Poverty Amidst Plenty: World Political Economy and Distributive Justice by Edward Weisband

Author:Edward Weisband [Weisband, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Poverty & Homelessness, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000307863
Google: O02fDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 51175723
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Europe, in sharp contrast to their successes as revolutionary doctrine in the Third World, gave rise to a reversal of emphasis so that the main thrust of theories of Dependency aimed at a diagnosis of the victim’s condition and concern for his immiserated state. Theories of Dependency as general macro-theories of world politics had their origin mainly in the micro-analysis of the Third World’s ailing economies. From the analysis of the patient’s symptoms in the micro-approach the Dependency approach soon turned its attention to the analysis of the metropolis (although at first it was neither a ‘patient’ nor on the ‘sick list’—and certainly was not complaining). When joined together predator and victim brought into focus a macro-perspective which upon investigation revealed to the Dependency authors that the causes of the malaise were actually to be found in the relationship between the two. It was further found that, in the case of the metropolis in particular, the condition was pathological since, they argued, through its own deliberate actions the metropolis ‘stunts’ the colony’s development and consciously brings to it ‘underdevelopment’.

Apart from differences in origin, differences in approach (in the sense of perspective held by the two theories) reveal themselves. Following acceptance of the fact that both imperialism and Dependency conceive of the Centre-Periphery relationship as asymmetrical, and that both are theories of inequality, the divergencies are seen to far outnumber the shared features, and it becomes increasingly apparent that imperialism in the Marxist understanding is not a theory of dependence in the same sense as is Dependency.

Unlike other Marxist theorists (and Rosa Luxemburg in particular comes to mind) who saw the metropolis depending for its survival on outward expansion and exploitation of colonies, Dependency reverses the relationship to have the ex-colonies depend for their ‘survival’ on the developed countries. And there are refinements of these broad parameters of the relationship: Barratt Brown, for example, among others, whilst acknowledging the fact of the enrichment of the metropolis through colonialist exploitation, denies that this process is of any major importance to the ‘torturer’, even though the maiming of the victim continues—which is to say that whatever the relationship may once have been, it becomes no longer a zero-sum relation (B’s loss in the long run being no longer necessarily the equivalent of An gain). Perhaps the better way (and certainly the safer way) of summarising ‘Dependency’ and of retaining the suggestion of the lopsidedness of the relationship is the descriptor ‘domination-dependence’.

Other important differences are to be found. For theorists of imperialism (including Hobson and Lenin) the strategy and ‘mechanism’ of imperialism consisted of the corruption of part of the proletariat and, by the creation therefrom of a labour aristocracy (itself a participant in some of the colonial superprofits) that traditionally revolutionary vanguard was deflected from its revolutionary purpose, whilst the mass of the proletariat continued to be oppressed. In contrast, whilst some Dependency theorists still subject the metropolis to sociological analysis and seek to isolate groups and identify their roles in the Dependency relationship, most do not.

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