It is possible to follow Marx's thinking on this subject through the
subject archive of Marx on Russia:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/russia/index.htm
The concept as known to both Marx and Hegel had to undergo fundamental
change with the advent of imperialism, as described by Lenin. I think that
though the genesis of the concept is traceable through Marx and Lenin, it
was really only Trotsky who was in a position to give the concept of
"combined and uneven development" a definitive form.
Andy
At 01:24 PM 22/10/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Thanks much for your response, Victor. You provide much to think about
>and research. I would like to return to the relation of hierarchy theory
>to CHAT again. Keith Sawyer has written several articles on emergence
>theory and socio-cultural theory, and Jay Lemke has also done some really
>interesting writing linking ideas from complexity science to CHAT to
>semiotics. Your thoughts and insights add new dimensions to all this,
>thank you.
>
>
>The question of the genesis of the terms "law of uneven development", "law
>of combined development", and the "law of uneven and combined development"
>has caught my interest. Below, Trotsky drops some interesting suggestions
>in the longish quote I copied from marxists.org. It looks like the study
>by Solnetz on the law of uneven development in Marx might answer some of
>my questions. Is this or a similar study available anywhere?
>
>Below is a quote from Novack, and then a quote from Trotsky, both
>providing some insights into the development of this theory and terminology.
>
>- Steve
>
>
>
>George Novack in Understanding History (1972) in the chapter Uneven and
>Combined Development in World History states:
>"Marx and Engels derived the essence of this law [of uneven and combined
>development] from the dialectical philosophy of Hegel. Hegel utilized the
>law in his works on universal history and the history of philosophy
>without, however, giving it any special name or explicit recognition.
>
>Novack continues: "Many dialectically minded thinkers before and since
>Hegel have likewise used this law in their studies and applied it more or
>less consciously to the solution of complex historical, social and
>political problems. All the outstanding theoreticians of Marxism, from
>Kautsky and Luxembourg to Plekhanov and Lenin, grasped its importance,
>observed its operations and consequences, and used it for the solution of
>problems that baffled other schools of thought."
>
>
> From Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed (1937), Appendix "Socialism in One
> Country":
>
>"In justifying his break with the Marxist tradition of internationalism,
>Stalin was incautious enough to remark that Marx and Engels were not
>unacquainted with the law of uneven development of capitalism supposedly
>discovered by Lenin. In a catalogue of intellectual curiosities, that
>remark ought really to occupy a foremost place. Unevenness of development
>permeates the whole history of mankind, and especially the history of
>capitalism. A young Russian historian and economist, Solntez, a man of
>exceptional gifts and moral qualities tortured to death in the prisons of
>the Soviet bureaucracy for membership in the Left Opposition, offered in
>1926 a superlative theoretical study of the law of uneven development in
>Marx. It could not, of course, be printed in the Soviet Union. Also under
>the ban, although for reasons of an opposite nature, is the work of the
>long dead and forgotten German Social-Democrat, Vollmar, who as early as
>1878 developed the perspective of an "isolated socialist state”not for
>Russia, but for Germany containing references to this "law" of uneven
>development which is supposed to have been unknown until Lenin.
>
>“Socialism unconditionally assumes economically developed relations,"
>wrote Georg Vollmar, "and if the question were limited to them alone,
>socialism ought to be strongest where the economic development is highest.
>But the thing does not stand that way at all. England is undoubtedly the
>most developed country economically, yet we see that socialism plays there
>a very secondary role, while in economically less developed Germany
>socialism has already such power that the entire old society no longer
>feels stable."
>
>Referring to the multitude of historic factors which determine the course
>of events, Vollmar continued:
>
>“It is clear that with an interrelation of such innumerable forces the
>development of any general human movement could not, and can not, be
>identical in the matter of time and form even in two countries, to say
>nothing of all.... Socialism obeys the same law.... The assumption of a
>simultaneous victory of socialism in all cultured countries is absolutely
>ruled out, as is also, and for the same reasons, the assumption that all
>the rest of the civilized states will immediately and inevitably imitate
>the example of a socialistically organized state...."
>
>ThusVollmar concludes“we arrive at the isolated socialist state,
>concerning which I trust I have proven that it is, although not the only
>possibility, nevertheless the greatest possibility."
>
>In this work, written when Lenin was eight years old, the law of uneven
>development receives a far more correct interpretation that that to be
>found among the Soviet epigones, beginning with the autumn of 1924. We
>must remark, incidentally, that in this part of his investigation Vollmar,
>a very second-rate theoretician, is only paraphrasing the thoughts of
>Engels to whom, we are told, the law of unevenness of capitalist
>development remained "unknown.”
>
>"The isolated socialist state" has long ceased to be a hypothesis, and
>became a factin Russia to be sure, not in Germany. But this very fact of
>isolation is also a precise expression of the relative strength of world
>capitalism, the relative weakness of socialism. From an isolated
>"socialist" state to a socialist society once for all done with the state
>remains a long historic road, and this road exactly coincides with the
>road of international revolution."
>
><end>
>
>
>
>
>
>At 10:55 PM 10/19/03 +0200, you wrote:
>Firstly, Thanks for the Hofkirchner material.
>
>Second,
>"I am interested in your insights on how Salthe's hierarchy theory could
>be related to cultural historical activity theory, as well as to
>dialectical materialism."
>CHAT is generally, and in my view, correctly, described by its explicators
>as a system, i.e. a scaled hierarchy of structure and operations comprised
>of systems incorporating subsystems. The CHAT model seems to me to be a
>collectivity of systems and subsystems linked by mediators that are
>analogous to if not identical to Salthe's interpolators. Check out
>Engstrom's graphic representation of CHAT as a complex of interlocked
>triangles where the basal vertices of each triangle represent respectively
>a system and a subsystem and the mediator is represented at the apical
>vertice, e.g. [subject [instument(the mediator or interpolation)
>object]](taken from Guohua, Bai and Lars Ake-Lindberg 1998 "Dialectical
>Approach to Systems Development" Systems Research vol. 15 pp.
>47-54). Salthe's description of scaled/extensional hierarchies is based
>on cybersystems (after all he and Joclyn were at one time co-workers)
>hence his insistence on the trupletted formation of minimal extensional
>hierarchies. It shouldn't be too hard to reformulate CHAT as a
>cybersystem, e.g. [subject[instrument object[division of labor
>community]]] where the italicized terms represent the interpolations that
>mediate between system and subsystem. This, by the way, provides a
>definitive description of mediation as a "...cohesion of entities out of
>lower level units guided by higher level boundary conditions" (Salthe,
>S. 2001"Summary of the Principles of Hierarchy Theory" URL:
><http://www.nbi.dk/>http://www.nbi.dk/
>~natphil/salthe/Hierarchy_th.html ). CHAT systems are no more
>dialectical than was Marx's description of "the capitalist mode of
>production," but , like the latter, they are a complex synchronic
>organization of a multiplicity of dialectical relations - read intensional
>hierarchies - that serve to impart both a temporal locality and purpose to
>the synchronic analysis.
>
> also see parallels in these theories with his work on the sociological
> or historical materialist theory Novack refers to as the law of uneven
> and combined development (the original formulation is Trotsky's), and
> Novack's way of describing historical processes in terms of qualitatively
> higher and complex levels, a way of thinking he attributes to Marx and Engels.
>I have to give here both a no and a yes.
>
> Trotsky's formulation of the "Law of uneven and combined development"
> was specifically tailored to work out a strategy of revolution in an
> underdeveloped country with a weak and bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx
> believed that a socialist revolution in Russia was only possible given a
> successful proletarian revolution in Europe. With the decline of the
> revolutionary impetus in the 1870s, Marx believed that the Russian
> peasant commune was doomed and would eventually be destroyed by
> capitalism. In the 1870s Marx drew the conclusion that development of
> bourgeois rights, a capitalist economy and modern working class was the
> only way forward for Russia (paraphrased from the entry, Law of uneven
> and combined development, in the MIA Encyclopedia of Marxism
> <http://www.>http://www.marxists.org.uk/glossary/frame.htm). Recent
> history seems to me to bear out Marx's position - compare for example,
> the history and results of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The
> dialectics of the evolution of modes of production regard the negation of
> prior modes of production as incorporating those forms rather than simply
> bypassing or annihilating them. Also, the relationship between the
> capitalist metropolis and its hinterlands is seamless, and should not be
> understood as respecting national or even cultural boundaries. Hence the
> "underdevelopment" of the capitalist hinterland is as much a part of a
> single unified network as is the relationships obtaining between
> financial and industrial sectors of capitalist economies. Michael Barrat
> Brown (1974) The Economics of Imperialism Peguin Books provides a
> succinct analysis of how capitalism produces underdevelopment rather than
> simply exploits it.
>
>On the other hand, the relation between scales and rates of activity
>provide much more satisfying explanations of the relations between
>elements of a materialist analysis of social relations than the ready
>formulas of orthodox Marxist theory. It also raises interesting questions
>regarding the relations between information (speech, icons and so on) and
>larger scaled negentropies of harnessed energy and imposition of material
>order.
>
>Enough for now.
>
>Victor
>
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