Reflections on “Imperialism in the Financial Capital Era: Forgotten Contributions from Marxist Dependency Theory”

This article is welcome, and appropriately focuses on imperialism in a period of finance capital as a means of assessing recent and past attention to a Marxist dependency theory. The bimonthly Latin American Perspectives (LAP), founded in 1974, turned attention away from North American and Eurocentric thinking and welcomed critical study of capitalist imperialism and dependency. Its initial issue carried a debate emphasizing the relevancy of a classical Marxist theory of imperialism as opposed by the new thinking of many Latin American intellectuals around a theory of dependency to explain backwardness and uneven development. Among those defending the dependency approach were Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, and André Gunder Frank (whose essay in the journal responded to many Latin American critics of his thinking). Over nearly two decades, LAP published four issues around the question whether or not dependency theory was sufficiently Marxist, and eventually interest in dependency dissipated as authoritarian regimes faded away. What did appear thereafter in LAP, however, were several assessments around the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini, one of the early Marxists to focus on a theory of dependency and whose work recently appeared in English translation by Monthly Review Press, with Jaime Osorio as one of its organizers (Marini 2022). Vânia Bambirra and Theotônio dos Santos wrote extensively about dependency, but in their early years without explicit reference to Marxist theory. They had lost their academic positions after the 1964 military coup and not until the early 1990s, by presenting personal memorias and reflecting on their early thinking and accomplishments, were they reinstated in Brazilian universities, and it became clear what was their Marxist influence. All three of them were founding editors of LAP.

Somewhat belatedly in its January and March 2022 issues, LAP brought together more than twenty of the younger scholars now articulating a Marxist dependency theory (MDT), most of them from Brazil and Argentina, also Chile and Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America. I think it important to recognize Carlos Eduardo Martins who, I believe more than the others, set in motion an exhaustive theoretical understanding of a Marxist theory of dependency in a book published in Brazil in 2011 and substantially revised and translated as Dependency, Neoliberalism, and Globalization in Latin America (Martins 2021). In a brief foreword, Theotônio dos Santos praised it as “a new chapter in the history of ideas by looking at the connections between dependency theory and world-systems theory” (Martins 2021: X). In my LAP review of the book, I wrote that “Martins is important also because he clarifies what is Marxist and essential in the world-systems literature and identifies the underpinnings of Marxist thought in the dependency writing of a half century ago” (Chilcote 2022: 257). Let me add that the use of the term MDT is relatively recent and, in my view, exaggerated in its reference to the early dependency theory and debate. For instance, Cardoso rejected dependency as theory and emphasized its “associative” character. Frank replied to critics that his theory need not depend on Marx. Bambirra and Dos Santos rarely referenced their early writing to Marx. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marxists were reluctant to associate Marxism with dependency. With the end of military rule in Brazil for example in the 1980s, interest shifted to politics through political parties and social movements. The dependency debates within LAP dissipated.

In general, I laud this article’s effort and find interesting and essential its relating dependency theory to the international division of labor and the internationalization of capital because, especially in the early years of dependency theory, so much attention was devoted to the internal political economy of nations in Latin America, perhaps influenced by the early ECLA studies. I find interesting and agree with but do not believe the proposition in the article that all dependency theorists understand two effects of capitalism’s polarizing tendencies in the international division of labor and the internationalization of capital. I have trouble with the discussion about Cardoso as part of a Weberian and Marxist tradition. I knew him during the 1980s, and in 1984 I interviewed him extensively about Weber and Marx. He was a student of Florestan Fernandes who later we learned had emanated from a Trotskyist influence but insisted that his doctoral students study Weber, which in 1958 and 1959 led Cardoso and other social scientists in São Paulo to form a Capital Group to study Marx. In our 1984 interview, he acknowledged his debt and interest in Weber and Marx but wavered as to the influence of Marx upon his thinking. He participated as an author in LAP’s initial issue on dependency in 1974, and he was briefly a member of the editorial board, but a paper on dependency submitted to the journal was later rejected, as I recall, because it did not relate to Marxist thinking.

It is also appropriate that the article introduces some of the ideas of the POLOP citing from the memoirs of Bambirra and Dos Santos. This group was of interest to me, especially the participation of Michael Löwy and other Trotskyists, a Brazilian who later exiled to Paris and wrote a book about combined and uneven development drawn from Trotsky’s thinking that I consider an important thread in Marxist theory of development and dependency.

I appreciate the article’s referencing to post-Marxism and Ernesto Laclau who contributed substantially to diverting attention away from Marxism. The message in the 1990 special issue of LAP, discussed in this article, was not so much that this was a new and important trend but simply a distraction that had influenced progressive scholarship away from Marxist thought. And the issue content, in my view, effectively dismissed that thinking—and yes, the essay by Dussel was brilliant in setting forth a path toward which useful Marxist dependency theory could be elaborated.

Lastly, I applaud this article’s attention to past and recent theory of imperialism because, for me, the contributions of dependency theory should relate to the substantial writings on imperialism. Near the end of the article, the author also appropriately writes that globalization is a topic in contemporary imperialist studies rather than suggest, as many scholars do, that global theory has supplanted the classical theories of imperialism. For some years I offered a graduate seminar “Political Economy of Imperialism” that turned to classical imperialist theory as a foundation for critically assessing contemporary developmental thinking. I agree that MDT offers opportunity to work out new direction.