What mainstream dependency theory did do for a period was provide an ideological justification for methods which enabled the rulers of some politically independent states to achieve impressive levels of accumulation, even if only for a period. Argentina's rate of economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s was comparable with that of ltaly71 and by the early 1970s a third of its workforce was in industry, with only 1 3 percent on the land.72 Brazil's 9 percent growth rate was one of the highest in the world73 and by the mid-1980s the Economist could refer to Sao Paulo as "a Detroit in the making" .74 South Korea experienced rapid economic growth of about 8 percent a year after a general, Park Chung Hee, seized power in 1961 and forced the big firms (or chaebols) to work within a framework established by the state and embarked on state capitalist industrialisation.
China, where state control of the economy came closest to the Russian model endorsed by the radical dependency theorists, had an economic growth rate no higher than these figures once it had completed the first short stage of economic recovery from 20 years of civil war and Japanese invasion. The imposition of plans which diverted resources towards new heavy industries-steel, cement, electricity-in a very poor, overwhelmingly agricultural country like the China of the early 1950s meant squeezing the living standards of the mass of the population. What the peasants had gained through land reform in the previous decade, they now lost through rigorously enforced taxation of their output. Then came the ultimately disastrous attempt at collectivisation through so-called People's Communes, in an attempt to bring about a "Great Leap Forward" in economic development. The leap cut total agricultural output, led to famine in vast areas of the countryside and had to be abandoned. Much of the new industry was far from efficient. The growth of heavy industry out of all proportion to what was happening in the rest of the economy led to acute shortages of inputs needed to keep plants running, and to the production of other goods which had no immediate use. There were massive swings between spells of fast industrial expansion and spells of near stagnation, and many of the grandiose new giant plants were only able to work at a fraction of their capacity.
There was usually growth even in countries that were not as successful as Brazil and South Korea. The manufacturing output in India grew by 5.3 percent a year from 1950 to 1981, and agricultural output by 2.3 percent, even if there was continual disappointment at the economy's inability to exceed a "Hindu" growth rate of 4 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa had "per capita growth rates of around 2 percent in the early 1960s" which "rose to nearly 5 percent by the end of that decade" .75 Egypt, whose leader Abdul Nasser nationalised almost all of industry, grew about 6 percent per year through the first half of the 1960s. Such outcomes in terms of levels of economic growth were enough to convince one "revisionist" Marxist, Bill Warren, to come to the conclusion in the early 1970s that most of the rest of the left were wrong. Countries in the Third World could catch up with the West without breaking with capitalism:
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