4. EXTRAVERTED ACCUMULATION AND DEPENDENCE

In studying the capitalist mode of productionwe have seen the central position occupied in the process of autocentric accumulation by the complementary relation between the production of means of production and that of consumer goods.

Autocentric accumulation does not mean autarchy. On the contrary, we have seen the decisive role played by external trade, not only in the origin of the capitalist mode of production, in the age of mercantilism, but also after the Industrial Revolution, periphery, which is subjected to this unequal specialization, we shall discover a fundamentally different model of accumulation.

In the periphery we find, at the start, an exporting sector

destined to play a determining role in the creation and shaping of the market. The capital of the central formation is not obliged to emigrate owing to a shortage of outlets at the center: it will move to the periphery only if it can find a better reward there. Equali­zation of the rate of profit will redistribute the benefits of this better reward and reveal the export of capital as a way of combating the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The reason for creating this exporting sector in the periphery is to obtain products that constitute elements of constant capital (raw materials) or variable capital (foodstuffs) at prices of production lower than those that apply to the production of similar products at the center (or of substitute products, when what are involved are specific products such as coffee or tea).

The products exported by the periphery are of interest to central capitalism in so far as — all other things being equal: that is, with the same productivity — the reward of labor is lower there than at the center. And it can be lower in so far as the peripheral society is subordinated by all available means, economic and extraeconomic,. to this new function of supplying cheap labor for the exporting sector.

When the given society has been subjected to this new function, it loses its “traditional” character: indeed, it was not the function of precapitalist societies to supply cheap labor to capitalism... The principal articulation characteristic of the process of accumulation at the center — the existence of an objective relation between the rewarding of labor and the level of development of the productive forces — is completely absent. Here the reward of labor in the exporting sector will be as low as economic,.social, and political conditions permit. As for the level of development of the produc­tive forces, it will be heterogeneous, whereas in the autocentric model it was homogeneous: advanced (and sometimes very advanced) in the exporting sector, backward in the rest of the economy — this backwardness, maintained by the system, being the condition that enables the exporting sector to benefit from cheap labor.

This being so, the internal market engendered by the develop­ment of the exporting sector will be restricted and distorted, and consequently the periphery attracts only a limited amount of capital from the center, even though it offers a better return. The contradiction between the capacity to consume and the capacity to produce is overcome, on the scale of the world system as a whole, by the expansion of the market at the center, with the periphery serving only a marginal, subordinate, and limited function. This dynamic leads to an increasing polarization of wealth to the benefit of the center.

Nevertheless, after a certain level of growth of the exporting sector has been attained,' an internal market does appear.

A specific articulation, expressed in the link between the exporting sector and luxury consumption, is thus characteristic of this depen­dent, peripheral model of accumulation and economic and social development. Industrialization, producing goods to take the place of imports, thus begins at the end instead of at the beginning: in other words, with goods that correspond to the most advanced stages of development at the center, namely, consumer durables. Now, these goods require a lot of capital and of scarce resources. The result will be a significant distortion in the process of alloca­tion of resources, in favor of these goods and to the detriment of the production of mass consumer goods. The latter will find little demand for its products and will attract no financial or human means to make its modernization possible. This accounts for the stagnation of subsistence, agriculture. Any choice of a strategy of development that is based on “profitability” ne~cessarily leads to such a distortion, the structures of income distribution, of relative prices, and of demand being what they are. The few industries established in this setting will not become poles of development but will, on the contrary, intensify the unevenness within the system, impoverishing the mass of the population (who, as producers, belong to the section that produces mass consumer goods) and at the same time enabling the minority to become more closely integrated into the world system.

i general, tend to increase, instead of remaining limited and stable, apart from fluctuations due to the conjuncture. The function of un­employment is thus different here from what it is in the central model: here, its pressure ensures a reward of labor that is minimal, and relatively rigid, and prevented from increasing, both in the exporting sector and in that which supplies luxury products. Wages Jappear here not as both a cost and an income that creates a demand Essential for the working of the model, but merely as a cost, with ■ demand originating elsewhere — either externally, or in the income of the privileged categories of society.

The “extraverted” origin of the development that perpetuates itself despite the increasing diversification, or industrialization, of the economy, is not external to the model of dependent peripheral accumulation. On the contrary, this model reproduces the social and economic conditions whereby it functions. The marginaliza­tion of the masses guarantees to the minority an increasing income that enables them to adopt European patterns of consumption. Extension of this pattern of consumption entails profitability of the sector that produces luxury goods, and intensifies the integra­tion — social, cultural, ideological, and political — of the privileged classes.

At this stage of diversification and the deepening of under­development there thus appear new mechanisms of domination and dependence. These are cultural and political, but also economic:

technological dependence and domination by the transnational firms. The exporting sector and that which supplies luxury products call for capital-using investments that only the big oligopolistic transnational firms can undertake, and which provide the material foundation for technological dependence.

Also, however, more complex forms of property structure and economic management make their appearance.

From another point of view, we see that, in the extraverted capitalist economies of the periphery, wages can be kept at very low levels without the process of extraverted development being hindered thereby. Where the capitalist mode of production is autocentric it tends to become exclusive, but extraversion restricts its development. This being so, what is the meaning of the “pair” constituted by the autocentric economy and the extraverted economy? It means that in the autocentric economy there is an organic relation between the two terms of the social contradiction — bourgeoisie and proletariat — that both are integrated into one and the same reality, the nation. And it means that, on the contrary, in an extraverted economy, this unity of opposites cannot be grasped within the national framework but only on the world plane.

Differential analysis of the essential laws of the functioning of the world system and.of the capitalist mode of production necessarily leads to conclusions that call in question the entire problematic of the future of capitalism. It is not possible to reduce the bearing of these laws to the economic domain alone, depriving them of any political significance, without thereby denying the determining role that is played, in the last analysis, by the production relations.

The first conclusion to be drawn, which is on the directly economic level, is the existence of unequal exchange, meaning simply the transfer of value. To say that this is meaningless because what is involved is relations between different formations would signify treating as absurd Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation, which also dealt with relations between different formations. To say that the theory of unequal exchange means that “the workers at the center exploit those at the periphery” is meaningless, since only ownership of capital makes exploitation possible. (This also implies accepting a mechanistic relation between I standard of living and political attitude, and so reducing the dialectic ⁱ of the infrastructure and the superstructure to direct economistic • determination.) To say, from a different standpoint, that it means I that the bourgeoisie of the periphery is, like its proletariat, interested j in shaking off the domination of the center, signifies that one has i simply forgotten that this bourgeoisie has been formed from the ⅛ outset in the wake of the bourgeoisie of the center.

Unequal exchange means, rather, that the problem of the class struggle needs to be looked at on the world scale, and that national problems cannot be treated as mere epiphenomena ac­companying the essential problem of the “pure” class struggle. It means that the bourgeoisie of the center, the only one that exists I on the scale of the world system, exploits the proletariat every- I where, at the center and at the periphery, but that it exploits the proletariat of the periphery even more brutally, and that this is possible because the objective mechanism upon which is based the unity that links it to its own proletariat, in an autocentric economy, and which restricts the degree of exploitation it carries out at the center, does not function at the extraverted periphery.

The constitution of a world system, with the characteristics that this possesses, has not only made possible the development of socialist trends at the periphery, but has also shifted the principal nucleus of the forces of socialism from the center to the periphery. It is a fact that transformations in a socialist direction have broken through only at the periphery of the system. To deny this is to deny the changes that have occurred in the world system, ultimately to deny the existence of a world system, and to forget that the periphery, integrated into the world system, has been very largely proletarianized. Charles Bettelheim wrote in his Letter to Rossana Rossanda: “I think it very important to draw... an extremely sharp line of demarcation between Mao Tse-tung’s ideas and the ‘Third World’ tendencies which see in the so-called under­developed.countries those which have been ‘left on the shelf by development, or merely backward countries, whereas in fact they are the product of imperialist domination, which has transformed them and integrated them into the imperialist system, in which they serve a quite definite function, namely, that of a reserve of raw materials and cheap labor. It is this function that renders the masses of these countries ready for revolution, whether the masses in question are proletarian in the strict sense of the word, or whether they are proletarianized, and thereby capable of being agents of a proletarian policy.”