Dependency Theory: Prospects and Challenges in the 21st Century

Carlos Eduardo Martins is currently one of the most prominent theoretical exponents of critical Latin American thought. At a time when many intellectuals were abandoning critical thinking and Marxism to follow the path of neoliberalism and the latest theoretical-methodological trends, Martins articulated Marxist dependency theory with the approach known as capitalist world system analysis. The virtuous relationship between the two approaches and the renewed dialectical analysis of Latin American dependency in the global context that it produces lie at the heart of the present volume.

Unlike other authors, Martins makes it clear that the concept of a world system cannot erase or substitute that of a mode of production. This is key to avoiding the mistake of one-dimensional analysis, as the latter constitutes the material base of production and reproduction of social life in all of humanity’s historical epochs. He thus takes his place as one of the leading Marxist exponents of dependency theory in the tradition of classic figures such as Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio Dos Santos and Vania Bambirra, whose insights and ideas contributed most to its development.

The book begins by laying out the big challenges facing the social sciences in the context of what is called globalization. It then comprehensively explains the origins, cycles and secular nature of the modern world system and its crisis. This leads to his exposition of the contemporary structural features of dependency in what is described as a modern world system constituted by intensified labour super-exploitation.

In my view, the originality of the author’s contribution to dependency theory lies in identifying, describing and systematising super-exploitation – the backbone of the global capitalist economy. Martins shows that this is a mechanism that operates not only in dependent economies like those of Latin America, but also as a function of capital’s structural and civilisational crisis. It is a mechanism that is gradually penetrating the very heart of the economic and productive cycles in the advanced capitalist economies of the imperialist nations: the European Union, United States and Japan. Previously, only the mechanism of production for average and extraordinary profits had functioned in those countries. This primarily took place via the rise in labour productivity achieved by intensely incorporating the fruits of the techno-scientific revolution into the productive process between the end of wwii up until the big structural and financial crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

The author argues that today, the structural determination constituted and driven by labour’s increased productive capacity is joined by super-exploitation as a new component of social relations and capital’s exploitation of labour in the advanced countries. This is precisely why his chapter “Revisiting the Political Economy of Dependency in the Light of Marx and Contemporary Capitalism” is so important. Here, he sets out his own unique view of this polemical issue, one which is crucial to understanding the modern-day dynamics of crisis-ridden capitalism.

After laying out the history of the notion of super-exploitation as it appears in the classic work of Marini’s Dialéctica de la dependencia, Martins then draws up a thought-provoking balance of the concept. He traces out the historical forms assumed by super-exploitation in Latin America in the export economy, import substitution and neoliberalism. In so doing, he offers a fascinating discussion of the past and present relationship between labour intensity and accumulation patterns based on technological development aimed at the world market. Martins concludes that the new model of capitalist development in the region broadens and deepens super-exploitation; generates economic growth that is both low on average and ecologically unsustainable because it actually destroys the environment; triggers the return of deep social and political crisis as a result of poverty, unemployment, and the rise in precarious and super-exploited labour, with growth tied to a capitalist world economy gripped by decline and a terminal civilisational crisis.

The book also presents alternatives to capitalism’s self-destructive path even if there are no magic answers or caudillos to perform miracles. As the author argues, capitalism in all its guises, dependent or advanced, needs to be superseded by what he calls a new model of regional development, whose historical transformative subject consists of whichever “antisystemic social movements” capable of articulating and developing a serious alternative project, democratic and liberatory in nature, that reaches beyond systems predicated upon exploitation and domination.

The question of exactly what alternatives might embody the social, economic and political transformation of the system is not an easy one for Marxism and critical Latin American thought to resolve as it involves a whole range of concepts and issues which that must be resolved. And that is precisely why Carlos Eduardo Martin’s book is so important. It provides an essential starting point for an urgent and necessary debate among interested parties and popular movements with the capacity to build alternative projects in the face of capitalism’s global crisis as both a mode of production and a system of political domination.