In a class recently, we had a discussion on
the stagist theory of growth that was supposed to be answered several weeks in
the future. I went early to the message board and posted that “Human
civilization has manifested itself in a series of organizational structures,
each determined by its primary mode of production, particularly the division of
labor that dominates in each stage. 1) the tribal form, 2) primitive communism,
3) feudal or estate property, 4) capitalism”. I posted this without citing
Marx, and it was mostly done in jest. When I posted it, I was unaware of the
Rostow model of growth theory, where we move from traditional society to “the
preconditions for take-off” to take-off to modernity where the economy is mature,
and the people are mass consuming (Cypher 189-192).
What the Marxian framework and the
Rostow model share is that, as Cypher notes, they are an attempt at a
universalist model of development (187). So, if you follow either of them, then
all societies must pass through these stages. If you subscribe to either one of
these fully, then you social and economic prescriptions become based on moving
the country of interest through these stages. My thinking on this goes to
arguments in the late nineteenth century about the possibilities of the
development of a communist state. The argument was that it was the most
Capitalists states that would move to the next inevitable step first. This led
people to think that it would be England and Germany that would be the first
homes of the universal brotherhood of the worker’s state. And well, we can see
that the lens of history disproved that, as it was the giant Russian state that
was levered into the international vanguard as the first communist state. There
was a big problem with this in terms of Marx’s theory of stages in that Tsarist
Russia was agrarian, so that one of the first things that had to be done for
the new Soviet Union was to industrialize it. The fact that they did
industrialize as much as they did in the years prior to the Great Patriotic War
is a feather in the cap of the Soviet system and its leadership (though at much
human cost).
The problem with both Marx’s
outline and Rostow’s is that it tries to universalize experience based on a
narrow understanding of how the world works through limited history (Cypher
187). A too-narrow understanding of how history can develop leaves all other
possibilities on the outside looking in. If we want to say that all nations
must move through these stages and then the only logical endpoint is the last
of the numbered states, it limits the possibilities of what growth and
development can look like. It takes the path dependency that we created for
ourselves and maps it upon another set of people. Though there have been
benefits to our mode of take-off and modernization, there have been social and
environmental costs that we do not necessarily have to grant to people in the
name of development. Both models are well in parallel, with Rostow adding finer
graduation, but they have the same end point, a developed world (Marx just
wants to see a different set of people own the capital).
Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development.
London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
