fled to
the towns. By 183"/ conditions in the countryside were worse than they had been for a long
time. "This destitution was largely the result o f the system o f monopolies", writes Owen (38).
To further expand the country's industrial base and t o increase government revenues Muhammad
All introduced the cultivation o f c o t t o n and was eventually forced, in the 1840s, t..~ reintroduce
semi-feudal property and relations o f exploitation to make the task o f collecting taxes fall on
the new estate holders. In Egypt the process o f primitive accumulation which All started rapidly
came t o a halt. On his death his factories were dismantled, and by this stage c o t t o n more and
more came to dominate the whole o f Egypt's economic life. Moreover, the disintegration o f the
State's economic hegemony "was hastened by the Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention o f 1838
which outlawed state monopolies and established a low external t a r i f f o f 8 per cent . . . further
industrialization was made very much more d i f f i c u l t " . (39) Under Muhammad Ali strenuous
efforts had been made to replace European imports w i t h locally manufactured goods. "This
policy came to an end in the 1840s, however. As a result o f European political pressure, first
at Islanbul, then on Egypt ilself, the country was rapidly opened up to foreign t r a d e . . . In-
creasing trade w i t h Europe was followed by a rapid growth in the import o f capital . . . by
187$ Egypt had borrnwed a nominal sum o f nearly 100 million f r o m Europe". (40)
In Peru exactly in this period, despite the emergence o f a liberal-nationalist programme
seeking a national Peruvian market defended f r o m the world market by tariffs and eager to
promote peasant capitalism in agriculture, it was the system k n o w n as compradorisrno which
finally triumphed. " T h e creole leadership was in debt; it was diplomatically dependent upon
other countries; its political legitimacy at home and abroad was still weak. In these conditions it
literally turned over the economy o f the country to the export-import businesses controlled
by f o r e i g n e r s . . . With compradorismo in certain branches o f the export trade - products such
as w o o l a n d g u a n o - t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f a g r i c u l t u r e was i n h i b i t e d , a n d t h i s in t u r n led t h e
creole elites m o r e and m o r e i n t o eompradorismo... " ( 4 I).
BA CK WAR D CAPITA LISM 403
industrial nucleus which emerged before World War I, mainly in Argentina and Brazil,
was forced to adapt its structure to the dominant exporter sector. On the other hand,
due to the possibilities of import-substitution and to the role of the latter in trans-
forming the dimensions of the market, even the least disruption in world economy
could shift the balance of class forces in favour of colonial capitalism. Regardless of
the specific elements determining the initial possibilities of expansion - import res-
trictions, war demand, tariffs, the Japanese Occuption - once lhe process of expan-
ded reproduction was established, it could move forward, within certain limits,
through the dynamism constituted internally by its own linkages and the additional
flow of income brought about by this expansion. 4z At, most certain political con-
ditions were required to ensure a certain relative continuity in the process of primi-
tive accumulation and these the industrial bourgeoisie in the main colonies and semi-
colonies sought chiefly through its struggle to control the state apparatus and main-
tain its hegemony within the ruling class through alliances with the urban middle
class and sections of the peasantry (India) or proletariat (Brazil, Argentina).
But the determining role of world economy was revealed in two opposite ways:
not only in the fact that only in conditions of world crisis could the colonial bour-
geoisie find room for expansion, but equally in the fact that the limits on the fur-
ther progress of accumulation in the backward countries, ie. the conditions which
formed the basis for their reintegration into the orbit of imperialism after the early
phases of import-substitution and for the emergence of new modes of international
dependence subjugating the backward countries to imperialism,43 were inseparably
bound up with the basic characteristics of colonial social formations - in other
words, with their entire past historical evolution within the framework of the
world market and with the innermost tendencies of the old mode of production.
Colonial capitalism emerged within a social formation characterized economically
by the following basic features: (i) by a retarded development of capitalist produc-
tion relations in agriculture, hence by a low productivity of peasant labour and stag-
nant output levels; (ii) by a structure of industry whose backward and one-sided
character sprang directly from the policies of delayed primitive accumulation; (iii)
by a concen, tration of exports on the products of agriculture. But far from eliminat-
ing and overcoming these features the peculiarities of the colonial process of indus-
trialization only i:ztensified them. In the first place, because early industrialization
drew on more archaic sources of primitive accumulation in trade (India) or the
profits of production for the world market (Brazilian coffee), no sharp conflicts
opposed the nascent industrial bourgeoisie to the classes whose fortunes were bound
up with colonial production. Moreover, as long as industrialization derived its main
dynamisms from a diversion of existing demand to local producers, ie. from the con-
quest of a pre-existing market by local industry, no historic basis existed for a radical
bourgeois assault on semi-feudalism. Thus while the urban market for capitalism
expanded rapidly throughout this period, the dimensions of the rural market for
industry were left untouched. 44 Secondly, as most of the h~dustrialization during
the Depression was confined to the consumer industries, the colonial bourgeoisie
remained dependent on imports for the bulk of its machinery, capital equipmeilt
and intermediate goods. At the particular stage of development which the most de-
veloped colonial capitalisms had reached by the 50s, this dependence assumed two
aspects - due to a shortage of foreign exchange to finance the needed capital equip-
ment, a financial dependence, and due to the progressively advanced character of
substitution in this stage, a teclmological dependence. As the limiting force of these
effects came into play, backward capitalism rapidly ran into sporadic but intense
deficits on current account which it could only finance by depleting its past accumu-
lations of foreign exchange and by recourse to foreign capital.
Thus the curve of import substitution was determined in the most general sense
by the conditions in which capitalism was forced to develop in the backward sectors
of world economy. Despite its intensely nationalist and genuinely anti-imperialist
ideology and political traditions, 4s the colonial-bourgeois State was driven by the
objective contradictions of its class situation into deeper and deeper dependence on
imperialism. On the political plane the transition to this new period of accumulation
determined one of two types of evolutions: either a relative displacement of the
industrial bourgeoisie by realignments within the ruling class, eg. renewed domi-
nance of tile landowners (Argentina) or a progressive readjustment of the forms of
its relationship with imperialism, varying from attempts to break with the West and
go over to Russia (Egypt) or to balance between Russia and the West (India) to whol~
sale capitulation to foreign monopoly capital (Brazil after Goulart). 46 But regard-
less of the specific type of evolution, hence of the specific political character of the
regime, military-oligarchic, bourgeois-democratic, bourgeois-nationalist and so on,
these shifts in the balance of class forces were important mainly in establishing tile
political conditions for the transition to dependent primitive accumulation, or in
carrying the process to a more advanced stage.
6 Phasesof Dependent Primitive Accumulation

From a different but overlapping perspective the fundamental characteristic of
this conjuncture of transition inaugurated by the more and more severe exchange
deficits was the role of imperialism in utilising its programmes of 'official assistance'
to restructure the forms of its domination over the backward countries. Against
the historical background of analogous shifts in world economy at earlier stages of
development, this process of restructuring was especially rapid and lacking in un-
evenness, for it took imperialism at most ten years to complete (1950-60).
The real causes of this peculiarity lie only partly in those elements of the inter-
national conjuncture which concentrated and centralized imperialist domination
in the period between the Wars and just after: the shifting balance of power in
favour of US capital and the formation of new financial superstructures of imperial-
ism (IBRD, IDA, IMF). In part they spring from the fact that export of capital to
the backward countries engaged in a primitive capitalist accumulation is a pheno-
menon overdetermined by two class standpoints. For the colonial bourgeoisie
capital imports from the West, imports of machinery, transport equipment, inter-
mediate chemical products and so on, become, at a certain stage, a condition of its
own further relative expansion. On the other hand, from the standpoint of imperial-
ism, the renewal of capital exports in the specific form of grants, official loans,
export credits, etc. becomes a necessary prelude to a more massive penetration of
the backward countries in the form of direct investment. Thus depending on the
national conjuncture and its relative weight vis-a-vis the given bourgeoisie, either
B A C K W A R D CAPITALISM 405
simultaneously with or shortly after the inception of official assistance, Ioreign

monopoly capital begins to monopolize the most dynamic sectoi's of import-substi-
tution: fertiliser, petrochemicals, and chemical products, automobiles, iron and
steel, machine tools, heavy electrical goods, electronics, transport equipment at~d
the like. Finally, depending on the forms and intensity of this penetration, that
is, depending on whether, in its new role of import-substitution, foreign monopoly
capital tends to displace the old industrial bourgeoisie with its base in earlier stages
of substitution, as in Argentina or Brazil (the phenomenon called 'denationalization'),
or, on the contrary,is kept within bounds and utilised by that bourgeoisie for its
own expansion, as in India, the first phase of dependent primitive accumulation
comes to be characterized, to a greater or lesser degree, by the emergence of new

social strata within the ruling classes, composed of comprador capitalists and a
middle and lower bourgeoisie of technical, managerial or clerical salaried staff
employed by the foreign monopolies.*
In the last instance, accumulation based on continual inflows of capital to
finance chronic and periodically severe exchange deficits reflects neither the
political dominance of the comprador strata within the ruling class nor any par-
ticular ideology inherited by the bourgeoisie from its colonial past. In fact, neither
of these conditions properly conforms to historical reality, for at both levels of the
superstructure compradorism is merely an effect of neo-imperialist penetration. In
the last instance, this mode of primitive accumulation reflects tile structure and
tendencies of world economy. Even where it has been able to establish its own in-
dependent base in the national economy by utilising the crisis of the world market,
the backward bourgeoisie cannot carry industrialization beyond certain narrow
limits except through the further collaboration of imperialist capital. From this
springs the basic dilemma of colonial capitalism - while dependent primitive accu-
mulation by its very nature threatens the backward bourgeoisie with economic dis-
integration should the flow of capital cease abruptly and for a long period, per-
petuation of its bonds of dependence offers no means of escape from the circle of
primitive accumulation. On the contrary, when it feels strong enot, gh to do so due
to the conquests of the first phase, the imperialist bourgeoisie inaugurates a new
and specific phase of dependent accumulation with the programmes of devaluation,
import liberalization and further encouragement of foreign capital which it compels
the backward bourgeoisie to adopt - either through IMF 'stabilization programmes'
(Argentina 1958-63, Philippines 1962) or through World Bank pressure (India
1966). 4g As the bourgeoisie emerges from this conjuncture stunned or crippled, it
moves into a phase of dependent accumulation characterized principally by the
* One of the most clearly discernible phenomena associated with foreign~dominated import-
substitution is the emergence of a certain neo.endavism within the industrial sector of the
backward countries to which the bulk of foreign private capital is attracted. The tatter tends to
be concentrated in the most rapidly growing industrial sectors (such as transport equipment,
electrical machinery, chemical products, etc.) which due to their specific technological charac-
teristics, and the effects they produce, both directly and through backward linkages, block
the expansion of industrial employment and deepen the vertical structure of the market. While
it condemns the mass of" the population to unemployment and underconsumption, colonial
capitalism is compelled to cultivate the sectors of bourgeois consumption more and more
feverishly.(47)
406 J O U R N A L OF CONTEMPORA R Y ASIA
stranglehold of debt servicing and the rapid conversion of former surpluses on

capital account into net outflows of capital. The dilemma of colonial capitalism
is reproduced on a higher scale.*
* From the standpoint o f the necessary theoretical and strategic tasks o f revolutionary parties
in the backward countries the notion o f dependent primitive accumulation is, o f course, insuf-
ficient because too abstract. The concrete analyses which these parties will have to make of their
own specific situations require a further, but still preliminary, step - differentiating the unity of
dependent capitalism into its concrete forms and the particular contradictions characterising
each form. For example, imperialism's subjugation of Ceylon and her domination of India could
be reduced to a single 'model' only at the cost of eliminating precisely those peculiarities in
each of these relationships which are, after all, the main object of marxist analysis.
The bulk of external capital for rapid industrialization has gone only to a few countries, in
which three groups stand out:
(a) the ultra-dependent accumulation of Pakistan, S. Korea, Taiwan and some other coun-
tries and territories. In the 1950s and the 1960s the three economies mentioned achieved the
highest rates of growth of manufacturing o u t p u t , far exceeding the average for Asia. The basic
characteristic o f industrial growth in this group was an abnormally high rate of investment sus-
tained mainly by massive inflows of foreign, chiefly US, capital. Eg. in 1960-64, net assistance
as a proportion of gross domestic capital formation was 58% for S. Korea, 30% for Pakistan and
2t % for Taiwan. Pakistan and Taiwan experienced the highest income elasticities o f demand for
imports, 2.6 and 1.9 respectively, and around 1965-67 attracted the largest flows of net foreign
private capital in Asia as a whole - S. Korea topped the list with ~1409 million, Pakistan was
second with [ 1 9 5 m and Taiwan third with ~192m. (49)
(h) the semi-dependent accumulation of Argentina, Brazil and India which in 1963 accoun-
led for about half the total manufacturing output o f the backward economies and were, with
Mexico, in the industrial vanguard of the 'third world'. This group experienced much lower
rates of growth in the 1960s. Despite lower import-elasticities, the combination of their much
higher levels of industrial development (vertically integrated import-substitution) with stagnant
or declining export levels induced chronic dependence on inflows of capital (in gross terms they
attracted the bulk of official assistance in their respective 'regions'). In Argentina the Prebisch
Plan of 1955 explicitly linked any potential acquisition of machinery and equipment for expand-
ing industrial capacity to the outcome of efforts to attract foreign capital; importation of most
capital goods was prohibited unless financed by foreign capital. Due to the efforts of the
Frondizi regime, heavy imports of such goods during 1960-61 enabled many import-substituting
and some export industries In expand. The bulk of foreign capital attracted to Argentina in this
period went into chemicals, automobiles, non-ferrous metals, oil refining and machinery. (50) In
Brazil much of the substitution in capital goods was carried through by foreign subsidiaries o f
General Electric, Siemens, Brown-Boveri (heavy electricals), and Schneider (heavy n=achinery)
etc. By 1968 foreign capital controlled 80% of the pharmaceutical industry, 39% of engineering
production, 62% of car component production, 4 8 % o f aluminium.(5 I) Finally, in India the
build up of Dept. I industries was totally bound up with official flows. However, in this group
unlike the previous one, industrialization was already fairly advanced before the transition to
dependent accumulation in the 1950s: Vargas, Peron and Nehru embodied, in this sense, the
uppermost limits of the potentialities of colonial capitalism.
(c) the type of dependent accumulation which lran today represents with her rapid and, in
some ways, quite advanced industrialization closely bound up with government receipts from
the profits of foreign oil monopolies and with the projection of forward linkages from petro-
leum to the rest of the economy. (52) To these three basic types we can add:
(d) countries like Bolivia or Thailand which appear to have attracted US assistance for mili-
tary or 'strategic' reasons (53)
(el countries like Cuba, Egypt and those in E. Europe which form or formed part of a system
of dependency dominated by Russian state capitalism. (54)
A complete analysis of 'nan-colonialism' would require a study of the complex relationships
between the particular forms of dependent accumulation - however we choose to determine
these - and variations in the form o f state power and in the politico-ideological superstructure.
One link that is immediately apparent is the relation between monopoly capital, chiefly US, and
the neo-fascist regimes of the third world - Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and so on; but what are
the specific interrelations between imperialism, dependent capitalism and formations of the
7. Socialist Revolution and Uneven Development

Taken in all its major phases colonial-capitalist industrialization has the distinct
character of a recurring and continually frustrated primitive accumulation. In the
former colonies and semi-colonies capitalism can only develop fitfully and sporadic-
ally "in dependence on the world stock exchanges" ,s6 compelling the colonial-
bourgeois state to reinforce its links with imperialism, to widen its own sphere of
action in the economy, and finally, behind a facade of pseudo-proletarian ideologies
and forms of organization (rural cooperatives in Peru, autogestion in Algeria) to
develop the productive forces of agriculture. But in contrast to earlier forms of
development or in the special historical conditions of backward capitalism, the con-
version of landlord or peasant into bourgeois economy moves in a historical space of

dependant accumulation and stagnant industrial employment. Rural capitalism is
forced to import its means of production at the cost of greater external indebted-
ness, while the proletariat which it creates out of the reservoir of semi-proletarian
peasants has no prospect of being integrated into capitalist industry as a factory
proletariat.
Backward capitalism combines the stages of the historic process according to its
position in world economy, but combined development is not its specific peculiarity.
Rather, what principally characterizes social formations of this type is the impos-
sibility of sustained capitalist development, of a successfi, I bourgeois revolution
which can accomplish the process of primitive accunrulation. Not combined develop-
ment but the impossibility of further development within the framework of the
combination becomes the principal feature of colonial capitalism.
Hence the possibilities and the necessity for proletarian revolution, a revolution
aiming at the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers' republic
based on the active support of the peasantry. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution
which the bourgeoisie cannot solve, the proletariat is compelled to solve. To be able
to do this, it must have its hands free. It must be conscious of its task, and, far from
lining up behind the banner of 'progressive national capitalism', it must go out to
the peasant masses with its own programme. Its class independence is the first con-
dition of its growth as an organized political force.
In this respect two questions arise: a general question regarding the possibilities
of proletarian revolution in the backward countries, and a specific question of the
forms of articulation of a proletarian programme.
Firstly, as in world economy as a whole so in its backward sectors, due to the
unevenness of capitalist development the possibilities of a proletarian revolution (a
revolution based on working class parties with an internationalist and anti-capitalist
programme) are not the same for all countries nor will the forms of that revolution
be identical. A failure to understand either of these facls, that is, to grasp the com-
bined and uneven character of the world revolution, determines two types of errors
superstructure such as honapartism, military reformism,(SS) populist democracy, communalism,
etc?
In the brief and therefore schemalic analysis of sections 5 and 6 what we have called the
'phases' of dependent accumulation should not be interpreted in a mechanical sense as referring
In sharply defined and sequentially structured stages. Rather they tend to overlap and merge
according to a combined development, thus giving the relations between backward capitalism
and world economy a planless and complex character.
on the Left. On the one hand, positions reminiscent of that held by Serrati in the
debate on the colonial question at the Second Congress of the Comintern, dismissing
peasant struggles against imperialism as scarcely worth support, as irrelevant inter-
ventions in a process which, like the movement of Hegel's Idea, fias its only point of
culmination in advanced Europe ;sT on the other hand, 'third worldist' positions
which confer on those struggles the determining role, dismissing the proletariats of
Europe, Japan, America and the backward nations as insufficiently 'revolutionary'
(many of the attitudes which Lenin fought against in the Narodniks recur in the
latter positions). But between the workers of Birmingham, Chicago, Berlin and
Tokyo and the peasants of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam has not the law of com-
bined development thrown up a whole series of intermediate and transitional types,

from the peasantries of southern Europe to the factory proletariat of Cordoba and
Bombay, the miners of Bolivia and the labouring peasants of Bengal and Java? After
all, did the October Revolution not occur in a country that was neither wholly
advanced nor wholly backward?
The question of revolution in the backward countries has to be approached from
this standpoint, ie. of the internal differences conditioned by their u n e v e n develop-
ment. Th.e backward countries are neither uniformly backward nor, for that precise
reason, of equal weight on the world scale. In sharp contrast to (a) the smaller and
most backward nations which in most cases have no industrial proletariat and where
revolutions can only take the form of a 'dictatorship of the impoverished peasantry 'sa
there are (b) the most advanced of the backward countries which, in their social
structures and levels of development as well as in the forms which bourgeois rule is
compelled to adopt in them, approach the most backward of the advanced countries
such as Spain, Italy and S. Africa: the main countries of this group are Argentina,
Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, India. Between these groups lies (c) a whole intermediate
zone of relatively industrialized smaller nations and territories in which dependent
accumulation has taken extreme forms, in some instances directly reducing the
major class contradictions to that between imperialism and the proletariat: Pakistan,
S. Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru, lran, Colombia, etc. In countries of the
two latter types revolutionary parties based on working class and proletarian-peasant
leadership are a concrete possibility and are the only means of breaking out of the
descending spiral of frustrated primitive capitalist accumulation. Here not only has
capitalism created a working class in the factories, mines and railways but, in most
cases, a large segment of the peasantry is completely proletarianized, ie. forms an
agricultural proletariat, "which is a part of the working class ''s9 - Brazil, Mexico,
Egypt, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia, Peru. Revolutions in these countries
would be of far more decisive weight in the world arena than others which can at
best assume the form of a dictatorship of the poor peasantry. Proletarian revolutions
in Brazil and Mexico would have incalculable consequences for the revolutions in
Latin America, apart from shattering the whole structure of American dominatmn
of the subcontinent, and likewise the revolutions in Egypt, India or Indonesia. Never-
theless, precisely due to the historical absence of working class parties in these
countries, it is revolutions based on tile peasantry which are currently forced to
confront imperialism in the forms specific to them - protracted struggles sustained
mainly by the profound courage, determination and inexhaustible moral energies
of tile rural masses.

Secondly, regarding the forms of articulation of a proletarian programme in tile
backward countries - unless the working class consciously incorporates the incom-
pleted tasks of the bourgeois revolution into that programme, its struggle for a wor-
kers' republic will be doomed by its isolation froln the peasant masses who stand
behind the village proletariat. "Democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the
problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs
in this struggle, but stem directly from one another". 6 In the consciousness of those
social classes and strata which the party must draw into alliance with the working
class the path to socialist revolution lies via tile transitional demands - for the
abolition of landlord economy and against the incursions of landlord capitalism, for
the unionisation of urban and rural workers, for the evacuation of foreign military
bases, etc.
FOOTNOTES
1. For reflections of this position in development economics see W.A. Lewis, 'Economic
Development with unlimited supplies of labour', Manchester School 1954, J.C. Fei and
0. Ranis, Development o f the Labour Surplus Economy: Theory and Policy (Illinois
1964), the articles by D.W. Jorgenson in Economic Journal 1961, Oxford Economic
Papers 1967, or, following a different line of thought, H.B. Chenery, 'Foreign assistance
and economic development', J.H. Adler (ed), Capital Movements and Economi'c Develop-
ment (New York 1967) and the other liberal advocates of foreign assistance criticised by
A.K. Bagchi, 'Aid models and inflows of foreign aid', Economic and Political Weekly,
January 1970 (Annual Number).
2. This position was argued for Russia by L. Trotsky: The Permanent Revolution and Results
and Prospects (Pathfinder Press 1969). See also the opening sections of the History o[
the Russian Revolution. For the agrarian queslion as an aid to the party see 1905 (Allen
Lane 1972).
3. L. Trotsky, 'Introduction', The Permanent Revolution.
4. L. Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (Pathfinder 1970) pp. 19-20.
5. V.I. Lenin, The Development o f Capitalism in Russia, chapter 8, section S. Collected
Works (CW) !11 p. S94.
6. V.I. Lenin, 'Once more on the theory of realisation', CW IV p. 91-92.
7. A.G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Penguin Books 1969)
or the similar position of L. virile, 'Latin America: feudal or capitalist', !. Petras and
M. Zeitlin (ed) Latin A merica: Reform or Revolution? A Reader (New York 1968).
E. Laclau, 'Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America', N e w Left Review May-June 197 I.
It should be empliaslsed that Frank's political position is perfectly correct insofar as it
stresses the primacy of socialist revolution.
8. For example, p-p. Rey, Stir I'Articulation des Modes de Production, Centre d'etude de
planification soclaliste, Sorbonne (mlmeo.), Bipan Chandra, 'Colonialism and modern-
ization', Indian History Congress i 970, S. Mukherji, 'Institutional rigidities in the
agrarian market in early 20th century Bengal', Current Dynamics, September 1970,
U. Patnaik, 'Development of capitalism in agriculture', Social Scientist. September ! 972 -
who all reject the simple characterization of the colonial economy as either 'feudal' or
'capitalist'.
9. Third International After Lenin, p. 209; Lenin's distinction between exchange and pro-
duction relations was cited by Kuusinen in the concluding stages of the 'decolonisation
debate' in the Comintern, t 928. See the International Press Correspondence numbers
for luly - November 1928.
10. K. Marx, "To the editors of Otechestvennlye Zapiskl', dated November 187'7. Contrast
with M. Dobb, 'Prelude to the Industrial revolution', Papers on Capitalism, Development
and Planning (Bombay 1967) w h o proposes exactly the view Marx attacks.
It. K. Marx, Capital 1 (Moscow 1961) p. 751. In these parts of Capital frequent references
are found to 'methods' and 'levers' o f primitive accumulation, suggesting that more was
involved in the process than the expropriation o f the peasantry.
12. E. Preobrazhensky, The N e w Economics (Oxford 1967). Preobrazhensky, a brilliant
Marxist economist and, with Trotsky, one o f the leaders o f the Left Opposition in
410 JOURNA L OF CONTEMPORAR Y ASIA
Russia. was the only one to make a serious intervention on the question of 'primitive
accumulation" after Marx.
I 3. C. Bettelheim, 'Theoretical comments', in A. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange. A S t u d y o f
tire Imperialism o f Trade (New Left Books 1972) p. 29"I-8.
14. For Italy cf. J. Cammett, 'Two recent polemics on the character of the Italian Risorgi.
men to ', Science and Society [ 963, and A. Gerschenkron, E c o n o m i c Back wardness in
Historical Perspective (Harvard 1962) chap. 5 on Romero's thesis that, had there been
an agrarian revolution in this period, the whole pace of Italy's primitive capitalist accu-
mulation would have been dragged hack. Cf. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins o f
Dictatorship and Democracy (Peregrine Books 1969) on 'labour-repressive forms of
capitalist agriculture'.
l $. A. Gramsci, Selections From The Prison Notebool~s (Lawrence and Wishart 1971 ) p. 83,
pp. 269-70, Cf. Trotsky, 'The war in the Far East and the Revolutionary perspectives',
The Founding Conference o f the Fourth International (New York, no date) on Japan:
"Emerging from the ranks of the feudal nobility and the warrior caste of samurai, the
bourgeoisie adapted the old institutions, with some modifications, to the requirements
of the new systems of capitalist exploitation. Thus ancient feudal institutions, including
a 'divine' monarchy, a semi-independent military caste, and semi-feudal types of exploit-
ation exist side by side with a 'democratic' parliament and'powerful industrial and finan-
cial t r u s t s . . . '" Cf. also the contribution of H.K. Takahashi to the debate on the tran-
sition from feudalism to capitalism, Science and S o c i e t y 1967, and .I. Halliday, 'Japan-
Asian capitalism', N e w Left R e v i e w 44 (! 96"/) who says of the Meiji Revolution: "even
the precise class nature of the Revolution is a subject of dispute. The problem seems Io
lie in the divorce between the force which brought about the Revolution (the developing
capitalist relations of production and distribution) and the main class behind the Meiji
Restoration itself (the warriors), and between the strata which controlled state power
after the Revolution and the class character o f their policies".
16. Takahashi, loc. cir.
17. cf. M.E. Falkus, The lndustrialisation o f Russia 1 700-1914 (Macmillan 1972) pp. 69-'/3.
! g. R. Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet. The Crisis in the German Social Democracy re-
printed in Rosa L u x e m b u r g Speaks (Pathfinder ! 970).
19. cf. A. Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror. F o u r Lecturs in E c o n o m i c History
(Ca mbridge 19"/0), lecture 3.
20. B e t t e l h e i m a p u d Rey, op. cir. Cf.T. Cliff, R u s s i a : A Marxist Ailalysis (IS 1972) and
R. Banaji, 'Russia from proletarian revolution to social imperialism', E c o n o m i c and
Political ICeekly 1973 (forthcoming).
21. see the good articles of L. Jorberg, 'Structural change and economic growth: Sweden in
the 19th ce,st ury', F. Crouzet et al ted) Essays in European Economic History 1789.1914
(Edward Arnold 1969), 'The industrial revolution in the Nordic countries', C.M. Cipolla
ted) The Fontana Economic History o f Europe: The Emergence o f lnclustrial Societies -
2, and cf. R.E. Caves, 'Export-led growth and the new economic history', 1. Bhagwati
et al ted) Trade, Balance o f Payments and Growth (Amsterdam and London 1971 ).
22. as pointed out by L. Cafagna, 'The industrial revolution in Italy 1830-1914', The
Fontana Economic History o f Europe: The Emergence o f lnclustrial Societies - 1 (Fon-
tana Books 1973), p. 303.
23. It does to C. Kindleberger, E c o n o m i c D e v e l o p m e n t (Tokyo 1965) p. 164, P. EIIsworth,
'The dual.economy'. Economic D e v e l o p m e n t and Cultural Change 1962, R.E. Baldwin,
'Patterns of development in newly settled regions', C. Etcher and L. Wilt ted) Agriculture
in Economic D e v e l o p m e n t (Bombay 1970). None of these writers even attempt to dif-
ferentiate colonial social formations according to the dominant form of the mode of
production. Moreover, because they disintegrate the structure of world economy, they
can only grasp certain relatively superficial characteristics of these formations and thus
finally end by uttering tautologies, eg. "the primitive and stagnant character of under-
developed economies explains their failure to develop"[
24. on this concept, cf. C.F.S. Cardoso, 'S.M. Pelaez y el caracler del regimen colonial',
Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos 1972, J.L. Herbert, 'F-ssai d'explication theorique
de la reallte sociale Guatemalteque', Indianite et L u t t e des Classes (Paris 1972), J. Banaji,
'For a theory of colonial modes of production', E c o n o m i c and Political Weekly, Decem-
ber 23, 19"/2.
25. For s remarkably concrete study of this process of incorporation, cf. C. Gibson, The
A z tees under Spanish Rule. A History o f the Indians o f the Valley o f Mexico 1319-1810
(Stanford and Oxford 1964). On the Philippines, see M.S. McLennan, 'Land and tenancy
in the Central Luzon Plain', Philippine Studies, October ] 969.
26. Cf. J. Delvert, Le Paysan Cambodgien (The Hague ! 961 ) pp. 51 I -S I 8 on the articulation
of local merchantusurer capital with the big import-export houses on one side and the
peasantry on the other. See also the article by S. Mukherji cited in footnote 8 above. In
China in the 19th century the older semi-feudal mode of production was combined with
a colomal mode o f production of this specific form, ie. characterized by the penetration
o f foreign capital through the circuits o f local merchant capital.
27. See the excellent analysis o f this form in G. Arrighi. 'Labour supplies in historical pers-
pective: a study of the I~roletarisation o f the African peasantry in Rhodesia', Journal o f
Development Studies 1970; The Political Economy of Rhodesia (The Hague 1967) and
S. Trapido, 'South Africa in a comparative study o f industrialization' (paper presented to
the seminar on 'the societies o f Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th century', Institute
o f Commonwealth Studies, University of London, October 1970).
28. Cf. the early sections o f C. Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil (California 1963)
who points out that the slave-based sugar industry was profitable enough to self-finance
a doubling o f productive capacity every two years.

29. As done by E.D. Genovese, The Political Economy o f Slavery (MacGibbon & Kee 1965)
30. V.I. Lenin, CW III p. 54.
31. V.I. Lenin, 'A characterisatlon of economic romanticism'. CW I! p. 155.
32. V.I. Lenin, 'On the so-called market question', CW I p. ! 02.
33. For a rigorous presentation of this question, cf. B. Hindess, 'Lenin and the Agrarian
Question in the first Russian Revolution', Theoretical Practice May 1972.
34. CW Ill p. 592.
35. On the advance system see the various District Gazetteers o f the United Provinces and
Oudho and cf. E. Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India. Volume One. The
United Provinces under British Rule 1860-1900 (University of California Press 1971 ).
For Marx's remarkable 'notes' on the role o f usurer capital in pre-capitalist formations
see Capital ill, ch. 36.
36. The phrase is from L. Trotsky, 'Peculiarities of Russian historical development', Restdts
and Prospects.
37. Eg. in Brazil, where "coffee interests were usually against tariffs, government loans to
industries, crop diversification, land reforms and education. And the British strengthened
the plantation interests". R.Graham, Britain and the Onset o [ Modernization in Brazil.
1850-1914 (Cambridge 1968). For imperialist policy to Indian industrialization, see
A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900-1939 (Cambridge 1972), especially the
concluding sections o f this excellent book. Cf. Bipan Chandra, 'British and Indian ideas
o n ! ndia n economic development, ! 858-1905', Studies in Modern Indian History, I
(Orient Longman 1972) who points out that " m o r e than any other single factor it was
the tariff policy of the Government of India which convinced Indians that British
policies in India were basically guided by the interests of the British capitalist class".
38. R. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian E c o n o m y , 1820-1 914 (Oxford ! 969).
39. R. Owen, 'Egypt and Europe: from French expedition to British occupation', R. Owen
and B. Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory o f Imperialism (Longman t 972).
40. Ibid. In Egypt in 1880, as pointed out by Hasan Riad, L'Egypte Nasserienne (Paris t964)
p. 196, the landowning class of recent bureaucratic formation and foreign origin, lined
up behind the Khedive in support of British imperialism.
41. The Peruvian example is from J. Piel, 'The place of the peasantry in the national life of
Peru in the 19th century', Past and Present. no. 46.
42. On import-substitution, cf. J. Ahmad, 'import substitution and structural change in
Indian manufacturing, 1950-66",Journal o f D e v e l o p m e n t Studies 1968, 'The growth and
decline of import substitution in Brazil', E c o n o m i c Bulletin f o r Latin America I X
(19641 J. Fiahlow, 'Origins and consequences of import substituion in Brazil', L.E. di
Marco (ed), International Economics and D e v e l o p m e n t (Academic Press 1972), C.
Furtado, Economic Development o f Latin America: A Survey f r o m Colonial Times to
the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge 1970) part four, R.B. Sutcliffe, Industry and Under.
d e v e l o p m e n t (Addison Wesley 197 I) p. 249f.
43. Modes of international dependence which were a subordinate mechanism of imperialist
domination at earlier stages of world economy when imperialism confronted a mass of
colonies and semi-colonies, cf. V.I. Lenin, Imperialism. The Highest Stage o f Capitalism,
Collected Works XXll p. 362, with reference to Argentina and Portugal and their
peculiar place in imperialist domination.
44. On the side of production this failure of capitalist development in agriculture would
force the colonial bourgeoisie to become a heavy importer of foodgrains. For the rela-
tively close integration between the industrial bourgeoisie and landowners, cf. Bagchi,
op.cit., oh. 6.11.
45. As shown for India by Bipan Chandra, 'The Indian capitalist class and imperialism
before 194'/', (mimeo, 1972). The anti-imperialism of the Indian bourgeoisie, specifically
the National Congress, which A. Gordon poses as a problem in his interesting, 'The
theory of the "progressive" national bourgeoisie', Journal o f Contemporary Asia, vol. 3
no. 2 19"/3, is not difficult to grasp when related to the c/ass interests o f a rising colonial
bourgeoisie in the phase o f import-substitution within a national framework dominated by
by a colonial state apparatus. In this context bourgeois anti-imperialism is neither a facade
which the bourgeoisie erects to fool the people nor the kind o f movement which justifies
tailism behind the banner o f 'national capitalism'. In Peru in the ! 920s, while APRA
tended to have the latter illusion, .lose Carlos Mariategui in his attack on APRA, 'The
anti-imperialist perspective', New Left Review, November-December 1971, showed
traces o f the former. Mariategui was absolutely right insofar as he denounced and exposed
illusions leading to tailism behind bourgeois nationalism, but wrong insofar as he tended
to assimilate all bourgeois-nationalist movements to the model o f a quick betrayal a la
Chiang Kai-shek. In the Indian context positions similar tO Mariategul's were taken up by
the Comintern during its 'third period', with disastrous consequences for the growth o f
the Indian CP.
46. On Argentina see E. Laclau, 'Argentina: imperialist strategy and the May crisia',New
Left Review, J uly-August 19'/0 ; on Egypt, M. Hussein, La Lutte de C/asses en E&ypre,
i 945. 70 (Paris 19"/I ); on Brazil, O. lanni, Crisis in Brazil (Columbia t 9"/0) and J. Quartim,
Dictatorship and Armed Struggle in Brazil (New Left Books 19"/I ). A similar analysis o f
the relations between imperialism and the Indian bourgeoisie still needs to be made. To
begin with, revolutionaries in India will have to abandon the classic myth that because
their bourgeois is not a 'national' one, ie. capable o f accomplishing primitive accumulation
through its own resources, it must be 'comprador'.
47. Cf. for an analysis of this mechanism, K. Bharadwaj, 'Notes on political economy o f de-
velopment: The Indian case', Economic and Political Weekly February 1972 (Annual
Number).
48. See C. Payer, 'The perpetuation o f dependence: the I M F and the Third World', Monthly
Review, Sept. 19'/I, and 'Exchange controls and national capitalism: the Philippines ex-
perience',Yournal o f Contemporary Asia, vol. 3 no. I 19'/3. On the background to these
interventions, ie. earlier accumulations o f foreign debt. cf. Economic Commission for
Latin America, External Financing in Latin America (UN New Y o r k 1965), Economic
Commission for Asia and the Far East, lndustridl Developments in Asia and the.Far East,
Volume I. Progress and Problems o f Industrialization (UN New York 1966), A. Maizeis,
Industrial Growth and World Trade (Cambridge 1965).
49. On this group: International Development Organisation, Industrial Development Survey,
Volume I V (UN New York 1972), S.H. Kim, Foreign Capital f o r Economic Development
A Korean Case StNdy (Praeger 1970), B. Balassa, 'Industrial policies in Taiwan and
Korea', apud di Marco, op.cit. I. Brecher and S. Abbas, Foreign A i d and Industrial
Development in Pakistan (Cambridge 1972).
50. C.F. Diaz-Alejandro. Exchange Rate Devaluation in a Semi.Industrialized Country: Tire
Experience o f Argentina, 1933.61 (Massachussets 1965).
$ t. Cf. J. Bergsman, Brazil: Industrialization and Trade Policies (Oxford 1970).
52. .l. Amuzegar and M. All Fekrat, lran: Economic Development under Dualistic Conditions
(Chicago 1971).
S3. Cf. the A d m i n i s t r a t o r of AID cited in L. Whitehead, The US and Bolivia: A Case o f Neo.
Colonialism (London ! 969).
54. For Egypt-Russia relations in terms of this t ype of analysis, cf. M. Hussein, op.cit.
$5. On this see E. Mandel, 'Imperialism and national bourgeoisie in L. America', International
vol. I no. 5, R. Pumaruna-Letls, Perou: Revolution Socialistee ou Caricature de Revo-
lution? (Paris 1971 ) and Hussein's analysis of Nasserism, op. cir.
$6. An image which Trotsky used for Russia, On Lenin (Oxford 1971) p. 144.
57. For Serrati, cf. ll. Carrere d'Encausse and S.R. Schram, Marxism and Asia (Allen Lane
1969) p. 165f.
58. A phrase used by Beta Kun at the Baku Congress in 1920, d'Encausse and Schram, op.
cir. p. 177, but not taken up since.
59. The Platform o f the Left Opposition 1927.
60. L. Trotsky, Tire Death Agony o f Capitalism and the Tasks o f the Fourth International.
What is referred to, on the Asian Left, as a 'new de moc ra t i c r e v o l u t i o n ' and s ome t i me s
a 'people's democratic r e v o l u t i o n ' oft e n means only what T r o t s k y i s t s have always meant
by a 'transitional programme'. The main difference is that when these concepts are
interpreted in this specific sense rather than as separate 'stages' of revolution in Stalin's
sense, the question of alliance with the rich peasantry, or even sections of the bourgeoisie,
recedes from the plane of strategy, where the Stalinists put it, to that of tactics, while
on the other hand, the problems of socialist revolution receive the main emphasis in the
party's propaganda and agitation.
PREACH, BUT DON'T PRACTICE - FIELD MARSHALL PRAPASS

CHARUSATHIAR THAi ARMY
"You cart teach anything you like today. Ten years ago if you taught
from a red book with a hammer and sickle sign on the cover chances
a r e you might land in jail, but today you can teach anything - provided
you stick to teaching and don't DO anything."
Field Marshall Prapass addressing an audience of Chulalongkom Univer-
si~ professors (Bangkok Post, August 31, ] 9 73J.
II
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This article was downloaded by: [Moskow State Univ Bibliote]

On: 11 December 2013, At: 16:04

Journal of Contemporary Asia

Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472337308566901

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1. Combined Development in WorldEconomy

]aims Banaji teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

world economy capitalism coexisted with non-capitalist modes of production both

them to new territories not previously inhabited.

2. Primitive A ecumulation and Forms of Developmeltt

peasants into proletarians |

ment, of interdependent and mutually conditioning processes of primitive accumu-

of expanded reproduction derive their dynamism from certain relationships between

3. Primitive Accumulation and the Sectors of Nascent Capitalist Development

A. Late Capitalist Development

As we know, in those sectors of world economy in which industrialization was

in Germany or Britain - a weak and compromising bourgeoisie, a working class

problematic 23 only as long as we misrecognize the structure of world economy an0

is the expression of that development, is a condition of capitalism and strengthens

mination by theories of free trade, notions about international division of labour,

consciously maintained tile colonies in a position of iridustrial backwardness

6 Phasesof Dependent Primitive Accumulation

simultaneously with or shortly after the inception of official assistance, Ioreign

comes to be characterized, to a greater or lesser degree, by the emergence of new

stranglehold of debt servicing and the rapid conversion of former surpluses on

7. Socialist Revolution and Uneven Development

version of landlord or peasant into bourgeois economy moves in a historical space of

bined development thrown up a whole series of intermediate and transitional types,

of tile rural masses.

a doubling o f productive capacity every two years.

PREACH, BUT DON'T PRACTICE - FIELD MARSHALL PRAPASS

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