Our present, however, is one of spiraling crises. Since the financial crash of 2008, the economic crisis converges with ecological collapse and the exhaustion of liberal democratic forms, reaching civilizational dimensions. In this context, the pandemic laid bare how, instead of disappearing, the divide between the center and periphery of the world system is as sharp and as meaningful as ever.
With neoliberal hegemony fractured, other ways of thinking and practicing politics have reemerged from their intellectual exiles. Among these, dependency theory stands out as an original and revolutionary contribution of Latin American critical thought, offering tools for understanding uneven capitalist development and imperialism both historically and today. For an introduction to this unique framework, we turn to Dr. Jaime Osorio.
When a military coup d’état in Chile overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Osorio had already been accepted to begin his doctoral studies at the University of Chile’s Center for Socio-Economic Studies (CESO, in Spanish). The dictatorship’s advance brought him instead to Mexico, where today he ranks as Distinguished Professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in Xochimilico and as Researcher Emeritus by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT). He is the author of many books, including Fundamentos del análsis social. La realidad social y su conocimiento and Sistema mundial. Intercambio Desigual y renta de la tierra.
In this interview, Osorio speaks with Jacobin contributing editor Hilary Goodfriend about the Marxist school of dependency theory, its origins and principles, and its present-day applications.
Dependency theory and its Marxist strain emerged from debates and dialogues about development, underdevelopment, and imperialism in the context of decolonization and the national liberation struggles of the twentieth century. What were the main positions and strategies in dispute, and how did Marxist dependency theorists position themselves in these arguments?
At the theoretical level, Marxist dependency theory [TMD, in Spanish] is the result of the Cuban Revolution’s victory in 1959. Latin American Marxism was moved by the island’s gesture. All the main theses about the nature of Latin American societies and the character of revolution came into question.
A little over a decade after that event, which sharpened the debates, TMD reached maturity. In those years, some of the proposals that fed theories of dependency emphasized the role of trade relations, such as the “deterioration of the terms of trade” thesis put forward by the [Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean] CEPAL, which referred to the cheapening of primary goods against the rising prices of industrial products in the world market.
Orthodox Marxists highlighted the presence of internal “obstacles” that impeded development, like idle terrain in the hands of landowners, which also blocked the expansion of wage relations. Generally, in these proposals, capitalism wasn’t to blame. In fact, it was necessary to accelerate its spread so that its inherent contradictions would heighten. Only then could a socialist revolution be proposed, according to this stage-based perspective prevalent in the Communist Parties.
For the Cepalinos, their horizon was achieving advanced capitalism, which would be possible by means of a process of industrialization. This would allow the region to cease exporting primary goods and food products and importing secondary goods, which would now be produced internally, sparking technological development and stemming the outflow of resources.
In both proposals, the industrial bourgeoisie had a positive role to play, be it in the medium or long term.
For Marxist dependency theory, the region’s so-called economic “backwardness” was a result of the formation and expansion of the capitalist world system, whose course produced development and underdevelopment simultaneously. Therefore, these divergent economic histories are not independent processes, nor are they connected tangentially. From this perspective, the fundamental theoretical and historical problem required explaining the processes that generated both development and underdevelopment in the same movement.
This problem demanded, furthermore, a response that accounted for how this process is reproduced over time since civilization and barbarism are constantly made anew by the world system.
Many of the acclaimed Marxist dependency theorists—Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio Dos Santos, Vania Bambirra—share a trajectory of flight from South American dictatorships and exile in Mexico. You were also subject to this forced displacement. How did these experiences of revolution and counterrevolution influence the construction of TMD?
Four names stand out in the development of TMD: André Gunder Fank, Theotonio Dos Santos, Vania Vambirra, and Ruy Mauro Marini. The first was a German-U.S. economist and the other three Brazilians, who shared readings and discussions in Brazil before the 1964 coup in that country. Subsequently, they found each other in Chile in the late 1960s in the Center for Socio-Economic Studies, until the military coup of 1973. During this period—at least in the case of the Brazilians—they produced their principals works with regards to TMD. I had the fortune of meeting and working with Marini in Mexico in the mid-1970s, before his return to Brazil.
TMD offers no concessions to the local ruling classes, holding them responsible for the prevailing conditions in which they manage to reap enormous profits in collusion with international capitals, despite [international] value transfers. For this reason, it was hard for these theorists to find spaces for their knowledge in the academic world.
The 1973 military coup in Chile meant that the principal creators of TMD appeared on the search lists of the military forces and their intelligence apparatus. And this coup in Chile, which was preceded by the coup in Brazil in 1964, was followed by many more in the Southern part of the continent, which dispersed and disbanded working groups and closed important spaces in those societies.
At the same time, this long counterrevolutionary phase, which was not limited to military governments, favored sweeping transformations in the social sciences, where neoliberal theories and methodological individualism came to reign supreme. TMD emerged in an exceptional period of recent history. However, subsequently and in general—saving certain moments and countries in the region—ideal conditions for its development and dissemination have not existed.
In his classic work, The Dialectics of Dependency, Marini defines dependency as a “relation of subordination between formally independent nations, in whose framework the relations of production of the subordinate nation are modified or recreated in order to ensure the expanded production of dependency.” What are the mechanisms of this expanded production, and how have they changed since Marini formulated his proposal in the 1970s?
When we talk about the processes generated by dependent capitalism, the “dependent” qualifier isn’t redundant. We’re talking about another way of being capitalist. That is to say that in the world system, diverse forms of capitalism coexist and are integrated, and they feed off each other and deepen their particular forms within the global unity of capital.
The heterogeneity of the system can be explained, then, not by the backwardness of some economies, not as prior states [of development], not as deficiencies. Each constitutes its full, mature form of capitalism possible in this system.
In this way, with the stroke of a pen, TMD destroyed the hopes of the developmentalists, who supposed that the dependent economies could achieve higher states of welfare and development within this order constituted by capital. For them, it was just a matter of taking advantage of windows that regularly open. There is nothing in the prevailing dynamic to suggest that things are moving in that direction. To the contrary, what is produced and continues to emerge is the “development of underdevelopment,” so long as capitalist social relations prevail.
The gap between underdeveloped and developed capitalism, or between imperialist and dependent capitalism is ever widening. Dependency deepens and more acute modalities are generated. In a world in which digital capitalism is gaining ground—the internet of things, artificial intelligence, robotics, as an example—this isn’t hard to understand.
Experiences like that of South Korea can’t be repeated at will. They are, instead, exceptions to the rule. Why did the IMF cut off and suffocate the Argentine economy and not extend its hand like imperialist capital did for South Korea after the 1952 war on the peninsula? It was the latter’s exceptional position in a strategic space, which was disrupted by the triumph of Mao’s revolution in China and the need to construct a barrier to prevent the expansion of socialism in Korea, that turned on the faucet of enormous resources, at least for Japan and the United States, and put blinders on those defenders of democracy and the free market when South Korea was governed by a succession of military dictatorships that ferociously applied state intervention, not the free market, to define plans and programs to define priorities for investment and loans.
Today, all a government in the dependent world has to do is establish some rules for foreign capital, and the whole clamor and propaganda of transnational media demand that communism be stopped, impeding international loans, blocking access to markets, and seeking to suffocate those alleged subversives.
The concept of superexploitation as a mechanism by which dependent capitalists compensate for their subordinate insertion in the international division of labor is perhaps Marini’s most original and polemic proposal. Some Marxists, for example, protest the possibility of the systematic violation of the law of value. This is a theme that you take up in your debate with the Argentinian researcher Claudio Katz. How do you define superexploitation, and why, or in what terms, do you defend its validity today?
With Marini’s short book, The Dialectics of Dependency, whose central body was written in 1972 and would be published in 1973, TMD reaches its point of greatest maturity. We can synthesize the nucleus of Marini’s thesis in the question: How is the reproduction of a capitalism that regularly transfers value to imperialist economies possible?
It’s possible because in dependent capitalism, a particular form of exploitation is imposed which means that capital isn’t just appropriating surplus value, but also part of workers’ consumption fund, which ought to correspond to their salaries, in order to transfer it to their accumulation fund. That’s what the category of superexploitation accounts for. If all capital eventually ends up being unpaid labor, in dependent capitalism, all capital is unpaid labor and the appropriated life fund [of the working class].
Marini’s response is theoretically and politically brilliant, because it allows us to explain the reasons for the multiplication of misery and the devastation of the workers in the dependent world, but also the reasons for which capital is unable to establish stable forms of domination in these regions, regularly expelling huge contingents of workers from its civilizational promises, thrusting them into barbarism and converting them into contingents that resist, revolt, and rise up against the projects of the powerful.
Superexploitation has consequences at all levels of Latin American societies. For now, we can emphasize that it accompanies the formation of economies oriented to foreign markets. Following the processes of independence in the nineteenth century, and under the guidance of local capitals, the region’s economies advanced on the basis of exports, initially of primary materials and foodstuffs, to which we can add, recently, the production and assembly of luxury industrial goods like cars, televisions, state-of-the-art cell phones—products equally distant from the general consumption needs of most of the working population. This is compatible with the dominant modality of exploitation, which seriously impacts salaries, reducing workers’ consumption power and reducing their participation in the formation of a dynamic internal market.
It’s relevant here to consider a significant difference with capitalism in the developed world. There, as capitalism advanced in the nineteenth century, it faced the dilemma that in order to keep expanding, which implied the multiplication of the mass of goods and products, it would need to incorporate workers into consumption. That was achieved by paying salaries with the purchasing power for basic goods such as clothing, shoes, utensils, and home furnishings. This balance was accomplished by introducing improved production techniques, which reduced the pressure to extend the working day by multiplying the mass of products thrown into the market. From there, we can understand the weight of relative surplus value in developed capitalism.
But in Latin America, things worked differently. Nineteenth-century capitalism didn’t see the need to create markets, because they had been available since the colonial period in the imperialist centers. In addition, English capitalism’s takeoff increased the demand for primary materials and foodstuffs. For this reason, there wasn’t any hurry to change the kind of use values and products put on the market. They continued to be foodstuffs and primary goods. In this way, the emergent capitalism in our region was under no pressure to do something qualitatively different. The mass of salaried laborers expanded, but they don’t comprise the principal demand for the goods being produced, which was in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Through their insertion in the world market and when it comes time to sell products, Latin American economies transfer value [abroad] for the simple reason that the capitals that operate here have lower compositions and productivities than the capitals in economies that spend more on new machinery, equipment, and technology, allowing them greater productivity and the ability to appropriate value created in other parts of the world. This process is called unequal exchange.
It's important to note that unequal exchange occurs in the market, at the moment of the purchase and sale of commodities. Apart from their low organic composition, this concept doesn’t tell us much about how these commodities were produced, and above all, what allows for a capitalist process to be reproduced over time in such conditions. That’s where super-exploitation comes in.
That is the secret that makes dependent capitalism viable. And this calls all the more attention to the errors of people like Claudio Katz, who have formulated proposals that try to eliminate this concept and do so, furthermore, with grotesque arguments, like that Marx never mentioned it in Capital – he refers to [superexploitaiton] many times, in a variety of ways – because that would imply a dilution or a direct attack on his theoretical proposition since capitalism can’t annihilate its workforce.
I’m not going to repeat those debates with Katz. I will simply reiterate that Marx’s Capital is a book that is central to the study of capitalism and its contradictions. But no one can claim that it accounts for everything, or that capitalism, in its spread over time, can’t exhibit theoretical or historical novelties of any kind. That is a religious reading, but Capital is not a sacred text. Such a position, furthermore, is an attack on a central dimension of Marxism as a theory able to explain not only what has existed, but also that which is new. For this reason, the only orthodoxy Marxism can claim is its mode of reflection.
It's also argued that the spread of superexploitation to the central economies following globalized neoliberal restructuring invalidates its character as a process unique to dependent capitalism.
Superexploitation can be present anywhere that capital operates, be that in the developed or underdeveloped world, just like forms of relative surplus value and absolute surplus value. Of course, there is superexploitation in Brazil and Guatemala, just as there is in Germany and South Korea.
But that’s not the problem. What’s relevant is to elucidate the weight of these forms of exploitation, which can be present in any capitalist space, in capital’s reproduction. So the central issue is different, and so are the economic, social, and political consequences.
Setting aside periods of crisis, when the most brutal forms of exploitation can be exacerbated everywhere, can capitalism operate in the medium and long term without a market that generates salaries, or with extremely low salaries? Something like if, in Germany, the average salary of the Armenians and Turks was generalized for the entire working population, or if the salaries of Mexican and Central American workers in the United States were predominant there. I don’t think so.
Finally, what tools or perspectives does Marxist dependency theory offer us in the face of today’s crises?
In its eagerness to deal with the acute and prolonged capitalist crisis, capital in every region seeks to accentuate forms of exploitation, including superexploitation. It seeks, once again, to reduce rights and benefits. With the war in Ukraine, it has found a good excuse to justify the increase in the price of food, housing, and energy, and its shameless return to the use of fuels that intensify pollution and environmental barbarism, as well as the increase in military budgets at the expense of wages and jobs.
The great imperial powers expect the subordination of economies and states to their decisions in periods of this sort. But the current crisis is also accelerating the crisis of hegemony in the world system, which opens spaces for greater degrees of autonomy—which does not put an end to dependency. This is evident in Washington’s difficulties with disciplining the Latin American and African states to support their position in the conflict in Europe.
The scenario in Latin America over the last few decades reveals processes of enormous interest. We have witnessed significant popular mobilization in almost every country in the region, questioning various aspects of the neoliberal tsunami, be it jobs, salaries, retirements, healthcare and education, as well as rights like abortion, recognition of gender identities, lands, water, and much more.
On this deeply fractured terrain that capital generates in the dependent world, class disputes tend to intensify. This explains the regular social and political outbursts in our societies. It’s the result of the barbarity that capitalism imposes on regions like ours.
One expression of this social force is manifested in the electoral terrain. But just as quickly as there have been victories, there have been defeats. These comings and goings can be naturalized, but why haven’t the victories allowed for lasting processes of change?
Of course, this is not to deny that there have been violent coups of a new sort that have managed to unseat governments. But even then, there were already signs of exhaustion that limited the protests, with the clear exception of Bolivia. There is an enormous gap between the leftist voter and the person who occasionally votes for left projects. The neoliberal triumph was not only in the economic policies and transformations it achieved, but also in its installment of a vision and interpretation of the world, its problems, and its solutions.
The struggle against neoliberalism today involves dismantling privatization of every kind and putting a stop to the conversion of social services and policies into private businesses. That means taking on the most economic and politically powerful sectors of capital, with control over state institutions where legislators, judges, and military members operate, together with the main media, schools, and churches. We can add that these are the sectors of capital with the strongest ties to imperialist capitals and their assemblage of supranational institutions, media, and states.
It's a powerful social bloc. It’s hard to think about attacking it without having to attack capitalism itself.
