1 Cited in Clement, Wallace and Drache, Daniel, A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978), 43.Google Scholar

2 Carroll, William, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” in Brym, Robert J. (ed.), The Structure of the Canadian Capitalist Class (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985), 42.Google Scholar

3 Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See Lumsden, Ian (ed.), Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Teeple, Gary (ed.), Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Laxer, Robert (ed.), (Canada) Ltd. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).Google Scholar

5 Resnick, Philip, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” Our Generation 15, (1982), 11–24.Google Scholar

6 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada.”

7 Moore, Steve and Wells, Debi, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: S. Moore, 1975), 113.Google Scholar

8 Panitch, Leo, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review 6 (autumn 1981), 7–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” Ibid., 35–63; and Ray Schmidt, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique,” Ibid., 65–92.

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.

10 Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 20.Google Scholar

11 Levitt, Kari, Silent Surrender (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1970).Google Scholar

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.

14 John Hutcheson, “Class and Income Distribution in Canada,” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd., 59.

15 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 7.

16 Drache, Daniel, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7 (1983), 25, 34–36.Google Scholar

17 See Baran, Paul, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Emmanuel, Arghiri, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Free Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Frank, André Gunder, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).Google Scholar

18 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 21.

19 Ibid., 22–23.

20 See Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 115.

21 Cited in Penner, Norman, The Canadian Left (Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 86–87.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 91, 100.

23 Ibid., 103.

24 Cited in Ibid., 104.

25 Resnick, Philip, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1977), 202–03, 70.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 203.

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.

29 Ibid., 9, 13.

30 Ibid., 14.

31 Levitt, Silent Surrender, 24.

32 McCallum, John, Unequal Beginnings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 15.

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.

36 Ibid., 17, 19.

37 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 28.

38 McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” 44.

39 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 25–43.

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

49 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 15.

50 This framework is extensively developed in Carroll, William, Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986).Google Scholar

51 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 31.

52 Ibid., 42–43.

53 Ibid., 25.

54 Ibid., 27, 28.

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.

57 Ibid., 35.

58 Friedman, Jonathan, “Crisis in Theory and Transformations of the World Economy,” Review 2 (1978), 143.Google Scholar

59 Warren, Bill, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980), 176.Google Scholar

60 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism, and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 37.

61 Bukharin, Nikolai, Imperialism and World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 157.Google Scholar

62 Some recent scholarship has begun to reverse this trend. See, for example: Haynes, Mike, Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (Kent, UK: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar; Coates, K., The Case of Nikolai Bukharin (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978)Google Scholar; Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)Google Scholar; and Lewin, M., Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar

63 Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 12.

64 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 17.

65 Cited in Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 291.Google Scholar

66 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 24–26.

67 Ibid., 126, 127.

68 See especially Cliff, Tony, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar Cliff argues on this basis that the Soviet Union is best understood as bureaucratic state capitalist. For a recent and iconoclastic examination of perestroika from this perspective see Harman, Chris and Zebrowski, Andy, “Glasnost—Before the Storm,” International Socialism 2 (1988), 3–54.Google Scholar International arms competition has another related impact on national economies which we will be unable to develop here. Briefly, three related concepts must be linked very closely—state-capitalism, world economy and the permanent arms economy. One of the principal thrusts behind the expansion of the state sector has been the competition between national-capitals which at a certain point becomes military competition. This military/state sector in turn becomes an economic factor in its own right, accelerating the very forces that brought it to birth—the concentration and centralization of capital. This argument is developed in the international context by Harman, Chris in Explaining the Crisis (London: Bookmarks, 1984).Google ScholarMcNally, David has developed its implications in the Canadian context in a provocative paper, “The Permanent Arms Economy and the Crisis of Canadian Capitalism,” paper prepared for the 1976 convention of the International Socialists, Toronto, 1976.Google Scholar

69 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 26.

70 Ibid., 61–62.

71 Ibid., 73.

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.