Theme: Decolonization and Global Governance

Topic: The Geopolitical Economy of Capitalist’s History: Revolution of Capitalism through Uneven and
Combined Development
Abstract:
Capitalism—that is to say states that represent and promote the interests of primarily capitalist ruling
classes, must act on the domestic and international planes to do so, including to manage the contradictions
of their capitalisms. Moreover, capitalisms’ history, including their international expansion, is driven
forward precisely by capitalist states’ domestic and international management of their contradictions,
producing new mutations in its political and geopolitical economy. Trotsky argued that the capitalist
mode of production transformed the general law of uneven development, which holds that societies grow
at different paces, some faster and others slower at various points in time. He maintained that capitalism’s
unique expansionary qualities led it to penetrate precapitalist modes of production, subordinating their
economies as minorities to its laws of development. It thus produced hybrid societies, combining the
worlds most advanced and backward features. His paradigmatic example was of course Russia at the turn
of the twentieth century. European capitalism penetrated it toward the end of the nineteenth century,
producing a hybrid formation that combined advanced capitalist development with backward feudal
relations. Using uneven and combined development (UCD) as a methodology to show how capitalism
came into being through an international, inter-societal process, illustrates how more developed modes of
production in societies like China and the Ottoman empire suffered the “penalty of progressiveness”. If,
three decades after the end of the Cold War, a new confrontation between capitalism and socialism has re-
emerged, it is simply because the Cold War was a chapter in the unfolding geopolitical economy of
capitalism, of its history of UCD, of imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance. This chapter elaborates
on the intertwined trajectories of capitalism and socialism. In what follows, after brief reflections on
capitalism and the revolutions that make and break capitalist states, we outline our understanding of the
contractions of capitalism in the realms of the state as minority before tracing the political and
geopolitical economy of capitalism and socialism up to the end of capitalism’s post-war long boom.