Who among the following scholars argued that “capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough”?

The scholar Geoffrey Kay is famously associated with the argument that 'capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough'. In his work 'Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis' (1975), Kay posits that underdevelopment is a result of a 'blocked transition'. He attributes this to the prolonged dominance of merchant capital in the Third World, which, unlike industrial capital, is unable to revolutionize the mode of production and thus fails to fully integrate these regions into the productive capitalist cycle. While Bill Warren also viewed imperialism as a pioneer of capitalism, the specific phrasing regarding the insufficiency of exploitation is the defining dictum of Geoffrey Kay's thesis. This perspective contrasts with traditional dependency theorists like Paul Baran, who focused more on the extraction of surplus as the primary cause of backwardness.

Sources

1. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41421285