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The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Fernando Henrique Cardoso*
Affiliation:
Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento, São Paulo
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If an observer from outer space had landed his UFO at any meeting of Latin Americanists during the last few years, he would have had to agree with the structural anthropologists. He would have said that at these meetings, versions of the same myth are constantly repeated: dependency and development, exploitation and wealth, backwardness and sophisticated technology, unemployment and extreme concentration of income. Somewhat wearily, our creature from space would have commented: “The brains of these beings appear to limit their images and thoughts to binary opposites.” Returning to the debate on the meaning of analyses of dependency gives one the sensation of entering a discussion in which imagination is bound by preestablished models. Nevertheless, as though I were one of the “founding fathers” of dependency, I endorse the ceremonial consumption of the theme. How to escape from this uncomfortable position?

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , 1977 , pp. 7 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The author thanks the Institute of Advanced Study for sponsoring his stay at Princeton, where he had the opportunity to review the literature on dependency. Based on this work, the author offered a lecture to the 1976 LASA meeting at Atlanta. The present paper is a revised version of that lecture.

References

Notes

1. Susanne J. Bodenheimer, The Ideology of Developmentalism: The American Paradigm-Surrogate for Latin American Studies (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1971), esp. “Toward a New Conceptual Framework: The Dependency Model,” pp. 34–40.

2. Some original formulations of dependency studies try to avoid the simplistic presentation of the subject. The same is true for some commentators. Several books and papers are available in English about “dependency theory.” See, for a historical view on Latin American sociology, Joseph A. Kahl, Modernization, Exploitation, and Dependency in Latin America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1976). For an extensive review of Latin American literature on dependency, Ronald Chilcote and Joel Edelstein, Latin America: The Struggle With Dependency and Beyond (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), “Introduction,” pp. 1–87. For some criticism and an alternative but not incompatible perspective, see Albert Hirschman, “A Generalized Linkage Approach to Development with Special Reference to Staples,” mimeographed, 1975. For a critique and a summary assuming another paradigm, Robert Packenham, “Latin American Dependency Theories: Strengths and Weaknesses,” mimeographed. For brief, but consistent summaries, Philip O'Brien, “A Critique of Latin American Theories of Dependency,” mimeographed, Glasgow Institute of Latin American Studies; and Juan E. Corradi, “Cultural Dependency and the Sociology of Knowledge: The Latin American Case,” in Ideology and Social Change in Latin America, ed. June Nash and Juan Corradi, forthcoming. For an overview and bibliography, see Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling, Structures of Dependency (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1973).

3. The debate between the “humanistic” and the “ontological” approaches in the interpretation of Marxist dialectics has influenced most of the attempts to use this methodology by Brazilian social scientists. The methodological introduction to my Ph.D. dissertation, “Capitalismo e escravidão no Brasil meridional” (São Paulo, DIFEL, 1962), for instance, expresses this mood. On the other hand, the concept of “project,” with all its metaphysical implications, was also behind most of the publications of the influential Brazilian Institute for High Studies (ISEB) since the fifties.

4. The methodology of the book Dependência e Desenvolvimento (whose first version was an ILPES document) is quite close to the methodology that I used in previous studies on slavery and capitalism, as well as in research on problems of development and entrepreneurship in Brazil (see, for instance, Desenvolvimento Econômico e Empresario Industrial no Brasil; [São Paulo: DIFEL, 1964]). Several other Latin American authors have published since the early fifties attempting to revitalize the dialectical approach.

5. Brazilian literature on this topic is considerable. The classic studies are the well-known books by Roberto Simonsen, Caio Prado, and Celso Furtado on the colonial economy. From the sociological viewpoint, Florestan Fernandes's analysis of slave society and the “ancien régime” provides insightful interpretations. All those books (as well as Octavio Ianni, As metamorfoses do escravo [São Paulo: DIFEL, 1962] and my own book on slave society in Southern Brazil) were already published when Gunder Frank discussed his thesis on “feudalism” and “capitalism.”

6. This is the perspective of interpretations proposed in F. H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependência e Desenvolvimento (Santiago: ILPES, 1967). The draft version was distributed in Santiago in 1965.

7. In spite of that, the usual conception of a static analysis of structures leads to misinterpretations of some of my writings. In criticism I have been considered a structuralist in the Lévi-Strauss tradition, or even a defender of a non-class-struggle style of analysis. See, for this kind of naive understanding of the methodology that I propose, John Myer, “A Crown of Thorns: Cardoso and the Counter-Revolution,” Latin American Perspectives 2, no. 1 (Spring 1975).

8. Theotonio dos Santos, for instance, presents a similar view in the study he wrote after the discussion in Santiago of the essay written by Faletto and myself (Dependencia e Desenvolvimento). See dos Santos, El nuevo carácter de la dependencia (Santiago: Cuadernos de Estudios Socio-Económicos 10, Centro de Estudios Socio-Económicos [CESO], Universidad de Chile, 1968). In other essays that dos Santos published after his first comprehensive writing about “la nueva dependencia,” the same pattern of dialectical and nonmechanical connection between external and internal interests is described in a simple and clear way. See especially, “La crisis de la teoría del desarrollo y las relaciones de dependencia en América Latina,” in Helio Jaguaribe et al., La dependencia político-económica de América Latina (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1970), pp. 147–87.

9. See, apart from Kahl's book which is more comprehensive in historical terms and is not limited to the discussion on dependency, Bodenheimer, The Ideology of Developmentalism and Chilcote and Edelstein, Latin America. See also, Packenham, “Latin American Dependency Theories,” pp. 4–5.

10. Even dos Santos proposes a formal (and thus static and nonhistorical) definition of dependency in his well known article “The Structure of Dependency” (American Economic Review 60, no. 2 [1970]: 231–36). Vania Bambirra also succumbed to the temptation of helping dos Santos to develop a “theory of dependency” or of dependent capitalism, as the latter suggested in his essay “La crisis de la teoría.” The result of that attempt was a new typology of forms of dependency and some formal possibilities of structural changes. See Vania Bambirra, El capitalismo dependente latinoamericano (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974). Bambirra misinterprets the analysis of situations of dependency suggested by Faletto and me when she refers to them as if we were proposing “types” of dependency.

11. The preoccupation with “laws of transformation”—in the Marxist tradition—is quite clear in dos Santos, as well as in Bambirra's book. Rui Mauro Marini, in “Brazilian Sub-imperialism” (Monthly Review 9 [February 1972]: 14–24), and Sub-desarrollo y revolución (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1969), refers also to some kind of historical laws. But Marini's views are more analogical-formal than historical-structural and his presentation of dependent capitalism's characteristics (in terms of overexploitation of the labor force and permanent crisis of capital realization) does not fit with the real historical process.

12. Examples of this are Packenham's criticism of dependency studies and, correspondingly, his contributions towards evaluating the performance of states and economies in terms of degrees of independence. See, especially, his article “Trends in Brazilian Dependency since 1964,” unpublished. Others, in spite of more adequate understanding about the theoretical meaning of dependency studies, have committed methodological fallacies. One example is the quite provocative paper by Cris Chase-Dum, “The Effects of International Economic Dependency on Development and Inequalities: A Cross-National Study,” unpublished. The author makes comparisons between different situations of dependency as if they form part of the same continuum of dependency-independence. The analysis becomes, thus, formal and ahistorical. Even in Durkheim's approach to comparative analyses, some compatibility among structures being analyzed is required to validate the results. Furthermore, in a historical-structural approach, the specificity of concrete situations is a precondition for any analytical formulation. Nevertheless, Chase-Dum does not take into account the basic distinctions between class and political structures in an enclave type of economy, a nationally controlled export economy, and an associated-dependent industrialized one. Mixing data drawn from distinct situations of dependency, he intends to validate or to criticize statements that have been presented as characteristic of specific forms of dependency. I am not arguing against the use of statistics or empirical (historical) data as a means of validation or rejection of theories. I am criticizing the inadequate use of them, in methodological and theoretical terms.

Some other papers present mistakes similar to the above, with an additional characteristic: they replace the theoretical views of dependentistas by the “common-sense meaning of the term” (dependency and imperialism). The pretext for this is the lack of precision in the literature. By precision these authors mean a positivistic approach. After redefining the “theory of dependency” according to their own conceptions they intend to submit it to “empirical test,” confronting hypotheses with data. Which hypotheses, how to categorize data, and who are the authors submitted to proof depends, of course, on the arbitrary choice of these empirical and objective cultivators of science. See, for instance, Raymond Duval and Bruce Russet, “Some Proposals to Guide Research on Contemporary Imperialism,” unpublished.

13. See Dependencia y Desenvolvimento, last chapter, “The New Dependency.” Dos Santos took these ideas and developed the characterization in El nuevo carácter de la dependencia. Nevertheless, several critics and commentators have not realized the implications of what is new in the dependency situations of industrialized Third World countries. Bodenheimer, for instance, kept the perspective of the expansion model of one phase of imperialism as the main feature of “la nueva industrialización”: “The international system today is characterized by: advanced industrial capitalism … the dominant nations need raw materials and, more important, commodities and capital markets” (“Dependency and Imperialism: The Roots of Latin American Underdevelopment,” in Readings in U.S. Imperialism, ed. K. T. Fann and Donald C. Hodges [Boston: Porter Sargent, 1971]), p. 161. Moreover, Bodenheimer's concept of the “infra-structure of dependency” relates basically to the multinational corporations. Thus, again, the external forces are supposed to reshape internal structures without internal mediation: “The infrastructure of dependency may be seen as the functional equivalent of a formal colonial apparatus,” sustained by client-classes which play, in “modern” Latin America, the historical role of a “comprador bourgeoisie” (see pp. 161–63). In this approach the functional-formalistic method is alive again, not because of the use of the expression “functional equivalent” by itself, but because Bodenheimer is comparing situations (the “colonial” and the “modern capitalist”) constructed without historical content, as Gunder Frank sometimes does when he refers to feudalism and capitalism.

14. In this respect, the most influential essay was Osvaldo Sunkel, “Transnational Capitalism and National Disintegration in Latin America,” Social and Economic Studies (University of the West Indies) 22, no. 1 (March 1973). Celso Furtado wrote some recent articles on contemporary capitalism, stressing the reorganization of the international market under the control of multinationals and its consequences for international political domination.

15. The importance of state bureaucracy and state enterprises in Latin America was stressed by several dependentistas. See, dos Santos, “La crisis de la teoría del desarrollo,” and “Dependencia económica y alternativas de cambio en América Latina” (Revista Mexicana de Sociología 32, no. 2 [March-April 1970]: 416–63). My own views on the subject can be found in Autoritarismo e Democratizacão (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1975). See, for more recent developments in the discussion of the role of the state, the insightful essay by Guillermo O'Donnell, “Reflexiones sobre las tendencias generales de cambio en el Estado burocrático-autoritario” (Buenos Aires: CEDES, 1975; to appear in LARR 13, no. 1 [in press]). Marcos Kaplan published pioneering essays on the nature of the state in dependent societies. See, esp., his “Estado, dependencia externa y desarrollo en América Latina” (Estudios Internacionales 2, no. 2 [July-September 1968]: 179–213). Francisco Weffort published a well-known, illuminating essay on “State and Masses” (Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología [Buenos Aires, 1966]).

16. This is not the occasion to recall the discussion on “marginality,” to which Aníbal Quijano and José Nun have contributed. Recent research and criticism seem to reorient the discussion by assuming other hypotheses with respect to employment, marginality, and industrialization. See Paul Singer as well as Elizabeth Balan and Lucio Kowarick in various issues of CEBRAP's Cadernos and Estudos. Vilmar Faria in his Ph.D. dissertation “Urban Marginality as a Structural Phenomenon: An Overview of the Literature” (Harvard University, 1976), not only summarizes previous discussions, but proposes new approaches to the subject, taking into consideration empirical evidence and theoretical elaborations on the question of employment and capitalist development, without the “stagnationist” bias.