🗓️ Session 7: Marxist Theories of Development
Class Conflict, Exploitation, and the Imperial Logic of Capitalism
Abstract
This session introduces development through a Marxist lens, offering a critical alternative to the growth models (Session 4) and institutional economics (Sessions 5–6) discussed so far. Rather than asking why some countries simply lag behind, Marxist analysis reframes the “development puzzle”: who benefits from a given set of institutional arrangements, and how are development and underdevelopment connected?
We build the core analytical apparatus step by step: historical materialism and the mode of production, primitive accumulation and the violent transition to capitalism, the circuit of capital (M–C–M′) and the production of surplus value, and the four internal contradictions of capitalism — culminating in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the labour theory of value that underpins it.
We then ask why these contradictions push capitalism beyond national borders. Following Lenin (1916), we trace the shift from Marx’s competitive capitalism to the monopoly stage — finance capital, the export of capital, and the territorial division of the world — and use the idea of the labour aristocracy to explain why revolution did not arrive in the capitalist centres. This imperial turn relocates class conflict onto a global, core–periphery axis and sets up Session 8, where we examine the concrete mechanisms through which that hierarchy is produced and reproduced — world systems, unequal exchange, and dependency theory.
Unlike Sessions 4 (growth models) and 5 (institutional economics), which largely assume countries develop independently through similar processes, Marxist perspectives insist that development in some places is intrinsically linked to underdevelopment in others. This fundamentally challenges both the convergence predictions of neoclassical models and the “global standard institutions” approach of New Institutional Economics.
🖥️ Lecture Slides
The slides will be made available here after the lecture.
🎯 Interactive and follow-up exercises
The exercise contains elements to be done in class, as well as follow-up elements, which can help you to deepen the topics of this lecture.
Here you also find a possible ‘solution’, although it is entirely possible to come up with a different assessment.
📚 Mandatory Reading
- Marx (1976), Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (p. 873-876).
- The simple, straightforward and original introduction of the concept of primitive accumulation. The book is available online.
- Federici (2004), Introduction or Chapter 2.
- An influential (and provocative) feminist critique of Marx’s concept, arguing that the expropriation of women’s reproductive labour and the restructuring of the family were equally foundational to primitive accumulation. A PDF is available online.
- Lenin (1916), Chapter VII.
- A short, punchy text explaining the shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism. It closes the “Marxism 101” arc of the lecture by explaining how capitalism became a global, imperialist system. The full text is available online.
🏆 Further Readings
- Harvey (2003), “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession”.
- Influential contemporary scholarship arguing that primitive accumulation is not just historical, but an ongoing process (e.g. privatization, financialization) in the neoliberal era.
- Marx (1865).
- A highly accessible, lecture-format explanation of the labour theory of value and surplus value. The full text is available online.
- Anievas and Nişancıoğlu (2015), Introduction.
- A critique of Eurocentric Marxist histories, showing how global geopolitics (e.g. the Ottoman Empire, New World colonization) drove primitive accumulation. See the publisher page.
If you have questions or problems, please post them in the Moodle forum.