IMPERIALISM AND INDUSTRIALISATION IN UDC 5 factors has come to pervade a large part of liberal and radical development literature in the post-Second World War period. If the post-war capitalist boom had resulted in a slackening of interest in the West in the loosely termed 'left' views on capitalism, the same could hardly be said about the literature on development. But much of this 'development theory' was based on more simplistic formulations of the constraints to development, which see under development as the inevitable fate of the 'peripheral' source of surplus for an expanding 'centre". In such a view both development and underdevelopment are easily deduced outcomes of capitalist growth on a world scale, and the limits to industrialisation in post-colonial societies are more rigidly, and often crudely, stated. As an anonymous reviewer of Rostow's recent book. Why the Poor Get Richer and the Rich Slow Down, put it in the conservative London Economist, "In the 1960s the neo-Marxists from the affluent countries liad an arresting slogan— 'they are poor because we are rich; we are rich because they are poor' ", as opposed to which the time is now ripe for "exploring the notion that a major migration of industry from the rich north to the poor south leaves a vacuum in the north".1 Interestingly, in recent years, primarily as a result of the emergence of the so-called 'newly industrialising countries' and their experience with growth based on exports, there has been a tendency within the 'left'—neo-Marxist and otherwise—which postulates exactly such a possibility. Our intention in what follows is to assess one such formulation, propounded by what has been termed as the 'Starnberg Group', which argues that the trend towards industrial growth based on exports in the UDCs, in fact, reflects an inexorable tendency in the current phase of capitalism—a tendency which is well under way and presages a major shift in world industrial production from the developed capitalist countries to the so-called Third World.2 The Argument of the Starnberg Group The argument of the Starnberg Group proceeds at three levels: (i) a brief analysis of 'world capitalism' which defines the conditions for the realisation of a tendency towards a new international division of labour; (ii) a sketchy overview of recent developments in the international economy which suggests (or at least, is best explained in terms of) such a tendency; and (iii) three case studies that are used to establish the operation of such a tendency. The theory that underlies (in fact, rationalises) the empirical findings of the Starnberg Group starts from the premise that the economic, social and political history of the world over the last five centuries has been determined essentially by the 'movement of capital', "however much the struggle of the oppressed classes may have been directed at the transformation of society". This 'movement of capital', which presumably corresponds to the 'unlimited