Uneven Development

Classical Origins: The Political Economy of Capitalist Development

The concept of uneven development has its origins in classical Marxist thought, and much of its later development has been in the work of various neo-Marxist scholars and critical social theorists. Though the precise phrase is not central to Karl Marx's work, the questions it raises are an important component of, for example, Volume 1 of Capital. In the analysis of changing English society from 1846 to 1866 (Chapter 25), a striking historical period for the study of capitalist accumulation, the detailed local patterns of economic and social change are situated within the context of an emergent world economy and free trade system. The observed changes are remarkable for the extraordinary concentration and centralization of wealth and capital alongside the relative immiseration of the direct agents of this industry and the producers of this wealth, the working class. Thus, the accumulation of wealth has as its necessary counterpart the accumulation of misery, and this is the basis for the characteristic pattern of unevenness associated with the emergent industrial economy.

This contradictory process underpins the political arguments of The Communist Manifesto, as the antagonisms between oppressing and oppressed classes are identified as the historical conditions for revolutionary change. This becomes more intense with the uneven development of modern industry with its exploitative logic and increasing tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the [Page 834]few while impoverishing and alienating the many. Hence, we get the well-known observation from the end of Part I of The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie has produced its own gravediggers in the shape of the international proletariat. That is, the contradictions of uneven development provide the basis for social struggle leading to social change, ultimately revolutionary in character.

Later, deployment of the precise term uneven development was similarly political in the beginning. For example, in Leon Trotsky's analysis in the early twentieth century, the process of uneven and combined development is seen as the basis for permanent revolution leading to the eventual creation of a new society. In this formulation, the geopolitical dynamics of capitalism are understood in relation to noncapitalist factors (e.g., ecological and natural variations, primitive social formations, etc.) as well as the general historical fact of uneven social development at every scale, including global, national, urban, and local. Again the general process (capitalist development) and local expression (unevenness) act one upon the other as a result of the inherent contradictions and tensions attendant to unequal social formations, an observable historical fact.

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