It has also been shown that an increasing share of manufacturing in total
production merely reflects declining production in the agriculture sector.
Averaging the export record of the Third World concealed the fact that over
half of it was accounted for by five countries. Any averaging of the devel-
oping countries conceals wide variations, including countries with very
large populations and very poor records of industrial performance which are
disguised by the impressive performance of some very small countries.
As far as the politics of neo-colonialism are concerned, the main issue
dividing Warren from his critics is the consequences of capitalist industrial-
ization and growth for different classes within Third World societies.
Warren’s critics were anxious to establish that development usually meant
the political repression and economic exploitation of workers and peasants.
As we have seen, Warren did not deny this – as a Marxist he was hardly
likely to. His conviction, however, was that growth and development were
based on increasingly autonomous, nationalistic, political leadership and
that this produced conditions for the development of capitalism signifi-
cantlydifferent from those preceding formal independence. Capitalist
forces might have been exploitative (must have been, in fact) but at least
they were national.
It is this point that raised the most serious objections from Warren’s crit-
ics, rather than the quality of the regimes that served those interests best.
Warren’s argument was that national classes and their political representa-
tives acted autonomously towards subordinate classes and foreign interests.
The importance of Warren’s conclusion about national independence and
the power of the new national bourgeoisies for Marxists was that it identi-
fied the fundamental division as between classes, not nations (Brewer,
1980, pp. 293–4). His critics maintained that these classes and their regimes
continued to be the instruments of foreign capital, and that as a consequence
the economic record was not as good as Warren made it out to be, let alone
the political and social record for those whom capitalism exploits.
The political significance of independence
Politically, independence and formal sovereignty produced states which were
significant actors in national political systems and the focal points of eco-
nomic development. Third World states, and the élites which controlled them,
often successfully negotiated with foreign investors over profit levels, wages,
rents, pricing policies, volumes of output, transportation needs, sources of
supply, taxes on multinationals, export policies and other interventions in the
100 Understanding Third World Politics