Uneven and Combined Development - Contemporary Applications

Contemporary Applications

Trotsky's concept is still being used today, especially in academic studies of International relations, Archaeology, Anthropology and Development economics, as well as in discussions of the Trotskyist movement.

Over the last decade or so, the idea of uneven and combined development has emerged as a thriving new research program within the discipline of International Relations. It is deployed as the intellectual basis for unifying international and social theory. The main base of this new research program is the department of International Relations at Sussex University, UK, where a Working Group meets regularly.

The field of Geography has also produced influential scholarship on the idea of uneven development. Geography started to lean left politically before the 1970’s resulting in a particular interest in questions of inequality and Uneven Development (UD). UD has since become somewhat of a homegrown theory in Geography as geographers have worked to explain what causes inequality within different scales of space, locally, nationally and internationally. Key scholars in this field include Doreen Massey, Neil Smith and David Harvey.

Uneven development results from the “spatially and temporally uneven processes and outcomes that are characteristic, and functional to capitalism”.

• Much of neoclassical economic theory holds that features of unevenness, such as income inequality, equalizes as a result of capital diffusion throughout the open market.
• Proponents argue that investment liberalization allows foreign capital to invest in capital-poor countries, yielding the highest rates of return, and that global integration promotes competitive advantage.
• Neoclassical theory contends that newly globalized, liberalized and capitalized developing countries have the added advantage over developed countries in that they are able to draw on existing markets, capital flow regimes and technologies.

This has the effect of placing all countries on an even playing field. The result is a global economy in equilibrium, or in other words, convergence. As such, in the neoclassical view, uneven development is merely an interim stage of economic development that can be erased by the free market.

Marxist geographers, on the other hand, assert that uneven development is persistently produced and reproduced by capital diffusion, and therefore, is an inherent and permanent feature of capitalism. Unlike the neoliberal contention of the erasure of disparities towards convergence, Marxists maintain that capital accumulation depends on differential economic climates for its regeneration. Harvey states that accumulation “is the engine which powers growth under the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist system is therefore highly dynamic and inevitably expansionary…” The dynamism of capitalism is due to its persistent search for competitive advantage and consequently, its movement away from oversaturated economies towards new spaces from which it can extract greater profit. For instance, developed economies are characterized by high land rents and wages, and unionized labour, translating into high costs of production and lower gains. By contrast, developing economies have abundant pliable labour, and low rents and wages. As such, it is favourable for capital investments to move into the latter economy from the former in the interest of gaining greater rates of return. Kiely argues that capital diffusion throughout the global market remains a highly uneven process marked by reversals of comparative advantage and by cycles of investment and disinvestment, having the effect of elevating some spaces while simultaneously marginalizing others.

Differential economic environments have material effects on the ground. Processes of capital accumulation through space and time create new geographic landscapes shaped by crisis, deindustrialization and capital flight on the one hand, and influxes of capital and industrialization on the other. Capitalism not only reshuffles core-periphery relations, but rather, as Neil claims, it also penetrates all geographic scales. At the urban scale, differential rent gaps trigger investment and disinvestment in particular neighborhoods driving gentrification. On the global scale, integrated economies provoke time-space compression enabling enhanced communication and capital mobility. Neil argues that the subsequent erosion of the nation scale as the primary agent created a pivotal link between the global and urban scales. Since the 1990’s, the increasingly integrated global economy has given greater importance to the role of the city. Indeed, world city building has become the geographical force of capitalism. New spaces of accumulation in Asia, Latin America and Africa are gaining competitive advantage as new centres of command and control and of surplus capital.

Other elements of neoliberal thought such as reducing the ‘left arm’ of the state including welfare and support for the poor create even bigger inequalities between residents of the same areas, also resulting in uneven development.

Marxist historian Tom Nairn has argued that uneven development can also lead to peripheral nationalism, for example in Scotland. Peripheral regions tend to promote nationalist movements when regional inequalities overlap with ethnic differences, or when membership of a larger state no longer presents advantages. In underdeveloped regions, nationalist movements mobilise the population against the persistence of ethnic economic inequality.