By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE & FELIPE DE LIMA BANDEIRA*
The critical rescue of dependency theory is fundamental for understanding the subordinate insertion that dependent economies present in the current phase of contemporary capitalism
Introduction
The objective of this work is to return to the central debate that took place in the pages of Brazilian economic and sociological history: the controversy between Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ruy Mauro Marini, in order to identify how these authors, when polemicizing, produced the critical deconstruction of the theses of the Economic Commission for America Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and to what extent their contributions and controversies have redefined the issue of underdevelopment and dependency. This debate is fundamental at a time when the conditions of dependency and Brazilian national sovereignty are being relocated to a new level of fragility and restrictions.
Dependency Theory (DT) emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a critique of ECLAC's theory of development and the orthodox Marxist approach. It was part of the effervescent intellectual environment that allowed the renewal of Marxism in the region and continued the autochthonous effort to think about the particularities of capitalism and class struggle in Latin America (FERREIRA and LUCCI, 2012; TRINDADE, 2020).
From the 1930s onwards, when the primary-export economic base was changed to an urban-industrial base (especially in Brazil), modernization came to be understood as a result of the action of an industrial class. However, it was in the 1940s and 1950s, under the guidance of ECLAC, that the issue of development was emancipated from such dichotomies and was based on more systematic foundations of economic analysis. Industrialization came to be seen as the lever of development, based on elements that would allow the self-determined formation of the nation.
An idea was consolidated that underdevelopment resulted from the global interweaving of capitalism which, more than economic dualisms, constituted a historically produced structure. Prebisch (2011), in his pioneering study from 1949, elaborated a systematic picture of the economic backwardness of Latin America, and showed that the unequal exchange between countries produced deep inequalities marked by the transfer of the fruits of technical progress – and of income – from the periphery to the center. Prebisch thought of the conformation of a world system differentiated between center and periphery.
The phenomenon of import substitution of consumer products for the urban middle classes, which emerged from the crises and contractions of the world market in the 1930s, became the guiding principle of developmentalist policies. In the 1940s, the substitution of imports was oriented towards durable consumer goods and, only in a last stage, already in the 1960s, did the substitution of the machinery sector begin. The incapacity of the regional bourgeoisies to produce the necessary reforms and continue industrialization on an autonomous national basis, as well as their tendencies towards integration into international capital, already announced the exhaustion and limits of ECLAC's forecasts.
The Latin American industrial bourgeoisie that was born out of the industrialization process in the 1930s and 1940s ran into structural limits: it aspired to continue the process of heavy industrialization, but did not have the technological knowledge or the financial weight to face the large investments that were necessary to ensure competitiveness in a more advanced stage of technological development (DOS SANTOS, 2000) and sought support from the State to fulfill a large part of this task, especially in those sectors that international capital refused to invest.
ECLAC's formulations represented a qualitative leap in the approach to the problem of underdevelopment. The most consistent methodological and empirical bases on development and underdevelopment went beyond approaches that were limited to dichotomies between the modern and the archaic, centered on stages that went from the least to the most developed. As seen, ECLAC's theoretical bases understood underdevelopment as a historical relationship of a global system that differentiates between center and periphery. This parameter, with strong explanatory power, guided most of the debates that followed and unfold until today. This brief retrospective was necessary, as it was from the discussions with ECLAC that the Theories of Dependency were developed. It was directed to his criticism that gained scope the theoretical scope and the debate that took place between Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ruy Mauro Marini.
Critical formulations of dependence on developmentalism
The pattern of reproduction of capital that emerged in the post-war period reconfigured the foundations on which national-developmentalism was sustained: with no more room to reconcile the demands of the working masses, pressures from the agrarian oligarchies and interests of the national and international bourgeoisies, the new milestones of peripheral industrialization were associated with the process of internationalization and monopoly integration of national markets. For ECLAC, the shift from “outward development” to “inward development” would have the consequence of removing underdeveloped countries from dependence on foreign trade and strengthening internal decision-making centers. Such would be the process of transferring the decision-making centers inwards, which would induce autonomous national development guided and planned by the State and by the internal bourgeoisie.
The strengthening of internal decision-making centers would conform, according to ECLAC, the development of an autonomous nation, whose bases would be the developmental State and industrialization. Coordinated economic policies for industrial development gained greater relevance that broke with structural imbalances (balance of payments, inflation and income distribution) and that allowed technical progress to expand as widely as possible in the most dynamic branches of the national economy . In short, it was believed that industrialization could act in the medium and long term to reduce disparities in income and relative prices between the center and the periphery, allowing the fruits of technical progress to spread more equitably through the system. global.
However, the optimistic decade (1950s) gave way to a decade of pessimism (1960s): the contradictions of capitalism not only disorganized the material conditions on which ECLAC's assumptions were based, but also frustrated the possibilities of constituting a self-determined development in the periphery . By modifying the parameters of circulation, production and realization of capital, the large monopoly company used the strengthening of internal markets in the periphery to establish new frontiers for the realization and expansion of global production. This movement shook the foundations of national-developmentalism, which began to be subordinated to the impetus of international monopoly capital.
The geopolitical dynamics of the post-war period made the question of dominating the periphery a priority and imposed new impediments to the continuity of nationalist-based developmental movements. Thus, the integration of the national bourgeoisie into imperialism culminated in the abandonment of “national-developmentalist” aspirations. The structural inflection inaugurated by the civil-military coup in 1964 in Brazil, impacted all of Latin America and materialized the authoritarian response to the impasse between the need to expand production and the need to increase the rate of labor exploitation in a context of growing political participation of women. popular masses.
The emphasis on “inward development” and the subordination of accumulation to the interests of the nation gradually lost vitality and was the object of criticism from conservatives and progressives. Among ECLAC's critics, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was undoubtedly one of the most prominent. Cardoso and Faletto (1984), gave greater importance to the theoretical treatment of political elements and sought to understand the constraints of the alliances that constituted the power bloc that was formed in the region.
For those authors, Latin American countries were able to take advantage of the conditions for the incorporation of monopoly capital to develop their base industry and produce concentric cycles of expansion of the internal market. When analyzing the new trends in development that emerged from the 1960s onwards, Cardoso contradictorily identified an opportunity for the growth of Latin American countries in monopolistic domination. The general conception was that from the coordinated action of the State, national bourgeoisie and international bourgeoisie, a progressive development of the productive forces could be produced capable of opening space for rupture with the conditioning elements of underdevelopment.
Countries that achieved a higher level of industrial development and increased competitiveness would have more conditions to balance public finances and could expand domestic base industries and thus, little by little, would get rid of the links of dependence. The “associated dependent development” could only take place through a competitive industry that occupied better positions in the world economy.
Marini (2011, 2013), in turn, considered ECLAC's reformism limited to deepening the organization's own propositions. That author noted that capitalist monopoly integration was established from a process that removed the prospect of moving towards a less unequal society within the framework of dependent capitalism. Marini considered ECLAC's perception of Latin American problems and difficulties remarkable to overcome it, but its own institutional limitations prevented it from finding solutions that went beyond the current system, so that the verification of the problem was paralyzed in the face of the limited capacities of national forces to act, since dependent capitalism produces a growing process of dispossession based on the overexploitation of labor.
Overcoming this process can only occur if guided by the exploited masses, whose mediation is established in a deeper way in the defense and struggle for Latin American socialism. Marini sought to understand dependency and underdevelopment based on the class struggle and defined the overexploitation of the workforce as the essence of underdevelopment that condemns the Latin American masses to a violent process of domination.
The multiple dependentismos: the formulations of Marini and Cardoso
Dependency Theory sought to demonstrate that industrialization did not bring the consequences expected by the developmentalist view. The nation's self-determination, as a central element of developmental theory, began to be questioned from the moment that industrialization began to be commanded by foreign investment by monopoly capital radiated from the US economy.
Industrialization produced a pattern of reproduction that concentrated income, reduced the “distributive ceiling” and worsened the living conditions of the working masses. The incorporation of foreign technology, by reducing the quantitative need for labor force, increased unemployment – partly disguised by the swelling of the service sector – and provoked a strong differentiation of wages within the working classes. that the rural exodus took place was greater than the capacity of the economy to incorporate these workers to new urban jobs, which exacerbated the conditions of marginality and social segregation.
One of the points in common between the theoretical contributions of Cardoso and Marini was the identification of the particularities of Latin American capitalism from the point of view of colonization and the specificities of the internal social dynamics that were articulated with external relations. Another point of agreement was the understanding of the impossibility of analyzing imperialism as an external phenomenon that opposed local realities. The dependency category made it possible to articulate internal and external factors as a social and economic totality of contemporary capitalism. It would be impossible to conceive the character of underdevelopment without illuminating it with the relations that were established between the hegemonic centers and the peripheral countries, just as it would be impossible to correctly understand the central economies without linking them to colonial and imperialist expansion (DOS SANTOS, 2000) .
The controversies between Cardoso and Marini refer to the limits and conditions for the development of capitalism in Latin America. In summary, we can indicate that for Cardoso (1970; 1984), it was possible to reconcile development and dependence, as long as it was based on the modernization and expansion of the national economy based on the association with international capital. Marini (2011), in turn, sought to demonstrate that the development of Latin American capitalism produced a pattern of reproduction sustained by greater exploitation of the workforce, which materialized in the degradation of the conditions of existence of workers, while concentrating income in monopoly strata.
These divergences were expressed in the form of polemics in the seventies, starting with an article by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1972), entitled “Note on the current state of studies on dependency”, where the first criticisms of the book “Dialectics of Dependence” appear. from Marini. The central point of his questions rests on the concept of super-exploitation of labor as the foundation of Latin American capitalism.
In a text from 1973, which is part of the definitive version of his “Dialectics of Dependency” in the form of a post-scriptum, Marini responded to Cardoso's first criticisms and stated that he confused his concept of overexploitation with the concept of absolute surplus value, in addition to having incurred the error of disregarding the theoretical and historical importance of forms of exploitation that distance themselves from forms of more relative value. As Hadler (2013) points out, this controversy unfolded with the text “New mistaken theses” written by Cardoso in 1975, which criticized the thesis of overexploitation and subimperialism, which, in turn, has Marini’s response in the preface of the 5th edition of his book “Subdesarrollo e revolución” (1974).
The controversy reached its height with the publication of “As misadventures of the Dialectic of Dependence”, written by Cardoso and José Serra, in January 1978. Its objective, as the authors themselves indicate in the first lines of the text, consisted of “putting locks that close the false exits” and characterize Marini's theses as economistic and underconsumerist. Marini's answer comes with the article “As Reasons for Neo-Developmentism”, from 1978, which criticizes Cardoso and Serra for emptying the specificities of dependent capitalism.
Cardoso's criticism of Marini
With the crisis of Populist National Development projects”, both Cardoso (1970; 1984) and Marini (2000; 2005; 2013), launched themselves into criticism of ECLAC theories, seeking to build theoretical contributions with the aim of better understanding the new historical period that opened in the region. Although both were based on Marxism, their elaborations took different directions. Cardoso's central idea was that Latin American capitalism would become more dynamic with the internalization of decision-making centers and the forces of world capitalism could be rebalanced in national markets.
An important part of the intellectuals, when observing what would be the “downfall” of the Latin American economies in the early 1960s, understood that this process would take the form of a structural stagnation. Celso Furtado, was the most emblematic defender of these theses and stated that without the reforms rooted in the assumptions of national development - a necessary condition to make Latin American development viable -, the tendency of dependent capitalism would inescapably be stagnation.
In controversy with the “stagnationist” theses, Maria da Conceição Tavares and José Serra (1983), stated that it was a mistake to confuse the unfeasibility of the national-developmentalist project with the frustration of capitalist development. What many consider the “inevitable character of stagnation”, consisted, for Tavares and Serra (1983), in a situation of transition to a new scheme of capitalist development and expressed new and very dynamic characteristics that reinforced some traits of the national-growth model. developmentalism in its most advanced phases (social exclusion, income concentration, productive heterogeneity and even backwardness of certain economic subsectors).
Cardoso accused Marini of also understanding the contradictions of Latin American capitalist development from the standpoint of stagnation theories. Thus, once the “national-democratic-bourgeois” stage had burned out, whose full representation was the exhaustion of national developmentalism, added to other factors such as the impacts of the model of the Cuban Revolution and the weakness of the organizations of the worker and peasant movement, Marini would have deduced erroneously that capitalism would be doomed to even deeper crises and the immediate alternative for the exploited classes would be to break with the agrarian structure, external domination and pave the way for socialism.
Cardoso and Serra (1978) indicated that it was the stagnationist belief in Latin American capitalism that led Marini to conclude that socialism would be the only alternative for the Latin American peoples, a belief from which the theory of superexploitation of labor had derived. 1978), what Marini (1973 [2000]) called labor overexploitation, would consist of a rough and, therefore, mistaken approximation of the phenomenon already developed by Prebisch and ECLAC in the late 1940s, designated as deterioration of the terms of trade . For Prebisch (2011), there is a tendency for wage differentials to the detriment of workers in the periphery, since in the center there is a greater capacity to defend wages and a tendency for capitalists to retain the fruits of technical progress in industry in their entirety, while in the periphery, part of this is transferred to the central countries.
In Cardoso's (1978) assessment, Marini stumbles upon history and an analysis that purports to be dialectical, but leads to a deductivist logic. and lowering the value of the workforce, had an impact on the organic composition of capital and put pressure on the rate of profit to fall. Cardoso considered the way in which Marini resolves the issue of transferring value to be simplistic, since “the fact that there is no mobility of the labor force makes it difficult to establish, on an international scale, the concept of socially necessary working time, which in turn in turn, it is crucial as a requirement for the operation of the law of value” (CARDOSO and SERRA, 1978, p. 49).
Marini's central error for Cardoso and Serra (1978, p. 49) “consisted in assuming that the increase in productivity in the production of manufactured goods in central countries implied a reduction in the rate of profit in the periphery”. The importation of manufactures would continue to be done at the same price as before and would only result in a greater margin between cost price and selling price in the center, which would in fact cause an increase in wealth in the center and an increase in poverty in the periphery, but only in relative and not absolute terms, given that this process does not interfere with the rate of profit on the periphery and does not induce any inevitability of overexploitation of the workforce.
Since the mass of value in the periphery has not changed, and on the other hand, since imported products have not become more expensive, it cannot be said that the mass of capital has risen due to any increase in the prices of its imported components. For Cardoso, “the simple fact that prices remain constant”, denounces Marini's lack of theoretical rigor. In turn, “[…] the low rate of profit or the transfer of income occurs through the deterioration of the terms of trade when and only when, this is not directly caused by unequal exchange per se, but rather by relative reasons, for example, to supply and demand” (CARDOSO and SERRA, 1978, p. 50). Therefore, it is unreasonable to consider that the rate of profit in the periphery reduces because productivity increases in the center, or even that only the overexploitation of the worker and the physical increase in production could counteract the downward trend in the rate of profit of Latin American capitalists.
For Cardoso (1978), the thesis of overexploitation, by assuming the reduction of wages per hour worked at constant levels of productivity, inferred, in practice, a stagnant production. Instead of increasing the intensity of labor, one should consider increasing production extensively by incorporating land and labor, given their relative abundance. By incorporating new factors, the exploitation of the workforce, measured at real wage levels, could even remain constant, while national production would increase significantly. Thus, there was no such inevitability for overexploitation of the workforce, the basis on which Marini's entire theoretical set is built.
Marini's criticisms of Cardoso
For Ruy Mauro Marini, the general traits of Cardoso's neo-developmentalism tend to soften the disruptive effects created by economic and political dependence on Latin American capitalism, which would have overestimated the greater degree of labor absorption and income growth in the phases of cyclic expansion. This is why Cardoso maintains that dependent accumulation does not necessarily imply that production is based on the overexploitation of the workforce. Therefore, he considers it possible to reconcile economic dependence with democracy and development. Marini, sought to show the inconsistencies of Cardoso's formulations and criticized his formulations and concessions to conservative forces that later legitimized the foundations of neoliberalism in the periphery.
For Marini (2013), Cardoso was wrong both in equating the concept of overexploitation with that of absolute surplus value (since it also assumes relative surplus value and the increase in the intensity of work), and in thinking that the superior forms of accumulation exclude the lower forms. The trends of the general law of capital accumulation that accentuate the polarization between growing wealth and misery, gain new determinations within dependent societies, from the constitution of the superexploitation of the workforce.
Cardoso would also have confused stagnation with crisis by failing to understand that crises correspond to structural historical moments of capitalism, but this is not to be confused with stagnation (MARINI, 2000). What is falsified and imputed to him as “stagnationism”, for Marini (2000) corresponds to the advanced forms in which the integration of Latin American markets to imperialism is established which, by conforming to industrial structures with superior organic composition, resulted in the hierarchization of underdeveloped countries, whose most concrete expression is the sub-imperialist form of development.
Cardoso's grossest error consists in the mistaken analysis of the law of value, marked by a true eclecticism in terms of theoretical rigor. By considering the law of value as a mere abstraction and devoid of practical importance, since, as he pointed out, “since there is no mobility of the workforce, it is difficult to establish on an international scale the concept of socially necessary working time” (CARDOSO & SERRA apud MARINI, 2000, p. 178), showed ignorance, according to Marini (200, p. 178), that the mobility or not of the workforce does not influence the concept of socially necessary working time, since the law of value is a function of the development of the productive forces, of the social productivity of the work that establishes the quantity of value incorporated in the merchandise and that, for this reason, can be confronted in the circulation sphere when comparing the average social working times. This is the basis on which the commercial price is determined, whose composition orbits around the formation of values.
“The circulation or non-circulation of the workforce, then, has nothing to do with the validity of the law of value” (MARINI, 2000, p. 178). For this reason, he states, “it would be useless for a country to import a tractor operator if it condemns him to work with a scythe” (MARINI, 2000, p. 179). Therefore, by considering only the character of the level of technological development of production and targeting only production costs, Cardoso reversed the role of price formation as an objective criterion for value formation.
The central error of the analysis consists in assuming that the increase in productivity in the production of manufactured goods in the central countries implies a reduction in the rate of profit in the periphery. Well, that would be inappropriate, as the importation of manufactured products would continue to be done at the same price per unit of the industrialized product. What actually happens is not the absolute increase in the price of industrial products, but the maintenance of their selling price, despite the drop in unit value. The difference obtained by productivity gains is distributed according to the advance of the class struggle between workers and capitalists in industrialized countries (CARDOSO and SERRA, 1978, p. 49).
The fetishism of economic forms such as price, supply, demand, and so many categories that are placed as markers of materiality or historical empiricism, is here in a very problematic way. Since value is not the same thing as price, while comparisons of values are expressed in the market in a price relationship, it is legitimate for this relationship to present itself as an unequal exchange, since, in its most concrete form, elements persist which, due to competition and the difference in the productivity of capital, are presented differently from the law of value.
By not taking into account this elementary knowledge, “Cardoso and Serra are led to surprising results, such as the postulate that the effect of variations in value in relation to price, even if the latter remain constant, does not alter the profit rate of the dependent countries” (MARINI, 2000, p. 179). This would be the fetishism of such authors, assuming that price dynamics do not imply variation in the value of goods.
The confusion that Cardoso established between value and price was expressed in the “dynamic foundation” of his theory, since both profit and the rates of exploitation of the workforce derive from his perception of the class struggle. Without denying the fundamentality of the class struggle, it does not become a “deus ex-machine” that would explain everything. that men and women produce their existence and is, for that very reason, governed by the objective conditions in which it develops.
Likewise, by sustaining that history is the history of the class struggle, Marx (2000) did not limit himself to describing the class struggle: he made an effort to distinguish the modes of production that constitute its foundation and the objective conditions, while contradictory tendential laws that condition capitalism and its social and historical formations, mainly identifying the basic conflict between workers, as a proletariat, and the different fractions of the bourgeoisie (MARINI, 2000, p.184). of classes, it is necessary to constitute a conceptual apparatus to explain the foundations of the class struggle. This is necessary because in each historical period the class struggle is governed by specific laws, based on the objective conditions in which social relations are sedimented in history.
Cardoso's mistake was not understanding that the increase in productivity, by reducing the unitary value of goods in the imperialist countries, made it possible to increase their mass of surplus value to the same extent that it widened the distance between their selling prices and their original value, causing a reallocation of surplus value to the detriment of dependent countries. As this process intensified, the periphery capitalist had no alternative but to increase the rate of exploitation of the workforce to repair the losses arising from the confrontation with international prices (MARINI, 2000; 2005).
As in the capitalist centers the expansion of the organic composition of capital is observed (increasing incorporation of dead labor in goods), while in dependent countries this portion is always smaller, living labor is left with the effort to compensate for this difference. Thus, it is observed that the value composition of goods, by keeping different proportions in the social average between living work and dead work, reveal a tendency to transfer surplus value to those economies that have a greater organic composition of capital and, therefore, even embody greater proportions of value in their wares.
What happened to the rate of profit? Contrary to what Cardoso advocates, the profit rate did not remain constant in absolute terms. As the rate of profit is measured based on total capital (c+v), there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall in countries with a higher organic composition, which are contradicted both by the appropriation of surplus value from dependent countries and by by numerous expedients that can be launched in an attempt to increase the rate of labor exploitation.
Cardoso's objective was to demonstrate that unequal exchange does not lead dependent countries to establish the overexploitation of labor as their structural dynamic. The rationality of capitalist expansion would be based on the tendency to increase the organic composition of capital, given the increasing introduction of new technologies in the productive process that increase the mass of value and drive accumulation. In short, competition between capitalists and the introduction of new technologies, for Cardoso (1970; 1984) are the driving forces that guarantee economic dynamism.
There is no contradiction between capital accumulation, dissociation of production from the real needs of the masses, with realization problems in the internal market, since always in relative terms, the components of aggregate demand can expand in order to absorb production, excommunicating the ghost of the inevitability of capitalist accumulation in the periphery.
Marini (2000) considers this vision to be idyllic, by denying that production and realization can go hand in hand. Considering the cycle of industrial capital in its entirety, for Marini, does not consist in adhering to stagnationist theses, much less that it can be said that there is a relationship between stagnationism and socialism. Thus, there would be a certain reconfiguration of the international division of labor that is particularized in the laws of dependent economies (overexploitation of labor, the divorce between the phases of the capital cycle and the monopolization of luxury goods industries), and produces contradictions that are expressed including the possibility of hegemony of one nation over the other within the periphery circuit itself (sub-imperialism).
By disregarding these facts, Cardoso, produces the separation and autonomization between the political and economic spheres, because although production goods grow at a greater speed than consumer goods, given the trends towards growth and capitalist accumulation, these must be referenced in last instance in the sphere of realization of final goods. And more: as this process takes place through the super-exploitation of labor, part of wage funds is transformed into capitalization funds and the contradictions between production and consumption become more acute, already signaled by the difficulty of carrying out industrial production internally.
Contradictorily, Cardoso gave the scope of the association with international capital the necessary dynamism for the expansion of production – through access to credit and technologies – and the internal market as a necessary field for the realization of this production, even if the dissociation between production and realization. This argument seems even more contradictory when one takes into account the objective ways to carry out this production, since they are concentrated in the higher spheres of circulation, consumption of luxury goods and, therefore, supported by the expansion of surplus value funds. Cardoso could not answer this question in any other way, except by pointing out that “everything is relative!” . All of this, for disregarding the tendency towards overexploitation of the workforce as a basic condition of economic relations of dependence on underdeveloped Latin American social formations.
Underdevelopment could not be considered just a logical and historical category, but a historical capitalist formation that has structures of particular domination. The national bourgeoisie is part of this process, marked by its inability to make ruptures, even if partial, with the backward and oligarchic sectors.
The merit of Dependency Theory and the contribution of both authors was to have identified the structural changes typical of dependent societies and formulated the particular laws of dependent capitalism. The current political and economic crises bring back many of these questions and concerns, whether in national terms or in terms of Latin American dilemmas.
The critical rescue of dependency theory is fundamental for understanding the subordinate insertion that dependent economies, and specifically Latin American ones, present in the current phase of contemporary capitalism. The thought of the main dependency theorists remains alive and articulated in the face of the vigorous changes that capitalism has undergone in recent decades and, more particularly, the contradictions and originality of Latin American capitalism and its structural dependence on the capitalism of the main hegemonic nations.
*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Graduate Program in Economics at UFPA.
*Felipe de Lima Flag is a doctoral student at Unicamp.
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