Paul Kellogg
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique
Volume 22, Issue 2
June 1989 , pp. 337-362
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900001335
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “left-nationalist” dependency theories dominated Canadian political economy. However, Canada defied the predictions of dependency theory and developed all the class relations appropriate to advanced capitalist societies. The origins of Canadian industrial capitalism were not such that the country was locked into a staple-trap, notwithstanding the very real reliance of the economy on staple-export. In recent years, a number of political economists have offered an “orthodox” Marxist critique of dependency to account for these and other weaknesses in its overall framework. This article first summarizes the dependency arguments, then the arguments of its Marxist critics, and finally introduces a summary look at the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a little-examined but nonetheless important theorist whose insights on the relationship between the state as a capitalist and the growing internationalization of economic life are key to a Marxist re-theorization of Canadian political economy.
Vers la fin des années soixante et le début des années soixante-dix, les théories de la dépendance « nationalistes de gauche » dominaient l'économie politique du Canada. Le Canada a pourtant défié les prévisions de ces théories et développé tous les rapports entre les classes qui caractérisent les sociétés capitalistes avancées. Les débuts du capitalisme industriel au Canada n'étaient pas au point de nous rendre totalement dépendants des produits de base, même s'il ne faut pas ignorer l'importance de l'exportation de ces produits. Dans les dernières annees, un certain nombre de spécialistes en économie politique ont présenté une critique marxiste de type orthodoxes des théories de la dépendance afin d'expliquer certaines faiblesses de son cadre générale d'analyse. Cet article résume d'abord les arguments portant sur les théories de la dépendance, puis ceux des critiques marxistes et présente enfin un bref aperçu des idées de Nikolai Bukharin, un théoricien important mais relativement peu connu. Ses théories du rapport entre l'État vu comme capitaliste et l'internationalisation croissante de la vie économique sont présentées comme étant la clé d'une re-théorisation marxiste de l'économie politique du Canada.
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References Hide All
1 Cited in Clement, Wallace and Drache, Daniel, A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978), 43.Google Scholar
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9 This will not involve a complete survey of all Marxist political economy. In particular, I shall not refer to the numerous and important contributions of Niosi, Jorge including The Economy of Canada: A Study of Ownership and Control (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Canadian Capitalism (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981); and Canadian Multinationals (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985). While it does not deal directly with Canada, Niosi's work co-authored with Bellon, Bertram, The Decline of the American Economy (Montreal: Black Rose, 1988)Google Scholar, is also relevant. I have restricted my horizons to those Marxists who have directly taken up the dialogue with the dependency theorists.
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12 In saying this, I do not wish to imply that the dependency theorists were by and large elite theorists. However, in developing a society-centred framework to understand the Canadian economy, many dependency theorists did use elite theory (whose classic Canadian formulation is found in John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic) as a starting point and developed their analysis through a critique of this approach. The attitude of the dependency theorists to elite theory was fraternal (agreeing that society was in fact based on manifest inequalities) but critical. Dependency theorists disagreed with the purely descriptive bias of this type of sociology and with its acceptance of the inevitability of inequality. They posited an explanation of the inequalities inside Canadian society that implicitly or explicitly contained a prescription—independence and socialism.
13 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 557, 54 and 166.
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27 Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 112. Moore and Wells here do not mean to argue that this unity is a “good” thing. While there might be one central Canadian state, there is very definitely more than one nation. According to their analysis, the historic oppression of the Quebec nation is intensified precisely because the central state is independent and unified.
28 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 8.
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34 Ibid., 10. For a more extensive discussion of this approach to the early years of Canadian industrialization, see Paul Kellogg, “The Early Years of Capitalism in Canada: A Defence of the Home-market Approach,” unpublished paper, York University, 1987.
35 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 16.
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40 To be fair, Panitch has recently developed his analysis in a somewhat different direction, one which is more complex than simply a “branch-plant” approach that makes much of the location of head office. See Panitch, Leo, “Class and Power in Canada,” Monthly Review 36, 11 (1985), 1–13Google Scholar, which makes a coherent case for his rich dependency approach, developing an argument that incorporates dependency from an angle that does not rely on the “Frank school.” In “terms of the extent of foreign ownership and control over the economy and of Canada's international trade pattern… Canada looks more like belonging in the company of Venezuela or Nigeria” (Ibid., 1). He argues that “the material foundations for a centralized Canadian state simply do not exist.” In Canada, industrial and financial capital have not merged into a unified and concentrated national bourgeoisie to form “finance capital”; rather, “Canada's commercially oriented bourgeoisie… entered into a partnership with American industrial capital in Canada.” This has resulted in the “implantation within the social formation of a powerful fraction of foreign industrial capital on a scale unmatched anywhere in the developed capitalist world” (Ibid., 4–5). Canada has a “neo-colonial relationship” with the United States and “nothing approaching a national bourgeoisie with its own political, ideological and economic unity vis-à-vis other national capitals has emerged” (Ibid., 10–11). This allows Panitch to theorize a dependent relationship with the United States that does not rest on the assumptions of the underdevelopment school. The crux of the case is the weakness in Canada of a national bourgeosie. While this phenomenon has not led to the underdevelopment predicted by the Frank school, it has held important implications for the ability of the state to direct the economy. This is an interesting approach, one that merits detailed examination in a separate paper. It does not, however, detract from the thrust of the argument presented here. Dependency in the sense of the Frank school was intimately bound up with a notion of underdevelopment. This underdevelopment was rooted in several structures of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, all of which have been shown by Marxist critics of dependency to be empirically and theoretically weak.
41 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 266.
42 Ibid., 269.
43 Ibid., 269–70.
44 Ibid., 271–72.
45 Ibid., 273.
46 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 12.
47 Ibid., 17, 22.
48 For a compilation of the various official statistics which attempts to prove just that, see Kellogg, Paul, “Canada as a Principal Economy: A Comparative Critique of the ‘Counter-discourse’ of Political Economy,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, McMaster University, Hamilton, 1987.Google Scholar
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53 Ibid., 25.
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55 Ibid., 32.
56 Ibid., 35. This conclusion is directly opposite to the one drawn by Panitch (“Class and Power in Canada”). See footnote 40. Has finance capital developed in a more or less “classical” form in Canada, with the oddity of a high degree of head offices being located in the United States (as Carroll argues) or did Canadian banking interests fuse their interests with those of American industrial capital, leading to a “Canadian-exceptionalist” view (as Panitch argues) where indigenous Canadian industrial capital was left out in the cold? As the Marxist critique of Canadian political economy develops, this should prove to be one of the key areas of controversy.
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72 This line of argument has been superbly developed by Harris, Nigel in Of Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Markham: Penguin, 1973)Google Scholar which develops the general argument that the great levelling effect of the world market has overrun the ability of nation-states—communist or non-communist—to counter the pressures towards homogenization and, therefore, crisis; and The End of the Third World (Markham: Penguin, 1987) which develops the implications of this approach for dependency theories of the Third World and its development prospects.
* Ken McRoberts and Leo Panitch of the Department of Political Science, York University, and George Perlin and Grant Amyot of the Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, may not agree with everything in this article; but they were all invaluable over the years in helping these ideas come to fruition. The comments of the three anonymous reviewers for this Journal were extremely useful. The completion of this article was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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