Justin Rosenberg : China, Brexit and Trump in the Mirror of UCD
Channel: Stuart Platt
Date: 2020-04-20

UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:
A CONFERENCE
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, 5-7 SEPTEMBER 2019

Hosted by the University of Glasgow's Socialist Theory and Movements Research Network in association with Historical Materialism

As recently as the early 1990s, anyone predicting that Trotsky's 'law' of uneven and combined development (UCD) would soon become a key theoretical reference point across several academic disciplines would have been treated with a great deal of scepticism. Yet, less than three decades later, UCD is regularly deployed in the fields of international relations, historical sociology, political economy, social geography and–perhaps most surprisingly–world literature. Not since the vogue for Gramsci's notion of hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s has a concept from the classical Marxist tradition enjoyed such widespread academic diffusion. Controversies have of course abounded: adherents have disagreed over whether UCD is a trans-historic or trans-modal process, or whether it is one which can only be found in the era of industrial capitalism; critics have alleged that UCD is simply a more sophisticated form of Eurocentrism; Trotskyist activists have complained–with some justification–that UCD has been detached from the political context in which it was first deployed. There have been some events focusing on specific aspects of UCD, notably one on culture at the University of Warwick in 2014; yet, in spite of the rapidly multiplying literature there has not been an international event bringing together representatives from all the relevant areas of scholarship to engage in inter-disciplinary discussion.