Understanding Revolution by Kavous Ardalan

Author:Kavous Ardalan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030475918
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4 Radical Structuralist View

Our epoch has been characterized by capital accumulation and expansion on the world scale and continually experiences recurring crises in forms of recessions, depressions, and fluctuations. In this context, an adequate analysis of social change in the Third World countries should not focus on stagnation and underdevelopment; rather, it should focus on the conditions under which the process of capital accumulation takes place and its impact on class structure. The examination of class relations in peripheral countries should be taken as the point of departure for addressing the problems of capital accumulation and expansion.4

Capital accumulation is affected by the following factors: (1) the nature of the state and the state policy and (2) class relations (the process of surplus extraction, the intensity of exploitation, the level of class struggle, and the concentration of the workforce). Capital accumulation affects class structure in the following ways: (1) class formation/conversion (e.g., the shift from small proprietor to proletarian or from kulak and rural proletarian to urban sub-proletarian, from landlord to merchant, from merchant to industrialist, or from national industrialist to branch plant manager of a multinational corporation); (2) income distribution (concentration, redistribution, re-concentration of income); and (3) changes in social relations, including labor market (“free” market wage and trade union bargaining), semicoercive (market and political/social controls), and coercive (slave and debt peonage) types.

The growth in production occurs in cyclical patterns, partly due to external decisions (“demand”) and partly due to internal conditions (e.g., externally linked classes, an alienated state, or repressed social movements). Capital accumulation in the Third World results in uneven development, that is, (1) integration of specific product areas with the external world; (2) sharp income inequalities due to external class linkages; (3) control over state revenues; and (4) coercive controls over the working class and the peasantry. While dependency studies focus on the growth of productive forces and the way external connections impede growth, the focus when placed on conditions of capital accumulation and their impact on class relations allow the examination of the nature of the state in a more concrete manner. The state is ultimately involved in capital accumulation and class formation, as well as in internal class relations as they emerge from and get involved in capitalist development.

A post-independence national regime, in the context of capital accumulation, can choose from among at least three strategies or types of class alliances. (1) It can join the imperial firms and regimes in intensifying surplus extraction from the labor force through various types of post-independence working relationships. (2) It can extract surplus directly from the labor force and limit or eliminate the share that used to go to the imperial firms and, therefore, channel it to the state and/or private national entrepreneurs. This approach, which can be referred to as “national developmentalism without redistribution,” leads to the concentration of income in the top class in the national hierarchy. (3) It can ally itself with the laboring population, extend the areas of national control (through nationalization), and either

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