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Uneven and combined development, unequal and combined development, or uneven development is a concept in Marxian political economy[1] intended to describe dynamics of human history involving the interaction of capitalist laws of motion and starting world market conditions whose national units are highly heterogeneous. The concept is used by Marxist scholars concerned with economic development.[2] David Harvey is an advocate of the usefulness of this theory to reconstruct historical materialism on Modern terms. It is an accepted key concept in academic economic geography.
The idea was applied systematically by Leon Trotsky around the turn of the 20th century to the case of Russia, when he was analyzing the developmental possibilities for industrialization in the Russian empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime in Russia.[3] The notion was then generalized and became the basis of Trotskyist politics of permanent revolution,[4] which implied a rejection of the Stalinist idea that a human society inevitably developed through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages". Before Trotsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Vasily Vorontsov, and others proposed similar ideas.[5]
- ^ Sam Ashman, "Combined and uneven development", pp. 60-65 in Ben Fine Alfredo & Saad Filho (eds.), The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2012.
- ^ Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice (eds.) 100 Years of Permanent Revolution. Results and Prospects. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
- ^ Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record. Chicago: Haymarket, 2011.
- ^ Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution
- ^ Day & Gaido, op. cit., p. 27.