The Law of Uneven and Combined Development Some Underdeveloped Thoughts

8/10/2019 The Law of Uneven and Combined Development Some Underdeveloped Thoughts

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Te Law of Uneven and Combined Development:Some Underdeveloped Toughts

Marcel van der LindenResearch Director, International Institute o Social History,

and Proessor o Social Movement History, University o [email protected]

Abstract

Tis paper presents a critical reconstruction o the main Marxist debates about the idea o leapsorward in historical development. Tere have been two important approaches: the so-called lawo uneven and combined development, as developed by Leon rotsky, George Novack and ErnestMandel, and Jan Romeins handicap o a head start. Although Romeins approach is Stalinist inorigin, elements o it are compatible with rotskys interpretation. But, even an expanded version othe law o uneven and combined development lacks predictive value, although one can say withcertainty in hindsight whether a combined development has taken place. It is argued that the lawis, in act, an underspecied social mechanism and that its explanatory power can be increased by

identiying a number o recurrent patterns.

Keywordsuneven development, combined development, diffusion, rotsky, Novack, Romein

One eels a little oolish in proclaiming a scientic law inasmuch as it is done sorequently as a orm o humor.

Elman Service1

Te law o uneven and combined development occupied a special placein Ernest Mandels thought. He used this law again and again to reer todevelopments in world capitalism as well as in the so-called transitional societies.In this paper, I seek to situate Mandels interpretation critically in the context othe twentieth-century debate on the connection between backwardness and

1. Service 1960, p. 102. I am grateul to Mike Hanagan, Joost Kircz, Knut Kjeldstadli, twoanonymous reerees, and members o the Editorial Board or their critical reading o earlier drafso this article.

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146 M. van der Linden / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 145165

leaps orward in development, and show that the law might be o greateranalytical value i certain elements o it were more accurately specied.

1. Te rotsky-Novack-Mandel approach

Within the Marxist tradition, the idea o leaps orward acquired its rstadvocates in the early twentieth century.2Rudol Hilerding wrote in hisFinanceCapital(1910):

Capitalist development did not take place independently in each individualcountry, but instead capitalist relations o production and exploitation wereimported along with capital rom abroad, and indeed imported at the level alreadyattained in the most advanced country. Just as a newly established industry todaydoes not develop rom handicraf beginnings and techniques into a modern giantconcern, but is established rom the outset as an advanced capitalist enterprise, socapitalism is now imported into a new country in its most advanced orm andexerts its revolutionary effects ar more strongly and in a much shorter time thanwas the case, or instance, in the capitalist development o Holland and England.3

Anton Pannekoek also observed in 1920, reerring to the October Revolution:

Tis is not the rst time in history that a transition to a new mode o production or a new orm or phase o a mode o production displaces the centre o theworld to new countries or different regions. In Antiquity the centre shifed romthe Near East to Southern Europe, in the Middle Ages rom Southern to Northern

Europe; the rise o colonial and merchant capital made rst Spain and then theNorthern Netherlands the leading country, while the rise o industry did the sameor England. Te reason is easily grasped. In a region where the earlier orm attainedits highest development, the material and intellectual orces and institutions thatensured its existence became so xed and sturdy that they became almostinsurmountable obstacles to the development o new orms. Tink or example othe guild ordinances o the medieval cities, which ensured that later capitalistmanuacturing could only ourish where they were not in orce; or think o theDutch merchants policies in the seventeenth century, which stied industry. Tere

is even a corresponding law in organic nature, which, to paraphrase Darwinssurvival o the ttest, could be called survival o the untted.4

2. We can also nd embryonic elements o it in Marxs own writings. See e.g. Mehringer 1978,

pp. 2064.3. Hilerding 1981, pp. 3223.4. Horner 1920, p. 267.


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M. van der Linden / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 145165 147

But it was chiey rotsky who made the idea o societal leaps acceptable amongMarxists. As is known, beginning in 19045 he worked on a theory ouninterrupted revolution [nepreryvnaja revoljucia], which stated that the rapid

development o world capitalism in Russia lef only the working class capable ocompleting a social revolution. Te proletariat will carry out the undamentaltasks o democracy and the logic o its immediate struggle to saeguard its

political rule will at a certain point pose purely socialist tasks or it.5Over theyears, rotsky generalised this theory into a much broader theory o socialchange. His theoretical labours reached their apex in this respect in 19323 inhis book on theHistory o the Russian Revolution. Here, he presented his law o

combined development:

Although compelled to ollow afer the advanced countries, a backward countrydoes not take things in the same order. Te privilege o historic backwardness andsuch a privilege exists permits, or rather compels, the adoption o whatever isready in advance o any specied date, skipping a whole series o intermediatestages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows or ries all at once, withouttravelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. Te European

colonists in America did not begin history all over again rom the beginning. Teact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstrippedEngland was made possible by the very backwardness o their capitalist development.On the other hand, the conservative anarchy in the British coal industry . . . is apaying-up or the past when England played too long the role o capitalistpathnder. Te development o historically backward nations leads necessarily to apeculiar combination o different stages in the historic process. Teir developmentas a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character.6

rotsky emphasised that the possibility o skipping over intermediate steps isby no means absolute. He voiced two major reservations. Firstly, the extent to

which such a possibility exists depends on the economic and cultural capacitieso the country.7Secondly, a leap does not always have a progressive result:

Te backward country . . . not inrequently debases the achievements borrowed

rom outside in the process o adapting them to its own more primitive culture. Inthis the very process o assimilation acquires a sel-contradictory character. Tusthe introduction o certain elements o Western technique and training, above all

5. Lev rockij, Socialdemokratija i revoljucija,Naalo, 10 (25 November8 December 1905),as cited in Mehringer 1978, p. 232. On rotskys collaboration with Parvus (Alexander Helphand)

in this early period, see Scharlau 1962.6. rotsky 1977, pp. 267.7. rotsky 1977, p. 27.


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military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening o serdom as theundamental orm o labour organization. European armament and Europeanloans both indubitable products o a higher culture led to a strengthening oczarism, which delayed in its turn the development o the country.8

In sum, rotsky distinguished tworegularities: rst the law o unevenness, andlinked to it the law o combined development, that is, a drawing together o thedifferent stages o the journey, a combining o separate steps, an amalgam oarchaic with more contemporary orms.9 Let me try to deconstruct rotskystheory to some extent. What is, in act, the unit o analysis here? Jon Elsterobserves:

World history may be studied rom two points o view: as the rise and decline onations or as the rise and decline o institutions. Te ormer approach is that oTorstein Veblen and, more recently, o Mancur Olson. . . . Te latter perspectiveis that o Marx and, more recently, o Douglass North. . . . rotskys theory ocombined and uneven development says that these questions are interrelated.10

Progress. Tere is progress; and this progress is linear, and can thus be used as astandard with which to measure to what extent a nation/institution is more orless backward.11

Unevenness. Te development o nations/institutions is uneven, so that more orless backward or advanced nations/institutions exist alongside one another incidentally, a thought that could already be ound in Lenin as the law o uneven

development.

Combination 1. Backward and advanced nations/institutions are interwovenwith each other.

Privilege o backwardness. A backward nation/institution can, under certainconditions (economic and cultural capacities o the country), appropriate

technical and other gains rom an advanced situation without going throughthe intermediate stages that the advanced nation/institution did have to gothrough.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid. See also the very useul study o rotskys views in Tatcher 1991.10. Elster 1986, p. 54.11. An outstanding analysis o the concept backwardness in Knei Paz 1977, pp. 703.


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Combination 2. Te new situation that thus arises in the previously backwardcountry can lead to an advantage over the previously advanced nation/institution; but not inrequently the result is only a orm o modied

backwardness.

Afer rotskys death, it was chiey the US philosopher George Novack (190592) who tried to develop the theoretical ramework in this area urther. In 1957,he published a two-part essay in the British Labour Review in which hegeneralised rotskys analysis, declaring it one o the undamental laws o humanhistory, and introduced the concept o the law o uneven and combined

development, which, in later decades, would come to lead a lie o its own.Novack considered the pattern that he had described a scientic law o thewidest application to the historic process.12He asserted that rotskys theorywas an application o a more general regularity to the key problems o theinternational class struggles in our own time.13Te law o uneven and combineddevelopment, Novack said, held true not only or human history but also or allevolutionary biological processes. Novack thus used a different unit o analysis

rom rotsky, namely all living organisms and their orms o social lie.He distinguished the law o uneven development on the one hand, whichprovides that the constituent elements o a thing, all the aspects o an event, allthe actors in a process o development develop at different rhythms, and thelaw o combined development on the other hand, which provides that eaturesbelonging to different stages can converge to orm something new.14

In the joining o such different, and even opposing, elements, the dialectical natureo history asserts itsel most orceully. Here, contradiction, at, obvious, agrantcontradiction, holds sway. History plays pranks with all rigid orms and xedroutines. All kinds o paradoxical developments ensue which perplex those withnarrow, ormalized minds.15

Te combination o slavery and capitalism could lead, or example, to a situationin which there were commercial slaveholders among the Creek Indians o the

Southern US. Could anything be more anomalous and sel-contradictory than

12. Novack 1972a, p. 82.13. Novack 1972a, p. 85. He said even more clearly a ew years later: Te law o uneven and

combined development is a general law o the historical process o which the theory o permanentrevolution is a particular expression limited to the period o transition rom the capitalist system to

socialism. Novack 1972b, p. 147.14. Novack 1972a, pp. 85, 99.15. Novack 1972a, p. 101.


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communistic Indians, now slaveholders, selling their products in a bourgeoismarket?16

Combined social ormations are characterised, Novack says, by a struggle o

opposites. He distinguishes two main types.

Combination ype 1: Te backward orm absorbs the product o the advancedculture. For example, the Indians could replace the stone axe with the iron axe

without undamental dislocations o their social order because this changeinvolved only slight dependence upon the white civilization rom which the ironaxe was taken.17Sometimes, elements rom an advanced culture can even prolong

the lie o a backward culture. Te entrance o the great capitalist oil concernsinto the Middle East has temporarily strengthened the sheikdoms by showeringwealth upon them.18

Combination ype 2: Elements o the backward culture are incorporated intothe advanced culture. When, or example, Native Americans became involved inthe ur trade, money pushed its way into their societies, with revolutionary

consequences, setting up private interests against communal customs, pittingone tribe against another and subordinating the new Indian traders and trappersto the world market.19

In the long term, ype 2 always prevails, because the superior structure . . . thrivesat the expense o the inerior eatures, eventually dislodging them.20

Ernest Mandel who placed considerable value on Novacks opinions21

took over the core ideas o this theoretical construct in later years. He ocused,however, on the constructs useulness or analysing capitalist and transitionalsocieties22 though he sometimes ailed to make a sharp distinction betweenNovacks law and rotskys theory o permanent revolution and almost nevermentioned Novack by name.

Mandel rarely made any pronouncements about the law in the abstract.23One o the rare occasions on which he did was in the late 1970s, when he

16. Ibid.17. Novack 1972a, p. 106.18. Ibid.19. Ibid.20. Novack 1972a, 107.21. It was Novack, or instance, who prevailed on Mandel to begin writing hisMarxist Economic

Teory see Jan Willem Stutjes orthcoming biography o Ernest Mandel.

22. For example see Mandel 1970b. Mandel borrowed the concept o the transitional societyrom Novack as well; see Novack 1968.23. See, however, his summary o rotskys view in Mandel 1995, pp. 18.


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deended the thesis that the law o uneven and combined development couldonly have been discovered in a particular stage o world capitalism. In Marxstime, it had still seemed as i every country were developing independently along

the same lines: Te country that is more developed industrially only shows, tothe less developed, the image o its own uture.24Tis idea reected the actualnineteenth-century situation, Mandel says: France and Belgium did generallyollow the pattern o English development; Germany and Italy by and largerepeated French development, although without a radical bourgeois revolution.25Tis pattern which economic historians like Alexander Gerschenkron havealso recognised, by the way26 ceased to be valid toward the end o the nineteenth

century. Japan, Austria, and sarist Russia started on that road, but were unableto traverse it completely.27With the rise o imperialism, it became impossibleor less developed countries to repeat completelythe process o industrializationand modernization undergone by the imperialist countries.28 Since then,imperialism had unied the world economy into a a single world market, eventhough world societyhad emphatically not become a homogeneous capitalistmilieu. On the contrary:

although [imperialism] submits all classes and all nations (except those which havebroken out o its realm) to various orms o commonexploitation, it maintains andstrengthens to the utmost the differences between these societies. Although theUnited States and India are more closely interwoven today than at any time in thepast, the distance which separates their technology, their lie-expectancy, their

24. Marx 1976, p. 91.25. Mandel 1979, p. 69.26. Commenting on Marxs assertion that an industrialised country shows a less industrialised

country the image o its own uture, Gerschenkron writes that this generalisation is in some broadsense valid. It is meaningul to say that Germany, between the middle and the end o the lastcentury, ollowed the road which England began to tread at an earlier time. Gerschenkron 1962,

pp. 67.27. Mandel 1979, p. 69.28. Ibid. Mandel gave three reasons or this reversal. First, the weight o imperialist capital on

the world market (and thereore in every country, including the backward ones) was such that anyorganic process o industrialization in competition with imperialist capital was ruled out so long asimperialism dominated. . . . Second, the native bourgeoisie in these countries was trapped betweenits desire to industrialize and modernize on the one hand and its close relations with agrarian

property on the other hand. Because o its close relationship, the bourgeoisie had no interest ineffecting a radical agrarian revolution, or to do so would have been to destroy a signicant part oits own capital. Such an agrarian revolution, however, is the precondition or the creation o theextensive internal market required or a thorough, organic process o industrialization. . . . Tird, the

peasantry which would have provided most o the potential participants in the bourgeoisrevolutionary process . . . was unable to offer central political leadership or that process. Mandel1979, pp. 6970.


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average culture, the way o living and o working o their inhabitants, is much widertoday than it was a century ago, when there were hardly any relations at all betweenthese two countries.29

But such expatiations were, in general, exceptional, as previously mentioned.Mandel tried much more ofen to show concretely that particular developmentshad been the result o uneven and combined development. Here, one example

will suffice: inter-imperialist competition. Mandel became aware o this problemin the course o the 1960s. He did not mention the subject in his Marxist

Economic Teory; but he did pay attention to it in his reply to Jean-JacquesServan-Schreibers Le D amricain (Paris, 1967), and was, in act, the rst

person on the European Lef to do so.30From the late 1960s on, Mandel analysedUS hegemony on several occasions in his works. InDie EWG und die Konkurrenz

Europa-Amerika(1968), he claimed that the United States had beneted romthe law o unequal development or a century and was now becoming its

victim.31Afer the end o the Civil War, the US had succeeded in a strikinglyshort time in catching up with Britain as an industrial power, thanks in part tothe lack o surviving eudal or semi-eudal elements in its society, the availabilityo advanced technology,32 and the presence o major raw materials. Te two

World Wars urther weakened the USs rivals, so that, in 1945, Germany, Japan,Great Britain, France and Italy had lost practically all their autonomous militaryand economic power.33A steadily increasing surplus productive capacity and agrowing surplus o capital, concentrated in the hands o the big corporations,accompanied the US economic growth that ensued.34Te surplus capital couldnot be exported to underdeveloped countries, because their markets were toosmall and the investment climate too insecure. It thereore hadto be placed inother developed capitalist countries, such as Western Europe and Japan. Teresultant gigantic transusion o American capital led to the reconstruction oEuropean and Japanese industries that had suffered greatly rom the Second

World War or otherwise become obsolete.35An exceptionally rapid accumulation

29. Mandel 1970b, p. 22.30. Neusss 1972, p. 6.31. Mandel 1970a, p. 9.32. Te advanced technology resulted rom the relatively high wages in the US, which in turn

resulted rom the limited labour supply, which in itsturn resulted rom the large quantity o reelyavailable land, which or many years gave US workers opportunities to become independentarmers.

33. Mandel 1970a, p. 10.

34. Mandel 1968.35. Tere was also a political and strategic consideration that played a role in this respect. UShegemony was contested almost rom the start, by the Soviet Union and colonial revolutions. In


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process thus began in these countries,36leading to a shif in the relationship oorces. In the 1960s, the US lost its absolute superiority or good though thisloss did result in a consolidation o its relativesuperiority.37

2. A second approach: Romeins handicap of a head start

Te idea that history makes leaps has been accepted by all sorts o authors or avery long time. Over a century ago Lewis H. Morgan (181881) suggested thatsocieties can skip over stages. Nikolai Chernyshevski (182889) concluded:History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grandchildren.38Torstein

Veblen too described in his bookImperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution(1915) how several generations had developed machine technologies duringthe Industrial Revolution in Britain at the cost o large and long experience andargumentation, which the Germans had subsequently taken over in denite andunequivocal shape a transer involving no laborious or uncertain matter.39

It should in any event occasion no great surprise that the Dutch Communisthistorian Jan Romein (18931962) developed a second theory o social leaps,independently o rotsky although I cannot rule out the possibility thatRomein implicitly intended his theory as a Stalinist answer to rotsky. While

order to maintain its hegemony against these challenges the US was compelled to restore WesternEuropes and Japans economic power. Mandel 1970a, pp. 1011.

36. Mandel 1964. In later publications, Mandel also pointed out that an extensive industrial

reserve army existed in Western Europe and Japan in the rst ten to feen years afer the SecondWorld War that could be mobilised or the accumulation process. See Mandel 1976, pp. 16971;Mandel 1974.

37. Mandel 1970a, p. 17. Christel Neusss argues that this last argument o Mandels turns logicupside down. Mandel shows that uneven development has determined the concrete historicalrelationship between the US and EEC, and then he callsthis an expression o the law. But this isexactly what he means to demonstrate: that the historical act o uneven development can beexplained on the basis o the relationship between the historically and naturally divergent

preconditions o capitalist production in particular countries, on the one hand, and the effect o thelaw o value on the world market, on the other. Neusss 1972, p. 80n.

38. As cited in Gerschenkron 1962, p. 179.39. Veblen 1964, pp. 1901. Te same theme has subsequently been put orward countless

times. Ronald Dore, or example, spoke o a late development effect: It is generally recognised thatlate-starters have some advantages Germany leaprogging over Britain in steel technology in thenineteenth century, or instance, or Japan in shipbuilding afer the Second World War, starting,

with her yards completely destroyed, unencumbered with all the nineteenth-century machinerywhich clutters the Clydebank. What is not so generally recognized is that there is a late development

effect also in (a) social technology educational systems, methods o personnel management,committee procedures, and (b) ideologies which in the case o the egalitarian democraticideologies germane to the present argument although originally consequences o an advanced


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rotsky had reasoned chiey rom the viewpoint o the backward country, JanRomein reasoned rom the other direction. Once more starting where Pannekoekhad in 1920, Romein spoke o a law o the handicap o a head start and used it

as a political standpoint, not only to the advantage o the new Soviet state butalso to the advantage o its new leader, Joseph Stalin.40In 1935, Romein publishedan essay on Te Dialectic o Progress. Citing many examples rom military,cultural and economic history, he deended the central thesis that the mostbackward competitor has the best chance o success in the struggle orsupremacy.41Developments in the Soviet Union, he argued, conrmed this:

otally contrary to the theory, which taught that the so-called Russian experimenthad to ail because it had skipped over the bourgeois-capitalist phase, it seemedinstead that that (relative) skipping over created the conditions or success. Teslogan o dognat i perignat, catching up with and surpassing Western capitalism,proved no idle phrase but a conscious application o what we have just tried toshow: namely, that each time the highest system is not the direct continuation othe previous one, but rather develops on a lower oundation in contradictionto theprevious one, albeit while drawing on the results o that previous one.42

Romein who was amiliar with rotskys work43 thus altered an element o it.We could call this altered element Combination 2A: while rotsky lef thequestion open o what the outcome would be o introducing advanced elementsinto a backward situation, Romein claimed that an initial lag in developmentleads not only to a leap orward but even to an advantage over the previouslyadvanced nation/institution. In this way, Romein gave an apologetic twist to the

law, using it to justiy socialism in one country. Contrary to ordinary Stalinists,however, he considered that the Soviet experiment was possible, not becausecapitalism was already well developed in Russia, but rather because it was not yet

well developed.At the same time, Romein added some elements to the argumentation that

werecompatible with rotsky.

stage o industrialization in the societies in which those ideologies rst appeared, can haveindependent lie and orce o their own when diffused to societies just beginning industrialization.I suggest that by these processes o diffusion late-developing societies can get ahead can show ina more developed orm, patterns o social organization which, in the countries which industrializedearlier are still emerging, still struggling to get out rom the chrysalis o nineteenth-centuryinstitutions. Dore 1973a, p. 12.

40. Otto 1998, p. 129.

41. Romein 1937, p. 29.42. Romein 1937, pp. 489.43. See his reerence to the German edition o rotskysHistory o the Russian Revolutionon p. 49.


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Handicap o a head start, the mirror image o the privilege o backwardness: justas an initial lag in development may lead to a leap orward, a head start may leadto stagnation.

Competition between advanced and backward nations.Only competition amongnations always reveals which is backward and which is advanced. However

petried old orms may be, they still rule supreme as long as new orms do notthreaten them. Tereore one cannot speak o the decline o old orms. Neitherdoes capitalism decline, although it changes in times o crisis. I would preer todrop that whole idea o inherent decline as a historical concept. It is unusable,

because it is too vague. It amounts to a more or less instinctive, and thereoremore or less supercial, biological view o historical processes.44

Intensity. Te tempestuous development o world capitalism has a contradictoryeffect on development by leaps. On the one hand, a steady acceleration takes

place. Increased trade, development o credit institutions and a greater quantityo available capital have made it possible to appropriate technical and organisation

improvements so much more quickly and easily! As a result, the period duringwhich a given system has and prots rom a head start is becoming shorter andshorter, because improvements are easier to appropriate and apply.45 On theother hand, the greater scale o capital investment leads at the same time toreluctance to make improvements, since they ofen require installing totally newactories.46aken together, the outcome o these two effects is that, while theduration o a head start is becoming shorter, it is being more intensively used,

so that the only differences with the earlier situation are ones o tempo andintensity.47

US anthropologist Elman Service (191596)48would, incidentally, discover thehandicap o a head start entirely on his own twenty-ve years afer Romein. In a1960 publication, Service made a distinction rom an evolutionary perspective

44. Romein 1937, p. 35.45. Romein 1937, p. 47.46. Ibid.47. Ibid.48. Elman R. Service had ought in the Spanish Civil War and belonged in the rst post-Second-

World-War years to the Mundiana Upheaval Society, a group o anthropology students in NewYork City that Stanley Diamond, Sidney Mintz and Eric Wol also belonged to. Wol characterisedthe group as ollows: Well, all o us were some variant o red. Some o us had actively been members

o the Party at some point. Others were Fourth Internationalist, or Tree and Tree-quarterthInternationalist. I think that was one o the strong bonds among us . . . a Marxian stew but notnecessarily with any commitment to a particular party line. Friedman 1987, p. 109.


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between two contradictory inuences: on the one hand, specic evolution,through which every given system improves its chances or survival, progressesin the efficiency o energy capture, by increasing its adaptive specialization, with

nonprogressive stabilisation or complete stagnation as its nal result; and, onthe other hand, general evolution, through which orms that are not highlyspecialized and have the potential to adapt to new circumstances continuallyoriginate alongside the stagnating orms.49Combining these two actors resultedin the Law o Evolutionary Potential, which Service summarised as ollows:Te more specialized and adapted a orm in a given evolutionary stage, thesmaller is its potential or passing to the next stage, or: Specic evolutionary

progress is inversely related to general evolutionary potential.50

Te directconsequence o this regularity is that over-all progress is discontinuous andirregular. Reerring to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Service also pointed out aspatial aspect o his Law, an element that neither rotsky nor Romein hadexplicitly mentioned local discontinuity. Service meant by this that i successivestages o progress are not likely to go rom one species to its next descendant,then they are not likely to occur in the same locality.51Leaps orward also lead to

geographical displacements.

3. Debates

Te theory o the handicap o a head start was the occasion o some debate.rotsky had stated that a backward country must have sufficient economic andcultural capacities in order to appropriate advanced technology successully.Romein had taken this aspect much less seriously; and the Dutch-Germantechnician Frits Kie (190876) argued that this had led Romein to overestimatethe scope o the dialectic o progress to a considerable degree.

In the classical Marxist approach, a orm o social development must maturecompletely in order or a new orm to originate. Given how closely the struggle orsocialism is to the working class, the existenceo the working class is aprecondition

or socialism also and above all because the existence o this class is an expressiono the existence o the economic and technical relations that make socialismnecessary.Marx thereore linked concentration o capital to socialisation o labor.

Botho these actors determine a societys degree o ripeness or socialism. Tecentralization o the means o production and the socialization o labour reach apoint at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

49. Service 1960, pp. 945.50. Service 1960, p. 97.51. Service 1960, p. 99.


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Reasoning in Marxist terms, a phase o development can thus in principle not beskipped over. Tis o course does not mean that every capitalist development mustretrace the route rom the most primitive to the most highly developed stage. Itonly means that the capitaliststage is an unavoidablestage, which mustbe traversed

in order to go rom absolutism to socialism. With one unless: unless socialism hasbeen achieved in the most highly developed capitalist countries. But this isobviously not what Romein means.52

Kie cited rotskys statement approvingly:

Te possibility o skipping over intermediate steps is o course by no means absolute.

Its degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities othe country. Te backward nation, moreover, not inrequently debases theachievements borrowed rom outside in the process o adapting them to its ownmore primitive culture.53

He added rotsky thus touched here on precisely the key missing element oRomeins theory: a countrys economic and culture capacities as the determinanto the possibility o skipping over stages o development.54Romein had allen

victim to a very common phenomenon among non-technically schooledintellectuals, Kie said: overestimating a peoples capacity to adapt to technology an overestimation that had led Lenin to make a tragic mistake:

His tragic mistake was namely to think that a country could industrialize insuccessive technical stages, rather than through organically building up its wholeproductive apparatus. Make sure that you rst build up heavy industry basic

industry and [Lenin thought] you have the basis or consumer goods industryand thus or prosperity.

Tis is a tragic error, because it only deals with the technicalside o the questionand neglectsthe human side; or in other words, neglects the culturalside . . .

No doubt one can attempt to make up or technical backwardness by importingactory installations and technical equipment. But the attempt will not succeedunless the living conditions o people are not simultaneously improved, because

peoplewill have to use the equipment. It turns out that human adaptation to modern

technology requires time,a loto time.In order to staff and run a actory, more is needed than just picking up someknacks. Te more delicate the mechanisms become, the more accurate themeasuring instruments and measurements must be. But that demands awareness.We can see that Romein has taken no account in his theory o many actors that areessential, particularly in the modern production process: actors that are also and

52. Kie 1955, pp. 3567. Te citation within the citation is rom Marx 1976, p. 929.53. rotsky 1977, p. 27.54. Kie 1955, p. 358.


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primarily psychological in nature, such as respect or the material, the product, thetools and the measuring instruments. Tese psychological actors are culturallydetermined.55

Dutch sociologist Jacques van Doorn wondered how universally valid the theoryo the handicap o a head start is. He argued in the 1950s that it would be betternot to use the term handicap o a head start because it was only a dialecticalartice, and that it was more useul to begin rom an empirically demonstrableand explicable act: so-called rigidication. Drawing on the work o RobertMerton and Philip Selznick,56 van Doorn argued that every social systemeventually rigidies:

At all levels, technical, psychological and sociological, the systems in question arecharacterized by a certain degree o structuration.Tis structuration results eitherrom a conscious allocation o unctions or rom unctioning in a particular wayover a long period o time. Te consolidation that thus arises acquires a certainautonomy in the course o time, however, which comes to impede changes in thesystems unctioning. In technical systems this consolidation takes the orm o an

apparatus out o balance; in psychology one speaks o a unctional autonomy omotivation; in sociology this consolidation is called institutionalization.57

Te handicap o a head start maniests itsel only when rigidication becomespredominant. But, contrary to what Romein seems to suggest, this kind o atalinexibility ar rom always occurs. A limited degree o institutionalization stillleaves room or integrating new elements, that is, room or social change. Teexample o constantly dynamic large-scale industry shows that structures thatretain a degree o openness can both be institutionalised and undergo rapidchange.58

Dutch sociologist Cornelis Lammers also concluded that Romeins theorywas not sufficiently worked out with an eye to concrete, systematic research.59He thereore tried to apply Romeins idea to organisational development, anddistinguished or purposes o operationalisation our different kinds o leapsorward:

55. Kie 1955, p. 360.56. Philip O. Selznick (1919), born Philip Schachter, was a rotskyist rom 1935 to about

1941. Assertions that Robert K. Merton (19102003), born Robert Schkolonik, sympathised withrotskyism in his early years as well, have neither been conrmed nor reuted (communications byMelvyn Dubosky and Alan Wald).

57. van Doorn 1958, p. 911.58. van Doorn 1958, pp. 91213.59. Lammers 1984, p. 95.


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60. Lammers 1984, p. 106.61. Lammers 1984, p. 107.62. Lammers 1984, p. 108.63. Lammers 1984, pp. 1089.

64. Lammers 1984, p. 112.65. Lammers 1984, p. 113.66. Ibid.

i) Deliberate leaps orward, by means o which organisations consciouslyskip over a stage. Tis involves a sober calculation by dominant organizationalelites that by introducing very advanced technology, etc., they can equal or

surpass their competitors, rivals or adversaries.60

ii) Non-arbitrary leaps orward, by means o which organisations that arenot engaged in a zero-sum game (or instance government agencies or voluntaryassociations) and that thereore have no need o constant change orient towardnew developments and subsequently decide o their own accord as it were tointroduce advanced technology or something comparable.61

iii) Leaps orward through acquisition, that is, ounding new [organizations]

on the ruins o old ones, or at least by using elements acquired rom the wrecko older organizations.62

iv) Leaps orward based on affinity, that is, abrupt changes as the result o acertain correspondence or convergence between the original organizationalorm or methods on the one hand and on the other hand the orm or methodsthat ultimately arise through renewal, adaptation or transormation.63

Lammers argued, in addition, that the dialectic o progress is not a universallaw but, at most, a connection that sometimes occurs under quite speciccircumstances,64or two reasons. First, ar rom every orm o backwardness orlag in development is the result o the handicap o a head start. Most organisationshave, afer all, never been at the head o the pack and thus never experience anyhandicap o a head start. Tey canbenet rom the privilege o backwardness(rotsky) by carrying out one or more o the our orms o leaps in development

previously mentioned.65

Second, not every handicap o a head start leads to aleap orward in development.

Rather, the normal consequence o the handicap o a head start is an organizationsremaining xed in its original orm until death ensues. I an organization whosepotential or renewal is retarded should nd itsel in a drastically alteredenvironment, the chance that it will agonize and ultimately perish will beproportional to the strength o the brake constituted by its head start.66


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67. C.S., letter to the editor inLabour Review, as cited in Novack 1972c, p. 120.68. See e.g. Wertheim 1958; Wertheim 1964, pp. 1618, 1801, 25960; Wertheim 1966.

69. Wertheim 1974, p. 76.70. Wertheim 1974, p. 77.71. Ibid.

4. Provisional conclusion

Despite the Stalinist inuences in the Romein debate, elements o it can denitelybe integrated into the rotsky-Novack-Mandel approach. Nevertheless, the lawseems so ar to be an analytical tool with a very restricted useulness.

Reacting to Novacks articles, Cliff Slaughter asked at the time to what extentone could really speak here o a law:

A scientic law should outline the particular sets o conditions which give rise to atypical result in the given sphere o investigation. . . . Can the law o uneven andcombined development be seen in the same way? It states that actors developed to

an uneven extent, either between societies or within one society, combine to ormsingle ormations o a contradictory character. I this generalization is to beaccorded the status o a law it should give clear guiding lines to the ollowingproblem, among others. Will the processes at work give rise to a dialectical leaporward in history, as in the October Revolution in Russia, or will they give rise todegenerative processes, as in the bureaucratic distortions o Stalins regime, or thedestruction o the asmanian aborigines?67

Te Maoist-inclined sociologist Wim Wertheim (190797), who had shown hisagreement with Romeins interpretation on several occasions since the late1950s,68 also expressed doubts in his book Evolution and Revolution (1974)about whether leaps orward can really be described as resulting rom a law.

While leaps orward constitute a recognisable pattern in history, Wertheimpreerred to use the term trend, the strength and the evolutionary validity owhich has still to be thoroughly investigated.69Neither Romein nor Service had

really specied the specic characteristics o a society earmarked or the nextevolutionary step, and, in addition, it is never the most backward society whichmakes the leap orward.70Instead o playing with quasi-scientic laws, Wertheimound it more sensible to elaborate and test a series o more or less concretehypotheses, in order to nd out under whatconditions the trend o the retardinglead and the privilege o backwardness [are] operative.71

What should we make o this? Novack had answered Slaughter that the

law cannot predict the outcome o combining actors at different levels odevelopment,


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because its action and results do not depend upon itsel alone, but more upon thetotal situation in which it unctions. . . . Under certain conditions, the introductiono higher elements and their amalgamation with lower ones accelerates socialprogress; under other conditions, the synthesis can retard progress and even cause

a retrogression. Whether progress or reaction will be avored depends upon thespecic weight o all the actors in the given situation.72

Tis deence leads us, at the very least, to the conclusion that the law isinsufficiently specic. We generally understand a law to be a statement o thetype: I preconditions C1. . . Cnhold true, then it ollows that i P, then Q. Forexample: I the atmospheric pressure is 1 bar, then water will reach the boiling

point at 100 degrees Celsius. In the case o the law o uneven and combineddevelopment, we know what P and Q are, but we do not know what all the

preconditions C1. . . Cn are that are necessary in order or P to lead to Q. opredict this result, we must not only observe thatthere is unevenness, but alsoexactly what kind o unevenness it is and what the possibilities and limits otransmission are. We cannot thus strictly speaking describe this as a law.73

Statements about uneven and combined development thus also lack any

predictive value, although one can say with certainty in hindsight, ex post acto,whether a combined development has taken place. It may be more correct tocall the law o uneven and combined development a mechanismin Jon Elsterssense, that is a requently occurring and easily recognisable causal patternthat is triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminateconsequences. Unlike a covering law, a mechanism does not say i A, then alwaysB, but i A, then sometimes B.74

72. Reply by George Novack, in Novack 1972c, pp. 1223.73. E.P. Tompson (1978, p. 86) already suggested that the argument will be advanced i we

discard the concept o law and replace it with that o the logic o process. Leo Koer has arguedthat, in a Marxist perspective, sociological laws can exist that are only applicable to one case. In myopinion, this approach undermines the whole concept o a scientic law. I preer Helmut Fleischers

position that the domain o the concept o law in its signicant sense is that o the isolatable andelementary, the typical and schematic. See Warynski 1944, p. 161; Fleischer 1973, p. 117; andcompare Alred Cobbans remark: In practice, general social laws turn out to be one o three things.I they are not dogmatic assertions about the course o history, they are either platitudes, or else, tobe made to t the acts, they have to be subjected to more and more qualications until in the endthey are applicable only to a single case. Cobban 1964, pp. 1314. One might see the concept oprobabilistic law as a way out here, but I am not convinced that this would be more than an act ointellectual camouage.

74. Elster 1999. Tere is here, o course, a close link with the Marxian concept o the tendency

(see e.g., Marx 1981, p. 339). Mandel (1995, p. 1) has also characterised the law o uneven andcombined development as a historical mechanism, but without urther specication o the concept.See also Stinchcombe 1991 and Bunge 1997.


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Te explanatory power o the mechanism o uneven and combineddevelopment can be increased by identiying a number o recurrent sub-mechanisms. Some insights can probably be gained rom non-Marxist diffusion

theorists,75

sociologists76

and economists,77

and rom world-system analysts.78

But, ultimately, we need historical studies that careully explore historicalattempts to transer particular innovations (ideas, technologies, organisations orinstitutions) rom one social context (A) to another (B). Such studies should atleast reveal: (i) context As relevant (political, social, cultural, natural) eatures;(ii) the actors attempting the transer rom A to B and their interests; (iii) thecharacteristics o the channels through which the transer rom A to B was

attempted; (iv) the social and material actors determining the innovationsassimilation, non-assimilation or adaptation in context B; and (v) the transerslater implications or the relationship between A and B.79Te results o suchstudies could probably teach us a lot more about the nature o historical leaps.

ranslated by Peter Drucker

75. Rogers 1995 is still a useul standard work. Studies that examine unsuccessul diffusion seemparticularly important.

76. See or example Dore 1973b, Meyer and Hannan 1979, Strang 1990, and Meyer, Ramirezand Soysal 1992.

77. Tere is, or example, much to be learned rom the work o Alexander Gerschenkron(190478) and the ensuing discussions about late industrialisation in Europe rom 1870 to 1914.See, above all, Gerschenkrons collected essays (Gerschenkron 1968). While Gerschenkron neverreerred openly to his political sympathies during his later lie in the US, his work cannot beunderstood without reerence to his past in the 1920s and 30s as an Austro-Marxist and criticalsupporter o the Soviet Union. It is also at the least highly likely that Gerschenkron amiliarisedhimsel during his years as a lefist in Vienna with rotskysHistory o the Russian Revolutionwhenit was published in German in 19323. Other interesting contributions include Jervis 1947, Amesand Rosenberg 1963.

78. For example, Bunker and Ciccantell 2003.79. Serious attention should be paid to political and cultural dimensions. Following rotsky,Ernst Bloch and other thinkers Mandel (1995, p. 107) has argued that historical processes mayexpress the partial non-synchronism o socio-economic and ideological orms. Tus, the transer oadvanced ideological elements may be non-synchronous with the less advanced socio-economiccontext where these elements are introduced, or the transer o advanced socio-economic elementsmay be non-synchronous with the ideological context where these elements are introduced. Non-synchronism may explain why cultural orms and institutions o advanced capitalism havesometimes not really been transerred to peripheral contexts, but as simulacra. In these cases, a

discrepancy may arise between the ormal aade and actual behaviour, leading to systematicregulatory inconsistency. Waldmann 1998 has a brilliant discussion o this phenomenon.


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The Law of Uneven and Combined Development Some Underdeveloped Thoughts

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