The range of experiences of different class-based regimes was not
assessed by Warren. Independence has not itself achieved development – it
has only made possible the release of forces which in some countries have
produced industrial advance. Some of the Third World countries that have
made the greatest advances in Warren’s terms have been least independent
from foreign controls (Brazil, Indonesia and Zaire, for example), and have
experienced extreme repression rather than popular pressures as the condi-
tions under which such advances have occurred.
Warren was thought to have paid insufficient attention to the ‘intensive
political and economic integration of the international capitalist economy’
during the period studied. He failed to distinguish the period of popular
mobilization, leading to national independence, from the post-independent
demobilizationof such forces to enable dependent industrialization to take
place in countries such as India, Algeria, Indonesia, Nigeria and Kenya.
Non-popular, pro-imperialist regimes, often resting on alliances between
the military and propertied classes, have been the prerequisite of industrial
growth (McMichael et al., 1974, p. 94).
The countries with the highest rates of industrialization not only have the
highest concentrations of foreign capital, they also have the highest rates of
exploitation of labour, and the lowest rates of working-class mobilization.
They are in effect police states.
Warren also assumed rather than proved that multinationals and foreign
capital brought benefits, and that Third World governments acquired
leverage or national control over their operations. Sutcliffe had shown that
while there had been rapid industrial growth in some LDCs in the early
1960s, this had not been matched by growth in employment or change in
the type of goods available. Industries used foreign capital and techniques
to produce the goods that used to be imported, reinforcing the pattern
of income distribution and therefore the social structure (Sutcliffe, 1972,
pp. 185–6).
Other criticisms were that Warren ignored ‘internal colonialism’ between
regions of Third World countries, equated development with industrializa-
tion, and exaggerated growth rates by the misuse of statistics. If economic
growth rates are calculated per capita rather than nationally, they ‘dwindle
into insignificance’ and do not compare favourably with advanced capitalist
countries because capital-intensive industrialization has not absorbed the
labour available: ‘More and more the developing countries show a structural
distortion, providing highly rewarding employment for a small minority,
and a very large amount of barely productive poverty-line employment, or
no employment, for the masses’ (Hoogvelt, 1978, p. 81).
Neo-colonialism and Dependency 99