Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> [clip]
> The threads concerning capitalist development originated in the
> question of whether post-colonial countries such as India (and post-
> socialist countries such as China and Russia) can grow to equal the
> West in per capita income, social indicators, and other relevant
> measures "within the structures and strategic possibilities that are
> integral to the prevailing system of capitalist accumulation" (to
> cite Kenneth Surin's summary of one of the tenets of dependency
> theory [clip]
>From Ellen Meiskins Wood, Empire of Capital
[In the passage below Wood is referring to the theories of Lenin, Luxemberg, and other theorists of imperialism before WW 2.]
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So in these theories of imperialism, capitalism by definition assumes a non-capitalist environment. In fact, capitalism depends for its survival not only on the existence of these non-capitalist formations but on essentially precapitalist instruments of 'extra-economic' force, military and geopolitical coercion, and on traditional interstate rivalries, colonial wars and territorial domination. These accounts were profoundly illuminating about the age in which they were written; and, to this day, it has still not been demonstrated they were wrong in assuming capitalism could not universalize its successes and the prosperity of the most advanced economies, nor that the major capitalist powers would always depend on exploiting subordinate economies. But we have yet to see a systematic theory of imperialism designed for a world in which all international relations are internal to capitalism and governed by capitalist imperatives. That, at least in part, is because a world of more or less universal capitalism, in which capitalist imperatives are a universal instrument of imperial domination, is a very recent development. (p. 127) *****
Wood states the core of earlier analyses of imperialism which still holds, though the structure of imperialism has changed profoundly. The earlier theories assumed the continuing existence of a non-capitalist world. That assumption no longer holds. But they _also_ assumed that "capitalism could not universalize its successes and the prosperity of the most advanced economies, nor that the major capitalist powers would always depend on exploiting subordinate economies." And that assumption still holds today. This thread has actually demonstrated again the continuing validity of that assumption, as Yoshie points out in her last two posts.
To undermine this assumption it would be necessary to show that the condition of the 'lower' 40% of the population of India (for example) had surpassed that of the 'lower' 40% of the population of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. No one has dared even to suggest such a comparison.
Carrol