By FABIO DE OLIVEIRA MALDONADO*
Presentation of the Brazilian edition of the recently released book by Jaime Osorio
Jaime Osorio, a Chilean sociologist who has lived in Mexico for a long time, has established himself as one of the most important Marxist sociologists in Latin America. With a vast and important body of work published, the author is still little known to the Brazilian public, even among that select and specialized academic group dedicated to understanding the problems of the continent. Nothing could be more normal, we would say.
While it is true that the social sciences can serve as a privileged mechanism to conceal and reproduce the concrete interests of the dominant classes, it is no less true to say that, when operated by critical thinking, they end up constituting the geometric antithesis of these interests, that is, they become an essential element for identifying the root of economic, political and social problems, contributing to finding ways to overcome them. On the periphery of the system, particularly in Latin America, the need to establish a vigorous critical thinking emerges even more urgently. It is in this deeper sense that Simón Rodríguez decreed: “either we invent or we err.”
Jaime Osorio is a direct heir to this critical tradition of Latin American thought, historically marginalized by established intellectual circles – the many “Ruas do Ouvidor” (Ombudsman Streets) that have always existed throughout Latin America. More directly, he is one of the intellectuals who are linked to the second generation of Marxist Dependency Theory.
Like a large part of the generation of intellectuals and revolutionary activists of his time, he had to leave Chile to go into exile after the coup d'état of September 11, 1973 and the long night of counterrevolution that fell upon the Andean country. It was in exile in Mexico – a country that sheltered students, intellectuals and activists from various Latin American countries – that Jaime Osorio gained notoriety as an intellectual linked to the Marxist Theory of Dependency, becoming one of the main disciples and intellectual partners of Ruy Mauro Marini.
Between the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, dependency theory became a paradigm in the study of Latin American capitalism, qualitatively surpassing the approach developed by developmentalist theorists – identified mainly with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) – and the sociology of modernization.
In turn, differentiating itself from the eclectic trend based on the Weberian matrix (represented, in particular, in the work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto), the Marxist theory of dependency introduced the perspective of dependency as a complement (and even improvement) to the theory of imperialism, characterized by a totalizing reflection of the world capitalist system. According to this theoretical current, reflecting on dependency also implies understanding the consequences of the action of imperialism in peripheral countries or, more broadly, the consequences of the expansion of the capitalist system towards these countries.
It is, then, the exercise of moving from the singular to the general based on particularities, in a process of constructing hierarchical relationships that are specified and determined, so that the resulting synthesis (the totality) appears no longer as a combination of diffuse and incoherent events, but as a set of relationships that are presented organized in thought.
Methodologically, understanding and synthesis in thought is achieved through the production of categories that help to understand these hierarchical relationships and their dynamics. In short, this movement means not only the characterization of the singular and the particular, but also the way in which the universal is informed by these. Hence the need for the category “dependence” as a complement and improvement of imperialism. In this way, the possibility is opened for development and underdevelopment to be understood in an integrated manner and as contemporaries of the same historical process.
In relation to the Marxist theory of dependency, among the many contributions he has made, Jaime Osorio stands out, in particular, for the theoretical construction of the category of “capital reproduction pattern” – developed based on the methodological paths initiated by Ruy Mauro Marini. In short, this category seeks to understand the faces that capitalism can assume in a given society, within a given historical period, indicating the sectors and branches that attract the greatest amount of investment and that constitute the dynamic nuclei of capitalist accumulation and reproduction.
Analyzing a region or country in a given historical period, it can be observed that capital favors sectors that, at that moment, will be more profitable for its valorization process. Thus, the pattern of capital reproduction consists of a category with a certain level of abstraction that reveals the periodization of the repetitive movement of capital valorization, taking into account the dynamic axis of capitalist accumulation in a given region, country, city, etc.
From this perspective, inter-bourgeois and intra-bourgeois disputes, as well as the dynamics of the class struggle, become better understood. In short, if the analysis of a given capital cycle can be compared to that of a photograph, in which one can observe the frozen image of the passage of capital through its different phases, the pattern of capital reproduction would consist of the sequential analysis of several photographs, configuring a film that allows us to identify the regularities of a given historical period.
However, this “creative” discovery (if we want to bring Simón Rodríguez closer) took place at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the following decade, a time when dependency theory was in sharp decline – after reaching its peak and becoming a paradigm of Latin American social sciences in the first half of the 1970s. The siege of military dictatorships on intellectuals and activists, the overwhelming rise of neoliberalism and the debate on authoritarianism and the democratic transition ended up shifting the Latin American debate – which, since the 1940s, had revolved around development and underdevelopment – having a decisive impact on the decline, and even ostracism, of this theoretical paradigm.
However, it was not only dependency theory that went into decline during this period. In the wake of the crisis of capitalism and its impacts since the mid-1970s, research and study programs in the social sciences took a different direction, with the repositioning of positivism as one of the predominant poles alongside postmodernism, which emerged with immense vigor as a scientific alternative to the “totalizing” sciences.
It is precisely due to the consolidation of these perspectives, with the predominance of empiricism, the fragmentation and dispersion of the analyses derived from them, that Jaime Osorio seeks to put the Marxist perspective back at the center of the concerns of the social sciences with his work. Fundamentals of social analysis: social reality and its knowledge.
Originally published in 2001 by the publisher Fundo de Cultura Econômica, in Mexico, with a second edition, revised and corrected, published by the same publisher in 2016 (from which this publication is based), the book that the Brazilian public now has in their hands proposes the rescue of the scientific concern in understanding the intelligibility of the social world from the articulation of its most diverse elements. In other words, it necessarily involves the controversy with positivism and postmodernism.
In this sense, Jaime Osorio observes that, to a certain extent, totality is taken by postmodernism as an academic version of totalitarianism, understood as a philosophical effort that would be exhausted and would be part of modernity, that is, of the past. For postmodernism, the study of the particular, the contingent and the undetermined is one of the main aspects of its epistemic proposal. In reality, the problem would not be in the study of particularities and singularities, but in the lack of articulation of these with the general.
Positivism and neopositivism reject the notion of totality for other reasons. Although they conceive of the existence of an order and a meaning in social life, and that it is the role of science to identify them, there is no rationality capable of encompassing them in a general explanation. For Karl Popper, for example, reality has no limits, so that totality, however it may be constituted, could not be grasped by scientific activity.
Here, as Jaime Osorio points out, there is confusion between knowing everything and knowing the whole (which would be associated with the idea of completeness). As the author observes, to know the whole it is not necessary to know all of its atoms – or, in other words, to know the forest it is not necessary to know each of its trees. This confusion occurs to the extent that this perspective takes the whole as a “mere” union of all things.
The totality, on the other hand, is an articulated, structured and hierarchical whole, composed of parts. But the totality is more than the sum of its parts, and also contains their relationships. Indeed, in our time, the historical activity that unifies the totality is capitalism – with emphasis on the capital-labor relationship – which unfolds into a hierarchical and unequal world system.
On the other hand, totality as a historical activity (understood not as a static being, but as a being-in-being) is constituted by negation, by internal contradiction, so that it is configured in a differentiated, non-homogenizing universality. This being the case, reality is set in motion by the negation of itself, so that by setting itself in motion by negating what it already is, it places itself in the possibility of change. In other words, it is an entity that is in a constant process of becoming other than itself. Here, then, is negation as the immanence of being.
It is along these lines that Marx proposed that the limit of capitalist production consists of capital itself, since its movement of reproduction carries within itself its negation in the form of economic crises that open fissures, which can result in its revolution and overcoming (repeal). Capital is responsible for creating its own gravedigger, namely, the proletariat, a subject that embodies the social and political negation of capitalism itself.
However, in order to be scientifically known as a complex totality, social reality must be decomposed. In the social sciences, this process of decomposition for its apprehension occurs from three dimensions: (a) the levels of analysis, (b) time and (c) space; so that each of them requires a particular set of categories.
The levels of analysis refer, initially, to the processes of abstraction and concretion of reflection that seek to overcome what is immediately given in perception, that is, the representations that appear in a chaotic way and that generally operate in a distorted way. This method of knowledge starts from initial representations (the concrete represented), with the separation and analysis of simple elements in order to then decipher and reveal the specific articulations of the reality that one wishes to explain.
This is the process of abstraction taught by Marx, which consists of distancing oneself from the immediately given reality in order to separate and analyze its simple elements – considered fundamental in the fabric that organizes and gives meaning to social reality – and then making the return journey, incorporating new elements and new processes towards an enriched totality, and thus generating a more concrete reality that appears in an organized, hierarchical and explained manner. In other words, this process will result in an explained concrete, which is a synthesis of multiple determinations.
For Jaime Osorio, starting from the most abstract to the most concrete level, Marxism allows the distinction of the following levels: mode of production, capitalist mode of production, world system, pattern of capital reproduction, economic-social formation and conjuncture. Each of these levels of analysis makes up an integrated and interrelated categorical system, so that the more concrete levels are fed by the notions, categories and tendencies of the more abstract levels, although they must conceive of their own notions, categories and tendencies, which account for the analytical particularity referred to.
On the other hand, when they are successful in grasping particularities, the more concrete levels impact the more abstract levels, redefining their reflection. In this way, Marxism has a theoretical body that is in permanent movement at all levels, conditioning and feeding back into itself. Even so, the author points out, each level has its own logic and regularity, which requires its own categories and methodologies, as well as technical instruments for collecting information.
The temporal dimension does not refer to any time, let us say natural time, chronologically represented in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries and millennia, which are measured and controlled by the clock or calendar. This dimension refers to social time, which is heterogeneous and discontinuous, which condenses and expands. It is in this second sense that it becomes possible to understand social reality as a unity of different social times, which includes processes that occur in the short term (the notion of conjuncture being a specific temporality of this process), in the medium term and even in long-term processes.
In fact, despite the differences, these temporalities are closely linked, forming a unity of social time. This temporal intersection, as Osorio tells us, is a central problem for analysis, which must identify the significance and incidence of short time in long-term time and vice versa.
The third dimension of totality is spatial, which refers to the connection between society and nature in geographically delimited spaces, so that geographical conditions play a central role in the very construction of social history. We can think, for example, that from the perspective of what is produced, it is different to occupy a space in a tropical region and a space in a temperate region in the South, even though both spaces are located in peripheral regions.
Likewise, the reproduction of the workforce differs in one location from another – in the first case, the workforce wears lighter clothing and maintains a less fatty diet, whereas in the second case, the workforce must wear thicker clothing, maintain a diet richer in fat and still have appropriate housing to withstand the low temperatures.
In this sense, the author tells us that the spatial dimension contains three main levels of analysis: the social processes that develop (i) in macro-regional spaces; (ii) in regional spaces; (iii) in local spaces. The systemic approach to capitalism applies to the first case; the approach of a politically or economically integrated region or a nation-state is consistent with the second level; and the third level refers to some micro-regional spaces, where economic, social and cultural relations are maintained.
Regardless of the unit of analysis adopted, it integrates a structure that gives it intelligibility, which implies answering two questions: how a more general process manifests itself and expresses itself in particular processes (or smaller units) and how particular processes impact and affect the more general processes of which they are part. As can be seen, the richness of the process of decomposition of social reality consists in the openness and flexibility with which it allows the passage from one dimension of analysis to another, or from one level of analysis to another, in order to arrive at the reconstruction of the totality.
Not shying away from critically debating approaches that relativize the existence of truth and deny the possibility of the existence of a knowable totality, one of the work's greatest contributions is the attention and care with which it presents the paths through which the process of scientific reflection must follow towards the concrete.
The reader is promptly led to understand the relevance of the abstraction process, as well as its necessary mediations, so that the social researcher is able to grasp social reality in its multiple determinations. It is from this epistemic and methodological perspective that Fundamentals of social analysis resumes the controversy with empiricist currents, reaffirming the need for theoretical-methodological unity for the reconstruction of data and facts.
This, on the one hand, raises the question of ideology as an expression of thought that illuminates a restricted aspect of reality, leaving everything else hidden, which, on the other hand, points to the problem of disciplinary division and specialization, with its increasingly restricted academic debates, enclosed by the high walls of fragmentation of thought, which progressively close off bridges of dialogue with other disciplines, transforming each field of knowledge into a true island.
In this way, the construction of the categorical system of Marx's work develops in the sense of creating bridges to reveal the articulations that organize society. Its categories are, therefore, “open”. It is in this sense that we can say that there is a categorical body in which transdisciplinarity is a constitutive component of its own construction.
In effect, the book resumes the concern for a real disciplinary communication, which qualitatively restores transdisciplinarity not as a schematic bricolage of the most diverse areas of social thought – as often occurs in interdisciplinary approaches –, but as a union of the diverse based on an open science, with a unitary principle that conceives the possibility of understanding the regularities and dynamics of social reality.
Precisely because it is an open science, the fact that the process of abstraction makes it possible to understand these regularities should not suppress the apprehension of singular facts, but, on the contrary, should incorporate them into its more general reflection so that they can be endowed with meaning and, therefore, better understood. As Jaime Osorio rightly states, there is no opposition in the Marxist method between the nomothetic and idiographic sciences, that is, in the relationship between the logical and the historical. Thus, there is no prominence of one over the other, of theory over history, or of history over theory; both go hand in hand.
A brief presentation of some points covered in Fundamentals da analysis social: a reality social e his knowledge confirms the successful publication of this rigorous work by Jaime Osorio in Brazil. As if that were not enough, the work provides us not only with excellent reference material for students, teachers and political activists to come into contact with the foundations of cognition and analysis of social reality, but also constitutes a work that seeks to reestablish the centrality of Marxism for the social sciences, especially in Latin America – an urgent and indispensable task.
Now, there could not be a better historical moment for this undertaking, whether in terms of the proposed itinerary, the accessibility of the language, the scope of the reflection, or the horizon presented.
*Fabio de Oliveira Maldonado holds a master's degree from the postgraduate program in Latin American Integration at the University of São Paulo (USP).
Reference
Jaime Osorio. Fundamentals of social analysis: social reality and its knowledge. Translation: Fabio de Oliveira Maldonado. New York, New York Times, 2025, 228 pages. [https://amzn.to/42iV5PY]
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