8

FROM UNEVEN TO COMBINED DEVELOPMENT

INTRODUCTION

Results and Prospects introduced Trotsky’s two most original contributions to Marxist theory, although it was only later that they received the names under which they have passed into history: the strategy of “permanent revolution” and—in a much more embryonic way—the theory of “uneven and combined development.” Both terms are equally important, yet they have not received comparable levels of scrutiny. In particular, the radical novelty of what Trotsky meant by uneven and combined development is often underestimated. The most common mistake is to reduce it to, or confuse it with, the long-standing theory of uneven development. This is partly because the theory of uneven and combined development has not yet received comparable levels of scrutiny to what has been visited on the strategy of permanent revolution. Perhaps the most accurate and detailed exposition ever made of the latter devotes precisely three out of two hundred and thirty-one pages to the subject whose political implications it seeks to discuss.¹ Those works that do attempt to discuss uneven and combined development tend to do so only in relation to “the advantages of backwardness” and “the disadvantages of priority.”² In a recent exchange with Justin Rosenberg, Alex Callinicos cites Robert Brenner’s comparison between English and French feudalism in a passage that concludes: “The development of the mechanisms of feudal accumulation tended to be not only ‘uneven’ but also ‘combined,’ in the sense that later developers could build on previous advances made elsewhere in feudal class organization.”³ Giovanni Arrighi summarizes this conception of “combination” for the contemporary period as “the process whereby laggards in capitalist development seek to catch up, and eventually succeed in catching up, with the leaders of that development.”⁴ But what exactly is being “combined” in such cases? As we shall see, what is being discussed in these passages remains uneven development.

The theory of uneven development is by no means irrelevant today. As Callinicos’s reference to Lenin suggests, it was also a component of the classical Marxist tradition. Trotsky himself stressed that the concept, if not the term, was present in the work of Marx and Engels, despite claims to the contrary by Stalin.⁵ More recently, it has also informed such memorable analyses as Robert Brenner’s delineation of competition between the core economies of global capitalism after the Second World War, Doreen Massey’s construction of a general explanatory model of regional inequality more comprehensive than those of either the neoclassical equilibrium or cumulative causation schools, and Neil Smith’s depiction of the “see-saw” reproduction of capital that leads to both spatial differentiation and equalization on the urban, nation-state, and global scales.⁶ These are important themes, but they fall within the province of uneven development as such. In order to demonstrate the innovation that combined development represents in social theory, it might therefore be useful to briefly trace the prior development of uneven development.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment thinkers developed a theory of staged development through a series of four increasingly complex modes of subsistence. In the initial formulations at least, most peoples or nations could be expected to traverse these stages, albeit at different historical times, until they finally reached the fourth or commercial stage. There were, however, two exceptions to the universalism of Enlightenment thought on this question.

One was concerned with the socioeconomic distinctions between different geographical areas. Eastern societies (principally Turkey, Persia, India, and China) were classified by Montesquieu as “Asiatic” or “Oriental” Despotisms, terms that implied two characteristics. On the one hand, they referred to the political regime, which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to European absolutism. On the other, they referred to those aspects of the socioeconomic order distinct from the West: the absence of hereditary nobility, a legal system subject to the will of the ruler, state ownership of land, and more generally an overall stagnation made all the more obvious when contrasted with the dynamism of the new capitalist system. It was Adam Smith who decisively shifted Enlightenment views of the East in the latter direction, arguing that the political differences between East and West were based on underlying economic differences. If the West was characterized by private property, manufactures, and foreign trade, then the East (which for Smith was typified by China) was characterized by state property, agriculture, and a localized internal market.

The other exception was concerned with biological distinctions between different human groups, or “races.” Enlightenment thinkers were deeply divided on this issue. One trend, represented by John Millar, Denis Diderot, and Johann Herder, broke with the racist ideology that had been used to justify the conquest of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans by both the absolutist and early capitalist empires after 1492. Another, expressed by David Hume, Montesquieu, and Immanuel Kant, doubted whether people with black skins could even be regarded as fully human. But the universality of the former, “progressive” aspect of Enlightenment thought, and consequently the optimism that it displayed down to the French Revolution, could not survive the experience of colonialism and the racism that the possession of colonies engendered—not, at any rate, without turning Enlightenment values against the system that required colonies in the first place.

A small minority of Enlightenment thinkers allowed not only for exceptions to staged development but also for nations and peoples compressing or bypassing certain stages. In many cases these alternatives appeared in the margins of work by individuals who otherwise adhered to the classic stages theory of development by successive modes of subsistence. The first example occurred, appropriately enough, in relation to Russia. During the reign of Peter the Great (1672–1725), Russia was forced by pressure from the more advanced absolutisms of Western Europe, particularly that of Sweden, to develop naval and military forces of comparable strength. This led in turn to the need for an indigenous manufacturing sector capable at least of producing ships and cannon. In the short term, Peter imported not only the technology and technicians but also intellectuals who could advise him on the type of educational system capable of training Russians in engineering and other skills. Many of these were Germans who may have seen in the Tsar a monarch of the type necessary to unite the divided German-speaking principalities. One of these hired savants was Gottfried Leibniz. He wrote to Peter in 1712, claiming that from a position of backwardness, even blankness (“tabula rasa”), Russia could borrow what it needed from Europe and Asia but discard in the process what was unnecessary or contingent.⁷ This may be the first reference to what would eventually be called uneven development, although it would find no echo for nearly forty years. Then, during the 1750s, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot opined that France, “whom Spain and England have already outstripped in the glory of poetry,” might benefit from her current economic position behind England: “France, whose genius finishes forming itself only when the philosophical spirit begins to spread, will owe perhaps to this very backwardness the exactitude, the method, and the austere taste of her writers.”⁸ But the suggestion was made only in passing and specifically in relation to culture, not society.

Ironically, it was in Scotland, where the four-stage theory was first formulated, that the alternative was elaborated in the greatest detail. Having helped to establish the organic metaphor of development (childhood, maturity, and decline) in theory, the reformers simultaneously set about subverting it in practice. In the successful attempts to overleap several of the stages that England had passed through in moving from the Age of Agriculture to the Age of Commerce, we see for perhaps the first time the brute fact of unevenness being the basis for a developmental strategy.⁹ But even the astonishing speed of Scottish development could not overcome the legacy of feudal backwardness overnight. For over half a century, therefore, Scotland was the site—perhaps the first site—of what Trotsky would call combined development. It did not last. By the second decade of the nineteenth century writers were reflecting, with some astonishment, how far they had progressed in a matter of decades. By 1815 an anonymous supplement to Lord Kames’s The Gentleman Farmer could observe

that there never were greater agricultural improvements carried on in any country than there have been in Scotland during the last thirty years; that the progress of the most correct systems of husbandry has been rapid and extensive beyond what the most sanguine could have anticipated; and that, in short, when we contrast the present state of agriculture in the south-eastern counties with what must have been its state about the middle of the last century . . . the efforts of several centuries would seem to have been concentrated in the intermediate period.¹⁰

Nor was it only in agriculture that effects were registered. During the previous year, Walter Scott published his first novel, Waverley, which recounts the adventures of the eponymous hero during the ’45. Near the end, the omnipresent narrator looks back from his vantage point in 1805 at the changes that had taken place in Scotland over the preceding sixty years:

There is no European nation, which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as the kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745,—the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons,—the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and customs,—commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time.¹¹

The astonishing claim in the final sentence was entirely justified. Because Scotland could draw on what England had already accomplished, it was able to make up the same ground in a much shorter period of time. But it was so overwhelmingly successful in doing so that—with the exception of the Highlands—the socioeconomic differences between Scotland and England had been overcome by 1815 and the political differences by 1832. No other country would ever complete the transition from feudal agriculture to capitalist industrialization so quickly or completely. The moment was too brief, the result too uniquely decisive, for any theoretical generalization from this experience to be possible.

MARX AND ENGELS

There are several differences between the Enlightenment concept of a mode of subsistence and the concept of a mode of production introduced by Marx and Engels. For our purposes the most important is that Marx and Engels were not proposing a universal succession of stages. Those modes of production that they listed in various places—primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and Communism—were chronological only in two senses. One is that, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, “each of these systems is in crucial respects further removed from the primitive state of man.”¹² The other sense is that these lists indicate the order in which the modes of production arose historically; they do not suggest that every social formation is fated to pass under the dominance of each of them in succession. In fact, Marx and Engels seem to have regarded only one transition as universal, that from primitive communism to different types of class society (Asiatic, slave, tributary, and feudal). Beyond that, they seem to have regarded the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a possible outcome that was in fact occurring during their lifetime, which in turn opened up the possibility for another, final transition from capitalism to socialism. But neither of these two transitions was automatic or inevitable.

What level of capitalist development was necessary for socialism? At one point in The German Ideology (unfinished and unpublished during their lifetime) Marx and Engels seem to suggest that the forces of production would need to exist at a globally even level of development before socialism was possible.¹³ During the later 1840s their attention became focused on Europe and its colonial-settler extensions in North America, which they saw as decisive and where the situation was relatively straightforward. Capitalism was the dominant mode of production only in parts of Western Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States, and industrialization was still more narrowly focused. Elsewhere the bourgeoisie were still politically and socially subordinate to the Old Regime. The task for Communists was therefore to encourage the revolutions that would overthrow the feudal-absolutist states, remove the structural obstacles to capitalist development, and thus create the material basis for the international working class that would make socialism a possibility. During the 1840s they assumed that only a short period of time would be necessary for capitalism to develop to the point where the socialist revolution was possible. However, as early as 1858 Marx wrote to Engels admitting that capitalism had a much longer future ahead of it than either man had thought possible in 1848, and that consequently socialism might be a more distant prospect than they had initially hoped.¹⁴

In the meantime, what were the implications of what Marx called “this little corner of the earth” bringing the rest of the world under colonial domination? In the preface to Capital he wrote that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”¹⁵ He was not suggesting that all countries would take the same length of time to reach the future as the original metropolitan powers, nor that arriving there would have the same implications for late developers, but neither was he suggesting that they could bypass sections of the road. Marx and Engels seem to have taken the view that it was necessary for the European bourgeoisie to introduce capitalism into Asia and Africa because the nature of these societies acted as a block to its indigenous development. Neither man had any illusions as to the means by which that bourgeoisie would accomplish this revolution.¹⁶

Were Marx and Engels right that India, China, and the other colonial and semicolonial countries could only be dragged from their stagnation by colonial conquest? They certainly exaggerated the lack of socioeconomic development prior to colonization, particularly with relation to India. In this respect they retained the Enlightenment view of the East as immobile and subject to Asiatic despotism. It is possible that, with sufficient time and freedom from external interference, at least some of these countries might have seen the indigenous emergence of capitalism. But given the existence of the capitalist powers and their need to secure territories for raw materials, markets, and investments, they were not to be given that time or that freedom. What might have been possible had India and the rest been situated in a dimension unreachable by the British navy is a question for science fiction, not historical materialism. Once colonization had taken place, Marx and Engels needed to take an attitude toward it. Their assumption was that whatever atrocities the colonial powers committed on the way, they would ultimately develop the countries over which they ruled, to the point where they would produce their own gravedigger as they had in the existing capitalist countries. This was their real error. The colonial powers had no intentions of hastening their own demise by developing the economies of the subject peoples, at least not in any systematic way. The implications of this for revolution in the colonial and semicolonial world only become apparent after their deaths.

Only once did either Marx or Engels suggest that capitalist development could be circumvented altogether. This was not in relation to the colonial world, however, but to Russia, the most backward of the great European powers. In 1877 Marx argued that Russia did not need to undergo capitalist development but could move directly to socialism through the institution of the peasant commune or mir. If not, then Russia would be condemned to suffer all that the peasant populations of the West had suffered. In response, Marx makes two points. First, although the Russian peasant commune may provide the launching pad for the advance to Communism in Russia, the advance of capitalism outside of Russia is already undermining the possibility of that happening. Second, even if capitalist development in Russia does come to fruition, it will not replicate exactly the earlier process in Western Europe.¹⁷ Under what conditions might the peasant commune play the role that Marx has suggested for it? These were outlined the following year in a preface, published under the names of both men, for the second Russian edition of the “Manifesto.” Here, revolution in Russia may act as the spark, but success is still dependent on the victory of the proletariat in the West.¹⁸ That the victory of a revolutionary movement in the West could establish a socialist context for Russian development and thus avoid the fate of capitalism was in their view a possibility, but by no means a certainty. By the early 1890s it had become clear which direction events had taken, and Engels changed his position accordingly. In his last writings, he drew up a balance sheet that is clearly loaded against those who still expected the peasant commune to act as the social basis of the Russian revolution. In the absence of revolution in the West and the beginning of capitalist development in Russia, the opportunity to bypass bourgeois society had passed.¹⁹ Beyond the Russian question, only two anticipations of uneven development appear in the work of Marx and Engels.

The first consists of a cluster of references to a particular form of unevenness arising from colonial settlement. In The German Ideology, they reflected on how these settlements could be established on the basis of a purer, more advanced version of the dominant mode of production than the societies the settlers left behind. On the one hand, where the settled territory was uninhabited: “Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of the old countries, and, therefore, with the correspondingly most advanced form of intercourse, even before this form of intercourse has been able to establish itself in the old countries.” On the other hand, where the colonized territory was inhabited by peoples at a much lower level of development: “A similar relation issues from conquest, when a form of intercourse which has evolved on another soil is brought over complete to the conquered country: whereas in its home it was still encumbered with interests and relations left over from earlier periods, here it can and must be established completely and without hindrance, if only to assure the conqueror’s lasting power, when they received the most perfect form of feudal organisation.”²⁰ The examples on which they tended to draw later in their careers were from the feudal period.²¹ They do not seem to have specifically considered that capitalism might also develop in this way.

The second is a single passage in a review of Friedrich List written during 1845. List had argued that Germany should seek to follow the same path of economic development as England.²² Marx, on the other hand, rejected the idea that every nation had to repeat the same experience and argues instead that it might be possible for nations to draw on what other nations had accomplished in the specific areas where they were most advanced.²³ There is the embryo of an idea here, but it never achieved full term—unsurprisingly, since it would be contrary to Marx and Engels’s own method to suppose that their thought could run ahead of actual developments. By the time of the foundation of the Second International in 1889, those developments had begun to unfold.

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

The second generation of Marxists took as their text on development a passage from the same work by Marx in which he identified the different epochs of human history, the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new and superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”²⁴ Marx by no means regarded the role of socialists as playing a waiting game until the conditions were universally “mature,” yet this was the lesson that the theoretical leaders of the Second International drew.

The nation in which this position was articulated and upheld more rigorously than any other was, appropriately enough, Russia, in whose future Marx and Engels had briefly glimpsed a possible alternative before dismissing it. Ironically, it was no Marxist but the Russian populist Alexander Herzen in the 1850s who became the first thinker since the Scottish Enlightenment to notice a decisive fact about late development: “Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.”²⁵ But for Herzen (and contemporaries like Chernyshevsky) this meant that Russia could avoid the traumas of the capitalist transition completely. It was only in the early years of the twentieth century that the insight was properly theorized in a more realistic basis. The key figure in this respect on the Russian Marxist left was Georgi Plekhanov.

Given the opposition that Plekhanov showed for the Russian Revolution toward the end of his life, it is important not to read back later positions onto those of an earlier period, for Plekhanov was perhaps the most sophisticated thinker of his entire generational cohort. His recognition of the necessity for capitalism in Russia was accompanied by an insistence that the working class, which it was bringing into being, had to struggle against the new bourgeoisie as hard as it did against the feudal-absolutist state to which both classes were ostensibly opposed. Indeed, he was initially prepared to echo Marx’s more unorthodox pronouncements concerning the prospects for Russian development.²⁶ But this element of his thought was quickly submerged by the need to emphasize the necessity of capitalist development against the populists. The ultimate outcome of the revolution in Russia, given the preponderance of land-hungry peasantry, could only be the more extensive implantation of capitalist economy in the countryside, not the agrarian Communism predicted by the populists.²⁷ If this was true for Russia, then it was even more so for those states, like China, which were further east in geographical terms and further behind in developmental terms: “The West European revolution will be mighty, but not almighty. To have a decisive influence on other countries, the socialist countries of the West will need some kind of vehicle for that influence. ‘International exchange’ is a powerful vehicle, but it is not almighty either.”²⁸ This is a more pessimistic perspective than that of Engels. It is important to note that, for Plekhanov at least, this was not a racist or paternalist discourse. He maintained essentially the same position in relation to the history of Western Europe: “Everywhere there has been imitation; but the imitator is separated from his model by all the distance which exists between the society which gave him, the imitator, birth and the society in which the model lived.” Plekhanov correctly notes that Locke was the greatest influence on French philosophers of the eighteenth century: “Yet, between Locke and his French pupils there is precisely that same distance, which separated English society at the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ from French society as it was several decades before the ‘Great Rebellion’ of the French people.” His conclusion? “Thus the influence of the literature of one country on the literature of another is directly proportional to the similarity of the social relations of those countries. It does not exist at all when that similarity is near to zero.”²⁹

In cruder hands than those of Plekhanov, the perspective simply became one of a socialist West continuing colonialism until the “backward races” had developed sufficiently to rule themselves. The debate on colonial policy that took place at the Stuttgart Conference of the Second International in 1907 raised some of these issues in stark relief. A Dutch delegate, Hendrick van Kol, supported by Eduard Bernstein among others, argued unashamedly that the colonies were necessary for the continuation of modern industry and as a place of emigration from “overpopulated” Europe. In the end an anti-imperialist position was adopted by the conference, but opposition to van Kol and his supporters, while stressing that Marx did not propose a universal linear path of development, had little positive to say with respect to how the colonial world could contribute to the struggle for socialism. Julian Marchlewski argued on relativist grounds that non-Western societies also possessed important cultures; Karl Kautsky argued that free trade would allow development to take place; but these positions either celebrated the culture of a precolonial past or saw socialism as a prospect for the long-term future.³⁰ What of the present?

The previous year, Kautsky had identified the disproportionately advanced role that Russian workers were playing in the Revolution of 1905, despite the paradoxical backwardness of Russian capital.³¹ But here, as in the work of Marx and Engels—and his contemporaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring—Russia is seen as an exception in Europe, not a model for Asia or Africa. What Trotsky would later call “the peculiarities of Russia’s development” had been noted by other Marxists, notably Antonio Labriola in 1896, who was a major influence on Trotsky’s thought.³² In other words, several writers had noted and commented on the peculiar militancy of the Russian working class, just as several more had noted the variety of different forms characteristic of the Russian economy. No one, however, had drawn the connection between them.

The problem lay in the conception of unevenness that emerged from the center and left of the Second International. Until the First World War uneven development had been a largely descriptive concept, without specific political implications. As Neil Smith notes, it “was first examined in any depth by Lenin, who tried to sketch some of the economic and geographical outlines of the process.”³³ In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin wrote that “the uneven and spasmodic development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system.”³⁴ Essentially, he argued that by the beginning of the twentieth century uneven development had acquired three main aspects.

The first was the process by which the advanced states had reached their leading positions within the structured inequality of the world system. During the late nineteenth century the “skipping of stages” had been the experience of several states, notably Germany, Italy, and Japan. The pressure of military and commercial competition between the actual or aspirant great powers forced those that were still absolutist states based on the feudal mode of production—at least, the ones that were capable of doing so—to adopt the current stage of development achieved by their capitalist rivals, if they were to have any chance not only of successfully competing but of surviving at the summit of the world order. In very compressed timescales they had been able to adopt the socioeconomic achievements of Britain to the extent that they became recognizably the same kind of societies, without necessarily reproducing every characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer: where backwardness remained it tended to be in the nature of the political regimes led by monarchs or emperors supported by a landowning aristocracy.

By the outbreak of the First World War membership of the dominant states was essentially fixed. What remained was the second aspect of uneven development: the ongoing rivalry between the great powers that involved them constantly trying to “catch up and overtake” each other in a contest for supremacy that would continue as long as capitalism itself. This rivalry led in turn to a third aspect: the developed imperialist states collectively but competitively asserting their dominance over two other types, described by Lenin as “the colonies themselves” and “the diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence,” like Argentina and Portugal.³⁵ Colonial expansion prevented some of the societies subject to it from developing at all, and in the case of the least developed, the peoples involved suffered near or complete extermination, and their lands were taken by settlers. More often the peoples survived, but their social systems were immobilized by imperial powers interested in strategic advantage or plunder, or both.

Trotsky, writing in 1907–09, was one of a group of Marxist thinkers (including Rudolf Hilferding in 1910 and Antonio Gramsci in 1917) who noted the way in which backward states did not recapitulate the entire history of capitalist development again, but began at the most advanced forms of technology and the labor process.³⁶ The insight was not restricted to Marxists. In 1915 the radical American economist Thorstein Veblen claimed—with some exaggeration—that in both economic and political terms Germany in 1870 had been two hundred and fifty years behind England. By the time of the First World War Germany had overcome this lag, but only in some respects. Veblen argued that, as in the case of Japan, these technologies that arrived “ready-made” would not necessarily overcome ideological or political backwardness, with which they could coexist for a period at least.³⁷ As we shall see, Trotsky’s position was subtly different from this.

By the First World War, then, a group of politically diverse thinkers had arrived at broadly similar conclusions about how capitalism had developed since the first epoch of bourgeois revolutions from above had ended in 1871. Specifically, they recognized that there were advantages in starting from a relatively backward position. It was possible to begin industrialization with the most advanced forms of technology and industrial organization, rather than work through all the stages of development that their predecessors had experienced. Indeed, it was impossible for them to avoid doing so if they wished to enter the competitive struggle between national capitals with any hope of success.

TROTSKY

We can now return to Trotsky and to the new element that he introduced into the debate. In Results and Prospects Trotsky acknowledged the influence of Kautsky on his argument that the working class would be the dominant force in the Russian Revolution, and that the peasantry would only play a subordinate role. Where he went beyond Kautsky—and indeed everyone else who took this position—was in suggesting that the Russian Revolution could lead not only to the overthrow of absolutism but to socialism, provided it was joined by the revolutionary movement in the advanced West.³⁸ What was missing from Trotsky’s account of permanent revolution was any explanation for the origin of the revolutionary process—for the revolutionary militancy of the Russian working class and, by extension, at least some of the other working classes in the underdeveloped world.

The most famous (and certainly the most often quoted) passage in Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution is an expression of this position: “The privilege of historic backwardness—and such a privilege exists—permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.”³⁹ But if all that Trotsky had proposed was a schema in which the “advantages of backwardness” allowed less developed nation-states to adopt the most modern available technologies, he would have remained within the established limits of unevenness and, indeed, would not have distinguished himself from Stalinist usage of the same concept. Indeed, the position was standard in Stalinist textbooks for several decades after the Second World War.⁴⁰ As Ernest Mandel once wrote, part of the “magnificent theoretical achievement” represented by the law of uneven and combined development is precisely that it is “quite distinct from the law of uneven development familiar to all Marxists.”⁴¹ Why was the distinction necessary?

Trotsky certainly took uneven development in the three senses outlined above as his starting point—as is suggested by the word order in the title of his own theory: “I would put uneven before combined, because the second grows out of the first and completes it.”⁴² How then does the concept of uneven and combined development differ from uneven development as such? The main difference is that it is takes account of the internal effects of uneven development.⁴³ To explain the link between the advanced nature of Russian industry on the one hand, and the militancy of Russian workers on the other, Trotsky had to transcend the theory of uneven development, a process he did not complete until the early 1930s. The inability of uneven development to fully encapsulate these phenomena is what appears to have made Trotsky search for a new concept with which to supplement it. It took a political crisis to provoke this conceptualization.

During the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27 the emergent Stalinist regime in Russia ordered the local Communist party to subordinate its own organization and demands to those of the bourgeois nationalists in the Kuomintang. The ultimately disastrous outcome for the Chinese working-class movement was the catalyst for Trotsky to generalize the strategy of permanent revolution from Russia to sections of the colonial and semicolonial world, not indiscriminately—since some were still untouched by capitalist development and had no working class of any size—but where conditions similar to those in Russia prevailed. Due to a common set of circumstances, the working classes in these countries had far greater levels of both consciousness and organization than the proletariat in the more developed countries, where Marxists had traditionally expected the socialist revolution to begin. Trotsky claimed that “the prediction that historically backward Russia could arrive at the proletarian revolution sooner than advanced Britain rests almost entirely upon the law of uneven development.”⁴⁴ But uneven development was not the sole basis for this prediction, as we can see by contrasting actual Russian development with two possible alternatives.

One was the path of the advanced capitalist states. The pace of development was relatively faster in most of the countries that followed Holland and England, partly because of the urgency of acquiring the attributes of capitalist modernity and partly because the long period of experiment and evolution, characteristic of the two pioneers, could be dispensed with. In the case of Scotland in the eighteenth century or Prussia in the nineteenth century, this led to enormous tensions that resolved themselves in moments of class struggle foreshadowing the process of permanent revolution, above all in the 1820 general strike in the former and the 1848 revolution in the latter. But because these societies did make the transition to the ranks of the advanced societies, either as the center (Prussia/Germany) or a component part of another national formation (Scotland/Britain), these moments passed with the tensions that caused them.

The other was the path of the colonies or semicolonies. What Peter Curtin calls “defensive modernization” was not enough to protect these societies from Western incursions. In the case of the Merina monarchs of Madagascar, for example: “They not only failed to modernize beyond adopting Christianity and superficial European fashions, they failed to build a kind of society and government administration that would perpetuate their own power.”⁴⁵ Colonial rule could even throw societies backward, as in the case of British-occupied Iraq. Ruling through the Hashemite monarchy after 1920, the regime deliberately rejected any attempts at modernization, except in the oil industry. Instead, it reinforced disintegrating tribal loyalties and semifeudal tenurial relationships over the peasantry. Peter Gowan describes the British initiatives as “the creation of new foundational institutions of landownership in order to revive dying traditional authority relations, resulting in economically and socially regressive consequences, undertaken for thoroughly modern imperialist political purposes—namely, to create a ruling class dependent upon British military power and therefore committed to imperial interests in the region.”⁴⁶

A further group of states embodied “combination.” These were unable to reproduce the level of development attained by the advanced capitalist states, but were nevertheless able to “unblock” themselves to the extent of making partial advances in specific areas. There were essentially three subsets in this group. The first were feudal-absolutist or tributary states, like Russia or Turkey, which, under pressure from the Western powers, were forced for reasons of military competition to introduce limited industrialization and partial agrarian reform. The second were still more backward states like China or regions like the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East, which had been broken by imperialist pressure but which, instead of being colonized, were allowed to disintegrate while the agents of foreign capital established areas of industrialization under the protection of either their own governments or local warlords. The third were colonial states like British India, and to a lesser extent French Algeria, where the metropolitan power was unwilling to allow full-scale industrialization in case it produced competition for its own commodities, but was prepared to sanction it in specific circumstances for reasons of military supply or where goods were not intended for home markets. Tsarist Russia neither emulated the process of “catch up and overtake” among the advanced countries nor suffered that of “blocked development” with the backward, but instead experienced a collision between the two.

It was in relation to developments in China that Trotsky finally moved beyond uneven development. He continued to employ the term between 1928 and 1930, most importantly in the articles collected in The Third International after Lenin and in Permanent Revolution and its various prefaces. In these texts his main emphasis is still distinguishing his use of uneven development from that of Stalin, for whom countries developed at different tempos and therefore had to advance through a series of stages—including that of socialism—at their own individual pace. Trotsky highlighted instead the “unity” of the world economy and the “interdependence” of the imperial powers and the colonial and semicolonial world. Unevenness in this sense means simultaneously that individual countries could leap over the capitalist stage of development, as Russia had done and as China might have done, but would still be unable to complete the transition to socialism while the world economy as a whole remained dominated by the capitalist mode of production: the international system was both a spur at one moment and a block at another.⁴⁷ Yet these important insights still did not address the question of how the first part of this process, the revolutionary moment, was possible; Trotsky needed a new concept, incorporating uneven development but deepening its content.

It was in the first volume of The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) that he first outlined this new concept: “From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which for want of a better name, we may call the law of combined development—by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.”⁴⁸ The precise forms that combination took obviously varied depending on whether the country involved was a formal colony controlled by a single imperial power, like India, or one nominally independent but actually subdivided between several warlords and imperial powers, like China. Clearly there were differences. Unlike tsarist Russia, neither imperial nor republican China was in a position to stimulate capitalist industrial growth. Where similarities did exist was in the role of foreign capital and imported technology, and in the limited geographical implantation of capitalist industry. Nevertheless it was possible to generalize in relation to the effects: “Historical backwardness does not imply a simple reproduction of the development of advanced countries, like England or France, with a delay of one, two, or three centuries. It engenders an entirely new ‘combined’ social formation in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal or pre-feudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating peculiar relations of classes.”⁴⁹

Uneven and combined development affects the totality of a national society, not merely the economy. Trotsky was not saying that forms characteristic of different stages of development simply coexist alongside each other in striking or dramatic contrasts, although that could be true. Nor was he just emphasizing the existence of transitional modes of production, although he recognized that these could exist. Uneven and combined development usually involves what Michael Burawoy calls “the combination of the capitalist mode of production with pre-existing modes.”⁵⁰ Jamie Allinson and Alex Anievas, too, have written of how the “logics of different modes of production interact with one another in consequential ways in backward countries.”⁵¹ But a process that permeates every aspect of society, ideology as much as economy, must involve more than this. The “articulation” of capitalist and precapitalist modes had, after all, been progressing slowly in the Russian countryside since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and had led to many complex transitional forms, as Lenin documented.⁵² None by themselves led to the type of situation Trotsky was seeking to explain: “At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them.”⁵³

The detonation of the process requires sudden, intensive industrialization and urbanization, regardless of whether the preexisting agrarian economy was based on feudal or capitalist relations. Burawoy is therefore right to describe uneven and combined development as a product of “the timing of industrialisation in relation to the history of world capitalism.”⁵⁴ Here too the Chinese experience was important. Trotsky was quite insistent—perhaps overly insistent—on which mode dominated the Chinese social formation. He rejected Communist International claims that feudalism predominated in the Chinese economic base and political superstructure: “Of course, matters would be quite hopeless if feudal survivals did really dominate in Chinese economic life,” he wrote in 1929. “But fortunately, survivals in general cannot dominate.” Instead he emphasized the extent of market relations and influence of different forms of mercantile and banking capital. Rural social relations “stem in part from the days of feudalism; and in part they constitute a new formation,” but within this formation, “it is capitalist relations that dominate and not ‘feudal’ (more correctly, serf and, generally, pre-capitalist) relations. Only thanks to this dominant role of capitalist relations can we speak seriously of the prospects of proletarian hegemony in a national revolution.”⁵⁵

Whatever the extent of Trotsky’s exaggerations here, it is important—not least in relation to modern China—that uneven and combined development can take place where the capitalist mode was already dominant.⁵⁶ The archaic and the modern, the settled and the disruptive, overlap, fuse, and merge in all aspects of the social formations concerned, from the organization of arms production to the structure of religious observance, in entirely new and unstable ways, generating socially explosive situations in which revolution became what Georg Lukács termed “actual.”⁵⁷ It is tempting to describe these as mutations, except that the inadequacy of the language led Trotsky to reject the biological metaphors in which stages of development had been described from the Enlightenment to the Third International in its Stalinist phase: “The absorptive and flexible psyche, as a necessary condition for historical progress, confers on the so-called social ‘organisms,’ as distinguished from the real, that is, biological organisms, an exceptional variability of internal structure.”⁵⁸

These new combined formations gave rise to conflicts unknown in earlier historical periods. On the one hand: “The [backward] nation . . . not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture.”⁵⁹ From 1861 tsarism established factories using manufacturing technology characteristic of monopoly capitalism in order to produce arms with which to defend a feudal-absolutist state.⁶⁰ On the other hand, by doing so they brought into being a class more skilled, more politically conscious, than that faced by any previous absolutist or early capitalist states.⁶¹ All subsequent non-Marxist theories of “the advantages of backwardness” assumed that technological transfers had a limited, or at least delayed, impact on other aspects of social life.⁶² Against this, Trotsky argued that these transfers could in fact quicken the pace of change more generally, so that they attained higher levels of development than their established rivals. As an example of this he drew attention to the greater implantation of Marxist theory among the working classes of Russia and, later, China than in that of Britain. Thus, for Trotsky, the most important consequence of uneven and combined development was the enhanced capacity it gave the working classes for political and industrial organization, theoretical understanding, and revolutionary activity:

When the productive forces of the metropolis, of a country of classical capitalism . . . find ingress into more backward countries, like Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Russia at the merging of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the present day in Asia; when the economic factors burst in a revolutionary manner, breaking up the old order; when development is no longer gradual and “organic” but assumes the form of terrible convulsions and drastic changes of former conceptions, then it becomes easier for critical thought to find revolutionary expression, provided that the necessary theoretical prerequisites exist in the given country.⁶³

But uneven and combined development can also work, as it were, in reverse: “debased adaptation” is not only a feature of backward societies. Here too the opening of the age of imperialism is decisive. Between 1870 and 1914, for example, imperial Britain, Germany, and Japan all consciously emphasized the role of their monarch-emperors; in each case, the preexisting symbolism of the Crown was used to represent national unity against two main challenges: external imperial rivalry and internal class divisions.⁶⁴ But Trotsky saw this as a much more general phenomenon, one necessarily caused by the need to maintain bourgeois hegemony over the exploited and oppressed in an era of revolution, and which reached its apogee in the US: “It is considered unquestionable that technology and science undermine superstition. But the class character of society sets substantial limits here too. Take America. There, church sermons are broadcast by radio, which means that the radio is serving as a means of spreading prejudices.”⁶⁵

Trotsky’s argument suggests two questions about the character of uneven and combined development. One is whether it applies to all periods in human history. Trotsky himself tended to think that it did. His claim that “the entire history of mankind is governed by the law of uneven development” can certainly be defended.⁶⁶ He later extended this, writing in The Revolution Betrayed (1937): “The law of uneven development is supplemented throughout the whole course of history by the law of combined development.”⁶⁷Whether this is equally defensible is, however, another matter.⁶⁸ Trotsky did not attempt to demonstrate his claims for the transhistoricity of uneven and combined development, but Justin Rosenberg has attempted to do so with examples from the Russian state after 800 AD, which he claims show three aspects of combination. First, “the course of Russian development was ‘combined’ in the sense that at every point it was causally integrated with a wider social field of interacting patterns of development.”⁶⁹ By this he means that Russia was subject to “inter-societal causality,” an environment in which the endless interplay of other states or social forces shaped her internal structure in a way that could never be completed. Second, combination also involved “structures” that “extended beyond Russia itself.” Among such structures Rosenberg includes “regional political orders, cultural systems and material divisions of labour.” The third, “yet deeper” dimension is the consequence of the first two, the creation of a “hybrid” social formation, “a changing amalgam of pre-existent ‘internal’ structures of social life with external sociopolitical and cultural influences.” Consequently, there “never existed a ‘pre-combination’ Russia”; at every point its existence was traversed by these influences: “combined development identifies the inter-societal, relational texture of the historical processes within which the shifting meanings of the term ‘Russia’ crystallized and accumulated.” In general terms, Rosenberg invites us to “abandon at the deepest theoretical level any notion of the constitution of society as analytically prior to its interaction with other societies.”⁷⁰

The inseparability of the international from the social is, however, inscribed in historical materialism from the moment of its formation, notably in The German Ideology. But in this moment, Marx and Engels were also clear that “history becomes world history” only as a result of capitalism.⁷¹Why? Before capitalism all class societies, with the exception of those based on slavery, were based on variations of the same mode of production, involving surplus extraction from a class of peasants and taking either a “feudal” or “tributary” form depending on whether the main agent of exploitation was a class of local landlords or the state bureaucracy.⁷² There were important differences between them, particularly in terms of how the ruling classes organized, but most precapitalist societies seem to have involved elements of both, with one or the other achieving dominance at different times. Those cases that were the purest examples of one variant or the other (for example, feudal England or tributary China) had quite different possibilities for capitalist development. Until that development took place, however, societies could borrow from each other, influence one another—particularly in the field of culture and philosophy—but were not sufficiently differentiated from each other for elements to “combine” to any effect. The very terms that Trotsky uses in describing combination—“archaic and more contemporary forms”—were unthinkable until capitalism defined what it meant to be “archaic.”⁷³

We therefore need to draw a distinction between Trotsky’s general account of Russian development, which, as Rosenberg correctly says, was always subject to external influence, and the specific moment at which these influences were not merely successfully absorbed into an endlessly mutating social form, but also set up a series of tensions that threatened to, and eventually did, tear the fabric of Russian society apart in 1917. The moment of uneven and combined development, in other words, only arrived with capitalist industrialization and the historically unique society to which it gave rise. The immense difference between industrial capitalism and previous modes of production meant that, from the moment the former was introduced, combination became possible in a way that it had not been hitherto; but the structural dynamism of industrial capitalism compared to previous modes of production also meant that combination became inescapable, as all aspects of existing society registered the impact on them, to differing degrees, of this radically new means of exploitation. “In contrast to the economic systems that preceded it,” wrote Trotsky, “capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships.”⁷⁴ Rosenberg himself notes that “for Trotsky, capitalism did not just change the world: it actually changed the overall nature of historical change itself.”⁷⁵ I think he has insufficiently incorporated this insight into his own work.

The second question is whether uneven and combined development is a process necessarily confined to individual states. Rosenberg argues that, for Trotsky, “‘combined development’ was a phenomenon not of individual societies alone, but of the evolving international social formation as a whole.”⁷⁶ In a discussion of Marx’s original plan for the structure of Capital, he further claims that if we “neglect the significanee of uneven and combined development” at the level of those determinants that apply to all societies, then the result will ultimately be either economic reductionism or a version of Realist International Relations theory in which states appear as sovereign actors seeking—insofar as they are able—advantage and security within the global system.⁷⁷ Colin Barker has reached similar conclusions to those of Rosenberg, suggesting that an “extended” concept of uneven and combined development is implicit in Trotsky’s own work: “Only from the angle of world economy, of the combined development of the different countries within it, do words like ‘advanced’ and ‘archaic’ have any meaning, as measures of coercive comparison within a larger system of competitive transactions.”⁷⁸

I have more sympathy with these arguments, since, as I have argued above, uneven and combined development is produced by the impact of different aspects of the international capitalist system (economic competition, military rivalry, and colonial rule) on the societies constitutive of it. It is important, however, not to confuse the sources of a particular historical process with the process itself. Trotsky famously wrote that “Marxism takes its point of departure from world economy, not as a sum of national parts, but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market, and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets.”⁷⁹ Uneven and combined development is a consequence of the world economy, but it is played out within the component parts of the states system: the territorial confines of these states are where the specific combinations take place. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any analysis of a “concrete situation” can be undertaken while remaining at the level of “the international.” If the writers quoted in the previous paragraph are right, and what happened in Russia was merely an example of a universal process, then what remains of the “peculiarities” of Russian development, which Trotsky took as the basis of his theory, and which he later extended to other areas of the colonial and semicolonial world? If everywhere is subject to uneven and combined development then it clearly explains nothing in particular about Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, and we must search for another theory to achieve what Trotsky sought to do.

Uneven and combined development is a feature of certain societies: unlike the world economy of which Trotsky spoke, or the states system, whose interaction gave it birth, it does not constitute “an independent reality” greater than its component parts. Uneven development occurs at the international level, but it is meaningless to talk about combined development in this respect. The significance of the process is precisely the tensions and conflicts to which it gives rise within the territorial boundaries of particular states, not least because the state itself is a combined formation. In Russia after 1861, for example, the state apparatus remained staffed by members of the landed aristocracy; but these were not, as in England after 1688 and Germany after 1871, essentially agrarian capitalists but rather feudal landlords presiding over a complex set of class relationships in various early stages of the transition to capitalism. The absolutist state nevertheless needed to industrialize in order to remain in a position of military parity with its rivals, but the reliance that it placed on the landlord class meant that industrialization could not be financed through taxation or by using the appropriation of agricultural surpluses. This in turn compelled the state to borrow foreign capital, above all from France, with contradictory effect. Industrialization took place rapidly and intensively, but without leading to the creation of a powerful native bourgeoisie. In order to sustain it the state needed to export grain in order to service its foreign debt repayments, leading, as prices for the commodity fell, to greater pressure on the peasantry to deliver more without the means to increase productivity, which led in turn to growing peasant unrest. And since industrialization effectively coincided with the transition to capitalism, the proletariat was formed without intermediary stages, making it more volatile from the start, in a situation where the state could afford less in terms of making concessions over wages, conditions, or political rights.⁸⁰

CONCLUSION

We can now summarize the argument. The theory of uneven development was a major theoretical breakthrough in two respects, by identifying both the relative changes in position between the advanced capitalist powers and the structural inequalities between these powers and the colonial and neocolonial world that they dominated. It further showed, with regard to the first set of relationships, how in the competitive struggle, national capitals could attain temporary economic advantage, but their rivals could appropriate in completed form the technologies, skills, or organizations that had given this advantage, without having to repeat the entire developmental process. This applied in the cases of those undertaking capitalist industrialization and of those already engaged in industrial competition. What the theory omitted, particularly as it became codified under Stalinism, was how this process applied in the case of the colonial and neocolonial world. Indeed, it was assumed that it was irrelevant: unevenness was seen as a dynamic process withinthe advanced capitalist world, but essentially as static between the advanced capitalist world and the colonial or neocolonial world. The theory of uneven and combined development explained what occurs when the same “overleaping” process takes place in the colonial or neocolonial world, where it is impossible to fully “catch up” with, let alone “overtake,” the developed West, and developing states must do so instead in a fragmentary or partial way. But the resulting combined forms, because of their inbuilt social instability, paradoxically made revolutionary outbreaks more likely than in the developed world, with its greater levels of stability and reformist traditions. In other words, combined and uneven development made it possible for a strategy of permanent revolution to be pursued.

There is a particular irony in the fact that Trotsky, who emphasized more than any of his contemporaries the reality of the world economy, was also the thinker who refocused attention from “the international” in general to its impact on individual nation-states. He never faltered in his belief that the socialist revolution could only ever be accomplished on a global basis, but was equally forceful in arguing that the strategies adopted by revolutionaries outside the developed West had to be based on an assessment of the extent of combined development and the specific forms that it took.