Postdependency? The Third World in an era of globalism and late-capitalism

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Volumn 22, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 205-226

  James, Paul ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 21744448490     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549702200204     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. MacNeill et al., cited in Stephen Gill, "Theorizing the Interregnum: The Double Movement and Global Politics in the 1990s," in Björn Hettne, ed., International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder (London: Zed, 1995), p. 74.
2. See for example Robert Keohane's highly regarded text After Hegemony: Co-operation and Discord in the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
3. He devotes a grand total of two paragraphs to what he calls "negative reciprocity"; that is, "attempts to maximize utility at the expense of others" (p. 128). There are, of course, exceptions. See for example Samir Amin, Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (London: Zed, 1990)
4. or, from a quite different perspective, Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1990).
5. Sec also Jeremy Seabrook, Victims of Development (London: Verso, 1993);
6. however, the strength of the book is as eloquent, passionate description, not as theory. In addition, it is worth returning to Samir Amin's Accumulation on a World Scale (New York: Monthly Review Press, in translation, 1974).
7. Reading Aijaz Ahmad's essay "Three Worlds Theory" is instructive on the contradictory political layers of meaning in the term "the Third World" - from In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992) - but I use it here nevertheless as a collective noun naming the very diverse regions and nation-states that were historically not included in the industrial capitalist and industrial (post) Communist "worlds." Its use here presumes no homogeneity, no hierarchy of centrality, no sense of a continuing political bloc.
8. Benetton (with 6,500 shops in one hundred countries, a turnover of $US2.3 billion, and an advertising budget of $US80 million) uses images of South American toddlers working as slave laborers in a brickyard to promote Luciano Benetton's concept of "a world without borders." The aid agency World Vision advertises its project by asking Westerners to sponsor individual Third World children. In November 1995 it incorporated its message into an episode of the Australian soap opera Neighbours.
9. Studio Bambini 10, no. 19 (1995). Emphasis added.
10. The title of chapter 4 from P. T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).
11. Trust (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), p. 27 (emphasis in the original).
12. See also Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
13. Cited in Magnus Blomström and Björn Hettne, Development Theory in Transition: The Dependency Debate and Beyond (London: Zed, 1984), p. 184.
14. Susan Strange, "Rethinking Structural Change in the International Political Economy," in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill, eds, Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 106.
15. Worlds Apart: The North-South Divide and the International System (London: Zed, 1993), p. 91.
16. The most influential and most criticized book of the formative years was Frank's Capitalism and Underdeveloprnent in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
17. Samir Amin's Accumulation, note 3, like the work of Dos Santos and Cardoso, was much more heavily influenced by Marxism than was Frank's. Blomström and Hettne, note 9, provide very helpful descriptions of the various strands of dependency theory and their historical twists and turns.
18. This was the doctrine of Walt Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
19. To this day there are transcontinental research teams doing very dubious empirical surveys showing the maturing of people in the West from hyperconsumption to "post-materialism" (Inglehart's term). On the background to development theory and its critics, see Ian Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1979).
20. Theotonio Dos Santos, "The Structure of Dependence," in Mitchell Seligson and John Passé-Smith, eds., Development and Underdevelopment: The Political Economy of Inequality (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993), p. 194.
21. Among the sympathetic but still damning critiques, see Peter Limqueco and Bruce McFarlane, eds., Neo-Marxist Theories of Development (London: Groom Helm, 1983).
22. Colin Leys' classic article, "Underdevelopment and Dependency: Critical Notes," reproduced ibid, from the Journal of Contemporary Asia (1977), is significant because it is written by a person who for a decade had worked within the dependency paradigm.
23. Armand Mattelart, Multinational Corporations and the Control of Culture (Sussex: Harvester, 1979).
24. Seligson and Passé-Smith, note 13.
25. Mary Ann Tétreault and Charles Frederick Abel, eds., Dependency Theory and the Return of High Theory (New York: Greenwood, 1986).
26. See Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "A Genealogy of 'Dependency,'" in P. James, ed., Critical Politics: From the Personal to the Global (Melbourne: Arena, 1994).
27. For me, at least, more impressive than the writings of the best-known theorist in the world system literature, Immanuel Wallerstein, is a volume by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of World-Economy (Cambridge, England: Blackwell, 1991).
28. Compare the different styles of approach of Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein in their jointly authored compilation Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
29. Chase-Dunn, note 20, pp. 207-210.
30. For a discussion of levels of extension in relation to the changing form of the economy see John Hinkson, "Postmodern Economy: Value, Self-Formation and Intellectual Practice," Arena Journal, new series 1, 1993, pp. 23-44.
31. The Cambodian Daily (July 13, 1994). Thanks to Peta Arbuckle for sending me this reference.
32. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 4.
33. Gyorgy Scrinis, Colonizing the Seed: Genetic Engineering and Techno-Industrial Agriculture (Melbourne: Friends of the Earth, 1995);
34. and Seabrook, note 3, chap. 7 "Replacing the Biosphere."
35. The classic early statement on the fragmentations of postmodernity by a structuralist is Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984),
36. republished as chapter 1 of Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
37. Similarly, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) is a brilliant attempt to theorize the structures of the changing world, but he still falls back upon the postmodernist language of fragmentation, without providing us with an account of the levels at which it occurs.
38. Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1987);
39. Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1985).
40. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), chap. 9;
41. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ahmad, note 4, pp. 128-129.
42. For a useful discussion of the relevance of a nonreductive "modes of production" approach to the study of international relations, see Robert Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
43. Jameson, note 27, p. 36.
44. Theda Skoçpol, "Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique," in Seligson and Passé-Smith, note 14, p. 236.
45. To be found in his forthcoming anthology At the Edge of International Politics (London: Pinter). A conceptually focused elaboration of this article will appear in that book.
46. From Cool Memories, cited in David Slater, "Exploring other Zones of the Postmodern," in Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood, eds, Racism, Modernity and Identity on the Western Front (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994), p. 95.
47. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 1977), p. 30.
48. See also Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Souvenir, 1965, 1974);
49. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban (New York: Praeger, 1964).
50. Australian Magazine (December 16, 1995).
51. Australian (July 1, 1995).
52. Reported in the international fashion magazine Marie Claire (Nov. 1995), pp. 12-18.