Much Western leftist scholarship on Third World development echoes the Eurocentric political downplaying of the national question by being unable to deal adequately with industrialization for reasons of national defense

Socialist construction has been burdened by what Colin Duncan calls the incubus of heavy industrialization not merely by the Eurocentric emphasis on the industrial proletariat but the USSR need for heavy industry to defend itself from capitalist attack

Necessarily this has meant internal levying of surplus and domestic primary capital accumulation, because the socialist states didn’t do a genocide or a colonialism

The coercive nature of those processes in the USSR (less so in China generally) is then activated as “Stalinism” or “dictatorship” rather than the burden of socialist construction when the western left has yet to develop capacity 2 check its governments aggression

We see kindred debates about extractivism & the suggestion that third world governments shouldn’t have an industrial base but ought instead to rely on peasant farming for socialism

The tragedy is that the worldwide level of productive forces is extremely high, plenty high for leapfrogging over heavy industrial steps *in the absence* of a need for national defense

Such a leapfrogging through relies ultimately at least in large part on western left capacity to constrain government violation of third world/peripheral and semi-peripheral sovereignty

Until then the third world will keep doing a lot of ‘extractivisms’

Read up! https://scholarship.haverford.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1172&context=economics_facpubs

PS I am working on developing some of this into some coherent thinking on heavy industrialization, self-defense, de-linking, agroecology, ecology vs/and development, & socialist construction for @Agrarian_South summer school but life has thrown me a lemon so it’s delayed