Louis Proyect wrote: > After Robert Brenner wrote his attack on > dependency theory in the 1977 NLR, the > impact was immediate.
Latin American Marxists were very involved in debating the merits and demerits of dependency theory. I imagine some works influential in Latin America were never translated into English. From my own experience, I can say that some of these works were extremely influential in Mexico, shaping up the views of many young political activists. One of the most effective Marxist critics of dependentism (not the only one) was an Ecuadorian political scientist who taught at UNAM, Agustin Cueva. Some of Cueva's critical essays were packaged in "El desarrollo del capitalismo en America Latina," a book published by Siglo XXI in the mid 1970s. That year, the book received Siglo XXI's award to the best essay. Cuevas later deepened his critique of dependentism. In 1979, he published another bunch of essays under the title "Teoria social y procesos politicos en America Latina." However, this book was published by a less known publishing house and thus had much less diffusion. This may be obvious, but as far as I can tell, Marxists never disputed that Latin American capitalism was "dependent" or "interdependent in a subordinate sense" to the capitalism in the rich countries. The issues were the mechanisms of such dependency or subordination (exploitation), its import or size, and the role they played in the evolution of Latin American social formations -- in particular whether such mechanisms of exploitation limited or enabled (or both) -- and how specifically one or the other -- the further development of capitalist production in Latin America. Agustin Cueva posed all these questions most sharply, in Marxist terms, and showed how the answers supplied by the dependency theorists were mostly wrongheaded in its understanding, predictions, and political implications. IMO, what happened in Latin America and the world in the 3 subsequent decades was not only unexpected, but incomprehensible under the paradigm of dependency theory, while entirely discernible under Marxism. Having said that, I must admit that the dependentists as individuals have roughly remained on the right side of the popular struggles in Latin America in the last few decades, or -- at least -- that their effective political record is not worse than that of the kosher Marxists. So, being right or wrong in the theory didn't keep anybody from taking the right or wrong political stances in important historical junctures in Latin America. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
