Uneven and combined development

The idea was most famously used by Leon Trotsky in the early 20th century to analyze the possibilities for industrialization and political emancipation in the Russian Empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime. After 1905, the theory of uneven and combined development became the basis of the Trotsky's political perspective of permanent revolution. Trotsky rejected the idea that human society inevitably had to develop through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages" of modernization; instead, backward countries could adopt the most advanced knowledge and technology from other countries for the purpose of accelerated development, without the need to repeat all the preceding stages to get there.

In the 1990s and the early 21st century, the concept of uneven and combined development experienced an academic revival among Marxist scholars in fields such as development theory and economic geography. David Harvey endorsed the usefulness of this concept to understand the spatial development of global capitalism.

Background

Trotsky's concept was originally inspired by a series of articles by Alexander Helphand (better known as "Parvus") on "War and Revolution" in the Russian journal Iskra in 1904. The theory was not exactly new; Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Vasily Vorontsov, and others had proposed similar ideas.

At first, Trotsky used this concept only to describe a characteristic evolutionary pattern in the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from the 16th century onwards, through the growth of a world economy which connected more and more peoples and territories together through trade, migration and investment. His focus was also initially mainly on the history of the Russian empire, where the most advanced technological and scientific developments co-existed with extremely primitive and superstitious cultures.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Trotsky increasingly generalised the concept of uneven and combined development to the whole of human history, and even to processes of evolutionary biology, as well as the formation of the human personality - as a general dialectical category.

The concept played a certain role in the fierce theoretical debates during the political conflict between the supporters of Joseph Stalin and Trotsky's Left Opposition, a debate which ranged from the historical interpretation of the Russian revolution and economic strategies for the transition to socialism, to the correct understanding of principles of Marxism.

Trotsky's theory

Different countries, Trotsky observed, developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.

At the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various "spill-over effects" from one country to another.

Sociologically speaking, this had five main effects:

• a more backward, older or more primitive country would adopt parts of the culture of a more advanced, or more modern society, and a more advanced culture could also adopt or merge with parts of a more primitive culture – with good or bad effects.
• Cultural practices, institutions, traditions and ways of life belonging to both very old and very new epochs and phases of human history were all combined, juxtaposed and linked together in a rather unusual way, within one country.
• In turn, this meant that one could not really say that different societies all developed simply through the same sort of linear sequence of necessary developmental stages, but rather that they could adopt/utilize the results of developments reached elsewhere, without going through all the previous evolutionary stages which led up to those results. Some countries could thus "skip", "telescope" or "compress" developmental stages which other countries took hundreds of years to go through, or, very rapidly carry through a modernization process that took other countries centuries to achieve.
• Different countries could both aid or advance the socio-economic progress of other countries through trade, subsidies and contributing resources, or block and brake other countries as competitors from making progress by preventing the use of capital, technology, trading routes, labour, land or other kinds of resources. In Trotsky's theory of imperialism, the domination of one country by another does not mean that the dominated country is prevented from development altogether, but rather that it develops mainly according to the requirements of the dominating country. For example, an export industry will develop around mining and farm products in the dominated country, but the rest of the economy is not developed, so that the country's economy becomes more unevenly developed than it was before, rather than achieving balanced development. Or, a school system is set up with foreign assistance, but the schools teach only the messages that the dominating country wants to hear (see How to Read Donald Duck).
• The main tendencies and trends occurring at the level of world society as a whole, could be also found in each separate country, where they combined with unique local trends – but this was a locally specific "mix", so that some world trends asserted themselves more strongly or faster, others weaker and slower in each specific country. Thus, a country could be very advanced in some areas of activity, but at the same time comparatively retarded in other areas. One effect was that the response to the same events of world significance could be quite different in different countries, because the local people attached different "weightings" to experiences and therefore drew different conclusions.

According to Trotsky, the unequal and combined development of different countries had an effect on the class structure of society.

• For example, the Russian empire in 1917 was largely a peasant society composed of many different nationalities and governed by an absolutist state headed by the Czar; popular democracy did not exist. Criticism of the state, or opposition to its policies, was very severely punished (imprisonment, deportation, execution).
• A process of industrialization had begun in the main cities since Peter the Great (for example, the Putilov steel works established in Petrograd - where the February 1917 revolution began, with a strike - was the largest in the world at the time). But this urban industrialization process relied mainly on the investment of foreign capital from France, Britain and other countries, and was limited to some urban areas and regions.
• The Russian bourgeoisie which developed under the tutelage of the Czarist state lacked much power, and was politically weak. The bourgeoisie was unable to establish political democracy. The rural population was kept in a backward condition. At the same time, a militant industrial working class developed in the main cities, concentrated in large factories and plants.
• In this way, the archaic culture of primitive peasant production and a semi-feudal state combined with the culture of modern industrial society.

Trotsky believed that this would shape the unique character of the Russian revolution. Namely, the Russian bourgeoisie was politically too weak and too dependent on the Czarist state to challenge its autocratic rule, and therefore the revolution against Czarist rule would be spearheaded by the revolt of urban workers.

Thus, the political and modernizing tasks normally associated in Europe with the leadership of the rising bourgeoisie, such as fighting for popular democracy and civil rights against absolutism, land ownership reform, industrializing the country, and national self-determination for oppressed nationalities, would have to be carried out in the Russian empire under the leadership of working-class parties, in particular the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party which had been outlawed (although there were several other socialist, nationalist and liberal parties).

In the chaos towards the end of the First World War, in which Russian soldiers fought against the imperial German army, this political assessment proved largely correct. The provisional government established by the February revolution in 1917 collapsed and the October revolution, in which the Russian Marxists played a dominant role, destroyed Czarist state power completely. Thereafter, the Russian bourgeoisie was largely expropriated; most businesses then fell under state ownership.

A new stage in Trotsky's understanding of uneven and combined development in world history was reached in his analyses of fascism and populism in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Trotsky makes it clear, the human progress is not a linear, continuously advancing process of bourgeois modernization - progress can also be reversed or undone, and ancient cults, superstitions or barbarous traditions can be revived, even though nobody previously thought that was possible.

Rudolf Hilferding's theory

Around the time that Trotsky settled in Vienna as a journalist in exile, after escaping from Siberia a second time, the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding wrote his famous book Finance Capital (first published in 1910) in which Hilferding mentions an idea very similar to Trotsky's. The passage occurs in chapter 22 on "the export of capital and the struggle for economic territory". It has never been proved whether Hilferding was influenced in any way by what Trotsky had written, although it is known that they corresponded with each other, but Hilferding's own analysis of "the latest phase of capitalist development" certainly influenced a whole generation of socialist leaders. In any case similar notions were widespread among socialists throughout Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe at this time. Among other things, Hilferding states:

The export of capital, especially since it has assumed the form of industrial and finance capital, has enormously accelerated the overthrow of all the old social relations, and the involvement of the whole world in capitalism. Capitalist development did not take place independently in each individual country, but instead capitalist relations of production and exploitation were imported along with capital from abroad, and indeed imported at the level already attained in the most advanced country. Just as a newly established industry today does not develop from handicraft beginnings and techniques into a modern giant concern, but is established from the outset as an advanced capitalist enterprise, so capitalism is now imported into a new country in its most advanced form and exerts its revolutionary effects far more strongly and in a much shorter time than was the case, for instance, in the capitalist development of Holland and England.

Hilferding's insight was rarely noticed by English-speaking Marxists. His book Finance Capital, which went out of print several times, was never translated into English until 1981 (i.e. 70 years later). After the publication of Lenin's classic interpretation of imperialism as the highest (and final) stage of capitalism in 1917, most Marxist writers based their analyses of imperialism on Lenin's book. Although in several places Lenin cites Hilferding approvingly, by the time that Hilferding became Finance Minister in Germany in 1923, the Leninists regarded him as a reformist renegade, and his analyses were no longer trusted, published or taken seriously.