Economism and Determinism in Dependency Theory

Abstract

The wide acceptance of dependency theory throughout the Third World constitutes a conceptual revolution in a scientific understanding of large-scale questions of capitalist development. The perspective has succeeded in discrediting the system, legitimating tenents of modernization theory, and in undermining the approach of reform nationalisms. Yet its intellectual and political weight as a now dominant paradigm for analyzing development and underdevelopment has caused a considerable consternation among some Marxists, especially those inclined toward orthodoxy. Dependency theory is particularly attacked for being excessively based on analyses of exchange and spacial relations rather than production relations; it is criticized as not having an adequate approach to stages of development of the mode of production, as economistic, and as lacking in class analysis. Each of these criticisms has some merit. Yet, in my view, the problem with almost all of the critiques is that, while they specify the problems with dependency theory, they do not offer any serious theoretical development beyond it, much less an alternative to it. I do not think this is at all accidental. The critics have been unable to develop an alternative because neither the classical theory of imperialism nor contemporary strains of orthodox Marxism provide ready answers to the problems of underdevelopment that dependency theory has addressed. Dependency theory developed not just in reaction to conventional modernization theory and the 1950s nationalist and reformist formulations of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and of the ideologues of developmentalism but as a so-called neo-Marxism, because traditional Marxism was inadequate to the task, in both its theoretical manifestations and its political conceptions (e.g., the limitations of Lenin's theory of imperialism; the feudalism thesis of backwardness; Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development; the reformist line of the communist parties of the region; the inability of the left generally to develop a coherent alternative to developmentalist reformism). * The author, who teaches sociology at Livingston College (Rutgers University), has adapted this article from his forthcoming book, Social Class and Social Development: Comparative Studies of