Dependency: a Special Theory Within Marxian Analysis

Abstract

A dependency which purports to explain underdevelopment in Latin America exclusively as a consequence of the transfer of surplus from backward areas to the metropolis (the exploitation of one nation by another) fails to comprehend the central role of the labor process in the formation of classes as well as class struggle as the motor of history. Divorced from the material reality of the working classes, it ignores the role of the masses in making history. It is static. Despite occasional calls for socialist revolution, it is based in idealism and is therefore incapable of guiding revolutionary action. Moreover, such a dependency presents the poverty, hunger, and oppression of peasants and workers as a consequence of a capitalism deformed by foreign monopoly capital. It imagines that an anti-imperialist coalition led by local capital could bring about normal capitalist development. Thus, this dependency defends the interest of local capital against Marxism-Leninism and against the struggle of the working classes for socialist revolution. This dependency is implicit in the work of Raul Prebisch and the Economic Commission for Latin America, which identified the long-term tendency in the terms of trade to be a decline in the relation of prices of primary products to prices of manufacturers. (Ironically, though this theory did truly speak on behalf of local capital, it set the stage for the penetration of foreign monopoly capital into the industrial sector under the recipe of importsubstitution.) This formulation was replaced in the mid-1960s by more adequate, radical, and Marxist efforts. However, the bourgeois nationalist concept of dependency reappeared in the 1970s beginning with Raul Fernandez and Jose Ocampo's article in the first issue of Latin American Perspectives. They and other left sectarians have equated the work of radical and Marxist writers such as Andre Gunder Frank, Theot6nio dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini with the limited bourgeois nationalist concept of dependency. In this fashion, the left sectarian critics ignore the explicit object of their attacks, the radical and Marxist dependentistas, and use bourgeois dependency as a straw man.