Uneven and combined development

Uneven and combined development (or unequal and combined development or uneven development) is a concept in Marxian political economy intended to describe dynamics of human history involving the interaction of capitalist laws of motion and starting world market conditions whose national units are highly heterogeneous. The concept is used by Marxist scholars concerned with economic development. David Harvey is an advocate of the usefulness of this theory to reconstruct historical materialism on Modern terms. It is an accepted key concept in academic economic geography. The idea was applied systematically by Leon Trotsky around the turn of the 20th century to the case of Russia, when he was analyzing the developmental possibilities for industrialization in the Russian empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime in Russia. The notion was then generalized and became the basis of Trotskyist politics of permanent revolution, which implied a rejection of the Stalinist idea that a human society inevitably developed through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages". Before Trotsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Vasily Vorontsov, and others proposed similar ideas. Trotsky's concept was originally inspired by a series of articles by Alexander Helphand (better known as "Parvus") on "War and Revolution" in the Russian journal Iskra in 1904. At first, Trotsky intended this concept only to describe a characteristic evolutionary pattern in the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from the 16th century onwards, through the growth of a world economy which connected more and more peoples and territories together through trade, migration and investment. His focus was also initially mainly on the history of the Russian empire, where the most advanced technological and scientific developments co-existed with extremely primitive and superstitious cultures. In the 1920s and 1930s, Trotsky increasingly generalised the concept of uneven and combined development to the whole of human history, and even to processes of evolutionary biology, as well as the formation of the human personality - as a general dialectical category.