The Struggle for Development by Benjamin Selwyn

Author:Benjamin Selwyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509512829
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Modernisation Marxism

There are numerous traditions within Marxism, ranging from perspectives that dovetail with anarchist thought in rejecting capitalism and embracing revolutionary socialism from below to those that portray capitalism as a progressive socioeconomic force, and which advocate state-imposed socialism from above (Draper 1966). The latter perspective, which was never adhered to by Marx, became an almost religious doctrine in Russia following Stalin’s assumption of total leadership of the USSR in 1928. From that time onwards, Soviet socialism would be achieved through state-implemented five-year plans designed to accelerate the country’s industrialisation and enable it to compete militarily with the West.

Following the USSR’s emergence as the world’s second superpower and the 1949 Chinese revolution, the five-year plan model of top-down industrialisation became popular across much of the Third World. Stalin’s explanation of the need for rapid Russian industrialisation struck a chord with newly independent countries struggling to find their geopolitical and economic footing in the emerging US-dominated world economy: ‘The pace must not be slackened!’ he said in February 1931. ‘On the contrary we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us’ (quoted in Deutscher 1967: 328).

The millions of deaths under Stalin and Mao, as a consequence of attempts at accelerated industrialisation, deterred neither state leaders in the Third World nor development theorists from adopting variations of modernisation Marxism to explain and facilitate state-led socialist development from above. Why did these ‘socialist’ forms of development generate such misery? An important body of literature demonstrates how the cases of ‘really existing socialism’ were actually forms of ‘state capitalism’ (see Cliff [1974] on Russia, Harman [1974] on Eastern Europe, Harris [1978] on China, Binns and Gonzalez [1980] on Cuba, and Zeilig [2010] on myriad sub-Saharan African cases). This literature identifies October 1917 as a genuine workers’ revolution. It also notes how, following international isolation and intervention, famine, de-industrialisation and the physical disappearance of the pre-1917 industrial working class, it was defeated from within by Stalin’s emerging state bureaucracy.

Following the model of Stalinist Russia, new post-colonial ruling classes used the state to accumulate capital rapidly, by means of exploiting of their countries’ working classes and peasantries, in order to compete in and attempt catch-up with more economically advanced capitalist countries. The developmental ‘successes’ – in particular rapid industrialisation and militarisation – of ‘really existing’ socialist states certainly influenced academic conceptions of Marxism. Whether or not they subscribed to Stalinist development strategies, these variants of Marxism portrayed capitalism and capital accumulation as a dynamic and progressive force in human developmental terms.

Within development studies, modernisation Marxism was theorised and given renewed popularity in the 1970s. The title and substance of Bill Warren’s Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism captures the positive dynamism ascribed to capitalism by him and his followers. For example, in John Sender and Sheila Smith’s prognosis for sustained economic growth in Africa, the

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