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The Struggle for Development:
National Strategies in an International Context

Edited by M. Bienefeld and M. Godfrey
© 1982 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Introduction


MANFRED BIENEFELD and MARTIN GODFREY


The central question addressed by this volume is: 'What are the prospects of development in the currently less developed economies and to what extent do these prospects depend on the effective implementation of national development strategies which take cognizance of the dominant trends in the international economy?' More specifically we are interested in the circumstances under which these economies could achieve a full-fledged industrialization, or other form of development, which would allow them to: develop their forces of production progressively; eventually mount a genuine competitive challenge to existing producers in various areas of production; and gradually spread the benefits of this development to the broad mass of their population.
In discussing the determination of the limits on this process for such economies the emphasis of this volume is on the relative weight to be given to external and internal variables, on the identification of possibly significant differences between nationally and internationally 'rational' choices, and on the interaction between these various spheres. Differences in opinion about the relative importance to be attached to each of these derive in part from different analytical perceptions of how variables are connected within a social system, and in part from differences in the concrete cases which are used as the basis for judgements. This volume does not attempt to develop a particular perspective but rather attempts to sharpen our understanding of these differences by bringing a variety of analytical perspectives to bear upon these issues with reference to selected country cases, in order to document the interaction between analytical perception and material circumstance and in order to improve our understanding of just how and why different theoretical approaches diverge on these issues. The basic premise of our approach is that the various theoretical approaches which do exist are not mutually exclusive, totally distinct spheres, but are rather deeply intertwined and have many

                                                               1

2                                                        THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

common points of reference. That does not, of course, imply that their conclusions may not be utterly incompatible or different in terms of the interests they serve in the first instance. But unfortunately the nature, or fervour, of any set of conclusions does not validate an analysis, as is all too evident when one looks at the range of strategic choices which can be espoused from a Marxist or neo-classical perspective, each claiming to represent the interests of the population as a whole.

Analytical Perceptions

As far as analytical perceptions are concerned, the possibility of a conflicting rationality between the national and the international spheres was denied by the longstanding view, largely derived from classical and neo-classical trade theory, that integration into the international capitalist system is always beneficial for any national economy, developed or less developed. This view was first challenged by economists like List and Carey, looking at the world from the point of view of nation states like Germany and the United States seeking to industrialize in a world where British producers dominated the markets for manufactures. The post-Second World War challenge came initially from the development economists of the 1950s. Singer, Prebisch, Lewis, Mandelbaum, Rosenstein-Rodan and Nurkse, among others, were important in this respect in their prescription of disengagement from the international capitalist system-at least to the extent of planned, capitalist, import-substituting industrialization behind a tariff or quota wall. The crux of their argument was that the developing countries had a set of characteristics which in the modern world would not allow them to achieve full employment in the context of an open market. Once that was admitted one had established the case for a new discipline called 'development economies'. This discipline concerned itself with the ways and means by which the resources thus left idle could be mobilized.
Parts of their theories survive more or less intact among more recent dependency and underdevelopment theorists. For instance, the Emmanuel-Amin theory of unequal exchange could be regarded as a restatement in Marxist language of the Prebisch-Singer-Lewis analysis of the differing effects of productivity increases at centre and periphery arising from the differing degrees of competition in their product and labour markets. But, unlike the later dependency school, most development economists operated with a Harrod-Domar type of growth model and looked favourably on foreign investment and aid as a means of easing the capital constraint, since it would increase capital goods imports, improve the balance of payments, reduce inflationary pressures and transfer technology. In effect capital was understood as physical machinery, or even as finance, but not as a social relation embodying certain central and certain internationally defined objectives.
INTRODUCTION                                                                                         3

Nurkse anticipated some ambiguities from the use of foreign capital, although he did not raise these to the level of elaborating conflicting objectives. Nevertheless he was one of the few early development economists to anticipate the dependency emphasis on problems arising from non-trade contracts between central and peripheral countries. He pointed to the international demonstration effect arising from the spread of knowledge in underdeveloped countries of the consumption standards of rich countries. Drawing a parallel with Duesenberry's work on the interdependence of individual consumption functions, Nurkse suggested that 'the presence or the mere knowledge of new goods and new methods of consumption tends to raise the general propensity to consume' and that 'the temptation to copy American consumption patterns tends to limit the supply of investible funds by inhibiting the willingness to save'. There is an obvious affinity here with the later emphasis on consumption patterns of, say Sunkel or Furtado, but there is a difference. Nurkse was still operating within a Harrod-Domar framework and thus emphasizing the demonstration effect only on the rate of saving and hence on the rate of growth. He recognised that disengagement from the international economy was logically implied by his analysis but regarded this as a 'defeatist solution', preferring to try to raise the rate of saving by a compulsory savings scheme, backed up by foreign investment and aid.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that the development economists who seem to get closest to the dependency position and who lay the foundations for defining a specific, and separate, national rationality for capital are those who question the Harrod-Domar emphasis on capital as the sole constraint and emphasize rather the inadequacy of the inducement to invest. For example, Myrdal (whose 'circular-causation' challenge to equilibrium economics is an unacknowledged influence on dependency and 'uneven development' theory) drew attention to the fact that the need for capital in underdeveloped countries

does not represent an effective demand in the capital market. Rather, if there were no exchange controls and if, at the same time, there were no elements in their national development policies securing high profits for capital-i.e. if the forces in the capital market were given unhampered play -capitalists in underdeveloped countries would be exporting capital. (Myrdal, 1957:53)

If the problem is seen to be on the side of the inducement to invest rather than of the supply of capital, then the logic of inviting an inflow of foreign capital is called into question, because capital is no longer a homogeneous concept responding to an undifferentiated global logic. Hirschman (1971:227) posed this question more explicitly: 'Could the inflow of foreign capital stunt what might otherwise be vigorous local development of the so-called missing or scarce factors of production?' His view was that it could -sometimes in an absolute sense, for instance through the foreign takeover of local banks or businesses, more often in relation to what might have happened in the absence
4                                                            THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

of the foreign investment. His evidence for this was the fact that during wars, depressions, national expropriations and international sanctions, the domestic supply of entrepreneurs, managers, technology and saving seems to he 'far more elastic than is ever suspected under business-as-usual conditions'. His conclusion that 'a policy of selective liquidation and withdrawal of foreign private investment' would be in the best interests of Latin America would be endorsed by most dependency authors.      Where members of the dependency school part company from 'global law of value' Marxism and from development economists (often their earlier selves) is in their rejection of an undifferentiated conception of the 'historically progressive' role of capitalism, or of modernization theory and in their emphasis on the nation state, but not in isolation, rather set in the context of the global evolution of capitalism. From the development economists they differed further because of their incorporation of a strong historical dimension into their analysis; their endogenization of the state as 'the crucial battleground between the different social groups' (Sunkel, 1979:29); and their use of a dialectical rather than an equilibrium mode of analysis. This difference in approach is reflected in the different set of questions addressed by them. The most important of these questions, assumed away by 'modernization' development economists and by many orthodox Marxists, is one of those raised by this volume: 'What are the special obstacles which peripheral status, or relative technological backwardness, places in the way of the generation of a cumulative' dynamic nationally focused process of capitalist accumulation?*                                                          The typical dependency answer to this question is, as already indicated, a gloomy one. None is more gloomy than Gunder Frank, perhaps unfortunately the author who has come to symbolize the dependency approach for readers outside Latin America. As Booth has pointed out (Oxaal et al. 1975) Frank's analysis is less mechanistic and metropole-oriented than is usually supposed, emphasizing 'the impregnation of the satellite's domestic economy with the same capitalist structure and its fundamental contradictions' as more important than 'the drain of economic surplus' from satellite to metropolis with which he is usually associated (Frank, 1967:10). However, he remains strongly insistent on the impossibility of capitalist development at the periphery:

the economic basis of a developmentalist national bourgeois class ... has been entirely eliminated or prevented from forming at all, thus precluding further or future development under capitalism .. short of socialist revolution, (Frank, 1978:10)

While critical of Frank, most of the more radical dependency authors share his scepticism about the prospects for capitalist development at the periphery. For

*The question was never perhaps directly addressed at this level of generality by the dependentisras. Much of their work was geographically localized and historically circumscribed, but this is the general question implicit in that work.

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               5
                                                                                                                    example, Dos Santos (1973) would put more emphasis than does Frank on the elements within a nation which determine the effects of international situations upon national reality and on the assimilation of the national bourgeoisie by foreign capital in the role of 'dominated dominators' and less on the surplus drain. He also emphasizes the inability of peripheral societies to develop a capital goods sector as a defining characteristic. However, he would agree that capitalist development or at least 'autonomous' capitalist development is not possible and that a socialist path offers the only escape for peripheral societies.                                                              Similar conclusions are reached via a different route by those who analyse the plight of the periphery largely in terms of 'unequal exchange'. Thus Amin (1978) describes his 'peripheral model', based on low-wage exports and (in the consequent absence of an internal mass market) on the production of luxury goods for internal demand, with 'new' mechanisms of domination by transnational corporations superimposed; and regards it as a 'dead end' with no possibility of transition to a 'self-centred' system based on production of mass-consumption and capital goods. He sees self-reliance, therefore, as a necessary strategy for transition to socialism. Marini (1972:14) extends a similar analysis to 'subimperialism' ( 'the form which dependent capitalism assumes upon reaching the stage of monopolies and finance capital') in Brazil. In this case the low-wage exports are of manufactured goods and the state takes an increasingly important role (in conjunction with foreign capital), but the whole system is crucially dependent on the superexploitation of labour. The successful pursuit of wage demands by urban and rural workers would close all exits for capitalist development in Brazil'.                                                                                     Perhaps the gloomiest vision belongs to the 'marginality' writers within the dependency school, such as Quijano (1974) and Nun (1969). In their view, the new 'hegemonic' monopolistic sectors are grafted on to, but not integrated with, the Latin American production matrix, bringing it permanently to the verge of breakdown. They suggest that competitive and monopoly capitalism are crucially different from each other, as far as labour absorption possibilities are concerned. Under competitive capitalism, technical change causes a fall in product price, which leads to a rise in demand for the product, which leads in turn to a rise in the demand for labour. Under monopoly capitalism, on the other hand, technical change does not result in a fall in price but partly in an increase in profits, partly in an increase in wages, which encourages stagnation in the demand for labour. Moreover, the fact that the labour force in the hegemonic sector is a non-competing group breaks the link with wage determination. So surplus population, on this analysis, is not a reserve but an excluded (and permanently excluded) labour force. This 'marginalized' labour force or 'marginal mass' is a non-functional surplus population-over and above what is necessary to perform a Marxian industrial-reserve-army role. This is a profoundly pessimistic, even catastrophic, vision, not only questioning the employment-generating performance of peripheral capitalism, but also
6                                                             THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

denying its capacity to create a socially and politically viable mode of production.  The Caribbean dependency school is on the whole less pessimistic about the possibilities of capitalist development, as long as the plantation economy model is replaced by a localized or 'people's' capitalism which is able to improve a national focus on accumulation. A notable exception is Thomas (1974) who points to the divergence in the economic rationality of the colonial power and that of the colony so that colonialism led to a separation of the pattern and growth of domestic resource use from the pattern and growth of domestic demand; and to divergence between domestic demand and the needs of the broad mass of the population. Even in the case of the most successful small capitalist economies at the periphery, he sees no real possibility of development ,beyond misleading rises in per capita income or indeed of even sustaining such advances on a long-term basis... unless a comprehensive socialist strategy is developed' (Thomas, 1974:106). He recognizes, however, in 'some of the larger economies' the possibility of a national capitalist development of productive forces as a genuine alternative to socialism.            Perhaps the most complex member of the dependency school, so critical in his more recent writing of most of its conclusions as almost to place himself outside it, is Cardoso. Like other dependentistas, he emphasizes the absence of capital goods and national financial sectors, the partial and slow import of technology and penetration by foreign enterprises as characteristics of dependency, which he defines as the situation 'when the accumulation and expansion of capital cannot find its essential dynamic component within the systems' (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979:xx). However, he sees the relationship between national and international forces as forming

a complex whole whose structural links are not based on mere external forms of exploitation and coercion, but are rooted in coincidences of interests between local dominant classes and international ones and, on the other side, are challenged by local dominated groups and classes. (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979:xvi)

Most important in the context of this volume, he therefore refuses to place theoretical limits on national capitalist development at the periphery. He sees dependent capitalism as capable of growth and of transforming social relations of production, although not of resolving the employment and poverty problems of the majority of the population. He insists, however, on the need to analyse particular situations rather than to develop general theories:

We do not try to place theoretical limits on the probable course of future events. These will depend, not on academic predictions, but on collective action guided by political wills that make work what is structurally barely possible. (Cardoso and Faletto: 175)

Sharing some of Cardoso's views but not his aversion to grand theory is the

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               7

most influential Marxist' critic of the dependency approach, Bill Warren. Warren turns Frankism on its head and suggests on the basis of 'empirical observations' that

the prospects for successful capitalist development implying industrialization, of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good; that substantial progress in capitalist industrialisation has already been achieved; that the period since the Second World War has been marked by a major upsurge in capitalist social relations and productive forces (especially industrialization) in the Third World; that in so far as there are obstacles to this development, they originate not in current imperialist-Third World relationships, but almost entirely from the internal contradictions of the Third World itself; that the imperialist countries' policies and their overall impact on the Third World actually favour its industrialisation; and that the ties of dependence binding the Third World to the imperialist countries have been, and are being, markedly loosened, with the consequence that the distribution of power within the capitalist world is becoming less uneven. (Warren, 1973:3)      
Among the 'internal contradictions' of underdeveloped countries which cause 'serious problems' for their capitalist industrialization, Warren emphasizes, along with agricultural stagnation, excessive urbanization and growing unemployment, the "premature spread of socialism prior to the development of industrial capitalism' (Warren, 1973:42).
Meanwhile a neo-classical backlash against the interventionist-protectionist approach to development and industrialization has denied any validity to the 'special subject' of development economics. The new conventional wisdom, found first in its purest form in Little, Scitovsky and Scott (1970) and underlying most recent IMF and World Bank diagnoses of 'what is wrong with country X', asserts the applicability of equilibrium economics and centres on the evils of protectionism, which violates the principle of comparative advantage and gives rise to distortions in domestic factor and product markets. 'Getting factor prices right' is the central policy prescription of this school, which usually means reducing the price of labour, raising that of capital and reducing the price of domestic currency in terms of foreign currencies, along with a reduction in tariff rates to a low and uniform level and a removal of quantitative import restrictions. In its more sophisticated version, that of McKinnon (1973), an increase in the price of capital, as part of a package of monetary, fiscal and trade liberalization policies, is seen as opening up investment opportunities in 'fragmented economies', previously hidden by indivisibilities in the pre-capitalist sector.
These are the debates which provide the context for this book's discussion-a discussion which does not set out to establish or to defend a particular argument, or to justify a particular strategy. It sets out to illustrate how different theoretical approaches dealing with different concrete situations confront the problem of reconciling the internal and the external, the national and the international as well as the economic and the political spheres of reality.
8                                                             THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

The unifying theme of the book is the focus on these questions, rather than on the development of a common approach to them. The various theoretical approaches to development must ultimately confront a common and a concrete problem, namely that of accelerating the development of the material forces of production in today's developing countries in a manner which is socially and politically beneficial to their populations, and especially to the poorest 60 per cent.                                           The only purpose in studying these processes of social change is to allow them to be influenced and shaped by people as social and political beings. Furthermore it is because political intervention in the social process continues to be primarily determined at a national level, that this must occupy a central position in our analysis. At the same time the global system of material production and reproduction has now reached such a degree of international complexity through ownership, commodity trade and technological and financial links, that in so far as these political processes are determined, influenced or constrained by the form of the material process of production, the possibility of formulating or implementing a nationally defined set of policies is effectively constrained. The task of development studies is to define the extent and the significance of such constraints arising from different types and degrees of economic links with the external world.                                                                 If the discussions which follow convey a message it is that an answer to such a question can be given only in the particular since it depends crucially on three sets of conditions: the physical and material circumstances of the country, including the size, resources, location and climate; the social and political situation, including the way in which productive ends are served and controlled, incomes are distributed and non-consumed resources are allocated, and the form of state, the political process, and the ideological perceptions of its population; and finally the nature of international economic and political circumstances and their changes over time.                          The case studies which follow are selected to cover a wide range of illustrative cases, including some where the conflict between a national or an international rationality has been virtually negligible over much of the 1970s (Ireland, Costa Rica); to others where capitalist development, with extensive state involvement, has created the strongest basis for an effective national bourgeois strategy (Japan, South Korea, Brazil); to yet others where a similar market-oriented strategy led by a much weaker state, holds out little promise of creating such a possibility in the foreseeable future (Kenya, India). At the other end of the spectrum there are cases which have chosen to pursue a broadly socialist strategy, providing for less room for the private ownership of productive assets. Their degree of material success has varied largely with their capacity to mobilize their people politically, and thence economically. They too have had to take continuing risks in deciding first what levels and degrees of involvement with the international economy they could accept or forgo, and
INTRODUCTION                                                                                                9

to pay a price for misjudging their capacity to sustain any particular set of links without compromising the fundamental elements of their national policies.                 But the issue which provides the critical background to these discussions concerns the trends at the international level in the availability of finance and markets to different types of economies. In this repect it may well be the case that the experience of the 1970s will be a bad guide to the 1980s because these conditions may well change significantly. Already many developing countries have suffered major reverses in their real levels of consumption per head; in many real wages have fallen dramatically and GDP growth has simply come to mean increasing production for export in a desperate and often futile bid to close a widening trade gap.                                      In the coming decade the question of whether or not a nation has built a substantial nationally based economic and political structure may come to be of the greatest significance, because the choice will often polarize into one where a shrinking minority may try to defend its old standards of living by an increasingly repressive exploitation of the few internationally saleable commodities over which they have control, or in which they maybe moved to a more self-reliant' and nationally-oriented strategy by the realities of the international market but at the cost of a significant reduction in the living standards of those in the modern sector.                                                          In short, whatever lessons one  may draw from the experience analysed in the following chapters, it must be recognized that these reflect the 1970s and not the 1980s. These are likely to provide a much harsher environment where the need for national strategies will increase dramatically as far as the poorest 60 per cent are concerned, but where at the same time the possibility of such national strategies is likely to decline -if necessary through armed intervention if recent signals are to be believed.                                                                                                                  It seems to us as a result at least unwise and probably disastrous to extrapolate certain excessively optimistic interpretations of the experience of certain developing countries in the 1970s into the 1980s, and to put central emphasis on export promotion drives. Even though a very few might still have this option, their numbers are currently shrinking, and some who think they have already succeeded via this role may well face a rude awakening in the coming decade. In the final analysis capitalism's ability to disperse material benefits to the spatial and social fringes of society is centrally related to its capacity to create conditions of full employment, and it is just that capacity which has been called into question in the 1970s and which is most unlikely to be restored in the 1980s, Japan, South Korea and Singapore serving merely as the exceptions which prove the rule.                                                     Under these circumstances an effective national policy is one which is able to integrate the internationally competitive part of its economy into the international market in a manner which does not impede politically or economically its capacity simultaneously to create a national economic context
10                                                          THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

which allows the full mobilization of all remaining productive resources according to the principles of comparative advantage, as nationally applied. Since such a process will have an impact on the pattern of imports it must be combined with a degree of trade management which effectively recognizes the current and prospective impossibility of achieving full employment on the theoretically optimal basis of achieving international competitive states for all available resources. Under these circumstances the importance of effective and strong state control over central parts of the material base of the economy, including finance and industry, emerges as a critical requirement for the formulation of such policies. The only exceptions are a few, very small economies which can exploit locational and other advantages to a sufficient degree. Such a strategy is necessarily precarious and extremely 'dependent'; it may nevertheless objectively be the best available option.                                      Of course such national and state control may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the pursuit of a policy to serve the long-term interests of its population. That will finally depend on the political situation and on the extent to which choices made at the political level can be effectively implemented at the material base of the society.

Country Cases

In effect, the relevance of this book's chapters to these debates rests not in any appeal to ideological first principles, nor in an exploration of the inner logic of the competing theories, nor in the marshalling of cross-sectional data from a wide range of countries. The attempt, rather, is to learn from the historical experience of political economies of various types at different stages in their industrialization process, against the background of the evolving international context. To try to derive generalizable conclusions from such case studies is, we recognize, to cross a methodological minefield, but to reach such conclusions without an analysis of country experience and prospects is even more dangerous.                                                                       Before considering the recent experiences of different types of developing countries, the chapters which follow give some thought to the way in which these issues presented themselves in an earlier and essentially different historical context. Hence the chapter on Britain's early industrialization provides an introduction to and summary of the extensive and often heated debate about the relative importance of foreign trade in Britain's rapid growth from the mid-eighteenth century. It illustrates rightly the importance both of Britain's access to global markets, as a means of releasing bottlenecks, and of freeing the rhythm of expansion from its otherwise inexorable links with agricultural growth, as the physiocrats so eloquently demonstrated. It also provided a stimulus for investment and for a relatively greater degree of specialization than would otherwise have been possible.                            At the same time it places these things firmly in perspective by emphasizing

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               11

that for Britain these things were factors which ecouraged and stimulated a nationally based process of growth and investment. The state, having established a unified market and a liberal domestic investment climate, having provided an infrastructure in transport and finance, and having established various central industries, especially in textiles, through extremely nationalistic and protectionist measures, soon found itself in a position where its technological capabilities no longer required such assistance, a point of which it was finally convinced when the industrialization of the newly independent United States, made possible by its new and widely used freedom to protect its industries, created a boom in Great Britain, and not the disaster so widely feared and predicted.                                                                                            The implication which arises from this should warn against the common pedantic discussions of whether the industrialization of Britain was caused by its access to external markets, or in a slightly amended version whether Britain's imperial dominance consisted of access to markets, or capital export as some other specific objective. But such questions are aimed at unreasonable straw men for the real issue is to consider the extent to which the external environment provided a complement and a stimulus to the internal process of accumulation, so that imperialism refers to an unequal relationship in which a dominant power can manipulate (to a degree) the terms of a relationship to suit its ever-changing and politically defined requirements. In this sense Britain's ability to gain access to raw material imports, to markets and to finance by virtue of its growing maritime dominance emerges clearly enough.           But Thomson's chapter also points to the undeniable fact that these advantages are seized by a process which is nationally based and which is in turn transformed by this connection, it also emphasizes the limits imposed on Britain's use of that advantage, and suggests that in this sense 'the nature of Britain's industrialisation... was unique and thus provides little basis for direct comparison's for currently industrializing countries because Britain's problem in its relationship with the external world at that time was the exact opposite of that facing underdeveloped countries today. If theirs derives from the extent to which they lag behind already industrialized nations, Britain's lay in the extent to which it was ahead of other economies, so that the limited extent of external technological development eventually constrained the growth of the British economy. In sharp contrast later industrializers are faced with a bewildering array of technologies the relative capital intensity of which fosters the generation of surplus labour, which is less readily eased by the possibility of massive permanent emigration like that from Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century although international labour flows have increased in the past decade. The really crucial difference however, is rightly emphasized by Thomson, which is that Britain's problem in overseas trade lay in the high price and limited availability of imports, whereas underdeveloped countries today face enormous difficulty in developing internationally competitive exports,
12                                                         THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

which would provide them access to the technology they need to attain that competitiveness. Thus Britain's industrialization was unique for two reasons: ' the fact that the means for achieving economic growth were so restricted-this was the basic cause of Britain's industrialisation being gradual and widely-based; and the fact that Britain's advance was so solitary'.
Perhaps more often than Britain and other early industrializers Japan is taken as a point of reference by those concerned with underdeveloped countries today. Not unnaturally they raise the question of whether others can emulate Japan hecause,as Bronfenbrenner puts it at the beginning of Chapter 3, 'Japan remains the outstanding if not the only case of sustained economic growth under capitalism by a non-European country without European colonization, and without unhealthy or paralytic dependence on the West'.
Bronfenbrenner is sceptical about the relevance of Japan's early industrialization experience for Third World development strategists today. He bases this scepticism not on arguments that 'the Japanese are different' but on four main differences in circumstances: (i) the advantage of domestically-maintained peace and tranquillity, enjoyed by Meiji Japan, is not shared by today's developing countries; (ii) Japan, he suggests had freer access to the most important Northern and Western markets; (iii) Japan did not suffer from 'the revolution of rising expectations' which leads to a refusal to accept increasing inequality in internal income distribution as the price of growth, and finally (iv) the influence of various development theories has not yet led ruling groups in the Third World to blame their countries' plight on imperialism and colonialism and to seek 'quasi-reparations' in the form of aid and concessionary loans from the West to finance levels of wages, technologies and social welfare institutions in advance of levels of development.
One could, of course, interpret these same points in a somewhat different manner. First, one might say that most of these conditions seem to have been reproduced in South Korea. Second one might stress that the validity of the belief in trickle down and hence the value of a willingness to forgo 'rising expectations', and the likelihood that 'peace and tranquillity' can be maintained depends on whether or not an effective, national process of accumulation and growth is set in motion as a result. Finally, while it may be true that the early Japanese leaders did not entertain foolish hopes with respect to the benefits they might obtain from Western charity, they were inordinately and acutely aware of the damage which they thought that imperialism and colonialism had done to other, neighbouring states which led them to formulate policies from such a singularly single-minded and coherent national perspective. Indeed this emerges clearly in the rest of Bronfenbrenner's discussion of the particular features of Japanese policy. One might add that many of these features have survived to the present day, so that even today Japan is characterized by a marked nationalism in its financial structure, its trade patterns, its investment policies and its treatment of direct foreign investment.

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               13

Bronfenbrenner's scepticism about the value of the Japanese experience as a model seems to us to be overdone. The 'six basic decisions' that he identifies as a necessary condition of Japan's success are at least of interest to later industrializers. These are the decisions: (i) to centralize the Japanese government and economy; (ii) to transform the samurai into a class of businessmen and financiers to act as managers and entrepreneurs in conjunction with an activist state; which (iii) pursued a single-minded and effective programme of acquiring existing foreign technologies by, among other things, setting up pilot plants; and (iv) financing investment in industrial enterprises; (v) to build up an extensive national education system, including a network of technical schools and colleges; and (vi) the postponement of military adventures, though it must be said that developments after the turn of the century would suggest that this may have been purely an acceptance of relative weakness.                                        Particularly interesting in the context of our preoccupation with the interaction between the national and the international is Bronfenbrenner's stress on the care with which the Japanese state made use of inputs from abroad. Thus, the Meiji state

selected and hired foreign experts on short-term bases and always subordinate to native Japanese executives. They selected ... Japanese students for foreign training, and financed this training themselves. They imported capital equipment, either to be used as imported for production or as models for modification.

This, combined with its hostility to Western imperialism and its minimal use of foreign loans, also emphasized by Bronfenhrenner, suggests that the answer to his final rhetorical question may not be as straightforward as he implies. Certainly, the fact that Japan was not extensively colonized would have prevented Meiji statesmen claiming that 'they are rich because we are poor' but their actions indicate absolutely clearly that they believed Japan would remain poor amid weak if it allowed its pattern of development to be determined by 'them'. This does not, of course, make Japan a 'model' for mechanical application, but it illustrates the importance which was, and is, attached by Japan to the establishment of political and economic conditions which would allow the formulation and implementation of a national development strategy. That lesson seems to retain considerable relevance, though the possibilities of heeding it vary widely over time and space, and the desirability of heeding it in its Japanese political form must be judged not merely in terms of the material wealth it produced, but also in terms of its potential for conflict.

The very different experience of China before 1949 is useful for putting the lessons of Japanese experience' in perspective. White argues in Chapter 4 that the Kuomintang state (in contrast to that of Meiji Japan) was too weak -'poli

14                                                           THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

tically divided, administratively incompetent and socio-economically regressive' -to enable China to follow the Japanese path to capitalist development. Given this weakness, exacerbated by international intervention, his view is that capitalist development in China would have taken a dependent and distorted form, with foreign dominance of key sectors, an uneasy coexistence of an urban bourgeoisie and a conservative landed class, an enclave pattern of unevenly distributed industrialization resulting in massive migration, rural stagnation and urban overcrowding, massive inequality and exploitation, and pervasive corruption.
Underlying this conclusion is the fact that White, like the Meiji rulers of Japan, attaches great importance to external factors as a constraint on earlier Chinese development. He points out that after a hundred years of foreign economic penetration China had little of the substance of economic development; that such pockets of economic progress as did exist were dominated by foreign economic concerns and directed towards foreign interests; and that the political impact of foreign domination has been particularly debilitating. The only 'positive' contribution of imperialism was a dialectical one-

to start a process in China which culminated in its own destruction-it changed the constellation of social, economic and political forces within the country and instilled the faith among Chinese across a wide political spectrum that the only way to achieve national regeneration was to create a counter-state capable of destroying foreign dominance.

White's counterfactual picture of what Chinese capitalism would have looked like in the absence of the 1949 revolution finds echoes in Byres' description of actual capitalist development in India, whose 'crisis of accumulation' he relates more to its historical roots and to the internal processes of class formation, in town and country, than to current external pressures. Nevertheless he echoes Bronfenbrenner when he suggests that the crisis is exacerbated by aid, which takes pressure off the state to mobilize resources domestically, and by private foreign investment, which has contributed to an upsurge of growth in luxury industries-presumably to meet the 'rising expectations' of certain classes at least-and in the process has imparted an excessive degree of capital-intensity to industry, thus reducing employment creation and intensifying the 'structural stasis' of the Indian economy.
Some readers may question the use of terms such as 'crisis' and 'stasis' to describe an industrial sector which has grown at an annual average rate of around 6 per cent since 1947 and which contains a wide range of basic and capital goods industries, sophisticated by most Third World standards. Byres' case rests on the slowing down in the rate of industrial growth since 1965 (to around 4 per cent per year) and on the 'inadequate development' of the capital-goods (particularly machine tools) and oil industries. Comparing India
INTRODUCTION                                                                                               15

unfavourably with China, he suggests that 'she continues to labour under the constraint upon her industrial growth imposed by her inability to manufacture her own machinery and equipment' and quotes Dasgupta's verdict that the oil 'exploration programme has always been half-hearted, unimaginative and lopsided'. He points out also that India's industrial growth has had no impact on the structure of the working population and that the proportion of the male labour force in agriculture was the same in 1971 as it had been in 1881.
With regard to internal processes of class formation Byres suggests an ascendancy of the commercial over the manufacturing bourgeoisie and of a domination of medium/smaller scale capital by a monopoly capital which veers towards financial manipulation rather than productive performance. In this context, he argues, the state has not been successful in playing the catalytic role in industrialization assigned to it by an urban bourgeoisie conscious of its own weakness and suggests that it is its failure to generate rapid accumulation by major investments in capital goods industries which is of greater significance than the existing narrowness of the home market.
The experience and trajectory of the Brazilian economy is of particular interest for our discussion because in this case a large economy which had built a substantial industrial base through a nationalist import substitution strategy, shifted sharply towards a more internationally oriented strategy, though with continuing extensive state participation in the economy. In Chapter 6 Andrade analyses this process of internationalization of the economy which was accompanied by rapid growth. He finds it difficult to give an unambiguous answer to the crucial question of the medium-term viability of this process. He lists the pressures building up in the Brazilian economy-monopolization, the absence of research and development, foreign indebtedness, income concentration, maintenance of traditional structures in rural areas, mushrooming cities etc-and recognizes them as liabilities'. He also realizes clearly that for the poorest 50 per cent of the population the rapid growth which was achieved produced few if any benefits. But at the same time he points out that, from the point of view of capital accumulation,

these liabilities can be turned into assets. Deep internationalization can mean that returns to foreign capital become more and more dependent upon the expansion of the internal market. Heavy unemployment or semi-employment can keep wages low and unions weak. Traditional agriculture can be a source of cheap food. Income concentration can soothe the middle classes. Heavy external indebtedness can trigger off big new investment projects which otherwise would not be considered, and so on.

As for the future, Andrade foresees a five-pronged survival strategy for Brazil's 'savage capitalism': the capitalization of the primary sector, both in agriculture and mining, with the heavy participation of MNCs; the development of energy, armaments, roads and communications programmes; the consolidation of the motor-vehicle industry; the substitution of alcohol for oil
16                                                           THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

as a source of fuel; and an expansion of commercial relations with other Latin American, African and socialist countries. He concludes by suggesting that Brazil may be entering a new phase in which external factors become relatively more important, owing to foreign control of oil and technology and to the growing importance of investment decisions related to multinational strategies rather than to the internal market. He points to growing social and political strains which suggest that, while capitalist expansion may continue, it will be accompanied by continued political and economic instability.
In the context of our general discussion, Brazil illustrates the extent to which an internationally oriented capitalism can under certain national and international circumstances produce extremely rapid growth while yielding few if any benefits to the poorest half of the population and while having a most ambiguous effect on the economic and the political bases required to formulate and implement those strategies required to establish the longer term strength and competitiveness of the country. It is not hard to show that the policies of the past fifteen years have not served the interests of the poorest half of the population. Whether they will serve their interests in future, as trickle-down theories would suggest, must he deemed highly uncertain in view both of internal and of international developments.
If our underlying question is posed in terms of emulating Japan, many would choose South Korea as the capitalist peripheral economy with the best chance of success in this respect. In Chapter 7 Michell asks whether, indeed, Korea can be regarded as a vision of the future for labour surplus economies. He questions the conventional view of the overwhelming importance of manufactured exports to Korea's success, allied with a responsive government strongly committed to growth, a highly educated and well-motivated labour force-and little else. Certainly the Korean experience shows how a densely populated country, with little agricultural potential, few natural resources except its well-disciplined population and a close relationship with Japan and the US, more than tripled its income per head in seventeen years, to $776 in 1978, growing rapidly in the easy circumstances of the international economy before 1973 and continuing to do so in the less easy circumstances thereafter, at least until 1979.
However, Michell suggests that anyone seeking to use the Korean experience as an easily applicable general model should consider the following questions.

Would a government be prepared to risk a high rate of inflation through the type of financial policies used in Korea? Indeed, was the controllability of this inflation dependent on the underlying stability of international raw material prices during the 1960s? Could a country with a banking system in private hands achieve the sort of investment required in Korea? How could a docile labour force evolve in a society without neo-confucian traditions? Would the labour force accept a generation of sacrifice in order to achieve growth? Given that Koreans only adopted the export of
INTRODUCTION                                                                                               17

manufactures faute de mieux could other countries be persuaded to adapt to the realities of export-led growth? Is not the Korean achievement to have walked the line precisely between the Scylla of autarchy and the Charybdis of multinational domination?

Moreover, for all its success so far, Michell emphasizes the difficult transition faced by Korea in the 1980s -from cheap-labour-based to technology-based industrialization. He points to the danger, for an economy as large as Korea, of a 'medium-level equilibrium trap'. When citizens demand better houses, their cars require better roads and everyone needs better education, can a country such as Korea sustain the levels of investment needed to satisfy all these areas when ICORs in industry also need to rise fast? As he says, confrontation with this question will ensure continued interest in Korea's experience during the 1980s.                             In general it is the cohesiveness, the pervasiveness, the effectiveness and the deep-rooted nationalism of the Korean state's economic involvement, as expressed in its policies on direct foreign investment, technology or investment which is evocative of the Japanese experience. It is further its capacity to push this process of state capitalist accumulation to the point of labour scarcity and the consequent diffusion of material benefits throughout most of the society which made it analytically and politically so important. For South Korea the question is whether under changing international conditions and with rising real wages it can sustain that dynamism. If it can then the social and political benefits which a full employment capitalism can deliver will be feasible. If it cannot, it may well generate dangerous and explosive social and political conflict.                                                                                       At this point the discussion turns to the very small economies' attempts to find a small niche in the international economy. Rodriguez argues in Chapter 8 that Costa Rica, given its particular circumstances, has not done badly out of its dependent integration as a tiny primary producer into the international capitalist system. He argues that this was probably the most progressive option available in that an attempt at socialist transformation would have entailed higher costs for labour, given the smallholder production of export crops, the liberal/democratic nature of the state, the relative absence of repression as a means of political control, and the degree of external opposition which any socialist struggle would have confronted. However, he recognizes that Costa Rica is at a crossroads. The current recession is emphasizing the vulnerability of a small economy dependent on a few primary products for its foreign exchange, while the investment opportunities arising from the easy stage of import substitution are exhausted. Under these circumstances he identifies three political options, broadly corresponding to some of the competing theories discussed above. Costa Rican 'liberals' are promoting the neo-classical prescription of 'getting factor prices right'; the radicals argue that disengagement from the international capitalist system is a necessary basis for a transition
18                                                          THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

to socialism; while the social democrats, in the spirit of the old development economists, emphasize the need to increase state intervention to maintain accumulation and to generate employment. If the 1980s really do turn out to be a period of greater conflict and uncertainty the integrationist alternative is likely to be more problematic and more risky, and the effective democratic social control of the country's resources is likely to be more desirable than ever. The trouble is that what is desirable may not be attainable, but the answer to what is attainable is not a matter for academic analysis, but for political struggle by those directly concerned.     Ireland may seem to be in a rather different category from the other peripheral economies considered in this book, because of its membership of the EEC, its social characteristics and its level of income per head. However, as Coughlan's Chapter 9 makes clear, it faces problems which are similar to those faced by other peripheral economies relying on foreign capital and manufactured exports as the motor for economic growth. In Ireland, too, these outward-looking policies have produced growth and a substantial industrial base, and although it is questionable whether Ireland could have done better with any alternative, and feasible, strategy, it is equally true that future uncertainty is increased by its consequent crucial dependence on continuing capital injections by foreign-owned firms; on the state's capacity to carry the debts it has assumed in implementing its present policies; and on its ability to make the transition from an industrialization strategy based largely on relatively cheap labour to one based on higher technology and skills. In its favour are its political stability, its widely respected and efficient Industrial Development Authority and its location within the EEC. Against it are its relatively feeble efforts at establishing a stronger technical base in key sectors, the world recession and intensified competition in the markets for manufactured exports, the enlargement of the EEC to include Greece, Spain and Portugal, and the relatively limited impact of the very rapid export-led growth of the 1960s and 1970s on Irish employment and income per head.

In the final analysis the external dependence of an economy like Ireland's is unavoidable, but the form and the degree of it is nevertheless of great importance if only because it largely determines the way in which the country is able to respond to future economic changes, even though there is no way it could avoid being strongly affected by these.

In Chapter 10 Godfrey explores the controversy about the role of the national bourgeoisie in Kenya. Is that bourgeoisie, with its roots in the pre-colonial past, moving increasingly into manufacturing, as some claim, and defining a nationally oriented strategy separate from that of international capital? Or is it a class essentially in alliance with foreign capital and no serious threat to it? While it is true that the number of Kenyan capitalists is increasing and that they are continually moving into new sectors of activity, it is unlikely that this group represents a 'national bourgeoisie' with a 'progressive' role.

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               19

Hence, the real political question for Kenya's people in the 1980s is: 'Is an alternative pattern historically possible which would expand Kenyan productive forces faster, with lesser costs in terms of the current living standards of the masses?' This question in turn reduces to one partly of the prospects for Kenyan capitalism and partly of the nature of the alternative. Prospects, crucially dependent on the success of the new strategy of export-led manufacturing growth (Kenya, unlike Costa Rica, is no longer at a crossroads), are judged to be poor. 'Costs in terms of the current living standards of the masses' of the existing pattern of Kenyan development are not regarded as negligible. And Leys' suggestion that the likely alternative is a strategy 'labelled socialist, put forward by the petty bourgeoisie, involving 'state socialism' in industry and trade along lines already broadly charted in Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania' is judged to be neither as self-evident as Leys assumes nor as self-evidently less preferable. The populism of the current Kenyan government is seen as having its limits, but the crucial question of whether it represents the limit of what is 'historically possible' as an alternative to the existing pattern has hardly been touched on in the Kenyan development debate so far.
In some sense the Tanzanian case raises a similar question to that of Kenya. Is there a realistic alternative to the current policy, or alternatively can the present state sustain a process of accumulation sufficiently dynamic to combine growth with equity, while coping with the massive current fluctuations in the international economy?
The chapter on Tanzania shows that country's mass-based ruling Party moving towards a self-reliance strategy, in response to the contradictions and limits of an initial market-oriented strategy. This response was designed to increase its effective control over the nation's material and political affairs, and it was consolidated by blocking the various avenues by which private capital sought to exercise direct and indirect political influence. However, the attempt to stimulate a more dynamic and coherent resource mobilization under difficult political and economic circumstances bureaucratized the Party and eroded its political base in a dangerous manner.
Even though the general performance of the economy has been far from disastrous, a major foreign exchange crisis has, from the mid-1970s, deepened the system's political and economic contradictions. Hence in spite of the fact that in some respects the leadership has demonstrated considerable flexibility and responsibility in its response to these developments, the combined drought, war, and administrative and political weakness have produced a very deep crisis in 1980/81. Even so the chapter concludes that the problems and shortcomings of Tanzania's efforts at greater self-reliance are neither such that they totally invalidate the strategy, nor can they be ignored by believers in such alternatives by the simple expedient of denying the existence of such a strategy in Tanzania. Rather, a sympathetic evaluation of the experience must accept
20                                                           THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

that in many respects the problems experienced represent central contradiclions associated with such strategies, though naturally to varying degrees. This still permits the conclusion that a more self-reliant strategy has much to recommend it for countries like Tanzania, and indeed that it may be the best realistically available alternative for most Tanzanians, particularly in the international circumstances most likely to prevail in the coming decade. Unfortunately the difficulties encountered over the past six years may by now have created political conditions which may have undermined the political foundations of the policy to such a degree that it has itself ceased to be a feasible alternative. In that event, whatever some leftists may dream of, the forces that will exert power will be those that effectively represent international capital's interests.

Finally the book turns to North Korea, the case with the most comprehensive and nationalist state involvement in its economy. Elsewhere Foster-Carter has elaborated the point made by White in Chapter 12 that North Korean Juche corresponds closely to the strategy proposed for the transition to socialism by the radical Caribbean dependency economist, Clive Thomas (1974), which aims at 'converging resource use and demand' and 'converging needs with demand'. White judges that the North Koreans have done a 'creditable job' in combining rapid development with a high degree of autonomy, while avoiding being tied to the international political economies of socialism or capitalism but trying to use the opportunities offered by each. As he says, 'these are remarkable achievements for a small country confronted by a hostile or suspicious West and a divided East'. At the same time he emphasizes the problems and costs of that process: the negative side of the intense political mobilization; and, in the economy, the planning rigidities, microeconomic inefficiences and waste, and problems with quality, incentives and meeting consumer demands. The difficulties involved in attempting to expand links with the capitalist world market, which was deemed necessary towards the end of the 1970s, are also underlined. Once again this case draws attention to the importance of a strong state and a united nation; to the importance of emphasizing domestic demand and dynamic comparative advantage as the bases of economic strategy, and to the need for the careful and skilful use of external resources to boost self-reliant development, without undermining the coherence of national policy. There are clear parallels here with the points that he makes about post-revolution China in Chapter 4, parallels which extend to the fact that in both the North Korean and Chinese cases the early very high degrees of national self-reliance have emerged as temporary phases leading to a reopening of contacts with the international economy at later stages, but from positions of greater relative strength from which to control the forms and the consequences of that interaction.

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               21

By Way of a Conclusion

To policy-makers and to those responsible for making effective decisions about the allocation of material resources it may seem banal and obvious to conclude such a discussion by stressing the absence of general solutions, and their specificity as to time, place and class or social group. But this does not mean that each case is unique, or that simple commonsense at the project level is a sufficient basis for decisions. Indeed there is nothing more subject to universalistic fashions than the prevailing commonsense about some current problem, and in any case an advance in our understanding does not lie in asserting one level of reality over another, or one level of abstraction over another, but rather in uniting these in a fruitful and effective manner. Indeed as social and economic structures become more complex and more independent the need to understand any particular concrete case within its broader social, economic and political context become ever greater. Hence the problem of changing any specific concrete reality must be addressed at many levels simultaneously and frequently appropriate choices at every level will be a necessary condition for success, even though no one of them will be sufficient for success.         In focusing on the national/international connection we have not therefore asserted it above all others in importance. We do suggest that it is an increasingly important issue as the complexity of the international economy grows and thereby calls into question the modern nation state as the effective political sphere within which the terms and conditions of social and economic relationships are primarily defined, It is our contention that the extent to which that change proceeds is itself a willing or unwilling result of the choices made within particular nation states by various actors, and that the future economic and political consequences of these choices are of the greatest importance because they will fundamentally affect the degree of effective social and political control which can in future be exerted over the material process of production by those in control of a particular state. Unfortunately the choice is as complex as it is important.                                                                                     Given the inevitable uncertainty of the future, the basic objective of any national policy aiming at the long-term standard of living of the mass of the population must be to increase its productive capacity and its flexibility by raising levels of skills and by strengthening the society's technological base. At the same time it must create the material and the political conditions which allow such policies to continue to he formulated and implemented.                                                                                 The dilemma lies in the difficulty of reconciling the acquisition and use of external finance and technology with these objectives and here the net balance swings one way or the other in accordance with changes in a number of critical factors. The importance of a specific nationalist policy changes with: the size of

22                                                           THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT

the economy and hence the extent of the external and dynamic economies to be attained; the coherence and administrative capacity of the state, which will determine the likelihood that any such potential will actually be realized; the degree of external hostility with which such efforts are met; and finally, the intensity of competitive pressure existing in the international markets for technology and machinery, and hence the volume and terms of the availability of international finance.                               The effective pursuit of such a national policy should eventually actually increase rather than decrease the rate at which external technologies and finance are effectively acquired, while complementing and accelerating the domestic development of such capabilities.                                                                                                           Such nationalist policies can he combined with different forms of ownership of the means of production but they do necessarily require an inhibition of the freedom of individuals to use their resources as they wish in the international sphere so that attempts to pursue such strategies in the context of the extensive private ownership of resources must include some effective controls over international capital flows (and the political basis for sustaining these against the potential opposition of private capitalists). In addition the state must either have the capacity directly to implement major strategic long-term infrastructural industrial and technological/educational projects and have a degree of control over 'private capitalists' to induce them to act in the spirit of such a nationalist policy or, to put it differently, to induce them to define their own long-term interests as national capitalists, even if their actual activities should extend beyond the nation's borders.

In this sense the case studies reflect the degree to which the objective material benefits to be derived from 'nationalist' policies will vary over space and time. Beyond this, political correlates of these choices are more complex than is often supposed. Hence a state controlled effectively by private capitalist interests may under highly restricted circumstances (strategic importance in terms of raw materials or labour or both, strategic, favourable international circumstances) generate a pattern and a pace of accumulation which generates effective labour scarcity and leads to a diffusion of material benefits and may even allow for some liberalization of the political process because it does represent the material interests of the mass of the population to a significant and possibly in the short term even to the best possible extent. In very small economies this may happen even if this private capital operates effectively from an international perspective. In larger economies it requires a strong state capable of imposing a national focus on this process of accumulation.                                         It would also appear, however, that the conditions which allow such a reconciliation of the material interests of capital and labour are unstable and impermanent. As the conditions for sustaining full employment are eroded social polarization, political repression and international conflicts emerge which will normally combine to transform that mutuality of interests into a

INTRODUCTION                                                                                               23

fundamental antagonism. In the relatively stronger economies this may actually reinforce the nationalism of capital, although in the absence of full employment it is more likely to be associated with fascism. In the weaker economies it is more likely to lead to 'save himself who can', involving the abandonment of all effective efforts to build a national base of accumulation and the escape of individual capitals into closer co-operation with, or subservience to, various dominant international capitals.           In any event most such forms of development, even under favourable conditions, produce a type of growth which is not in the material interests of the mass of the population, though clearly in the interests of certain dominant classes or groups, which often include some sections of skilled labour. Furthermore, in most of these the promise that trickle down will eventually justify the suffering involved for the bottom 60 per cent is as empty as it is cynical.                                                        Unfortunately, when a state comes to free itself from the domination of private capitalist interest as exercised through control of the ideological or the political spheres and backed up by control of the material means of production, there is no guarantee that such a state will represent the interest of its population as a whole. There is unfortunately no self-evident set of practices which serve some homogeneous interest of 'workers and peasants', quite apart from the issue of a separate bureaucratic interest which may or may not come to dominate in such a situation.     In such a context the questions of what risks should be taken with respect to foreign involvement, or urban/rural relations, of the commensuration of effort and reward, of sustaining a common commitment while also eliciting individual effort and initiative, of achieving a level of current restraint in consumption which permits a rapid rate of accumulation without thereby undermining the political foundations of the policy, provide plenty of scope for conflict and even for failure.                                         For all that, the record of such strategies in the developing world is such that for the poorest 60 per cent the struggle for control of the state must still be a priority. The hope that global full employment will diffuse material benefits to them automatically is more forlorn now than it has been for some time. On the other hand the idea that gaining political control of the state is to open the door to unambiguous policies emerging from some permanent consensus emanating from the total political involvement of the masses in a sort of perpetual cultural revolution is an unrealistic picture produced by the hyperactive imaginations of people who have not had a great deal of responsibility for co-ordinating complex processes of production, requiring a vital concrete and measurable output at a time when it is needed for further reproduction. Such systems must work with a degree of hierarchy, a degree of direction, a degree of compulsion even. These are things to be traded off against a different set of costs and benefits, differently distributed among social classes under different forms of
24                                                          THE STRUGGLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
                                                                                                                          social and economic organization. It is for people to make such choices. It is for analysis to provide as clear an idea as is possible concerning their most likely implications and consequences. We hope this volume contributes to that task.

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