reading response w 5

Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will? A Response to Gunder Frank*

Henry Bernstein and Howard Nicholas

The contribution of the work of Andre Cunder Frank to debates about the nature of Third World ‘underdevelopment’ over the past twenty years is well known, and its significance widely acknow- ledged. The arguments that he has consistently put forward have been assimilated into the broad mainstream of contemporary anti- imperialist ideology. Also well known are a number of criticisms of the approach of Frank and other writers of the ‘dependency’ school. The extension of Frank’s influential version of dependency theory to the current recession in the world economy and its effects for the Third World, provides an opportunity to reconsider his position, with particular reference to its political and ideological implications. This is the principal focus of our response, which we begin with a brief resume of Frank’s main theses and of criticisms of their theoretical and methodological bases.

FRANK’S THESIS A N D ITS CRITIQUE

The following points summarize the main themes and conclusions of Frank’s argument. 1 . Frank’s theory is concerned, above all, with the distribution of

the surplus product (or ‘economic surplus’, Frank 1975) between

*A. Gunder Frank: ‘Global Crisis and Transformation’, Developmen1 ond Change. Vol. 14. 3 , 3 2 3 - 4 6 .

Developmenr and Change (SAGE. London. Beverly Hills and New Delhi). Vol. 14 I 1 983). 609-624

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countries or groups of countries. National economies compete to maximize surplus appropriation, and the extent to which they are able t o d o so rests on their possession (or lack of possession) of certain types of monopoly power in international economic relations. Successful surplus appropriation is the key condition of accumulation and hence development, although other factors also have a role, for example, adequate levels of effective demand and technical change.

2. While all countries were originally ‘undeveloped’. the advanced capitalist countries (DCs) were able t o achieve a path of (‘normal’) capitalist development denied to the countries of the Third World (UDCs). The two categories can be grouped in terms of ‘metropole’ and ‘satellite’ or ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.

3. The UDCs were actively underdeveloped as a consequence of their forced integration with the capitalist world economy, through which they became exporters of primary products (and also sources of effective demand for exports from the DCs). The economies of UDCs are locked into a structural relation of dependence on those of the DCs, whose reproduction needs they are compelled to satisfy. This occurs through a variety of mechanisms - international trade (unequal exchange), invest- ment, aid, technology transfer, transfer pricing etc. - the result of which is a ‘drain’ of surplus from UDCs t o DCs, thereby restricting the accumulation and development of the former.

4. It follows that ‘de-linking’ f r o m the capitalist world economy is an indispensable condition of the development of UDCs, allowing them to retain their surplus for accumulation and to provide a market to encourage growth and technical change, free from international competition dominated by the monopoly power of DCs. The following points summarize some of the main criticisms of

Frank’s thesis. 1. In Frank’s work capitalism is understood primarily as a system

of exchange relations, above all those of international exchange. This has important implications because the obverse of defining (capitalist) underdevelopment by integration with the world market, is to define (socialist) development by de-linking and autarky.

2. Closely linked to this preoccupation with exchange relations (as the means of distribution of the ‘surplus’) is the use of countries, or groups of countries, as the units of analysis of international economy - and indeed, one could say, as its subjects or ‘actors’.

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3. Within this framework, accumulation is seen as a quantitative process: the amassing of goods and money. The historical ‘drama’ of accumulation is played o u t between countries on the ‘stage’ of the international economy.

4. Together w i t h a strongly mechanistic methodology (on which more later), Frank’s mode of argument encourages what one could call a ‘puppet master’ view of imperialism. Not only does this deny the dynamics of class and popular struggle w i t h i n UDCs, and the specific contradictions they express, but it also and necessarily produces a generalized pessimism about the prospects for socialism. Indeed, as we shall argue, it is the lack of any adequate conception of class contradictions and of political struggle in Frank’s work that has the most dangerous effects. I n o u r view, these lines o f criticism have been most effectively

formulated and elaborated w i t h i n an avowedly Marxist framework (Brenner 1977, Leys 1977, Bernstein 1979, among ot hers). However, i t is clear that Frank is not a Marxist nor has he ever claimed to be one. To criticize his work for this reason, then. may seem beside the point. On the other hand, there are several counter- arguments to this. First, to propose a theory of the history of (global) capitalist development, and to argue for socialism as the only way ahead for the development of UDCs. is to enter a terrain already occupied by several generations of Marxist thinkers and parties, and is implicitly to contest their contributions.’ Second, as Frank’s w o r k is committed to the needs of contemporary anti- imperialist struggle (similarly a preoccupation of Marxists) i t can be assessed from the viewpoint of these needs, to see how effectively i t contributes theoretical and ideological resources to the struggle. I t may be found wanting in this respect, independently of the claims of the Marxist tradition. The latter, however, does have its own claims. and this leads to the third point. Marxism has long been concerned with the issucs which Frank addresses, and i t can claim that the method of historical materialism is better equipped to inform struggles for the same goals that Frank believes in.

The perspective and method of historical materialism can be con- trasted with that of Frank i n relation to the kinds of criticism noted above. I . Capitalism is a particular mode of production. constituted

through distinctive relations of production which give rise to distinctive forms of class and popular struggle. The distinctive contradictions of the history of capitalism include the mechanisms of uneven and combined development, determined

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by the fundamental contradiction of the relationship between capital and labour (which does not have to take in all cases the immediate form of fully proletarianized ‘free’ wage labour; see Banaji 1977, Gibbon & Neocosmos 1983).

2. Accordingly, the focus of Marxist analysis is on class and other social categories constituted through antagonistic relationships of exploitation and oppression. These include relations of domination and subordination in the sphere of gender, and in the sphere of the ‘national question’. For Marxists the national question is generated by the contradictions of capitalism, and has to be assessed from the viewpoint of the struggle for socialism. National economies and states are not the primary units of analysis and historical subjects that they are for Frank, but arenas of class struggle with their own specific articulations and mediations. The latter, of course, are subject to determination by the dynamics and contradictions of world capitalist economy, but this is neither an exclusive nor a one-directional determination.

3. Accumulation is a social process, marked by struggles between capital and non-capitalist producers (‘primitive accumulation’), and between capital and the working class. Accumulation within the transitional period of socialist construction is also necessarily a process with its own contradictions and struggles (a point we shall come back to).

4. Class and popular struggles affect accumulation processes within national economies and internationally, as well as being affected by them. To grasp the significance of these struggles (which is systematically if unwittingly devalued by Frank’s ‘puppet master’ view of imperialism, in which the ‘external’ deter- mination explains everything) requires a dialectical method lacking in Frank’s work.’ Even more important than its implica- tions for the analysis of capitalist development/underdevelop- ment, is its effects for understanding struggles for national liberation and for socialism, and the criteria used to assess them. The ‘all or nothing’ quality of the binary oppositions of Frank’s ‘structuralist’ economics (de-linking and autarky vs world market integration and dependence) provides no means, and leaves no space, for getting to grips with the complexities and contradictions o f socialist construction in particular conditions. Major experiences of mass struggle, and the lessons to be gained from them, are ‘written off‘ by a view of socialism which renders i t synonymous with withdrawal from the capitalist world

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economy. This can only lead to an ever-growing list of countries which failed to ‘pass the test’, thus reinforcing defeatism and pessimism. This will be pursued further as we consider more closely Frank’s

analysis of ‘global crisis and transformation’.

FRANK O N GLOBAL CRISIS A N D TRANSFORMATION

It is striking that Frank provides no systematic explanation of the cuuses of the present crisis, also a notable omission in his book on the crisis of world economy (Frank 1980). The latter contains a few vague references to ‘the rising organic composition of capital’ (a curious appropriation of Marxist vocabulary by a non-Marxist) and to ‘long waves’ in its first chapter, and thereafter there is virtually no reference to the causes of crisis. It can be inferred from his general argument, however, that capitalist crises are caused primarily by increased costs of production - what may be characterized as a neo-Ricardian position (Fine & Harris 1979: ch. 5). Certainly, rising costs of production and their effects for rates of profit and accumulation are the predominant manifestation of the crisis for Frank. Accordingly, responses by capital to the crisis are characterized as various ways of reducing the costs of pro- duction, including both labour costs and the costs of raw materials.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the response is seen in distributional terms: shifting distribution in favour of capital through cuts in public spending (at least on social consumption, if not on military and police forces) and reduction in levels of real wages, facilitated by a general political shift to the right. Marxist criticisms of the limitations of neo-Ricardian analysis of crisis are well established (Fine & Harris 1976, 1979), and we need only note their relevance to Frank’s argument briefly. He is unable to analyze crisis as an inherent outcome of the dynamics of capitalist accumu- lation, and its contradictions rooted in the capital relation itself. Because he sees accumulation as a quantitative phenomenon, with the relevance of classes limited to their role in distribution (and demand), Frank views crisis as resulting from a lack of technical change in production in the face of conflict over distribution. Mass unemployment is also seen primarily in terms of distribution: it is manipulated by capital t o weaken the bargaining power of workers over wages. For Marxists the massive expansion of the reserve army of labour is, i f anything, even more important as a weapon in class

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struggle over the restructuring of production. The introduction of new technologies and work practices requires an offensive against the capacity of workers to resist forms of control imposed on them by the capitalist labour process itself.

In Frank’s account, crisis appears in principle as both resolvable and avoidable. I t is resolvable through the introduction of new technologies and the reduction of costs of production, and avoid- able through the imposition of some kind of ( d e f u c f o ) domestic and international incomes policy, together with state sponsorship of technological change and diffusion (within and between countries).

The role of UDCs in the response of metropolitan capital to the crisis is primarily as a supplier of cheap labour, whether directly to (export oriented) industries relocated in the Third World or to the production of primary commodities for the world market (export production vs import-substitution for the internal market). This argument, in fact, does not distinguish the role of UDCs in a period of crisis from their role in the capitalist world economy during periods of ‘boom’: what is demanded of them now is essentially the same as before only, perhaps, more so. The ‘before’, i t should be remembered, comprises five centuries of world capitalist economy marked by an essential structural continuity as far as ‘world system’ theorists are concerned. Frank himself expresses this:

The new dependent export-led growth of manufacturing and agribusiness production for the world market are i n no wu.v signiJicunrly di’j-erenr from the old raw materials export-led growth which underdeveloped the Third World in /hejirsr pluce (Frank 1983: 3 3 5 ; our italics).

I t follows that the two responses identified by Frank as available to UDCs and socialist countries - ‘acceptance’ or ‘rejection’ - can not be specified as responses to the demands of the metropole at any time. Bearing this in mind, we shall briefly consider Frank’s description of the ‘acceptance’ response and its effects, and then his description of ‘rejection’ and de-linking.

The acceptance response (further integration in the world capitalist economy) is discussed mostly in relation to the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico. Frank’s aim is to show that despite their impressive rates o f industrialization and economic growth more generally, they d o not constitute a generalizable, viable or desirable ‘model’ of development for other UDCs to emulate. I n criticizing Frank it is-not necessary to endorse the

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recent experience of the NlCs as providing a positive ‘model’ (which is more the position of Warren 1980). Our position is rather that the significance of those experiences cannot be adequately assessed by Frank’s methodology and the criteria i t employs. Our disagreement entails very basic issues of theory and historical method which can only be briefly summarized here (for fuller discussion see Bernstein 1979, 1982).

Frank’s conception of ‘underdevelopment’ is derived from an underlying notion of ‘normal’ capitalist development historically realized in the metropole. At the same time, the capitalist develop- ment of the metropole required the formation of a ‘world system’ that denies the possibility of development to the UDCs. Whatever changes (even ‘transformations’ in Frank’s term) occur in the latter, they can never replicate the pattern of development of the DCs. This is essentially a tautology with a negative (and not very illuminating) punch-line: history does not repeat itself. That the industrialization of certain countries at certain times influences the conditions of industrialization in other countries subsequently is a perception neither unique to the ‘world system’ approach, n o r a demonstration of its ‘scientific’ character. That the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was able to analyze the specificity of Britain’s industrial revolution ‘without the benefit of “world system analysis”’ (as Frank puts i t . 1983: 332) is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising that a non-Marxist historian Alexander Ger- schenkron (1952, 1962) produced a still rewarding discussion of the ways in which one ‘generation’ of capitalist industrialization changes the conditions for the next.

All that Frank is saying is that capitalist development of the NICs neither (i) leads to ‘relatively autonomous and self-propelling technological development based on national resources and capacities’ (1983: 335) (an accolade bestowed uniquely on North Korea among the dozens of countries he refers to), nor ( i i ) delivers the goods of full employment, satisfaction of basic needs, equaliza- tion of income, and so on. But neither of these is what capitalist development means. I t means the accumulation of capital and the development of the productive forces through a distinctive mode of exploitation, and the class struggles it generates. The types of questions that socialists need to investigate are: what are the ‘trans- formations’ that have occurred in the NICs? How have they changed the conditions of class and popular struggle? What are their implications for political organization and programmes, strategy and tactics?

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These are not questions that can be answered according to pre- packaged o r deductive formulas - and that is precisely the point. Frank’s theory provides no means of investigating the specificity of particular social formations and sites of struggle within the capitalist world economy, characterized as it is by a basic structural dualism (metropole/satellite, centrelperiphery) and a fundamental continuity over five centuries. The dead weight of Frank’s ‘world system determinism’ either negates specificity (all UDCs are ultimately trapped in the same blind alley), or can only construct specificity in an ad hoc and empiricist fashion. This is clearly illustrated in his assertion of the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Asian ‘Gang of Four’ NICs, as Frank feels it necessary to distinguish them from the rest of the (theoretically) undifferentiated periphery (pp. 3 3 1 f f ) .

His discussion of the ‘acceptance’ response (Ibidem) of UDCs can only provide negative conclusions: ‘acceptance’ may provide a limited avenue of growth for a limited number of UDCs, and it cannot provide ‘real’ development for any UDC. The experience of the NICs fails the test of development according to both nationalism and socialism. ‘Dependence’ is the key term in the nationalist lexicon because industrialization and accumulation cannot connote ‘real’ development, if they are considered to be determined by metropolitan capital as a means of maximizing ‘surplus drain’. As Anne Phillips pointed out, the ‘national capitalist’ response was rejected by dependency theorists nor because it is capitalist but because it is insufficiently ‘nafional’ (1977: 19). The nationalist reaction to imperialism, therefore, cannot provide a revolutionary critique of capitalism of the kind required by the struggle for socialism.

Furthermore, it is only confusing to dismiss capitalist develop- ment, as Frank does, because it fails to d o what we believe socialism should d o for human emancipation. The result is a moralistic and utopian critique of poverty, misery, injustice and oppression. I t completely misses the point that these widespread phenomena may manifest the ‘success’ of capitalist development rather than its ‘failure’, expressing the contradictions through which capitalism develops.

The ‘transformations’ experienced by the NlCs encompass simultaneously (i) new forms of ‘marginalization’ and oppression (emphasized by Frank), (ii) major developments of internal productive linkages, of the internal market, and of indigenous capital accumulation (Frank’s empirical generalizations to the

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contrary are inaccurate),’ and (iii), most importantly, massive pro- letarianization and urbanization. The significance of the last for generating new forms of class and popular struggle - in short, new political possibilities - is altogether lost in the story as Frank tells i t . This is the political point that we shall carry forward to our discussion o f Frank’s account of the ‘rejection’ response of UDCs and socialist countries (p. 331).

The extension of Frank’s theory to the current period of crisis contains no surprises, as far as the ‘acceptance’ response is concerned. What he says about the effects of world economy integration for UDCs in the context of 1983 is familiar from what he said in the 1960s. The extension of his discussion to take in ‘rejectionist’ responses (including socialism) is more novel (pp. 338 ff). I t is also, in our view, even more confused and politically dangerous.

In the last part of his paper, socialism appears more or less synonymous with ( i ) de-linking from the world economy, plus ( i i ) the redistribution of political power together with popular participation (p. 342). The inadequacies of these (vague) notions for assessing the record of socialism (and of UDCs that have followed a ‘rejectionist’ line at certain times) is borne out in Frank’s ad hoc and impressionistic judgements. First, i t is not clear to what extent countries termed socialist satisfy these criteria; for example, Frank states that ‘the Soviet Revolution certainly did not bring the Russian proletariat to power’ (p. 345). One may also inquire (and genuinely, because we d o not know) about the role of popular participation in North Korea development.

Second, while the achievements of socialism are registered in terms of (an initial) de-linking, increasing production, and satisfy- ing basic needs, socialist economies are seen as trapped in low levels of productivity (he does not explain why). This impels them to turn to the West for technology (1983: 345). and thus draws them into re-linking with the capitalist world economy. This both threatens the social gains they have made, and entails the danger of a transition to capitalism (which Frank thinks is occurring in Eastern Europe) (p. 345). The practical difference between socialist countries and non-socialist but ‘progressive’ UDCs appears only as one of degree. Attempts by the latter to de-link are nipped in the bud sooner, and re-integration with the world economy imposed on them more easily.

The general conclusion is necessarily a gloomy one. Frank refers t o the ‘real economic limitations. social costs and political short- comings of both the integrationist and rejectionist options - and

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the failure of Marxist theory and socialist models in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere to offer sufficiently persuasive alternatives’ (p. 341; our e m p h a ~ i s ) . ~ He also points out that the ‘very fact that de-linking is not only a policy that is attempted by progressive governments but is also an arm that is used against the progressive governments, gives cause for reflection about the rational utility of de-linking in the world today’ (p. 343).

We argue that Frank’s ability to assess the nature and signifi- cance of capitalist development is limited by the lack of adequate conceptions of class contradiction and struggle. The same applies to his assessment of socialism. The meaning of the latter for Frank is effectively exhausted by the existence of progressive regimes and the pursuit of de-linking as a policy. The remarks about mobiliza- tion and participation are too abstract and vague to inform his sub- stantive judgements. The history of mobilization and participation in Vietnam and China, for example, has not saved their socialisms from the clutches of re-linking in Frank’s view (p. 344).

In short, Frank shows no awareness of the politics of state forms, practices and policies in relation to class struggles and their contradictions. I t appears that ‘the people’ is simply a residual and homogenous mass, which regimes more or less succeed (or fail) to rally behind their policies. That the construction of socialism is a complex process of transition, constituted by its own specific contradictions, both ‘external’ and ‘internal’, antagonistic (class contradictions) and non-antagonistic (contradictions amongst the people), is not indicated in even the most general way. Nor is there any recognition that relations of production in factories and farms, social divisions between mental and manual labour and between town and countryside, gender and cultural divisions, party and state organization, strategy and policy, are all actual or potential sites of contestation and struggle, in the transition to socialism.

The reason for this is Frank’s dual obsession with de-linking and with policy (‘responses’, ‘options’, ‘alternatives’, etc.). While de- linking stems directly from his ‘world system determinism’, the obsession with ‘policy’ paradoxically reflects an astonishing volunfarism: ‘de-linking is in essence voluntary’ (p. 343). This, as much as anything, expresses the core of the problem: the whole apparatus of the world system approach is put at the disposal of finding a ‘policy’ of development alternative to (capitalist) under- development or dependence. ‘Socialism’ is thereby reduced to an impoverished conception of finding the right policy and making i t work (a spuriously technico-rationalist view that mirrors the

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‘applied’ ideology of conventional development studies). With de-linking as the key litmus test, the examples given by

Frank appear as failures on either voluntarist or determinist grounds. The former include Zimbabwe where Mugabe ‘has completely failed to pursue the policies that he had promised’, and Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique ‘none of [which] have sought to de-link significantly from the world capitalist economy’ (p. 3 3 9 ) . In Mozambique ‘the FRELIMO regime has recently back- (racked on its earlier policies’ (p. 339). The emphases we have added to these revealing phrases highlight the subjective attribution of ‘failure’ consistent with a voluntarist approach. All that these statements tell us. in fact, is that their author is disappointed with the individuals and regimes concerned, not about the severe contra- dictions that socialists in these countries have to confront and try to act on.

The determinist version of failure is expressed by the over- whelming power of imperialism to impose its demands on, under- mine or threaten progressive regimes (Tanzania, the Manley government in Jamaica, Nicaragua). The point here is not to under- estimate the power of international reaction, but to suggest that Frank’s erratic leaps between the poles of voluntarism (failure through subjective weakness or betrayal) and determinism (failure in the face of hopeless odds) is an effect of his lack of grasp of class contradiction and struggle. I t is precisely the absence of class struggle that enables Frank to provide ‘a review of some recent experiences’ (p. 3 3 8 ) constituted, on one hand, by a voluntaristic conception of the way forward, and, on the other hand, by a determinism that denies its possibility.

The theoretical incoherence of this framework reflects itself in a number of throwaway remarks displaying a lack of political responsibility that we can only regret coming from Gunder Frank. For example, the intensity of class contradiction and struggle in the Chile of the Popular Unity government, and the painful lessons to be learned from its defeat, are betrayed by reducing the counter- revolutionary class forces in the country to the status of a ‘Quisling fifth column’ (p. 3 4 3 ) . No less irresponsible is the casual reference to Deng Ziaoping (and the millions of Chinese he speaks for?) being in ‘alliance with American imperialism’ (p. 344).

The only thing that Frank has to counter the mechanical deter- minism of his own theoretical framework, is a voluntaristic aspiration to the right ‘policy’ as a means of moving forward. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he has discovered that everything

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is for the worst in the worst of all possible world systems, that the will has succumbed to the pessimism of the intellect.

CONCLUSION

Communism is not for us a stute o/uJ/uirs which is to be established, a n ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. We call communism the r e d movement which abolishes the present state of things. (Marx and Engels 1970: 56-57)’

T h e immediate effect of ‘marxifying’ radical structuralism was to shift the implied solution t o the problem of underdevelopment from economic nationalism to sociulism. and to shift the means from utopian recommendations of structural reforms to revolutionary struggle. But this was an illusion. It is n o less utopian to appeal to ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’ to solve the problem a s rudirol structurulism formulures it, than to the existing third world governments o r the USAID, since a structuralist analysis doesn’t disclose the potential class forces o n which a revolutionary struggle can be based, o r the contradictions which condition and are developed by the struggle. o r a strategy o r organisational forms of struggle. o r - u fortiori - a ‘socialist’ solution since a socialist solution must itself be disclosed by t h e interests and capacities of the revolutionary forces and their strategy which has not been identified a t all (Leys 1977: 98).

I t has not been easy for us to engage with Frank’s arguments and the style in which they are presented, for the following reasons. First, his problematic combines a deductive and a prior; determinism drawing on a few global propositions about the world system (and its history), and a verificationist empiricism in which any set of facts illustrates and ‘proves’ these global propositions. I f the latter are assimilated uncritically (and even unwittingly as part of the mainstream of contemporary anti-imperialist ideology) then everything that follows is plausible. The ‘conjuring trick’ of empiricism is that it provides descriptions of the world that we ‘recognize’ as valid. When Frank talks about the chronic indebted- ness of Brazil and Mexico, or state repression in the Philippines, we are confident that he is describing important facets of the current world conjecture. In this sense, he continues to contribute to what could be called the ‘symptomology’ of contemporary imperialism. However, the ‘recognition’ factor in our reading of his description of the manifesfations of crisis and transformation, should not be the same thing as accepting its (often submerged) explanations and prognoses.

A second difficulty in getting to grips with Frank is his

A Response lo Gunder Frank 62 I

undoubted commitment to anti-imperialist struggle and to the goals of socialism, which a number of us share. At the same time we have argued that his commitment is expressed through a utopian and voluntarist, hence politically impoverished, notion of development. It is rooted in the search for an ‘ideal’ state of affairs (progressive regimes with the correct ‘models’ and policies and the ability to make them work), detached from the centrality of class struggle and uninformed by any understanding of contradiction - ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx and Engels). Such a utopian and voluntarist conception contains the seeds of its own ‘disillusionment’, leading only too easily to pessimism of the will as well as of the intellect.

In trying to uncover what is at stake in Frank’s paper, we have not been able to confront all the particular points it raises. I t is, after all, a kind of whirlwind ‘Cook’s tour’ of the present world conjecture, containing many statements that are unsubstantiated, unelaborated, o r only partially valid empirically. In our criticism, however, we have indicated some of the elements of a different approach based in (our understanding of) historical materialism. Criticism has clustered around three kinds of points and the links between them: theoretical, methodological. and political.

Theorefically, we have criticized the form and content of Frank’s version of ‘world system’ analysis. Its content lacks concepts of relations of production, contradiction and class struggle; its form is that of a mechanical and deductive determinism.

Merhodologically, this expresses itself in a form of empiricism more committed to ‘verification’ than t o invesfigofion. i.e. the production of new knowledges adequate to changing conditions and processes of struggle. Frank’s methodology lacks any differ- entiation of levels of abstraction necessary to construct specificity within the general. I t essentially packages facts in a few global categorical boxes.

Politically, the formulation of a voluntarist conception of ‘development’/‘socialism’ which neither starts from the concrete struggles of the exploited and oppressed nor puts them at the centre of analysis, leads to a gratuitous and dangerous pessimism. There is a painful irony in this for those of us who respect Frank’s commit- ment but have to recognize that the ways in which it is expressed can undermine the struggle for the very goals that he believes in.

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NOTES

I . It is relevant that Frank announces ‘the failure of Marxist theory’ (see note 4 below), and that one of his followers assimilates his work t o a body of current ‘neo- Marxism’ presented a s establishing a salutary break with the older traditions of Marxism (Foster-Carter 1974). Tensions a n d debates within the Marxist tradition are illustrated. for example, by Bill Warren’s criticism of Lenin’s /mperialism and of Comintern policy on the national question, a s historical precursors of contemporary ‘Third Worldist’ political economy (Warren 1980: chs. 3 and 4).

2. Valuable recent discussions of the dialectical method can be found in Nicolaus 1973, Echeverria 1978, Banaji 1979, Mepham & Ruben (eds.) 1979.

3. We are unable t o go into the details of this disagreement here. Some idea of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpreting the relevant evidence, and the political sources and implications of diverging interpretations, are conveyed in the recent ‘Kenya debate’: see. for example, Leys 1978. the exchanges between Kaplinsky 1980. Leys 1980, and Henley 1980, the commentary by Beckman 1980. the special issue of the Review of African Political Economy 1981. and the penetrating discussion by Kitching (forthcoming). For an incisive analysis of comparable issues in the Nigerian context see Beckman (forthcoming).

4. This statement reveals once again Frank’s ‘all o r nothingism’ tied to his utopian and voluntarist conception of development (discussed below). The definitive pronouncements of ‘failure’ it produces can only be disturbing to socialists. To whom is Frank’s assertion of ‘the failure of Marxist theory and socialist models’ (p. 341) addressed? What is a ‘persuasive alternative’ (p. 341) and to whom is it ‘persuasive’? T h e experiences of the Soviet Union, China and a number of other countries constitute the most profound and critical ‘school’ for learning about the contradictions and struggles intrinsic to the transition to socialism. Frank, however, more o r less writes them off a s having ‘failed’ to conform to the (utopian) expectations of his conception of ‘development’. His pronouncements show no awareness of the intense debates these experiences have generated among socialists; see. for example, the original and provocative work of Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer 1978.

5 . We are grateful 10 Peter Waterman for reminding us of this apposite statement by Marx and Engels.

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-- (forthcoming): ‘Neo-colonialism, Capitalism and the State of Nigeria’, in Bernstein & Campbell (eds.).

Bernstein, H . (1979): ‘Sociology of Underdevelopment vs Sociology of Development?’. in D. Lehmann ( e d . ) : Development Theory. Four Criricul Studies (London).

!

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- - (1982): ’Industrialization, Development and Dependence’. in H . Alavi & T. Shanin (eds.): Introduction to the Sociology of the ‘Developing’ Societies (New York a n d London).

Bernstein, H . a n d B. Campbell (eds.) (forthcoming): Contradictions of Accumulation in Africa. Studies in Economy and State (Beverly Hills, Cal.).

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Frank, A.G. (1975): On Capitalist Underdevelopment (Bombay). -- (1980): Crisis: In the World Economy (London). -- (1983): ‘Global Crisis a n d Transformation’. Development and Change. 14, 3.

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Econoniy. 8.

Agrarian Question.

624 Henry Bernstein and Howard Nicholas

Henry Bernstein is a Lecturer in Third World studies at the Open University, and Visiting Research Fellow at the

Institute of Social Studies during 1982-3. He has published many articles on theories of development and underdevelopment, peasant economy, African

historiography, and state and peasantry in Tanzania. He is the editor of Underdevelopment and Development. The Third World Today (Penguin, fourth printing 198 1); co-

editor with Hazel Johnson of Third World Lives of Struggle (Heinemann, 19821, and with Bonnie Campbell of

Contradictions of Accumulation in Africa. Studies in Economy and State (Sage Publications, forthcoming).

Howard Nicholas is Assistant Lecturer in Economics at the Institute of Social Studies. He has recently been awarded a

doctorate for a dissertation on the role of money in world market crises. His interests include value theory, modes of

production and uneven development, and national liberation movements.