请将“1	Disarticulated development of productive forces
in the periphery
In an economy, one sector produces means of consumption, and another sector produces means of production. The latter sector has two sub-sectors: one produces means of production needed to produce consumption goods, and another produces other means of production.4 ‘In order to be auto-centered an economy must contain production at all of these levels and especially at the two highest levels of reproductive importance’ which involve the production of the means of production (Ougaard, 1982: 389). In addition, the different sectors and subsectors must be articulated with one another, even if an auto-centred economy does not have to produce all the products in all the three major sectors (ibid.).
In the core, accumulation is autocentric: ‘production of capital goods and the production of consumption goods’ are articulated with one another, and foreign relations of central economies ‘are subject to the requirements of this determinate articulation’, and therefore generally ‘labor’s pay can follow the progress of productivity’5 (Amin, 2009: 272). In contrast, the peripheral economy tends to be dominated more by the production of consumption goods and less by other types of production. A significant level of production in all the sectors/sub-sectors mentioned earlier is absent in a typical peripheral economy. An industrializing peripheral economy often assembles imported industrial parts, as it happens in many SEZs and Mexican maquiladoras. Or, some countries produce IT support, including in call-centres, for advanced countries. A major part of the periphery’s IT industry is actually similar to its manufacturing assembly, where low-paid engineers such as those in India ‘develop components or subpackages/assemblies/programmes that go into the final products made and marketed by US companies’ (Bidwai, 2003). Bidwai says that ‘a good proportion of the sub-programmes in Windows 95 and 98 were developed by Indian engineers. But it’s Mr Bill Gates who skimmed off the profits!’ (ibid.) 
The lack of articulation between the main sectors blocks the periphery’s economic development. Such an economy is also extraverted: internal linkages are not stronger than external ones. It remains export-oriented, or its production caters to the local elite (production of goods and services that workers and small-scale producers do not normally consume). Such a production system has, generally, little incentive, or need, to raise wages/income of the masses who are not the consumers of such a system (see Richards, 1986; De Janvry, 1981). Indeed, distribution of income/wealth does feed back into the nature of production system.
So, apart from the peripheral society where capitalism exists mainly in the sphere of exchange relations, there are two other types of peripheral society from the standpoint of production. In one type, there is capitalist production of consumer goods for the domestic (and foreign) market. This society is ‘dependent on the import of means of production for its consumer industry’. Another type of peripheral society ‘produces the means of production for its consumer industry’ at least to a significant extent, but it is still ‘dependent on imports of the means of production for its own producer goods industry’ (Ougaard, 1982: 394). And ‘since this dependency is located at the highest level of reproductive importance it can be expected to lead to an intensification of the conflicts with foreign capital’ (ibid.).
What are the implications of all this for the peripheral state then? The state has a role in facilitating the transition from the first lower level of peripheral economy (capitalism in circulation, export of raw materials) to the form where ‘a society can produce the means of production for its producer goods industry’ and where this production covers a significant part of the society’s needs and is reasonably integrated internally (Ougaard, 1982: 395—6). How well the state plays such a developmental role depends on a number of processes. These include which dominant class or class-strata (e.g. landlords, merchants, domestic capitalists, foreign capitalists, and so on) control state power; whether and to what extent the state can exercise autonomy vis-à-vis mutual competing capitalists and vis-à-vis conflicts between capital-owners and ground-rent receivers (landowners); and how well the state protects its capitalist (and small-scale) production from the globally operating law of value. The developmental state has reflected on some of these processes.6
Amin (2009: 273) says that ‘[i]n the periphery, constant adjustment in economies have to be made in relation to the economies of the core’. So, in the core, ‘[t]he state . . . fulfils the conditions that make possible autocentric accumulation and the dependence of foreign relations on the logic of that accumulation’, but in contrast,
the peripheral state . . . does not control local accumulation. It is thus objectively, an instrument for the adjustment of the local society to the requirements of globalized accumulation, the tendencies of which are determined by the requirements of the center.
This difference explains why the central state is a strong state and while the peripheral state is a weak state, says Amin. But to the extent that the periphery lacks economic dynamics associated with auto-centric production, the question is why? We need to turn to the very nature of capitalism in the periphery in terms of class relations and to imperialism as a form of class relation and explore their implications for the peripheral state.
2	Peripheral social formation dominated by ‘backward’ capitalism7
Whether in the global periphery or in the more economically advanced world, a society is capitalist if it is characterized by the dominance of the following features: commodity production, means of production confronting labour as capital, a class of nominally free labourers forced to work for a wage because they do not own sufficient means of production, and operation of the law of value (law of competition based on socially necessary labour time). When such conditions exist, then capitalist relation exists, at least in the sense of FSL. In FSL, lots of workers are hired to work for long hours on an enormous amount of raw materials with limited or little labour-shedding technical change used. There is hardly any place in the world which is not dominated by capitalism at least in this sense. While FSL is based on the appropriation of absolute surplus value, RSL is based on the appropriation of relative surplus value. RSL has all the features of FSL and an additional attribute — that is, the systematic tendency towards technical change. Then there is also hybrid subsumption, which is post-feudal and which does not involve wage labour; it involves exploitation by merchants and moneylenders of direct producers (see Das, 2017a: 340—90 for a detailed discussion on the subsumption of labour by capital).
Marx says in the Appendix to Capital 1: FSL is ‘directly a process of the exploitation of the labour of others. . . . It is the general form of any capitalist production process’ (i.e. production process under the rule of capitalist social relation) (Marx, 1977b: 1019). As the more general form of capitalist production, it ‘can be found in the absence of the specifically capitalist mode of production’, which is RSL for Marx (ibid.). The two forms of subsumption are similar in the sense of the general conditions for capitalism. But a dialectical approach also sees a difference.
Contrary to what Marx might (sometimes) have believed, the transition to RSL is not automatic, even if there is a long-term tendency towards the RSL, associated with a rise in the ratio of constant to variable capital (Das, 2017a). To me, the transition from FSL to RSL is contingent on the balance of power between the basis classes, which is expressed in the struggle of workers against the regime of long hours (and low wages). Class struggle (potential or actual) conditions the extent to which capitalists who are competing with one another cut costs of production through (a) the use of technology aimed at increasing labour productivity or (b) for example, FSL. And certain objective conditions can promote or constrain class struggle, and accordingly the transition to RSL can be quicker or be a prolonged process and geographically uneven.
Advanced capitalism is characterized by a successful transition to RSL and the resultant economic dynamism. This transition has been partly possible because of two factors such as colonial transfer, and class struggle against capitalists using labour for long hours and low wages. However, in most parts of the periphery (and especially in its vast rural areas and in small towns), the situation is a little different. There are the necessary conditions for capitalist relations. In some areas, property owners may be formally subsuming labour (e.g. capitalists use highly vulnerable and low-cost labour, including labour that is reproduced outside of capitalist reproduction as in indigenous communities).8 In other areas, especially in selected large cities and villages near them, there do exist real subsumption. The state is connected to both, to the localized existence of RSL and to the obstacles to the transition to it.
Let’s begin with localized existence of RSL. Backward countries can adopt technology from already-advanced countries, and this means that
[t]he development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process’ leading to combined development ‘by which we mean a drawing together of the dif-ferent stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.
(Trotsky, 2008: 4-5)
By borrowing technology already developed in an advanced country, a peripheral country can skip some stages in the development process, thus producing combined development:
The development of backward countries is characterized by its combined character. In other words, the last word of imperialist technology, economics, and politics is combined in these countries with traditional backwardness and primitiveness.
(Trotsky, 1940)
This means that in an LDC, technologically backward ‘peasant land-cultivation’ can coexist with an industry which ‘in its technique and capitalist structure’ is ‘at the level of the advanced countries’, and in certain respects it can even surpass industry in advanced countries (ibid.: 8).
The peripheral capitalist state can be responsible for real subsumption, both by working with, and independently of, imperialism. Partly prompted by the struggles of the masses against low living standards and partly prompted by geopolitical rivalries (sometimes overlain by nationalist chauvinism with religious overtones), and in some cases, to protect their own capitals against imperialist competition (law of value), capitalist states in the periphery can give various forms of assistance to national capitals to introduce modern technologies and to increase labour productivity. This process may signal some kind of transition from formal to real subsumption.”翻译为中文