Dependence in an Interdependent World: The Limited Possibilities of Transformation within the Capitalist World Economy

Abstract

“Dependence” has become the latest euphemism in a long list of such terms. No doubt its original intent was critical. The term itself emerged out of the “structuralist” theories of Latin American scholars and was meant as a rebuttal to “developmentalist” or “modernization“ theories and “monetarist” policy views. Andre Gunder Frank has traced its intellectual origins and its limitations in a recent combative paper entitled “Dependence is dead; long live dependence and the class struggle.” We live in a capitalist world economy, one that took definitive shape as a European world economy in the sixteenth century (see Wallerstein 1974) and came to include the whole world geographically in the ninteenth century. Capitalism as a system of production for sale in a market for profit and appropriation of this profit on the basis of individual or collective ownership has only existed in, and can be said to require, a world system in which the political units are not co-extensive with the boundaries of the market economy. This has permitted sellers to profit from strengths in the market whenever they exist but enabled them simultaneously to seek, whenever needed, the intrusion of political entities to distort the market in their favor. Far from being a system of free competition of all sellers, it is a system in which competition becomes relatively free only when the economic advantage of upper strata is so clear-cut that the unconstrained operation of the market serves effectively to reinforce the existing system of stratification.