The prospects for successful capitalist economic development (implying industrialisation) of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good... Substantial progress in capitalist industrialisation has already been achieved . . . In so far as there are obstacles to this development, they originate not in current imperialist-Third World relationships, but almost entirely from the internal contradictions of the Third World itself . . . The imperialist countries' policies and their overall impact on the Third World actually favour its industrialisation . . . 76
He provided figures showing the real per capita economic growth that was in fact happening. In challenging the assumption of the radical version of dependency theory he was on strong ground. So too was he when he made the point that if the left saw its main priority as supporting industrialising regimes as "anti-imperialist" it could "find itself directly supporting bourgeois regimes which, as in Peru and Egypt, exploit and oppress workers and peasants while employing anti-imperialist rhetoric" .77
But lacking from his analysis was any real accounting for the enormous unevenness between Third World countries, even though his own figures showed that per capita annual growth in two of the most populous countries, India and Indonesia, was only 1 .2 percent and 1 percent (compared to 6.8 percent for South Korea, 4.9 percent for Thailand and 7.1 percent for Zambia). He also failed to see that rapid capitalist development was not necessarily smooth and uninterrupted through time:
The Long Boom
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