The Origins of Economic Inequality Between Nations by Ramirez-Faria Carlos;

Author:Ramirez-Faria, Carlos;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

A time of political radicalism

The historical circumstances in which Baran divulged his ideas on underdevelopment were crucial to the influence that they achieved as well as in connection with the basic targets that they aimed at. Of these targets, one was technically within the purview of Marxism, and the other could fairly be described as one of the main intellectual adversaries of violent change in the Third World. Baran gave, if not proof, at least colourable arguments against the notion that capitalist development in the Third World was possible, or as G. Lichtheim had put it, that there was nothing in the laws of the system to prevent it. B. Warren later would say that capitalist development in the underdeveloped countries was inevitable, that it was, in fact, happening. Even later, N. Harris would adduce that he had proof of it.

But from Lenin's day the bulk of Marxist opinion had been that capitalism not only did not develop but also prevented development by any other means and even tended to immiserate. However, until Baran this was dogma and propaganda. It was founded on images and feelings and not primarily on reason. Baran gave reasons. Latin Americans were torn between hatred of Yankee imperialism and the Marxist logic that feudalism engenders capitalism. Baran explained that feudalism was not the primary cause of the condition of underdevelopment, because endogenous capitalist development could evolve from it, as it had in the advanced Western nations, and that it was capitalism imposed from the outside as a system of exploitation and of lopsided trade relations that had been producing backwardness and poverty over the centuries from the start of European expansion. In proposing these explanations, Baran fused Marx's sometime-negative view of colonialism with a vast historical expansion of Lenin's theory on the reactionary nature of imperialism.

The other target singled out by Baran was development economics: the whole wide myth that all that Latin America needed was social reform, some state intervention and plenty of investment in order to develop without tampering with private property or with the incentives to private enterprise. It was against this more than anything else that Baran flung his missiles, because here was an enemy that had to be destroyed, and that was the idea of potential progress at the heart of the concept of underdevelopment. Before Baran, the left had been content to castigate the colonialist and semi-colonialist Western domination of the world, and it had done nothing significant to counter the specific threat in the idea of a potentiality for development in the Third World that only had to be stimulated. This was an ideological and policy approach that bid fair to move and, in fact, was moving the relations between the industrialized and the non-industrialized nations from the old Eurocentric and colonialist patterns on to a new basis of possible dialogue and collaboration, certainly of strong intellectual and political complicities. This was not a promise of instant change, and thirty years ago it was not even much of

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