Development and ChangeVolume 51, Issue 2 p. 599-630 LegacyOpen Access Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory Cristóbal Kay, Cristóbal KaySearch for more papers by this author Cristóbal Kay, Cristóbal KaySearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 December 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12560Citations: 2 I wish to thank the editors for inviting me to write this Legacy and for their helpful comments. Any remaining shortcomings are my exclusive responsibility. AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat INTRODUCTION On 11 September 1973 — the day of the military coup in Chile in which the Allende government was overthrown — a decree was issued by the military junta headed by General Pinochet, in which the name of Theotonio Dos Santos was mentioned. His first name was misspelled as Teotorio, revealing the unfamiliarity with Brazilian names. He was the only foreigner mentioned on this list of 95 persons. Their names were all familiar to me as key public figures of the Chilean political system. The decree ordered the persons mentioned on this list to give themselves up voluntarily to the Ministry of Defence before 16:30 hours on this fateful day. Furthermore, the decree threatened that ‘if they refused to do so they would have to face the consequences which could easily be foreseen’.11 For the ‘Military Junta Decree No. 10: Order to Political Leaders in this List to Appear before Military Authorities to be Arrested’, please see: www.archivochile.com/Dictadura_militar/doc_jm_gob_pino8/DMdocjm0022.pdf This list included the leaders of the various political parties of the Popular Unity coalition which formed the Allende government as well as some key government functionaries. This list of 95 persons also included the leaders of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), an extreme left-wing organization which did not belong to the Popular Unity coalition. Most of those on the list did not present themselves at the Ministry of Defence: some requested asylum in embassies, some went into hiding and some were sooner or later detained. A few were shot or died in the concentration camps. Theotonio Dos Santos managed to find asylum in the Embassy of Panamá under difficult circumstances (Dos Santos, 1978a: 14) but it took five months before he was able to leave the country and start his second exile in Mexico. But why was his name on the list? At the time of the coup, Theotonio Dos Santos was the Director of the Centro de Estudios Socio-Económicos (CESO) — Centre of Socioeconomic Studies — belonging to the Faculty of Political Economy of the University of Chile, the country's oldest and principal university. He had arrived in Chile as an exile from Brazil only seven years earlier, in 1966, and while at CESO he wrote his key texts on dependency theory (referred to hereafter as DT), becoming one of its pioneers. Soon after Allende assumed office in November 1970, Dos Santos and a member of his dependency research team, Roberto Pizarro, were approached in the offices of CESO by a key person from Allende's Socialist Party, inviting them to become members. It is perhaps not surprising that they received such an invitation as the programme of the Popular Unity coalition was heavily influenced by DT. Soon thereafter Dos Santos joined the party; he never occupied any leading position within it although he had strong links to some of its leaders. As he recounts: ‘I was a militant, but considered as such only to some extent, as they referred to me as the intellectual comrade … I think this was more a restriction, I was a militant but an intellectual’ (Lozoya, 2015: 269).22 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Spanish or Portuguese are mine. But the military junta knew full well the power of ideas and wanted to silence his voice. Dos Santos has been referred to in a variety of ways: as ‘one of the most brilliant intellectuals of Latin America’, ‘an authentic organic intellectual’, ‘a real revolutionary’, ‘one of the most important social scientists and economists in the history of the 20th century’, ‘an economist at the service of the people’, and it has been claimed that his ‘epistemological contribution to the social sciences has transcended the regional space of Latin America’.33 These quotations have been taken from various obituaries after his death. Some of these characterizations are naturally exaggerations by enthusiastic admirers but they do reflect the impact he had on many people and his large following. He was an inspiring speaker who was able to talk on a great variety of contemporary topics in a critical and illuminating manner. As a former colleague at CESO reminisces: ‘When Dos Santos is in full flight, he reminds us of the sociological imagination of Wright Mills: he begins to analyse the political and economic situation by tying things together here and there, with ever greater speed … there one finds hundreds and even thousands of bright and promising working hypotheses’ (Valenzuela, 2018: 2). I fully agree with such an assessment having been myself a colleague of Dos Santos. But what particularly stirred his audience and readers was the optimism he radiated about the possibilities for a better future. Dos Santos was a persistent critic of imperialism and capitalism and a tireless campaigner for revolutionary socialism. His predictions on world affairs sometimes turned out to be wrong but he made people reflect and engage. He was a sociable, approachable and warm person full of vitality who was driven by his convictions and historical optimism. His optimism contrasted with the rather disempowering pessimism of André Gunder Frank — another CESO colleague — as illustrated in the following observation. Given Frank's past personal history (his family had fled Nazi Germany), he correctly foresaw the overthrow of the Allende regime and was packing his luggage to leave Chile, having accepted an invitation at the Free University of Berlin (Kay, 2005a: 1179). Meanwhile Dos Santos, having settled in Chile as an exile, had bought a house in Santiago just a few months before the military coup. Although his optimism was often misplaced, it did inspire people and encouraged their participation in progressive social and political movements. In a more conventional manner, Dos Santos could be characterized as a committed intellectual, an organic intellectual, a public or engaged intellectual. But for me his life and work is best captured in the expression used by Lozoya (2015: 259) — that of a ‘revolutionary intellectual’, by which she means an intellectual who not only argues for revolutionary change but is also able to revolutionize his disciplinary field.44 Details of Dos Santos's professional activities can be seen and downloaded from the website of the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) — National Council for Scientific and Technological Development: http://lattes.cnpq.br/6723468271805377. According to this source he authored or edited 119 books, and published 42 chapters in books not edited by himself, 173 articles in scientific journals, and 163 articles in magazines and newspapers. This includes new editions and translations. His works were translated into 15 languages and published in over 30 countries. He gave over 200 presentations at conferences, seminars and similar events. Furthermore he actively used conventional and social media, giving interviews on radio and television and writing blogs. Several of his writings are available online; some of his interviews and talks are available on YouTube. FORMATIVE YEARS IN ACADEMIA AND POLITICS IN BRAZIL It is necessary to provide the context in which Dos Santos grew up in order to gain a proper understanding of the emergence and development of DT and of his legacy. Various factors played key roles in the appearance of DT in Latin America: the turbulent world politics during the Cold War period and, especially, the political ramifications in the region of the 1959 Cuban revolution; the realization that the process of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) was not fulfilling all its expectations and was entering a phase of ‘exhaustion’ of its ‘easy’ stage; the increasing influence of Marxism among students and young scholars, especially the writings on imperialism and decolonization; and, last but not least, the dissatisfaction with orthodox economic theories and the sociology of modernization (see Kay, 2019a). Theotonio Dos Santos was born in 1936 in Carangola in the state of Minas Gerais of Brazil. He studied sociology, politics and public administration at the Faculty of Economics of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, graduating in 1961. He then continued his studies for a master's degree in political sciences at the new University of Brasilia (UB) which was founded in 1960 — the same year that the city was founded. Brasilia displaced Rio de Janeiro as the capital of Brazil; its location in the centre of the country was highly symbolic, as was the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. Among the founders of UB was Darcy Ribeiro who became its first rector. He encouraged interdisciplinary studies as well as progressive curricula, research and teaching methods. Dos Santos graduated in 1964 with a thesis on the social classes in Brazil (Martins, 1999: 38). While completing his master's thesis, Dos Santos also became a part-time lecturer at the university. He recalls the university with fondness as ‘an extremely rich experience in the pedagogical field, but also by the contact with the most daring of the Brazilian intelligentsia’ (quoted in Dal Rosso and Seabra, 2016: 1036). He praises its ‘magnificent environment for teaching and learning’ and laments that Ribeiro's innovative project was ‘in great part destroyed after 1964 by the military dictatorship’ (Dos Santos, 2005a: 91). While at the university he published his first book, Who are the Enemies of the People? (Dos Santos, 1962). It was at the University of Brasilia that Dos Santos met fellow students Vânia Bambirra and Ruy Mauro Marini. They formed part of a reading group on Marx's Capital — as was quite common in those days among left-wing students in universities throughout Latin America. It was the period of the Cuban revolution, the emergence of guerrilla movements in some countries of the region, as well as of the growing influence of Marxism and activism among students. These three colleagues, who I will refer to as the ‘trio’, were active in politics and were among the founders of the Organização Revolucionária Marxista — Política Operária (Marxist Revolutionary Organization — Labour Politics), referred to as Política Operária or POLOP, for short. It was an extreme left-wing organization resulting from the fusion of various smaller revolutionary political organizations, including dissidents from the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), who all disagreed with the politics of the PCB which they considered class collaborationist (Martins, 1999: 79).55 Several of the founders of POLOP became influential intellectuals in Brazil and beyond, such as Paul Singer, Eric Sachs, Emir Sader, Eder Sader, Michael Löwy and Simon Schwartzman, besides the trio, already mentioned (Martins, 1999: 79). Raphael Seabra (forthcoming) argues that the debates among members of POLOP were influential in shaping the ideas on DT by the trio. I am grateful to Seabra for enabling me to access various draft chapters of the book on the life and work of Dos Santos which he is currently editing with J.C. Cárdenas. Dos Santos had already been an activist during his student days at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, being involved with the labour movement and socialist politics. While in Brasilia, Dos Santos became the General Secretary of POLOP but he later shifted away from the organization due to political differences regarding its strategy of foquismo based on the establishment of a foco (a focus or centre). A group within POLOP took up the armed struggle in their fight for socialism. They were inspired by the Cuban revolution and Che Guevara, believing that revolution could be brought about by a small group of fighters (hence the term ‘foco’) engaged in guerrilla warfare, starting among the peasantry in the countryside. This foco would trigger an uprising and spread from the countryside to the cities and eventually overthrow the existing regime. Dos Santos refused to endorse the armed struggle as he was not convinced that it would lead to the desired outcome; rather, he argued that it was necessary to create a mass movement through political work. As predicted by Dos Santos, the armed struggle failed and several of his comrades died in the process (Lozoya, 2015: 272). One of Dos Santos's books is dedicated to ‘Comandante Juárez Brito; compañero y amigo, tu muerte no será en vano’ — ‘Commander Juárez Brito; comrade and friend, your death will not be in vain’ (Dos Santos, 1972a).66 Vânia Bambirra, who married Dos Santos, was later to edit a two-volume book with the most comprehensive analyses of the insurrectional revolutionary movements in Latin America at the time, including of POLOP (Bambirra, 1971). In 1963, André Gunder Frank was hired as a visiting professor by Darcy Ribeiro to teach a postgraduate course on sociological theory in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Brasilia. Ribeiro was already a well-known and respected anthropologist when he became the rector of this new university and it was fellow anthropologist Eric Wolf who had recommended Frank to him. Dos Santos, Bambirra and Marini became Frank's students at UB. It was one of Frank's first teaching appointments. He was then 33 years of age, while Dos Santos was 26 or 27 years old when taking Frank's course and participating in his seminars. It is possible that his years at Brasilia (1963–64), being in the midst of a progressive university, played a role in the development of some of Frank's ideas for his path-breaking critical analysis of the sociology of modernization (Frank, 1967/1972).77 Frank's Latin American experience at an early stage of his academic life, living from 1962 to 1973 in the region, had a radicalizing influence on him and shaped many of his ideas; see Kay (2005a). Dos Santos would later reminisce: ‘It was at the University of Brasilia also that I met André Gunder Frank and we systematically started a collaboration of decades with Ruy Mauro Marini; along with my then wife Vânia Bambirra, we formed a polemical trio worldwide’ (quoted in Dal Rosso and Seabra, 2016: 1036–37). In 1964 a military coup d’état overthrew the reformist government of João Goulart initiating a period of dictatorship in Brazil which lasted for 21 years and drove many people into exile. Dos Santos first went into hiding, continuing his political activities clandestinely, but he decided to seek asylum in the Chilean embassy in 1965, when the tribunal of Minas Gerais condemned him to 15 years’ imprisonment for rebellion (Lozoya, 2015: 265–66).88 The military tribunal had charged him for being the ‘the intellectual mentor of subversive penetration in the countryside’ (Dos Santos, 1978a: 13). In 1966 he arrived in Chile where several prominent intellectuals were already living in exile, among them Florestan Fernandes, who helped Dos Santos to get a job at CESO (Vidal, 2013). Fernandes was a renowned sociologist who was a friend of Eduardo Hamuy, a fellow sociologist, who was then Director of CESO. Chile was an attractive and inspiring place to be at that time for an intellectual and revolutionary activist. The regional offices of various United Nations organizations were located in the capital Santiago, among them the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), the Institute of Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). These and other international organizations attracted some of the best professionals from Latin America and elsewhere. Several Brazilian exiles found employment in these institutions, among them Fernando H. Cardoso who was to become one of the founders of DT and later President of Brazil. Politically, Chile was also an exciting place to be due to its relatively mature political culture and the existence of significant Marxist political parties. Moreover, Eduardo Frei Montalva had been elected to the presidency on a reformist programme in 1964, and Salvador Allende had come a close second in that presidential contest. Hence, a new phase in Dos Santos's life started auspiciously in Chile. THE RISE OF DEPENDENCY THEORY: EXILE IN CHILE As soon as Dos Santos had settled in CESO, he tried to recreate the trio from the University of Brasilia so as to strengthen the research capacity of CESO, to tilt it more to the left and also for personal reasons. In 1967, Vânia Bambirra, his wife, joined the staff of CESO and Dos Santos managed to convince Ruy Mauro Marini to move from his exile in Mexico to Chile. Marini heeded his advice and travelled to Chile where he initially managed to get a job at the University of Concepción in the south of the country. It is significant that in this university some of the key leaders of the MIR had studied: the university was considered one of the strongholds of this revolutionary movement which developed close links with the revolutionary leaders of Cuba. After just a year at the University of Concepción, Marini was invited to join CESO in 1970 and the trio were together again, albeit in exile. All three remained in CESO until that fatal coup d’état in 1973. It is this trio who, together with André Gunder Frank, are at the heart of the development of the Marxist strand of DT. Frank was already in Chile, having accepted an appointment in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chile in Santiago in 1968. The trio re-established the relationship with Frank which they had formed in Brasilia. This was further strengthened when Frank also moved to CESO in 1971. The trio became a quartet and CESO became known as the centre of DT in Latin America.99 For the most detailed analysis of the history of CESO during its relatively short existence from 1965 to 1973, see Cárdenas (2011). See also Wasserman (2012). In mid-1967 Dos Santos created and led a research team to investigate the relations of dependency in Latin America. A year later he presented a 14-page progress report of his research team which can be considered one of the key foundational texts of DT. In explaining the aims of the research he provided one of the first definitions of dependence: It is about analysing dependency not only as an external factor that limits economic development, but as something that makes up a certain type of social structure whose legality or dynamism is given by the condition of dependence. By defining dependence as the mode of operation of our societies, this concept has been placed as a fundamental explanatory concept of the condition of underdevelopment. (Dos Santos, 1968/2015: 29) The initial team was composed of six researchers of which only Dos Santos and Bambirra were senior researchers, while the remainder were just starting their academic careers. There were also a few student assistants attached to the research.1010 Besides the various publications by Dos Santos on dependency, two other remarkable books which arose from this research team were Caputo and Pizarro (1970) and Ramos (1972). Sergio Ramos was a member of the Chilean Communist Party who took part in the discussions on Popular Unity's economic programme and later formed part of the Allende government's economic team. Both books had a significant influence on shaping the programme of the Popular Unity government. One of the activities of the CESO research team on dependency was the organization of a permanent seminar in which prominent authors who had done research on topics related to dependency in Latin America were invited to present their work; these included André Gunder Frank, Sergio Bagú, Marcos Kaplan, Aníbal Quijano, Osvaldo Sunkel, Tomás Vasconi and Pierre Vilar. It is worth pointing out that even at this early stage Dos Santos was not only thinking in terms of Latin America but more generally about the world economy. At that time, there were no institutes of Latin American studies, let alone centres on the world economy, in any university in the region, and only a few countries were beginning to establish research centres for the study of their own country from a social sciences perspective rather than from a traditional, and usually conservative, nationalistic descriptive historical perspective. The only institutions which had a regional remit and were located in Latin America were the various UN Regional Organizations or Offices such as ECLA, FAO, UNESCO and the ILO. In this sense, too, Dos Santos's research programme at CESO was quite a pioneering effort. Theotonio Dos Santos's Concept of Dependency Dos Santos's first visit to the United States came when he was invited by Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, as a visiting professor in the department of sociology for the first semester of 1969. Besides teaching he took the opportunity to conduct some research, gathering a wealth of empirical material on the US economy, society and politics (Dos Santos, 1978a: 13–15). In December that year he was invited to present a paper to the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA) which took place in New York. The title of his presentation was ‘Imperialism as Viewed from the Underdeveloped Periphery’ which he delivered in the panel on ‘Economics of Imperialism’; the chairman of the panel was the well-known Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, founding editor of the independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review. Another speaker on that panel was Harry Magdoff, known for his work on imperialism and closely associated with Monthly Review. The discussants of the panel were the distinguished scholars Stephen Hymer from Yale University, Arthur MacEwan from Harvard University and Victor Perlo, a graduate from Columbia University and member of the communist party of the United States. This panel chaired by Sweezy was highly unusual, not only because most of the speakers were Marxists but also due to the topic and the fact that Dos Santos was a sociology graduate and not an economist in the traditional sense.1111 Similar versions of the text he presented had been presented earlier at the Second General Assembly of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) and at the Ninth Congress of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología (ALAS) which were held in Lima in 1968 and in Mexico City in 1969, respectively (Dos Santos, 1970b: 11–12). Dos Santos's paper was published the following year in the American Economic Review (AER), the most influential journal in economics, under the title ‘The Structure of Dependence’ (Dos Santos, 1970a). He became known initially in the English-speaking world largely through this article, which has been fully or partially reprinted in several readers.1212 Such as in the readers edited by Fann and Hodges, Livingstone, Todaro and Wilber; see the References under Dos Santos (1970a). It contains his classic definition of dependence which was first published in Spanish in a CESO publication (Dos Santos, 1968b: 6) and subsequently reproduced in a compilation of some of his CESO texts (Dos Santos, 1970b). These CESO texts, or parts thereof, were reproduced in subsequent single-authored books by him, for example in Dos Santos (1978a), by different publishers in several Latin American countries, for example Dos Santos (1970c), as well as in edited books by others, for example Dos Santos (1972b), thereby securing a wide diffusion of his key text on dependency throughout Latin America and beyond. What then is Dos Santos's definition of dependence? By dependence we mean a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected. The relation of inter-dependence between two or more economies, and between these and world trade, assumes the form of dependence when some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and can be self-sustaining, while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of that expansion, which can have either a positive or a negative effect on their immediate development. (Dos Santos, 1970a: 231, italics added) An almost identical definition appeared in Dos Santos's earlier text presented at the CLACSO Assembly of 1968 (see footnote 10), which was published in Dos Santos (1970c: 180). This text was translated by David Lehmann and published in a book edited by Henry Bernstein, which is also often quoted or referred to in English language texts which discuss DT. It is worth comparing the two definitions: Dependence is a conditioning situation [italics in the original Spanish text] in which the economies of one group of countries are conditioned by the development and expansion of others. A relationship of interdependence between two or more economies or between such economies and the world trading system becomes a dependent relationship when some countries can expand through self-impulsion while others, being in a dependent position, can only expand as a reflection of the expansion of the dominant countries, which may have positive or negative effects on their immediate development. In either case, the basic situation of dependence causes these countries to be both backward and exploited [italics added]. (Dos Santos, 1973: 76) There are two notable differences between these two definitions: (1) for some reason, the last sentence of the second quotation (see my italics), which strengthens Dos Santos's definition of DT, is omitted from the AER article; (2) the phrase ‘to which the former is subjected’ is omitted in the first sentence of the second quotation but is included in the first quotation, from the AER (see my italics), thereby providing a stronger sentence. In a text published several years later, Dos Santos (1991: 28) clarifies that in the dialectical relations between the dominant and the dependent countries, that is between the external and internal factors, ‘the process of capital accumulation of the dependent countries is conditioned by their insertion in the world economy while at the same time being determined by their own internal laws of development’ (italics in the original by Dos Santos). Influence of Raúl Prebisch's Centre–Periphery System What transpires from these definitions is the central idea of an interdependent world system, shadowing Prebisch's idea of the centre–periphery system (ECLA, 1951; Kay, 2019b) in which a certain international division of labour dictates that the centre countries industrialize and develop through the export of industrial commodities while the periphery countries are largely confined to the production and export of primary commodities based on the exploitation of their natural resources. Both Dos Santos and Prebisch characterize this as an unequal trading system in which the periphery (or dependent countries in Dos Santos's terminology) transfer an economic surplus to the centre (or dominant countries). Prebisch explains this transfer of surplus as arising from the periphery's deterioration of the terms of trade, in terms of the evolution of the price of primary commodities exported by the periphery countries and imported by the centre countries, as compared to the price of industrial commodities exported by the centre and imported by the periphery. Dos Santos also includes other transfers such as those arising from profit remittances, transfer pricing, royalty payments, high interest payments for servicing foreign debt, and payments for other services common in studies on imperialism. In later publications Dos Santos also introduces the Marxist concept of unequal exchange derived from the analysis of Arghiri Emmanuel (1972); this is rooted in the Marxist labour theory of value and hence is not confined to the production and export of raw materials by the periphery, as in Prebisch's analysis, but also arises in the export of industrial commodities as well as services from the dependent to the dominant countries. However, Prebisch (1950, 1964) does refer to the existence of surplus labour in the periphery as leading to a low-wage economy which is one of the reasons for the deterioration of the periphery's terms of trade, as well as for unequal exchange, foreshadowing elements of Arthur Lewis's famous analysis on ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ and terms of trade published in 1954. There are, of course, other similarities and differences; there is no space here to discuss them all, but one of the major differences relates to the social and political dimension. Unlike Prebisch, Dos Santos was both a trained interdisciplinary scholar and a Marxist and therefore also brought to the analysis of dependency relations the social and political dimension. In his writings, Dos Santos always stresses the dependent country's internal class relations and political relations and how these are interlinked and articulated in a dialectical manner with those of the dominant country. Hence, dependency is not just an external factor but is c