Trotsky on uneven and combined development

pp. 222-242

in: M. C. Howard, J. E. King, A history of Marxian economics I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

In the preface to the first volume of Capital, Marx had written: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future."¹ Both Plekhanov and Lenin adhered to this perspective, as we have seen in Chapters 8 and 11. Their economics focused upon the development of Russian capitalism from the relations of commodity production — thereby following the structure of Capital itself— and their political strategies were each geared to accelerating the Westernisation of Russia. By contrast, Leon Trotsky denied Marx's claim.² He did so by formulating a political economy which brought him closer than any other theorist to understanding the structure and contradictions of tsarist modernisation, and thus the nature of the Russian revolutionary process. Trotsky integrated ideas which had first made their appearance in populism with the concepts of Marxism to argue that neither the past nor the future path of Russia could follow the tracks of the advanced West.