Uneven and combined development (also known as "unequal and combined development", and similar to "uneven development") is a concept in Marxian political economy,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. Marxist sociology,Baruch Knei-Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapters 2 and 3. political science and social geography. It refers to the different patterns of development within and between countries trading in the world economy, characterized by the coexistence of traditional and modern economic systems, as well as the coexistence of old and new political systems.
The idea was most famously used by Leon Trotsky in the early 20th century to analyze the possibilities for industrialization and political emancipation in the Russian Empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime.Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record. Chicago: Haymarket, 2011. After 1905, the theory of uneven and combined development became the basis of the Trotsky's political perspective of permanent revolution.Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution Trotsky rejected the idea that human society inevitably had to develop through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages" of modernization; instead, backward countries could adopt the most advanced knowledge and technology from other countries for the purpose of accelerated development, without the need to repeat all the preceding stages to get there.
In the 1990s and the early 21st century, the concept of uneven and combined development experienced an academic revival among Marxist scholars in fields such as development theory and economic geography.Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice (eds.) 100 Years of Permanent Revolution. Results and Prospects. London: Pluto Press, 2006. David Harvey endorsed the usefulness of this concept to understand the spatial development of global capitalism.David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso, 2009, chapter 2.
Background Trotsky's concept was originally inspired by a series of articles by Alexander Helphand (better known as "Parvus") on "War and Revolution" in the Russian journal Iskra in 1904.Michael Lowy, The politics of Uneven and Combined Development. London: Verso, 1981. (republished by Haymarket Books in 2010). The theory was not exactly new; Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Vasily Vorontsov, and others had proposed similar ideas. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record. Chicago: Haymarket, 2011, p. 27.
At first, Trotsky used this concept only to describe a characteristic evolutionary pattern in the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from the 16th century onwards, through the growth of a world economy which connected more and more peoples and territories together through trade, migration and investment.Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects His focus was also initially mainly on the history of the Russian empire, where the most advanced technological and scientific developments co-existed with extremely primitive and superstitious cultures.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Trotsky increasingly generalised the concept of uneven and combined development to the whole of human history, and even to processes of evolutionary biology,"Talk of uneven development becomes dominant in Trotskii's writings from 1927 onwards. From this date, whenever the law is mentioned, the claim consistently made for it is that 'the entire history of mankind is governed by the law of uneven development'." - Ian D. Thatcher, "Uneven and combined development", Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 4 No. 2, 1991, p. 237. as well as the formation of the human personality - as a general dialectical category.
The concept played a certain role in the fierce theoretical debates during the political conflict between the supporters of Joseph Stalin and Trotsky's Left Opposition, a debate which ranged from the historical interpretation of the Russian revolution and economic strategies for the transition to socialism, to the correct understanding of principles of Marxism.Yuri Felshtinsky, "Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Left Opposition in the USSR 1918-1928". Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 31, No. 4, Oct-Dec 1990, pp. 569-578.
Trotsky's theory
Different countries, Trotsky observed,Leon Trotsky, "Peculiarities of Russia's development", chapter 1 in History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1 developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.
At the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various "spill-over effects" from one country to another.Baruch Knei-Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapter 3.
Sociologically speaking, this had five main effects: a more backward, older or more primitive country would adopt parts of the culture of a more advanced, or more modern society, and a more advanced culture could also adopt or merge with parts of a more primitive culture – with good or bad effects.Modern research has shown that "primitive" culture is not at all "primitive" (see: Adam Kuper, The invention of primitive society. Transformation of an Illusion. New York: Routledge, 1988. However, what Trotsky meant with "backward" or "primitive" was not a lack of human qualities but low productivity, lack of efficient technology, high adult mortality and infant mortality, illiteracy, religious superstitions, and lack of schooling in essential skills, inadequate housing, lack of electricity and running water in the home, etc. It has to be borne in mind that in many parts of the Russian empire, it was not unusual that huge numbers of people died from famines every few years (caused for example by unfavourable weather conditions). Every year, many people literally froze to death. Cultural practices, institutions, traditions and ways of life belonging to both very old and very new epochs and phases of human history were all combined, juxtaposed and linked together in a rather unusual way, within one country. In turn, this meant that one could not really say that different societies all developed simply through the same sort of linear sequence of necessary developmental stages, but rather that they could adopt/utilize the results of developments reached elsewhere, without going through all the previous evolutionary stages which led up to those results. Some countries could thus "skip", "telescope" or "compress" developmental stages which other countries took hundreds of years to go through, or, very rapidly carry through a modernization process that took other countries centuries to achieve. Different countries could both aid or advance the socio-economic progress of other countries through trade, subsidies and contributing resources, or block and brake other countries as competitors from making progress by preventing the use of capital, technology, trading routes, labour, land or other kinds of resources. In Trotsky's theory of imperialism, the domination of one country by another does not mean that the dominated country is prevented from development altogether, but rather that it develops mainly according to the requirements of the dominating country. For example, an export industry will develop around mining and farm products in the dominated country, but the rest of the economy is not developed, so that the country's economy becomes more unevenly developed than it was before, rather than achieving balanced development. Or, a school system is set up with foreign assistance, but the schools teach only the messages that the dominating country wants to hear (see How to Read Donald Duck). The main tendencies and trends occurring at the level of world society as a whole, could be also found in each separate country, where they combined with unique local trends – but this was a locally specific "mix", so that some world trends asserted themselves more strongly or faster, others weaker and slower in each specific country. Thus, a country could be very advanced in some areas of activity, but at the same time comparatively retarded in other areas. One effect was that the response to the same events of world significance could be quite different in different countries, because the local people attached different "weightings" to experiences and therefore drew different conclusions.
According to Trotsky, the unequal and combined development of different countries had an effect on the class structure of society.Baruch Knei-Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapter 2 and 3. For example, the Russian empire in 1917 was largely a peasant society composed of many different nationalities and governed by an absolutist state headed by the Czar; popular democracy did not exist. Criticism of the state, or opposition to its policies, was very severely punished (imprisonment, deportation, execution). A process of industrialization had begun in the main cities since Peter the Great (for example, the Putilov steel works established in Petrograd - where the February 1917 revolution began, with a strike - was the largest in the world at the time). But this urban industrialization process relied mainly on the investment of foreign capital from France, Britain and other countries, and was limited to some urban areas and regions.Baruch Knei-Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapter 3. The Russian bourgeoisie which developed under the tutelage of the Czarist state lacked much power, and was politically weak. The bourgeoisie was unable to establish political democracy. The rural population was kept in a backward condition. At the same time, a militant industrial working class developed in the main cities, concentrated in large factories and plants.Baruch Knei-Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapter 2 and 4. In this way, the archaic culture of primitive peasant production and a semi-feudal state combined with the culture of modern industrial society.
Trotsky believed that this would shape the unique character of the Russian revolution. Namely, the Russian bourgeoisie was politically too weak and too dependent on the Czarist state to challenge its autocratic rule, and therefore the revolution against Czarist rule would be spearheaded by the revolt of urban workers.
Thus, the political and modernizing tasks normally associated in Europe with the leadership of the rising bourgeoisie, such as fighting for popular democracy and civil rights against absolutism, land ownership reform, industrializing the country, and national self-determination for oppressed nationalities, would have to be carried out in the Russian empire under the leadership of working-class parties, in particular the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party which had been outlawed (although there were several other socialist, nationalist and liberal parties).