Debate on capitalism and development: The theories of Samir Amin and Bill Warren

1. Haldun Glap

Abstract
Disputes, in recent years, over the significance of capitalist development in the Third World have ranged between those holding to the dependency theories of Frank and Amin and the proponents of the argument, associated with Warren, that capitalism provides the dynamic thrust of development. This dispute has often been referred to as the dialogue of the deaf because different meanings have been attached to the idea of development. Haldun Glalp, however, argues here that the ideal of development is common to both schools and that developmentalism has subsumed Marxist analyses of class and change in the world division of labour. He shows why capitalism has been conflated with imperialism, in the case of Warren, and why socialism, for Amin, is nothing other than some ideal model of auto-centric capitalism.

Debate about aspects of colonialism

Debate about the perceived positive and negative aspects of colonialism has taken place for centuries, amongst both coloniser and colonised, and continues to the present day. Different types of colonialism must first be distinguished, as they were spread in time and thus did not represent the same historic phenomenon. Starting in the 15th century, the School of Salamanca, gathering theologians such as Francisco Suarez, theorized natural law, thus limiting the domination of Charles V's imperial powers by according natural rights to indigenous people. However, the School of Salamanca also created a casuistry justifying legitimate cases of conquests, thus legitimizing the colonisation project itself. The Valladolid controversy opposed the famous Dominican Bartolom de Las Casas to the dominant beliefs of his times, which considered that the Native Americans had no souls and could thus be freely enslaved. In the 18th century, Diderot criticized ethnocentrism and the colonisation of Tahiti in Supplment au voyage de Bougainville ("Supplement to Bougainville's Travel", 1772). Academic debate about the process of colonialism itself is increasingly using the Stranger King concept.

Imperialism and dependency theory

Main articles: Dependency theory and Neocolonialism Dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank argue that colonialism leads to the net transfer of wealth from the colonised to the coloniser and inhibits successful economic development. Critics such as Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth,[4] the Ngritude movement (gathering Aim Csaire and Lopold Sdar Senghor) argue that colonialism does political, psychological and moral damage to the colonised as well. Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy likened debating the pros and cons of colonialism to "debating the pros and cons of rape".[5] Critics of the alleged abuses of economic and political advantages accruing to developed nations via globalised capitalism have referred to them as neocolonialism, seeing them as a continuation of the domination and exploitation of ex-colonial countries, merely utilizing different means. Neocolonialism is in this sense a new form of imperialism, which had first been theorized by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg thought that the necessary economic expansion of

capitalism automatically led to territorial expansion, in order to find new resources and markets. However, the dependency theory and theories of economic underdevelopment of the Third World by colonial powers are contested by many economic historians. Bill Warren, a Marxist historian, disagreed with the dependency theorists:[6] There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopmentThe evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking placeand that this has been a direct result of the west. Other economists, such as Celso Furtado, have widely theorized on the specificities of third world economies, forming a concise theory of underdevelopment which understands it not simply as an early stage of a nation's economic history, but as a specific sort of modernized macroeconomic structure (a point of view which corroborates dependency theory, from a different perspective).