Rolf 2015

Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy
Locating the State: Uneven and Combined Development, the States System and the
Political
Steve Rolf
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LOCATING THE STATE: UNEVEN
AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT,
THE STATES SYSTEM AND THE
POLITICAL
Steve Rolf
ABSTRACT
This paper uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined

Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and metho-
dologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While
uneven development theorists working in economic geography have
demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the
completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic uneven-
ness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process.
This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted
under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State
theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system
of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this
reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the rela-
tionship between patterns of capital accumulation and states’ institu-
tional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive
Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

Research in Political Economy, Volume 30A, 113 153
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0161-7230/doi:10.1108/S0161-72302015000030A012
113
114 STEVE ROLF
interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations,

is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by clo-
sely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist
means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their
distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is
developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research
something lacking from recent development in the field.
Keywords: Capitalism; uneven development; combined development;
state; Marx
INTRODUCTION
A theory of the capitalist State must be able to elucidate the metamorphoses of its
object. (Poulantzas, 2014, p. 123)
The post-crisis emergence of multipolarity has reinvigorated Marxist

debates about the state and the international order. Predictions of the emer-
gence of a transnational state per theories of ‘hegemony’ and ‘empire’
or a withering away of state power per those of ‘globalization’ have
proved premature (Desai, 2013). Theories of the contemporary world econ-
omy must now be able to examine capital accumulation on a world scale,
while acknowledging the fracturing of this system into unevenly developed
blocs and states. Acknowledging the ‘materiality of nations’ under capital-
ism, Desai’s geopolitical economy (GE) can mark a major new research
programme in historical materialism.
My purpose in this paper is to provide a useful conceptual framework
that can be operationalised, in future GE research, to develop a materialist
account of the increasing significance of once ‘peripheral’ states in Asia,
Africa and Latin America, to world capitalism. Key to constructing such a
framework is a deeper engagement of GE with Leon Trotsky’s theory of
uneven and combined development (UCD) (Desai, 2013, pp. 51 53;
Trotsky, 2009). Trotsky’s theory provides crucial insights for those seeking
to understand the materiality of the capitalist states system as a ‘dimension
of the capitalist mode of production’ (Callinicos, 2009, p. 83; Davidson,
2012a; Desai, 2012; Pozo-Martin, 2007). An extensive debate on the value
of UCD for developing an integrated analysis of states and capital has
developed over the last decade (for a useful overview, see Rioux, 2014,
UCD, the States System and the Political 115
pp. 2 5). While this has significantly advanced our understanding of how
the feudal states system was transformed into a capitalist one, it is yet to
satisfactorily account for why, and with what consequences, the plurality
of states remains ‘a constitutive expression and component of capitalist
relations of exploitation and competition’ (Hirsch & Kannankulam,
2011, p. 22).
In what follows, I return to the work of Trotsky, Marx, theorists of
uneven geographic development and state theorists: in order to systematise
Trotsky’s scattered remarks into a research framework which can incorpo-
rate states, systems of accumulation, and hegemonic projects as active

moments in the process of capitalist accumulation.1 The real promise of
UCD for research in GE is to provide a methodological internationalism
that is nonetheless geared towards the analysis of the specificities of
nations. UCD is conceptualised not only as the driving force of capitalism’s
geopolitical economy, but also as the source of tension between contrasting
forms of accumulation within states, as well as between them (Davidson,
2009). It thus underlines the unstable and dynamic materiality of the states
system, and provides a means of incorporating politics and the path depen-
dency produced by political struggles at multiple levels and scales into the
single, contradictory logic of capital. I close by providing some suggestions
as to how an empirical research programme based upon these conceptual
refinements can be developed.
RECENT APPROACHES TO UNEVENNESS AND

COMBINATION
For critics of capitalism, the crisis and its aftermath have put states back at
the centre of attention. State-led financial and industrial rescue packages;
the growth of statist capitalisms in the form of the BRICs; and the revival
of interimperialist skirmishes in the Caucasus, Ukraine, Syria and the
South China Sea; have decisively challenged the thesis that national states
are in permanent decline under the pressures of ‘globalisation’ (Callinicos,
2010; Klassen, 2014). Cosmopolitan capitalism, the smoothing and evening
out of economic and political space hypothesised by neoliberals (Bhagwati,
2004; Wolf, 2005) and some Marxists (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Robinson,
2005) alike, has not materialised. Instead, ‘globalisation’ has proved itself
to be yet another phase in the world expansion and deepening of antagonis-
tic capitalist social relations (Rosenberg, 2005).
116 STEVE ROLF
As neoliberal conceptions of the withering away of the state were

disarmed, many critical voices again proposed state developmentalist
alternatives to globalisation as more equitable and sustainable models of
growth, especially for late developers (cf. Evans, 2014). Examining the inter-
nal characteristics of individual political economies in a comparative fashion,
such scholars extrapolate that state intervention, protectionism, capital con-
trols and welfarism form a superior set of policies to be applied (by a benign
state) and conclude that ‘ideology’, ‘vested interests’ or a ‘lack of capacity’
are to blame for the cases where these policies aren’t pursued (Selwyn, 2014).
While providing welcome relief from neoliberal prescriptions, such develop-

mentalist perspectives fall prey to methodological nationalism as they present
capitalism not ‘as an international relation of exploitation [and competition]
but as a relation between different sets of owners of sources of revenue within
the state’ (Pradella, 2014, p. 190). The opportunities for states to play a pro-
ductivist and progressive role are exaggerated by ignoring the world scale of
capitalist development and its contradictions which outstrip the bounds of
any individual state and the competitive interactions between states, which
limit any individual state’s autonomy.2
The dualism of cosmopolitan and methodologically nationalist perspec-
tives is increasingly strained by the current conjuncture, in which, while
production has become ever more internationalised through complex cross
border production networks (Henderson, Dicken, Hess, Coe, & Yeung,
2002), state agency is also more substantial than ever in shaping the politi-
cal economy of world capitalism. The challenge is to seek an approach that
on the one hand refuses to explore political economies in their isolation but
as part of a world economy and system of states, and, on the other,
explains why states are reproduced as significant political economic actors
even under conditions of the ‘geographical spread and functional integra-
tion of production activities’ (Dicken, 2014). The following section explores
Trotsky’s notion of UCD as a possible methodology capable of living up
to this challenge, before highlighting the shortcomings of this approach
and relating them to problems in Marx’s own theorisation.
THE PROMISE OF UCD
In 2006, Rosenberg (2006) concluded that Leon Trotsky’s analysis of

Russian development, linked to the uneven and combined development
(UCD) of world capitalism, was singularly successful in incorporating
political multiplicity into social theory. Exchanges on a range of issues
from the US intervention in Iraq (Callinicos, 2003; Harvey, 2003), the

origins of capitalism (Teschke, 2003; Wood, 2002) and the persistence of
the states system under conditions of globalisation (Cambridge Review of
International Affairs [CRIA], 2007, 2009) have similarly led Barker (2006),
Ashman (2010) and Callinicos (2009, p. 92) amongst others to suggest
UCD as the most important ‘source of a powerful centrifugal drive which
helps keep states multiple’, and so can explain their role in the structure of
world capitalism. UCD holds the promise of providing an elusive social
theory of capitalist states.
Where did the theory come from, and what gives it its contemporary
allure? Trotsky, since the failed revolution of 1905, had sought to justify
the Bolsheviks’ future seizure of power on the basis of the strategy of per-
manent revolution. In contrast to the stagism of the Marxist orthodoxy of
the Second International, it could theorise the possibility of transition from
the underdeveloped semi feudalism of fin-de-siècle Russia to socialism
without the necessity for a capitalist stage. Underpinning the strategy of
permanent revolution, though itself rather ironically underdeveloped, lay
Trotsky’s broader theory: that of the uneven and combined development
(UCD) of world capitalism (cf. Löwy, 2010; Trotsky, 2007).
Uneven development had become common parlance in the Bolshevik
party since Lenin (1916) theorised imperialism as an effect of a world
system dominated by capitalism: in which the ‘uneven and spasmodic
development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and
individual countries is inevitable’ (cf. Davidson, 2010). This perpetual
dynamism meant that any stable, ‘ultra-imperialist’ arrangement between
the great powers was impossible. Later, Stalinist usages of uneven develop-
ment were aimed at justifying the process of building ‘socialism in one
country’; because the ‘advantages of backwardness’ provided the possibility
of skipping ahead of rivals through catch up development. Challenging this
notion, Trotsky emphasised the twin tendencies inherent in capitalism, of
both differentiation as well as equalisation: through perpetual expansion,
capital ‘brings about their rapprochement and equalises the economic and
cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries’.
He stressed the global nature of capitalism, a system defined by the devel-
opment of its parts in combination, not isolation. The result is ‘on the one
hand, unevenness, i.e., sporadic historical development … while, on
the other hand, the organic interdependence of the several countries,
developing toward an international division of labor’ (Trotsky, 1928).
Interconnectedness of the world economy rendered impossible any delink-
ing of socialist Russia.
118 STEVE ROLF
While UCD built on Lenin’s (1916) earlier recognition of both the world
domination of capital and the spatially uneven pattern of its development,
Trotsky grasped far better how unevenness was not only distributed
amongst states, but also inside social formations. In Russia, highly
advanced industrial forms coexisted with semi feudal social relations:
modern munitions factories in St. Petersburg and Moscow provided the
anachronistic Tsarist state with the means to defend itself against colonial
encroachment:
The backward nation, moreover, not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed
from outside … The very process of assimilation acquires a self-contradictory character.
Thus the introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all
military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the funda-
mental form of labor organization. European armament and European loans both
indubitable products of a higher culture led to a strengthening of tsarism, which
delayed in its turn the development of the country. (Trotsky, 2009, pp. 4 5)
This problematises any easy notion of catch up development via technolo-

gical transfer. Russian entry into the world market neither set it on the same
road to capitalism as Britain had followed, nor entirely inhibited its develop-
ment into a major capitalist power. Instead, it inflected the path of this devel-
opment so that it would emerge as a ‘peculiar’ form of national capitalism
(Trotsky, 2007). Incorporation into capitalist modernity preserved the late
developing features of the Russian social formation, as the tsarist state
remained reliant on the peasant economy while creating extremely
advanced urban centres of industry . Development is thus doubly ‘com-
bined’: as capitalism links all corners of the world into an integrated totality,
advances ricochet around all other societies, producing social combinations
of progressive and regressive elements in late developers.
With his concept of Russia’s ‘insertion’ into the world market and the
imperialist hierarchy at a particular point in its development, Trotsky also
highlights the role of the states system as a constitutive factor of national
development (Trotsky, 2009, p. 7). While capitalism is a ‘single economic
and political organism’ (Trotsky, 2007, p. 12),3 it is territorially fragmented
into a system of states. The ‘coeval’, rather than contradictory, develop-
ment of a world economy and a competitive system of national states
(Ashman, 2006, p. 95) means that developments in competitor states con-
front capitalists and state managers as ‘external’ forces. Such ‘external
influences differ not only in (socio-spatial) origin but also in kind from
their internal political, material, and ideational equivalents. Because they
traverse more than one political jurisdiction, they add a strategic, geopoliti-
cal dimension to social development’ (Rosenberg, 2013, p. 583). So the
states system, as it systematically differentiates social space under capital-

ism, has a determining role in national development. Elements of capital
(such as new technologies) become the objects of strategic and competitive
struggles between states.
Strategic competition between states allows for the understanding of
advanced capitalist states and imperialism as upholders of unevenness.
Capital operates through ‘anarchistic methods … developing some parts of
the world economy while hampering and throwing back others’, through
‘tiger leaps and such raids on backward countries’. The result is any ‘unifi-
cation and leveling of the world economy is upset by [imperialism] even

more violently and convulsively than in the preceding epochs’ (Trotsky,
1928). So while unevenness is the most ‘general law of historic process’, the
combined development does not eliminate uneven development, while
subjecting it to a new dynamic, embodied in novel class formations and
state forms (Trotsky, 2009, p. 4). Against Marx’s (1979, p. 91) expectation
that each society would pass through the same stages of development
(‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less
developed, the image of its own future’), Trotsky presents a nonlinear
world history. This does not, as argued by dependency theorists, block the
possibility of late developers catching up with advanced capitalist states
but neither does it make it inevitable (Harman, 2009). Catching up is an
outcome of specific historical conjunctures and strategic agencies, which
must be explored in their full complexity.
UCD can be reduced to three propositions and their implications:
(1) The ‘whip of external necessity’ mandates statist developmental initia-
tives, due to economic and military threats from more developed states
(Trotsky, 2009, p. 4).
(2) The ‘privilege of historical backwardness’ grants late developing states
unique prospects to temporally compress development, leapfrogging
whole stages of development by importing technologies, organisational
and institutional forms, cultural resources, etc. (Trotsky, 2009, p. 5).
(3) In the process of catching up, the ‘contradictions of social amalgama-
tion’ tend to accumulate a set of intractable and unique contradictions
in late developing societies, related to capitalism’s crisis tendencies (for
a summary, see Davidson, 2006, p. 12).
While (1) and (2) are forms of combined development which operate
between states, (3) operates within social formations. Immediately, three
significant conclusions affecting social formations arise from these proposi-
tions. The first is that the world economy constitutes a totality, not the
120 STEVE ROLF
occasionally interactive arena of autonomous units (states): intra and inter-

state developments are thus mutually conditioning (see also McMichael,
2001). The second is that the states system both upholds unevenness by
attempting to block rival developers and, through the agency of peripheral
states pursuing strategies of catch up development, enforces combined
development and interstate competition.4 Finally, states’ interactions are
shaped by their constantly changing developmental trajectories induced
by the combined character of development, as advancements are appro-
priated by late developers. And as novel state forms emerge from combined
processes of development interact with other states, the outcome is the set
of disruptive effects known to international relations theory merely as
‘anarchy’, which makes possible spatial, economic, political and ideological
unevenness.
There can be no hard and fast separation between what constitutes
national and world politics. As Gramsci (1971, p. 176) put it:
Any organic innovation in the [national] social structure, through its technical-military
expressions, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international
field too.
The promise of UCD in this regard is that it is methodologically interna-

tionalist, while it retains a distinctive capacity to analyse national social for-
mations (Green, 2014). Overcoming methodologically nationalist state
market dichotomies, UCD takes the world economy as its starting point,
utilising a ‘telescoping’ analysis which can go on to explore conjunctures in
national politics; without reifying them or abstracting them for their inter-
national context (Rosenberg, 2013).
The relevance of a better understanding of UCD for geopolitical
economy is clear. Desai (2013) makes it the backbone of her reinterpreta-
tion of the US’s world role in the post-war period, suggesting that US
power was seriously constrained by the rapid economic development of
multiple contender states. A key counter to the ‘hyper globalisation’ thesis
of an increasingly flat earth is posed by UCD’s recognition of a centrifugal
drive emanating from the capital relation which accounts for capitalism’s
‘integrated but differentiated … clumpy and territorialised’ character
(Ashman, 2006, p. 101). UCD also challenges methodologically nationalist
accounts of capitalist diversity,5 by recognising the dialectic of universali-
sation and differentiation inherent in capitalism: ‘only the correlation of
these two fundamental tendencies both of which arise from the nature
of capitalism explains to us the living texture of the historical process’
Trotsky (1928).
PROBLEMS IN THE UCD LITERATURE
Despite its apparent promise for grasping current developments, the revival
in UCD has instead led to historically focused debate on the transition to
capitalism. Rosenberg (2008), Anievas (2013), Shilliam (2009) and Matin
(2013), stand out as contributions that strikingly unite early capitalist
developments with their precapitalist origins, in ways that advance our
understanding of the geopolitical origins of capitalism. Because, as Anievas
(2015) points out, the existence of the states system was assumed rather
than historically accounted for by theories of imperialism (cf. Bukharin,

1917; Lenin, 1916), tracing how precapitalist political multiplicity inter-
acted with emergent capitalist development has proved to be an extremely
fertile pursuit.
Recognising how despite its historical primacy the states system has
been subsumed under the logic of capital also highlights the limits to the his-
torical focus of recent UCD literature. This work has not proposed any
logical-theoretical mechanisms, predicated in capital’s system of value rela-
tions, which act to produce the dialectic of equalisation and differentiation
between states. Rioux (2014, pp. 26 27) thus notes a ‘lack of proper theori-
sations of why capital’s dynamics produce uneven and combined develop-
ment’, leading to a ‘perennial failure to theorise historically and spatially
specific processes of U&CD’. The outcome is that recent UCD literature has
not engaged with dependency theory, world systems theory, or uneven geo-
graphic development: all of which share the problematic of the perpetuation
of geographic unevenness, political multiplicity and catch up development.
It has also not explained precisely why capitalist UCD should reproduce a
system of states.
Another problem is a tendency for those using UCD as a means of
researching the impact of the states system under contemporary capitalism
to lapse into realist accounts of geopolitics (Pozo-Martin, 2007). As Desai
(2013, p. 145) points out, much recent scholarship has reproduced the
binary between international relations and economics whereby states
appear either ‘detached from their role in creating and managing national
economies … as creatures of international relations’, or, not at all. While
geopolitical and mercantilist interactions of states clearly play a determin-
ing role in national social development, these cannot be explained without
reference to the social constitution of the states in question (Rosenberg,
1994). Reifying the ‘realist moment’ reinforces the state/market dichotomy
that UCD was initially deployed to try to transcend, by assuming geopoli-
tics exists on a separate plane of theorisation to that of capital. The key
122 STEVE ROLF
contribution of UCD to social theory, then, should be to insist upon a con-

cept of combined development that operates as part of the logic of capital:
between and within states. Why, then, has recent scholarship struggled so
much to develop Trotsky’s insights into a research programme capable of
understanding contemporary conditions?
The tendency towards historicism is surely to some extent rooted in
Rosenberg’s (2010) insistence of the value of UCD as a transhistoric
abstraction, valid for historical periods prior to capitalism, and the result-
ing debate which has served as something of a distraction for scholarship
(Ashman (2010)). Removed from the capitalist law of value, which gives
advancement and late development their meaning, UCD ‘becomes descrip-
tive rather than explanatory’ (Kiely, 2012, p. 234). Rioux (2014), however,
has suggested that these weaknesses may derive from the original formula-
tion itself. Trotsky’s scattered remarks on UCD only haphazardly relate it
to specifically capitalist dynamics. As Herod (2006, p. 156) argues, Trotsky
‘does not develop a formal conceptual outline’ of UCD. The concept is ela-
borated with reference to the specificities of the Russian social formation
rather than as a more general process capable of theorisation, leaving rela-
tions between capitalist development and UCD (understandably) vague
due, most likely, to a preoccupation with developing socialist strategy.
Hardy (2013, p. 145) also notes that Trotsky ‘did not offer an explanation
of the drivers or causes of unevenness’. As such, recent attempts to apply
UCD have resulted in confusion as to whether the ‘international’, or the
laws of accumulation highlighted by Marx, should take logical priority.
In an interesting attempt to provide this kind of logical-theoretical
account of UCD, Barker (2006, p. 80) certainly appears to be on the cor-
rect track in suggesting the capitalist law of value, defined by the obligation
of less productive capitals to improve or perish, ‘expresses the capitalist
form of combined and uneven development in a summary manner’. The
most advanced capitals ‘shape the validation of products via socially neces-
sary labour time’, and ‘producers are compelled’ to try to match the latest
technique’. Capitalist development, measured by the productivity of labour
in a national economy, provides an objective measure of what constitute
advanced and late developing states. Such an abstract formulation, how-
ever, cannot tell us much about existing patterns of UCD in the world
economy or their relationships with states. The challenge remains to
explain why the states system remains a constitutive ‘dimension of the capi-
talist mode of production’, a key driver of the capitalist system’s political
economy (Callinicos, 2009, p. 83). Advancing the debate requires returning
to Marx and his analysis of capitalist development.
MARX AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT
As Desai (2013, pp. 36 43) shows, the understanding of capitalism as a

fragmented totality, comprised of state-led protectionism, cooperation, and
interimperialist competition rather than a flat, unitary system of the sort
conjectured by globalisation theorists such as Thomas Friedman (2005)
reaches back to classical political economy, and Marx and Engels’ critique.
Marx comments on the early development of protectionist competition
between the United States and the United Kingdom in the Grundrisse
(1973, p. 886) that:

The harmony of bourgeois relations of production [within a nation] ends with the most
complete disharmony of these relations on the grandest terrain where they appear, the
world market … the general relations of bourgeois society e.g., concentration of
capital, division of labour, wage labour etc. … appear in their most developed form
in their world market form as the internal relations which produce English domina-
tion on the world market’.
Marx’s conception of the world market as a set of contradictory and

conflictual ‘internal relations’ appears a useful starting point for theory
construction around the persistence of uneven development, imperialism,
and state competition in a period of neoliberalism and internationalisation
of capital. Avoiding a perspective of external relations between states and
markets that dominates orthodox international political economy, this
‘internal’ approach is a necessary precondition of explaining the essential
role states continue to play for capitalism (Bieler & Morton, 2014; Bruff,
2011; cf. Ollman, 1970).
A problem arises, however, for those wishing to deploy Marx’s theory to
understand a world where the unprecedented expansion of the world market
and the internationalisation of capital have strengthened tensions between
rival imperialist blocs in the states system (evident in current US-Sino and
EU-Russian relations). Despite a clear inclination to treat the capitalist sys-
tem as a international totality, fractured into competing blocs of capital,
with an increasingly blurred boundary between economic and extra eco-
nomic power, in Capital where he most completely elaborates his theory
of accumulation Marx (1979, p. 727, fn2) specifically abstracts from terri-
torial differentiation, foreign trade, and state power. Describing the process
of the reproduction of the total social capital in Volume I, he notes that:
In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturb-
ing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world of trade as one nation, and
assume that capitalist production is established everywhere and has taken possession of
every branch of industry.
124 STEVE ROLF
Discussing the production of gold in the context of simple capitalist

reproduction in Volume II of Capital, Marx (1978, p. 546) grapples with
the problem of its production in distinctive concrete social formations,
which sits in contradiction with its universalising role. He concludes that
while ‘capitalist production never exists without foreign trade’, because
trade ‘replaces domestic articles only by those of use or other forms …
[analysing it] can therefore only confuse things, without supplying any new
factor’. Finally, in Volume III, when ‘Marx discusses the various phenom-
enal forms that surplus-value takes within capitalist society … he quite
ignores one form: tax. Any further development of the critique of political
economy most decidedly requires the development of that category, for tax
collection is the presupposition of all state intervention’ (Barker, 2009,
p. 22; Marx, 1991).6 Reluctance to integrate uneven development and states
into his analysis was not, however, ‘arbitrary … [but] consistent with his
logico-historical method, this assumption reflects his conviction that capital
would progressively level these geographical differentiations’ (Smith, 2010,
p. 128).
Outlining his method in the Grundrisse (1973, p. 101), Marx proposes to
ascend ‘from the simple, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange
value, to the level of state, exchange between countries and the world mar-
ket’. Capital, however, never reached this level of theoretical exposition. So
while Marx certainly recognised the critical significance of many states for
capital, Capital’s theoretical schema did not develop these internal relations
between states and capital. Marx excluded consideration ‘of foreign trade,
of geographical expansion’, and the states system, as they ‘merely compli-
cated matters’ (Harvey, 2001, p. 308).7 This has caused ongoing problems
for those wishing to use Marx’s analysis to understand the political form of
world capitalism. Lasslett (2014, p. 2) notes that ‘reluctance among
[Marx’s] students to widen the boundaries of Capital with honourable
exceptions has blunted efforts to theorise the specific way state power is
organized under capitalism, and how it mediates the processes and tenden-
cies conceptualized in Capital’s first three volumes’. While politics is imma-
nent in Marx’s political economy (Jessop, 2006), its elaboration into a
theory of the state remains incomplete: presenting a major challenge for
those wishing to develop Marx’s categories in order to grasp contemporary
geopolitical economy.
The remainder of this paper aims to construct a logical-theoretical
approach to explain where the states system fits in a schema of capital accu-
mulation. Beginning with theorists of uneven development Harvey
(2006b), Smith (2010), Massey (1995) who have best engaged with the
spatiality of capitalist accumulation, I develop a critique of their work for

emphasising capital’s ‘economic’ logic without incorporating states into the
scope of analysis. Next, I examine the most carefully elaborated body of
state theory, Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (1982, 1990, 2008),
exploring its tendency to produce an overly politicised analysis of capitalist
development. Both literatures, I contend, implicitly counterpose opposed
‘logics’ at work: globalising, and methodological nationalism. Finally,
using Trotsky’s insights, I sublate them into a theory of UCD that is
explicitly linked to Marx’s theory in Capital.8
UNEVEN GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT
The states system is predicated upon capitalism’s uneven geographic devel-

opment. Rosenberg (2009, p. 109, 2010) notes that it is ‘uneven develop-
ment [that] gives rise to political multiplicity; and through this multiplicity,
that same unevenness super-adds a class of anarchical causes to the nature
of social development’. So the states system as a set of ‘anarchical’ competi-
tive interstate relations has its precursor in the uneven development of the
productive forces.9 As Bonefeld (2014, p. 152, my italics) argues, quoting
Marx’s Grundrisse, the ‘system’ of interstate relations is founded on the
‘international relations of production. International division of labour.
International exchange and import. Rate of exchange’. Capitalist states are
thus inherently spatial entities, which produce and define distinctive spaces
of production and consumption in the world economy with unique roles
in terms of providing territorial coherence, monetary and legal systems,
infrastructural provision and economic intervention for the maintenance
of capitalist production (Miller, 2005).10 Understanding the formation
of these spaces is analytically prior to understanding their interactions. The
first step towards explaining why capitalism is divided into a system of dif-
ferentiated sovereign states is, then, to grasp how a uniform process of
capital accumulation can result in uneven development across geographic
space.
By returning to Capital, the literature on uneven geographic develop-
ment has highlighted a dialectic between fixity and motion across locations
in the process of capital accumulation: noting capital’s opposing tendencies
to concentration and centralisation in certain spaces on the one hand, and
its mobility and dispersal between spaces on the other (Harvey, 2006b;
Massey, 1995; Smith, 2010). Here we have the corollary of Trotsky’s
126 STEVE ROLF
dialectic, spelled out with reference to the accumulation process theorised

by Marx. Capital strives for ever greater mobility in search of the highest
rates of profit. However, in order to become more mobile, it must fix an
ever greater degree of use values in space: both in the production process,
and in physical infrastructures (airports, highways and railways). Capital’s
dynamic competitive environment compels perpetual technological and
organisational advances, which emerge in particular locations. The out-
come of this dialectical process of development is unevenness at every scale
of social space: the city (region), the nation-state and at the world scale.
The result, distinct from prior forms of uneven development, is a specifi-

cally capitalist world geography.
The most basic determinant of spatial differentiation is the tendency
towards the ‘concentration and centralisation’ of capital, which Marx
(1979) identified in the first volume of Capital. As well as the tendential
social concentration and centralisation of capital in the hands of fewer
firms and fewer individuals, Neil Smith notes a parallel process of the ten-
dential spatial concentration and centralisation of greater quantities of use
values in particular cities and urban regions (Smith, 2010). This takes place
due to:
• The increasing ratio of capital to labour power required by capitalist

development and the resultant increase in physical use values over time,
• The necessity of clustering together greater numbers of labour processes
as the division of labour proceeds,
• The development of an increasing quantity of ancillary services and
infrastructures to feed the increased productive forces of capital,
• The improved productivity granted to capital by the clustering of greater
quantities of productive capacity in geographical locations,
• The improved productivity granted to capital by reducing the cost
of reproducing workers through the collective consumption of
infrastructure.
These forces draw capital together in certain spaces at the expense of

others. The equalisation of profit rates, however, ‘brings only a limited
equalization of levels and conditions of development’, due to the existence
of spatially differentiating forces (Smith, 2010, p. 196). Without the exis-
tence of centripetal forces, the spatial concentration and centralisation of
capital would become absolute and communism would be the result:
Centralisation of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a
point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument
is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated. (Marx, 1979, p. 625)
If capital is not to centralise itself to the point of eradicating competition

and suspending the law of value, opposed tendencies must also be at work.
The tendential disintegration and fragmentation of capital is brought about
by:
• The disruptive influence of continuous technological advancement, and

the consequent shifts in production towards new sectors in new regions
of production (Storper & Walker, 1989, chapter 9).

• Capital’s tendency towards overaccumulation, and the expansionary
urge that results to (i) produce new spaces of production and consump-
tion which are not yet afflicted by capital’s crisis tendencies; and (ii) to
geographically reorganise existing spaces in ways which permit the
greater extraction of surplus value and the restoration of the rate of
profit.
• Perpetual shifts in the organisation of production between vertically and
horizontally organised production networks, which act to decentre nuclei
of fixed capital through the establishment of new spatial divisions of
labour (Massey, 1995, 2005).
• An increasing liquidity of deterritorialised forms of capital precious
metals, money, and credit. (Marx, 1979, chapter 3).
These counter tendencies inhibit the absolute spatial concentration and

centralisation of capital, and enforce competition, as ‘portions of the origi-
nal capital disengage themselves and function as new capitals’ (Marx, 1979,
p. 625). In particular, the credit system provides the ideal means to lubri-
cate this process and dislodge the monopoly of certain spaces at the
expense of others, by mobilising saved capital into highly profitable, capital
scarce areas during crises of overaccumulation in already developed spaces
(Harvey, 2010).
The consequence of these powerful and opposed tendential forces is the
oscillating motion of capitalist development in which certain spaces are pri-
vileged, developed and finally abandoned by capital as it floods to new
locations to repeat the process (Smith, 2010, p. 196). Once overaccumula-
tion strikes again, capital may abandon the new location and return to the
original space of development now devalued by the exodus of capital
and so prepared for another round of accumulation. Capitalist develop-
ment proceeds by fixing an ever greater quantity of capital in the landscape,
permitting the greater mobility of capital (Harvey, 2006b). The result is a
128 STEVE ROLF
dynamic, shifting system of space economies centred around differentially

valued, productive, and capital intensive, agglomerations of fixed capital.
This forms the crystallisation of an international division of labour (Post,
2010).
Within the absolute space of the world economy, concrete spaces of
capital exist in a relative relation to each other being either more or less
productive than the world average. The agglomeration of capitals into
concrete fixed capital formations logically entails a tendency for those
involved to collectively ameliorate the effects of competition: through
establishing generalised conditions of production including legal structures,

a stable economic environment (infrastructure, monetary stability, a skilled
labour force) and attempts to externalise the costs of devaluing (for
instance, through currency wars). States can be conceived as organic
outcomes of the tendency for agglomerated capitals to provide forms of
security and legality in defence of their property (Barker, 2009, pp. 16 20).
This leads Harvey (2005, p. 105) to conclude that although ‘capital did not
invent territorial administration. It seized hold of political-administrative
structures and adapted, transformed, and in some instances totally revolu-
tionised them. If states had not existed, in short, capitalism would have had
to invent them’. Those spaces with superior spatial strategies will triumph
in this competitive battle.
The emergence of what Harvey (2001) calls ‘structured coherences’ of
capital accumulation, whereby capital of multiple forms, turnover times,
and sizes, is brought into some kind of functional unity under the authority
of a capitalist state can thus be understood as an effect of the inner
dynamics of capital. The development of an ever shifting division of labour
in the world economy produces its opposite in a territorially fixed system of
states. As Bukharin (1917) writes, ‘the internationalisation of capital is
simultaneously its nationalisation’. The states system provides the fixity in
which capital mobility can occur to an even greater degree, without threa-
tening the basis for its own survival. This process provides the material
basis for an international states system as a primary means of mediating
the sharp contradiction between fixity and motion inherent in the process
of capitalist development (Holloway, 1996).
Uneven geographical development determines the shape of the states
system and the varying forms and functions of its constituent states.11 As
Pradella (2013, p. 130) comments on Marx’s method, ‘the logic of the state
is internal to the logic of capital. For this reason, although historically state
intervention was primary for the genesis of industrial capital, its analysis
logically follows the analysis of accumulation’.
THE LIMITS TO UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT THEORY
We may conclude that the uneven geographic development of capital accu-

mulation contains the potentiality of a hierarchically organised and territo-
rially differentiated political system, on the basis of the laws of capital
accumulation outlined by Marx in Capital. The geographical elaboration
of Marx’s categories suggests that capital survives ‘by occupying space,
by producing a space …’. but ‘the space that homogenizes has nothing
homogenous about it’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 21, 1991, p. 308). This marks an
advance upon world systems theory, as it roots uneven development in the

effect of competitive battles between capitals and states in production rela-
tions, rather than in the problematic concept of unequal exchange (Cox,
2008; Shaikh, 1979, 1980; cf. Amin, 2010; Wallerstein, 1979, 2000).
However, uneven development theory’s functionalist view of the state leads
it to highly abstract and unsatisfactory explanations for the actual patterns
of unevenness that characterise the world economy.
Much like orthodox International Relations (IR), uneven development
theory tends either to present states in a functionalist manner, as unified
representations of pregiven national interests, or to refuse to theorise them
at all.12 Smith’s (2010) classic study of uneven development begins by refin-
ing the concept of the production of nature to analyse the production of
space in general and that of a distinctively capitalist space, before consider-
ing how the opposed tendencies towards fixity and motion in the capitalist
production of space are expressed in the production of urban, global
and national spatial scales. As Smith (2010, pp. 182, 187) argues, the con-
tradiction between the equalisation and differentiation of space tends
towards differentiation at the urban scale (‘through the centralisation of
capital, urban space is capitalized as an absolute space of production’,) and
equalisation at the global scale (through ‘the attempt to level the world’s
labour power to the status of a commodity’).13
Once the analysis reaches the scale of the nation-state, however, it hits a
block:
The actual determination of this [national] scale does not come directly from the dialec-
tic of equalisation and differentiation, however much it is provoked by this relationship,
but is politically determined by a series of historical deals, compromises, and wars.
(Smith, 2010, p. 190)
Smith appears to conclude that (i) the states system is only contingently
necessary for capital (and explicates this position more fully in Cowen &
Smith, 2009; Smith, 2006), and (ii) capital theory is inherently unsuited to
130 STEVE ROLF
analysis of the political nature of state power and its exercise. His aim is
explicitly to ‘offer a skeletal account of the economic rationale for uneven
development’ (Smith, 2010, p. 284). So the dynamics of each spatial scale
of organisation can be theorised as part of capital’s value relations apart
from the states-system which, within the bounds of uneven development
theory, appears as a product of pure historical contingency.
The confusion over the theorisation of the state in the uneven develop-
ment literature more frequently results in a functionalism, which assumes
that states relay the pregiven interests of capitalists unmediated. David
Harvey suggests a functionalist view of state space that treats institutions

as unmediated expressions of fixed capital formations in a given territory: a
view that he has since recognised as inadequate, noting that he has yet to
discover any theory of the state which avoids this pitfall (Harvey, 2001,
2006b, chapter 13, 2006a). Kevin Cox’s concept of local ‘growth coalitions’
presents state policy as the outcome of state capture by fractions of capital,
representing their own particular interests abstracting almost entirely
from the form of state (cf. Cox & Wood, 1997). Similarly, Amin and Thrift’s
(1994) concept of ‘institutional thickness’ in the relations between firms and
states fails to adequately theorise any distinctively political dimensions to
regional development patterns.
The result is an extremely restrictive treatment of politics as territorially
defined struggles over the fruits of unevenly developed space. In this strug-
gle, actors (represented by class fractions directly tied to segments of the
productive forces) are assumed to hold coherent territorial interests and to
bear these interests in power contests in an unmediated fashion. The form
that states take is either assumed to directly correspond to the ‘general’
interests of capital, or to be an unalterable barrier to certain forms of capi-
tal accumulation while it is structurally advantageous to others. In concep-
tualising states in this way, uneven development theorists overlook the
accumulation strategies that emerge as states and capitals contend with
uneven development and its ‘whip of external necessity’. Massey notes this
problem in her own work (1995, p. 45), arguing that state economic regula-
tion should be understood primarily as a function of ‘politics, set
obviously within the wider constraints of economic conditions but not
simply relaying them unmodified, and as a function of the construction of
that particular political hegemony’.
If the uneven development of capital entails the development of a states
system, the functioning of this system is surely contingent on the form that
it takes; just as, for example, the rise of joint stock companies alters the
accumulation process in a determinate way by virtue of the uniquely
concentrated form they take (Marx, 1978, pp. 310 311). Since the form of
state is constituted through the political mechanisms of the organisation of
classes and class fractions as social forces, capable of acting in their own
interests; the development of hegemonic projects; and methods of state
intervention. These all entail their own unique set of determinations, none
of which the rigidly demarcated capital-theoretical perspective of uneven
development theorists is able to fully consider. As Poulantzas (2014,
pp. 128 129) view of the state: ‘like “capital”, it is rather a relationship of
forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship
among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed within the State
in a necessarily specific form’.
A second problem is that uneven development theory tends to assume
contemporary patterns of uneven development can be sufficiently explained
by an elaboration of the categories developed by Marx in Capital. Weeks
(2001) posits the existence of unevenness as the outcome of competitive
agglomerations of fixed capital with productivity differentials. Guido
Starosta (2010a, 2010b), in an otherwise fascinating critique of the global
value chains literature, attempts to capture contemporary global patterns
of uneven development without consideration of state mercantilism or
imperialism. Arrighi et al. (2003) argue that core countries are locked in a
virtuous cycle of capturing the gains from large corporations facilitated by
plentiful savings and credit, while firms in peripheral states languish in low
value added segments of production networks. Callinicos (2009) cites
the potential of rising returns to scale facilitated through agglomeration
economies. Selwyn (2012, 2014) suggests that the relentless and shifting
exploitation of global production networks by transnational corporations
debars late entrants from competing with firms in the core countries.
These various explanations shy away from internalising within the logic
of theory the active role of the states system in upholding patterns of
uneven development, alongside the intermittent interruption of such
patterns by contender development. The role of hegemonic state strategy,
in its destabilization of developmental states, and the construction of inter-
national organisations that behave in a mercantilist fashion, is absent from
such accounts. But this is the striking fact of contemporary capitalism. As
Gowan (2010, p. 135) notes, the past few decades have seen states massively
increase their roles in ‘constructing secure market bases for their compa-
nies, training workforces, supplying transport and communication infra-
structures and, of course, the exercise of geopolitical influence to open
and protect overseas markets’. A fuller explanation would point to the
structural and strategic role of competition between states in establishing
132 STEVE ROLF
preferable conditions for capital to operate in the core at the expense of the
periphery, and in shaping the superior structures of capitals located in core
states (Gowan, 1999; Harman, 1991).
Why has uneven geographical development theory shied away from
doing so? A suggestion may be to find in its disavowal of an examination
of combined development. Desai (2013, p. 14) notes a lack of attention to
‘the multiple instances of combined capitalist development’ in the post-war
period. Smith (2006, p. 185) suggests that the qualifier ‘combined’ is no
longer necessary, since it is implied by the very global reach of capitalism
theorised by Lenin in 1916 (‘the colonial policy of the capitalist countries

has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet’). The
problem with Smith’s assumption is that it draws attention away from
Trotsky’s most prescient point of analysis: that unevenness is reproduced
under international capitalism not only in an economistic fashion (by the geo-
graphically uneven development of the productive forces), but also politically,
under the direction of unique and varied state forms directing accumulation
as part of an imperialist chain. As the system evolves spasmodically, it
enforces conformity on the totality upon pain of devaluation. But imperial-
ism’s role in ‘throwing back’ some parts of the world, alongside the
disruptive effects of the ‘contradictions of social amalgamation’ in late
developers, strives to concentrate this pain outside of the capitalist core.14
Uneven development, conceived as an outcome of the purely economic
dynamics of capital, remains blind to the mediation of capital’s tendencies
through sets of political actors. While it keenly comprehends the fixity/
motion dialectic at the level of the city and at a global scale, its orientation
means that it struggles to grasp the functioning of these opposed tendencies
at the national scale where politics frequently intervenes and directs
capital’s tendencies according to transformed logics of calculation. In so
far as it deals with state regulation, this account can only conceive of it in
functionalist terms. A relational theory of uneven development, integrated
with a politicised theory of the state as a material component of capitalist
development, can better conceptualise peripheral state-led development
and its challenges.15
A STATE THEORETICAL EXTENSION
The functionalist approach to the state in uneven development assumes

that the state acts in the general interests of capital accumulation, as
opposed to the short-term interests of capitalists themselves. However, as
state theorists have demonstrated, the ‘aggregate requirements’ of capital

accumulation are not a pregiven, measurable quantity, but a strategically
constituted product of the exercise of hegemony by a particular fraction
of the capitalist class. The capitalist state ‘realizes the function of
political hegemony which the [fractured] bourgeoisie is unable to achieve’
(Poulantzas, 2014, p. 284). Including the political determinations of the
states system into an analysis of uneven development, as an outgrowth of
this economic set of determinations, provides a better explanation for parti-
cular patterns of global and national unevenness and their relationship
with state forms. This section aims to open up the space of a consideration
of these determinations, before providing a critique of state theory for its
treatment of state forms in the singular.
It is therefore necessary to identify the process by which the ‘general
interests’ of capital are formed, articulated and pursued in every case; as
well as how they become mediated by their conflict with alternative inter-
ests and class (fractional) strategies (Jessop, 1990, p. 215). Such an
approach also points towards a means of theorising interstate relations, as
any actors wishing to take state power must take on the problems of mana-
ging capitals’ global competitive strategy. As Adrian Smith (2015, p. 10)
argues, ‘the particular configuration of the state and the accumulation
regime, involving the organization of forms of insertion into the world
economy through global production networks, is contingent and associated
with the wider social struggles involved in establishing the form of the
state’. We cannot conceptualise concrete patterns of accumulation without
a politicised reading of state regulation.
Jessop (1982, p. 221, 1992, 1999, 2008), the most noted contemporary
state theorist, develops an incredibly insightful theory of the state as a
social relationship comprising a set of institutions which ‘cannot, qua [an]
institutional ensemble, exercise power’ without the successful exercise of
hegemony by a particular class or class fraction ‘which must be consti-
tuted politically’. Thus the state does not merely function for capital. This
functioning is contingent on the successful political constitution of a
particular faction of the capitalist class which can present its interest as
a universal interest, binding together a heterogeneous territory into a
(relatively) unified state.16 Capital, at the level of abstraction at which
Marx was working in his economic manuscripts, can only supply the raw
materials for this political process and cannot guarantee its success.
For Jessop, there is no necessary correspondence between the separate
‘chains of causality’ implied by economic and political approaches to social
analysis respectively and that though they may intersect, the autonomous
134 STEVE ROLF
logics of economics, politics and ideology tend to operate according to their

own causal pathways (1982, p. 213). A rigid analytical separation is thus
maintained between the political level of the state, and the economic level
of capitalist development, because of the impossibility of reconciling these
logics due to the unpredictability of state forms:
While the combination or interaction of different causal chains produces a determinate
outcome (necessity), there is no single theory that can predict or determine the manner
in which such causal chains converge and/or interact (contingency). (Jessop, 1982,
p. 213)
Where Holloway and Picciotto (1977, p. 96) insist that ‘the state is not
capital’ and must be treated as part of a separate chain of causality to that
of the value form, they maintain that there nonetheless exists a ‘generality
implicit in [the state’s] form’, the source of which remains ambiguous in
their work. Jessop (2008, p. 8), however, contends that there can be no
general theory of capitalist states: although states find their basis in the
capitalist value form, they exist on a fundamentally different plane of exis-
tence and operate to a logic almost entirely removed from that of capital:
A state could operate principally as a capitalist state, a military power, a theocratic
regime, a representative democratic regime answerable to civil society, an apartheid
state, or an ethico-political state … [while there] is no unconditional guarantee that the
modern state will always (or ever) be essentially capitalist.
Thus an attempt to extend value theory to encompass the state (as the
German state derivationists did, cf. Clarke, 1991; Nachtwey & ten Brink,
2008) is to wrongly invoke ‘one plane or axis of theoretical determination
to explain everything about the state and politics’ (Jessop, 1982, p. 212).
For Jessop, at the level of the state, contingency rules and only a partial
consideration of the ‘economic limitations’ confronting states is neces-
sary.17 This focuses on the plethora of state forms produced by modern
capitalism is a relief from the rigidly abstract model of uneven geographical
development, and sits well with Trotsky’s (2007, p. 132) insistence that
‘economic [and political] peculiarities of different countries are in no way
of a subordinate character’ in understanding their development. Two inter-
related problems are, however, evident here.
Firstly, Jessop maintains a rigid analytical separation between state and
capital because of the lack of a concept of uneven geographic development
in his theory of the state. Treating the state in the singular rather than
as one component of a multiplicity of interacting states results in an
aspatial model, in which interactions between units have no determinate
effect on the individual units themselves (see Rosenberg, 2013). This also
precludes consideration of differences between advanced states and those

pursuing combined forms of development. UCD provides a useful correc-
tive to this problem: an orientation that accounts for the production of a
multiplicity of states as an outgrowth of the value form suggests that
the determinant effects of this system on its components cannot be
overlooked. Recognising the point at which the uneven production of
space entails the production of a states system, this system can be better
located as an inherent part of the value form rather than as its potential
antagonist.
Second, Jessop’s arguments are rooted in the regulation school approach

of Aglietta (2010) (see also Jessop & Sum, 2006). In prioritising the analysis of
state forms and their interventionist capacities, this theory abstracts from
uneven geographic development as both the material basis for the states
system, and as a determinant of state form (Budd, 2008). Jessop thus tends
to fall prey to both methodological nationalism and politicism: in which
states are granted significant autonomy in their relations with their ‘own’
economies.18 Instead, these national economies should instead be under-
stood as spaces of global capitalism (Bryan, 2001). As McNally argues
(2014, p. 25) a national economy is already a ‘space of world money, a
hyper-complex space, to borrow a term from Lefebvre, which resides inside
the state itself and thus operates as an internal power, rather than merely
as an external constraint’. Any contest for state power, then regardless
of how radical is a contest for the responsibility to successfully manage a
particular segment of world capital. Catch up development must internalise
the logic of the value form in its state strategy.
UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT:

TOWARDS A RESEARCH PROGRAMME
Presenting the states system as the result of uneven geographic develop-

ment cuts against the grain of most historical materialist theories of the
state, which have, as Barker (1991, p. 210) points out, treated it in the sin-
gular rather than as part of a system and consequently as a potentially
‘non-capitalist’ form, since it is not subject to the discipline of interstate
competition:
The strict demarcation line drawn between ‘state’ and ‘capital’ rests on an account of
the state form in which the state is treated in the singular … the bounds of capitalism
are treated as coterminous with the national frontiers. That is, rather than seeing
136 STEVE ROLF
capitalist society as a global ‘social formation’, as a real totality, the world is seen as a
set of capitalist societies, a mere agglomeration and not a unity.
By returning to the work of theorists of uneven geographic development,

who have developed Marx’s categories in a way that accounts for the geo-
graphy of accumulation, we have established a material and logical basis
internal to the capital relation upon which to posit political multiplicity.
Locating the drive to differentiation as an outcome of the spatial division
of labour, and to equalisation as a consequence of the equalisation of the
profit rate by mobile capital, we have identified logical-theoretical mechan-

isms, rooted in the dynamics of capitalism, which produce UCD.
From this perspective, variations in national ‘accumulation regimes’,
‘modes of regulation’ and state forms, can be better conceptualised as
(a) aspects of uneven development and the international division of labour
and (b) the determinate effect of the political ‘moment’ of accumulation in
moudling modes of regulating capital. Modes of state regulation and inter-
vention cannot be divorced from the coercive operation of the law of value
in the world economy. State strategies are, after all, fundamentally competi-
tive strategies shaped from the outset in competition with other state
regulatory strategies. States can then only have limited autonomy over the
accumulation of capital occurring within their borders, precisely because
these extend beyond the territorial sovereignty of any particular state.
Variations in state forms and systems of accumulation can be conceived of
as elements of a variegated capitalist totality, rather than disconnected
‘varieties of capitalism’ (Peck & Theodore, 2007).
Trotsky’s major theoretical contribution was to integrate this political
moment of accumulation with its broader context in the uneven develop-
ment of global capital avoiding the ‘voluntarism’ whereby much state
theory grants states a great deal of agency (Bonefeld, 1994). Indeed,
Trotsky emphasised state failure and the developmental traps facing Russia
at the expense of its success, providing an interesting consonance with the
‘variegated capitalism’ literature’s recent suggestion that state theory pro-
blematically tends to privilege ‘coherence’ of political economies at the
national scale at the expense of a focus on regulatory crisis and failure
(Zhang & Peck, 2014). UCD is, by contrast, explicitly tuned to exploring
uneven patterns of development within a social formation because of its
focus on catch up strategies and their peculiar impacts inside social forma-
tions. As Davidson (2006, p. 23) notes, ‘Trotsky, who emphasised more
than any of his contemporaries the reality of the world economy, was also
the thinker who refocused attention from “the international” in general to
its impact on individual nation states’.
Using a reformulated concept of Trotsky’s ideas, we may elaborate a

nonreductionist methodology for the study of states, their forms and their
process of transformation.19 A schema is established for examining the
impact of combined development upon a late developing social formation:
(1) Begin by examining global unevenness at multiple scales, as constituted
by the uneven geographic development of the productive forces.
(2) Explore how a late developing social formation inserts itself into a new
pattern of global capital accumulation, combining its development with
the most advanced capitalist states through the appropriation of some

of their progressive elements.
(3) Explore the uneven impact of this combination within the late develop-
ing social formation itself in terms of class formation, urban/rural
divisions, political contestations inside the state, and novel ideological
forms unique to the social formation in question.
(4) Consider how this unevenness produces unique social tensions that
become reflected in state form and strategy, feeding back into the states
system and affecting international patterns of unevenness in novel
ways.
Section 2 noted the three major dynamics enforced by UCD upon late
developers:
• The ‘whip of external necessity’;
• The ‘privilege of historical backwardness’;
• The ‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’ (cf. Davidson, 2006;
Trotsky, 2009).
My proposed schema integrates these three dynamics into a research
framework as follows. Analysis begins with an account of the structural
tendencies in the production of space at both the national and international
scales, and the international division of labour that results. Uneven develop-
ment is not conceived arbitrarily (Rioux, 2014) but as the uneven development
of capital’s productive forces across space, at defined scales of analysis.
Uneven development constitutes the material basis for the international
states system; each single state exists in a relationship of competitive
tension with the economic and military capacities of every other state,
which is experienced as the competitive imperative to modernise (the ‘whip
of external necessity’) (Mann, 1993; Trotsky, 2009, p. 5).
Research should then explore precisely how this competition is mediated
by the form of state, and the unique sets of actors charged with its opera-
tion (politicians, security officials, bureaucrats) who hold distinctive logics
138 STEVE ROLF
of calculation. These actors are designated the task of overcoming the

structural constraints imposed by the global accumulation of capital by
seeking specialized advantages for their particular home capitals on the
global stage through tariffs, trade agreements, treaties and military inter-
vention. While capital moves, state managers remain bound to a particular
territory (Harvey, 2001). The geoeconomic conjuncture is thus an active
moment in the composition of any single state, shaping the conditions of
the possible for state managers in their strategies for securing the accumula-
tion process.
The structural limits imposed by the global patterning of accumulation

are never absolute, and states in the periphery hold at least the possibility
of improving their position because of the ever present possibility of skip-
ping stages of development. Combined capitalist development (the material
basis for state managers’ strategic autonomy) allows the possibility of tech-
nology transfer, the importation of organisational techniques, social prac-
tices and ideologies whereby late developing states can (particularly
under a programme of state-led development) break with patterns of
inequality between states: the ‘privilege of historical backwardness’
(Gerschenkron, 1966; Trotsky, 2009, pp. 20 21). This necessitates a focus
on state agency and strategies, successful or otherwise. In pursuing
combined development, social formations tend to experience the ‘contradic-
tions of sociological amalgamation’ (Allinson & Anievas, 2010)20 associated
with the import of more developed technologies and social forms. Precisely
because these technologies and organisational techniques cannot be
imported wholesale, but are implanted into a social formation with
a unique class and state structure, they serve to alter processes of class for-
mation, class struggles, state forms, peripheral social in unpredictable ways.
This point draws our attention towards the problematic of what may be
termed ‘bounded complexes of production and circulation’, ‘territorial pro-
duction complexes’, ‘structured coherences’, or ‘territorial assemblages’ of
fixed capital: in other words, the social and technological mixes making up
national economies (Braunmuhl, 1978; Harvey, 2001; Storper & Walker,
1989; Swyngedouw, 1992). Classic theories of ‘catch up’ development such
as Gerschenkron (1966) and Veblen (2003) have conceived these in purely
economic terms. But the emergence of such territorial assemblages of capi-
tal is, as we have seen, in no way a merely economic process but critically
reliant on the state. As Swyngedouw (1992, p. 425) argues,
The uniqueness of territorial assemblages as a force of production, compared with tech-

nology, is the combination of the indivisibility of its use value on the one hand, and its
rootedness in space on the other. This double characteristic defines the unique nature of
the socialized character of territorial organization as a force of production [my italics].
Because the state provides an organising role for labour markets, and a
multiplicity of fixed capitals and infrastructures with differential turnover
times, catch up development is intrinsically political. Since it by definition
cannot be organised on the initiative of a single or collective capitalist’s
short-term interests, catching up requires the intervention of a state in order
to construct a socialized territorial assemblage able to compete with more
advanced productive forces. This may empower fractions of the capitalist
class that (at least in appearance) are antithetical to contemporary forms of

neoliberal capitalist development (consider how development has bolstered
China’s Communist Party, or Lula’s Workers’ Party in Brazil).
This adds a new dimension of complexity to the simple notion of import-
ing technologies in order to catch up with more developed social forma-
tions. What happens when a technological innovation is torn from its
context in an ‘indivisible’ complex of use values in an advanced capitalist
society, and implanted into a late developer? Trotsky’s answer was a rapid
pace of change, ‘national peculiarities’ of class formation and development
embodied in entirely new forms of state, and explosive political struggles.
The transformation in the balance of class forces within a state can lead it
to unpredictable geopolitical conjunctures with its allies and rivals. This has
the effect of producing new patterns of unevenness in the world economy
in a non-teleological manner. A deepened concept of unevenness is thus
arrived at, shaped by the ‘political’ and the destabilising, path dependent
effects of combined social development.
IMPLICATIONS FOR GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY
Reworking the theory of UCD also has implications for our understanding
of the interstate system. The system of capitalist states is the outcome of
the dialectic between the international compulsions of capital and its
continued national political mediation. While ‘the political … is a moment
of a global relation it is expressed not in the existence of a global state
but in the existence of a multiplicity of apparently autonomous, terri-
torially distinct national states’ (Holloway, 1996, p. 31). States are, in turn,
only particular sets of specific institutions, charged with establishing the
universal interest within a social formation (Poulantzas, 2014). There is a
perpetual tension between the inherently extra-national instincts of capital
140 STEVE ROLF
(a general phenomenon) and the national character of any given state

(a particular phenomenon), as states form the spatially fixed components
of a geographically dynamic totality.
This contradiction between the universal and the particular at the heart
of every capitalist state begets another, with which each individual state
must contend: state strategy projects the contradiction between an impulse
to organise global capitalist expansion, and to protect and arbitrate the
particular capitals and sets of class relations within their territorial jurisdic-
tion. As they enter into contestation with all rival states, states are forced
to either accept or attempt to improve their location in an imperialist chain.

They must manage the demands of maintaining both cohesion and compe-
titiveness in both the international and their specific national political
economies. Varying conjunctures produce varying commitments to some
configuration of these options, and a certain fulfilment of all criteria may
be possible for hegemonic states in certain circumstances. Commitment to
a programme of national social development and toward supporting the
contemporary configuration of hegemony in the global political economy
may become part of any hegemonic project within a state,21 but while jug-
gling the two may be possible in periods of global expansion, crisis tends to
frustrate hegemonic stability and deepen imperial rivalries (Harvey, 2006b).
State policy is always articulated on unevenly developed space since the
pattern of capital accumulation and class relations in any given state are
subject to perpetual alterations. This means that the perpetual dynamism
of global accumulation will upset any ephemeral spatio-temporal fixity
achieved by hegemonic formations (Harvey, 2003). As such, structural
transformations in patterns of capital accumulation on the world scale
have the power to upend even the strongest hegemonic forms in the global
system. As certain spaces rise at the expense of others, combined develop-
ment becomes a producer of unevenness between states and frustrates con-
vergence across the global economy: consider the experience of late
developers falling into the middle-income trap (Cai, 2012). Because of the
complex interdependencies evident in hegemonic power structures, any
radical social challenge from a counter-hegemonic alliance to state power
in a subordinate state may thus pose a potential threat to the entire global
order.22
Using the reformulated UCD perspective, we may also move towards
accounting for geopolitical periods (classical imperialism, the Cold War,
the new liberal internationalism and the new imperialism) with reference to
the spatial patterning of capital accumulation.23 As an outcome of the com-
petitive interactions of various state forms, these geopolitical periodisations
must be included as necessary factors shaping any state strategy. Whether a

particular social formation embarks upon a road of challenging or acquies-
cing to dominant powers in the international system cannot be reduced to
its structural location within that system, but must examine the social basis
of the state, its form of insertion into global accumulation and geopolitical
patterns, the particular strategic balance of class forces within the social
formation, and the type of state which is created by these processes.
CONCLUSION
UCD provides a means of formulating a nonreductionist theory of the

states system, which is particularly suited to analysing the social content of
late developing states. Taking a detour through theories of uneven develop-
ment and the state, I have aimed to use Trotsky’s insights in order to pre-
sent a theory of states based firmly in Marx’s account of capitalist
development. I have suggested that any attempt to understand contempor-
ary capitalism without a materialist theory of the states system is inade-
quate, while theories that focus their attention on states in isolation often
remain blind to their broader determinants in the uneven development of
capitalism. Exploring how capital is both uneven and combined provides a
means of analysing states without falling prey to either globalising logic or
to methodological nationalism, treating capitalism as a systematically
differentiated totality.
This paper has also opened further space for a consideration of distinc-
tive capitalist and statist/imperialist (if not ‘territorial’) rationalities, as a
necessary condition for the reproduction of the capital relation (Callinicos,
2009; Harvey, 2003). Each operates through a unique set of actors (capital-
ists and state managers respectively), with different responsibilities and
rationalities in the system of commodity production. But these distinctive
modes of strategic action remain differentiated parts of the single logic of
capital. These ‘mutually independent and antithetical processes form a
unity’, in the process of the reproduction of capitalist class power (Marx,
1979, p. 209).
Recent theories of world politics have stressed the re-emergence of mul-
tipolarity (Callinicos, 2010; Desai, 2013; van der Pijl, 2006). While the fact
of an increasing balancing away from US power is self-evident, its charac-
ter and implications are far more ambiguous and difficult to characterise
(see Starrs, 2014; Stephen, 2014; ten Brink, 2014; for contrasting
142 STEVE ROLF
perspectives). To what extent are the BRICs ensnared in circuits of capital

accumulation? Will they acquiesce to US leadership? Is the resurgence of
deep interimperialist rivalries inevitable? One means of clarifying matters is
to explore in much greater detail the effects of combined development on
the internal constitution of the societies in question. Class structures, sys-
tems of capital accumulation, institutional forms and cultural particulari-
ties all play determinate roles in the dynamics of development. Indeed,
conceptualising shifting catch up strategies is impossible without exploring
how deepening economic integration employed by technology and indus-
trial development implies novel developmental trajectories and national

peculiarities, and alternative approaches to interstate relations. This
approach necessitates treatment of the world system as a differentiated and
mediated totality in which state forms play active roles in directing the
course of accumulation (Davidson, 2012b).
In the process of exploring the social constitution of states pursuing
catch up development, attention must be given to the world structures of
accumulation in which they are embedded. For instance, Japan and West
Germany could pursue their post-war combined development in the context
of the dominance of Keynesian policy and Fordist industry, highly comple-
mentary with state-led capitalist development and the supportive ‘umbrella’
of US hegemony. The neoliberal period, by contrast, problematises state-
led catch up strategies, as international organisations explicitly seek to
contain developmental states in an atmosphere of financialisation and
heightened competition for global markets (Desai, 2013; Kiely, 2012). One
consequence of this is that we may anticipate the structure of territorial
assemblages of capital being formed in late developing societies today to
look very different to earlier cases: in terms of the capital’s composition,
innovation capacities and relations with wider society. Future research
could explore a periodisation of forms of combined capitalist development,
contingent upon the structures and conjunctures of world order and hege-
mony (cf. Clarke, 2001). In this way, catch up development is not treated
as the inevitable result of capital’s see-saw space economy in which every
region is bound to experience a leveling out of development but instead
as politically mediated through hegemonic projects contested from within
and without the capitalist state. Closer attention to the particularities of
national and international class formation would be the implication here
(cf. Bieler & Morton, 2014).
Developing a historical materialism suited to the task of analysing con-
temporary social formations requires a theoretical orientation that is truly
political economic in its outlook. If there is a contradiction between the
spacelessness of capital flows and the territoriality of the states system, then
this contradiction can only exist within the logic of capital. This states
system has long been subsumed under the imperatives of capitalist accumu-
lation; as Marx (1979, p. 919) writes, ‘national debts, i.e., the alienation of
the state whether despotic, constitutional or republican marked with
its stamp the capitalistic era’. States cannot be understood without grasping
their fundamental subsumption under the law of value. While this sub-
sumption is not passive but active: states’ competitive strategic agency, and
their territorialised form of competition, ultimately serve to reproduce the
capital relation.24 The novel, non-teleological patterns of development

unevenness and combination produces should serve as the starting point
for future analyses of the geopolitical economy.
NOTES
1. I take the concept of an ‘active moment’ from Harvey’s (2006a, 2006b) work.
In my usage, it implies that states and political struggles are effects of capital accu-
mulation, but they also causally determine the shape of this accumulation process.
2. A third means of understanding states and their interactions is offered by rea-
lism in International Relations theory, and its mercantilist equivalent in interna-
tional political economy. This work avoids the ‘globalisation’ trap by cutting off
states from their domestic social makeup entirely, treating them as ‘black boxes’
whereby internal political processes can be ignored in theorising their external sys-
temic interactions (cf. Gilpin, 2001; Krasner, 1983; Waltz, 1979). This approach is
the mirror image of ‘internalist’ approaches to the extent it has no tools with which
to link the internal and external aspects of states. IR ‘avoids the immediate problem
of methodological nationalism; but it also produces an anomalous conception of
“the international” as a dimension of the social world which subsists without socio-
logical foundations’ (Rosenberg, 2013, p. 570).
3. Cited in the 2007 introduction by Michael Löwy.
4. This competition does not of necessity take military form. In fact, it is far
more likely to take the form of tariffs, protectionism and the formation of regional
trading blocs.
5. See the Varieties of Capitalism literature, which catalogues multiple types of
diversity across political economies but has thus far struggled to convincingly
explain (cf. Hall & Soskice, 2001; Hall & Thelen, 2009; for a critique, see Bruff &
Ebenau, 2014).
6. Compare Marx’s more or less scattered remarks on taxation, with the 100 +
pages each devoted to: the conversion of surplus value into industrial profit,
merchant capital, interest bearing capital and ground rent, respectively.
7. Pradella’s (2013) recent contention that Marx was here theorising a globally
expansionary system and thus did to some extent aim to incorporate political
mediations into his theory of accumulation in Capital as, for instance, in
144 STEVE ROLF
the chapter on primitive accumulation does not resolve the problem that he delib-
erately chose not to incorporate the competitive dynamic of multiple nation states
into the scope of his analysis. As she notes (2013, p. 124), ‘in Volume I Marx does
not take into account the relations in circulation and the multiplicity of nations’.
8. This position is made explicit by work on the new imperialism, amongst it
Harvey’s New Imperialism (2003) and Arrighi’s (2007) late work, which treats the
territorial logic of states as opposite and separate from the ‘economic’ logic of capi-
tal. Suggesting means to conceptually overcome such a dualism is one aim of this
paper.
9. My approach, however, differs critically from Rosenberg’s, in that I assume
uneven development to be a specifically capitalist process rather than a transhistoric
process which precedes capitalism. Geopolitical economy should also question just
how ‘anarchical’ interstate relations are: or whether their interactions are structured
enough to make them amenable to theorisation (thanks to Radhika Desai for this
point).
10. This is evidenced by many critical studies of globalisation, which repeatedly
found a tendency (even before the crisis of 2008) for supposedly transnational cor-
porations to trade mainly within their home state or home region (see Rugman,
2005; Rugman & Verbeke, 2004). More concretely, the crisis of 2008 acted to put
such novel ‘globalized’ forms of spatial regulation to the test and they emerged
wanting, as capitalist states provided enormous rescue packages for supposedly
deterritorialized forms of capitalist finance and production (see Therborn, 2011).
11. Avoiding a functionalist reading of the production of this states system
requires an historical account of its emergence out of feudal relations of production
and its simultaneous transformation and incorporation into the capitalist mode of
production (Anievas & Nisancioglu, 2013; Wood, 2002).
12. On international relations theory, see Waltz (1979); for a critique, see
Rosenberg (1994), and Buzan and Little (2001).
13. Though the equalisation of space is certainly never achieved in class-riven
cities, close geographical proximity of the labour force to concentrations of fixed
capital permits a more or less absolute space of capitalist production to develop in
which the law of value operates unmediated through a system of ground rents.
Concomitantly, the global scale forms the site of a purely differentiated space; while
extremities of wealth are evident in underdeveloped states (and poverty in developed
countries), they are broadly found concentrated in advanced capitalist societies
and this global system is upheld through the disparity in valuations of labour
power. Arrighi, Silver, and Brewer (2003, p. 5) discover that the main axis of
income inequality remains international, accounting for around two thirds of total
income inequality, rather than within states or regions.
14. To this extent, Trotsky took on board Lenin’s theory of imperialism which
is more nuanced than it is often credited for in its account of why a nonterritorial
form of imperialism comes to dominate under advanced capitalism (see
Sakellaropoulos & Sotiris, 2015).
15. A second danger in the existing literature on uneven development (the first
being that of capitulating to form-determinism) is the state-derivationist argument
that it is possible to ‘read’ the existence of the capitalist state from the capital-
relation alone. This, I believe, accounts for the conceptual consonance between
Marxist geography and Open Marxism (for a critique, see Bieler, Bruff, & Morton,
2010).
16. For a rich and varied literature on this question, see the work of the neo-
Gramscian state theorists (summated in Overbeek, 2000; updated in Worth, 2011).
17. The political corollary of Jessop’s position is the eurocommunist strategy
pursued by Western European communist parties from the 1970s until their decline,
which eschewed revolutionary politics in favour of a struggle for workers’ hege-
mony within the state. Inspired by the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and
Nicos Poulantzas, this approach was predicated (theoretically, at least) upon a mis-
reading of Gramsci’s concept of the state as ‘the condensate of class struggle’, found
in the works of Poulantzas and avidly incorporated into the practice of the Italian
and French Communist parties in particular (Poulantzas, 2014, pp. 128 129).
While the state is undoubtedly a condensate of class struggle, it is not the only, nor
necessarily the most significant one. The state remains structured in the interests of
capital and thus never meekly reflects the state of workers’ struggle, but rather seeks
to absorb and contain it.
18. Jessop (2008, pp. 23 25) acknowledges the problem of politicism but prefers
it to the risk of capital-centrism. My approach aims to transcend what I regard to
be a false polarity. It should also be noted here that Jessop’s more recent work
(2012, 2014) has moved away from a focus on national states and begun to explore
questions of world market.
19. For a ‘first-cut’ attempt at theorizing the operationalization of combined and
uneven development, which has proved extremely influential in the development of
my ideas, see Anievas’ (2013) excellent account of the outbreak of the First World
War. Anievas goes some way towards constructing the methodological approach
that I present here, but does not at least explicitly relate his methodology to
theoretical debates around the states system (in which he participated see
Anievas, 2010 for an overview). This contribution seeks to plug this gap.
20. Trotsky discussed in particular the effects of sociological amalgamation
across modes of production that is, between feudalism and capitalism. There
seems little reason, however, why this analysis cannot be extended to the contradic-
tory effects of sociological amalgamation inside the capitalist mode of production
but across variegations of it that is, between the predominantly neoliberal global
north and the predominantly state capitalist global south, for instance. For more,
see Davidson (2006).
21. This is precisely the dilemma facing developing economies of the global
South at the present conjuncture. Debates over the possibility of decoupling in
Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) and mounting a challenge to US economic
hegemony have found expression in the creation of a development bank aimed at
fostering an alternative path of accumulation to US-led neoliberalism for underde-
veloped states, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (Bond, 2013), alongside more
recent debates over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
22. Consider the dramatic impact of the North African revolutions of 2011 and
their aftermath, and the panicked response that they continue to generate in both
the US state and its allies. This is the source of the policy of ‘transformismo’ prac-
ticed by advanced capitalist states, to incorporate anti-systemic contender states
into hegemonic global structures: see Cox (1983).
146 STEVE ROLF
23. British financial capital and the rapid development of the core European
states; American Fordism, the rise of US counter-hegemony, and the Cold War;
US-led neoliberalism and financialisation, post-colonialism and perpetual crises in
the periphery. The crisis of neoliberalism has witnessed the resurgence of the periph-
ery as an emerging engine for capital accumulation. For the definitive statement of
this accumulation-geopolitics relationship, see Arrighi (2009).
24. Without wishing to endorse his pessimistic conclusions for emancipatory
politics, we may follow Postone (1993) in considering capital and capitalist strategy
as a (if not the) subject of historical development: there seems no reason why we
cannot incorporate the determinations of the states system into this kind of strategic
model which produces novel forms of social development via strategic agency while
upholding and reproducing a system of class subordination.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Many thanks to Radhika Desai, Alex Anievas, to the two anonymous

reviewers, as well to participants at Historical Materialism journal’s confer-
ence in London, November 2013; all of whom provided valuable comments
on earlier versions of this paper and helped me to refine my argument. The
remaining errors are my own.
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Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

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This paper uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined

Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations,

The post-crisis emergence of multipolarity has reinvigorated Marxist

rate states, systems of accumulation, and hegemonic projects as active

RECENT APPROACHES TO UNEVENNESS AND

As neoliberal conceptions of the withering away of the state were

While providing welcome relief from neoliberal prescriptions, such develop-

THE PROMISE OF UCD

In 2006, Rosenberg (2006) concluded that Leon Trotsky’s analysis of

from the US intervention in Iraq (Callinicos, 2003; Harvey, 2003), the

This problematises any easy notion of catch up development via technolo-

states system, as it systematically differentiates social space under capital-

cation and leveling of the world economy is upset by [imperialism] even

occasionally interactive arena of autonomous units (states): intra and inter-

The promise of UCD in this regard is that it is methodologically interna-

PROBLEMS IN THE UCD LITERATURE

than historically accounted for by theories of imperialism (cf. Bukharin,

contribution of UCD to social theory, then, should be to insist upon a con-

MARX AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT

As Desai (2013, pp. 36 43) shows, the understanding of capitalism as a

(1973, p. 886) that:

Marx’s conception of the world market as a set of contradictory and

Discussing the production of gold in the context of simple capitalist

spatiality of capitalist accumulation, I develop a critique of their work for

UNEVEN GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT

The states system is predicated upon capitalism’s uneven geographic devel-

dialectic, spelled out with reference to the accumulation process theorised

The result, distinct from prior forms of uneven development, is a specifi-

• The increasing ratio of capital to labour power required by capitalist

These forces draw capital together in certain spaces at the expense of

If capital is not to centralise itself to the point of eradicating competition

• The disruptive influence of continuous technological advancement, and

of production (Storper & Walker, 1989, chapter 9).

These counter tendencies inhibit the absolute spatial concentration and

dynamic, shifting system of space economies centred around differentially

establishing generalised conditions of production including legal structures,

THE LIMITS TO UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT THEORY

We may conclude that the uneven geographic development of capital accu-

advance upon world systems theory, as it roots uneven development in the

Harvey suggests a functionalist view of state space that treats institutions

theorised by Lenin in 1916 (‘the colonial policy of the capitalist countries

A STATE THEORETICAL EXTENSION

The functionalist approach to the state in uneven development assumes

state theorists have demonstrated, the ‘aggregate requirements’ of capital

logics of economics, politics and ideology tend to operate according to their

precludes consideration of differences between advanced states and those

Second, Jessop’s arguments are rooted in the regulation school approach

UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT:

Presenting the states system as the result of uneven geographic develop-

By returning to the work of theorists of uneven geographic development,

profit rate by mobile capital, we have identified logical-theoretical mechan-

Using a reformulated concept of Trotsky’s ideas, we may elaborate a

the most advanced capitalist states through the appropriation of some

of calculation. These actors are designated the task of overcoming the

The structural limits imposed by the global patterning of accumulation

The uniqueness of territorial assemblages as a force of production, compared with tech-

class that (at least in appearance) are antithetical to contemporary forms of

IMPLICATIONS FOR GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY

(a general phenomenon) and the national character of any given state