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The Underdevelopment of Development / Part 2
by Andre Gunder Frank
From Development of Development Thinking to its Underdevelopment
(with apologies to my some time colleague Ian Livingston)
The idea, if not the name, of economic development started long ago, like the idea of progress with which they are largely synonymous. Where and when they started is hard to tell. However, it may be well to recall some famous "developers": The Chinese emperor who had all wheels cut to the same size to promote standardization and exchangeability of parts (like Colt and Ford millennia later), Peter the Great who wanted to "develop" Russia, and Stalin who sought the same and by many of the same means.
Closer to home, development was also the first and foremost concern of all classical political economists from Petty and Hume, via Smith and Ricardo, to the Mills and Marx. These same economists were also concerned with equity distribution and efficiency allocation in development. Indeed, this concern with equity and efficiency in development long dominated economics. Then the neo-classical marginalist (counter)revolution of the 1870s subtracted both distributional equity and economic development to leave only allocational efficiency in economics. This was just as the world economy was going into a long Kondratieff B phase crisis and its British hegemonic center was beginning its decline in the face of growing competition from its German and American rivals. One result was the growth of more monopoly capitalism (while marginalists focussed on the efficiency of competition). Another result was renewed colonialism and the drain of resources and capital from South to North (while marginalists deleted development from the economists' menu). Before this "marginal" counterrevolution, my present above cited subtle distinctions among varieties of (development) economics would have been hard to make. Indeed, Marx had written that England showed India the "developed" mirror of its future and that the Mexican-American war was progressive. Marx argued, as Texans and New Mexicans will be glad to know, that annexation would promote the development of the annexed territories and perhaps even of the remainder of Mexico as well. Since the advent of neo-classical marginalism, economists would have none of that! Marginalist microeconomists preferred to sit it out on a side track, while the world economic development was passing by on the main track.
It took another Kondratieff B phase crisis in the world economy and the Keynesian revolution response to put economists back on track. Even then, they only did so for particular Western countries. There they put macroeconomic problems, some considerations of macro-equity and development by another name (stagnation a la Hansen) back on the agenda. Any other development elsewhere was only of interest insofar as it might pose a competitive threat to the West. Thus, Folke Hilgerdt studied Industrialization and Foreign Trade in The Network of World Trade for the League of Nations (1945, 1942). The also non marginalist Schumpeter remained marginal with his emphasis on technological growth in the Theory of Economic Development. Even his immediately relevant Business Cycles, not to mention his macro political economic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remained marginal. De facto, the Keynesians ( though perhaps not Keynes himself) continued to accept the neo-classical tenets of (non)equity through perfect competition at the micro level and to exclude world and third world development from the agenda.
Another Kondratieff B phase world economic crisis today has now led to another crisis and the total bankruptcy of all neo -classical micro theory and (post)Keynesian macro theory as well as of their policies. This new crisis has put on the economists agenda to remarry (reformed) macro and micro economics in a new union of world political economic development. However, economists' by now congenital short sightedness and self-imposed blinkers prevent most (development) economists from seeing either the crisis or how to resolve it. Demand side macro economics must divest itself from the unrealistic assumption of a supply curve, which is infinitely elastic until it becomes totally inelastic at a mythical full employment level. (So interpreted, the supply siders on the Reaganite right and the Marxist left have a valid point). Supply side microeconomics must divest itself from the unreal assumption of perfect competition and foresight. (The monopolistic and imperfect competition economists like Robinson and Chamberlain had a point in the previous crisis).
Macro- and micro-economics must then be married into a union, which takes account of the macro economic effects of individual (firm) microeconomic decisions -- and vice versa, the macroeconomic influences on these same microeconomic decisions. Both must devote special attention to supply side decisions and policies of technological change and to the demand side conditions under which they are made. Moreover perhaps following Pasinetti (1981), we must reinsert the classical political economists considerations of distributional equity, sectoral imbalance and dynamic developmental into this new demand-and-supply-side union. Finally, all these must be united in face of a single world economy, whose political economic development is the final arbiter of all this economic theory and policy; although it is itself hardly subject to either. But this is getting ahead of my story, and I may leave it to return to this matter at the end. But first a brief glance at the supposed Marxist alternative.
Marxism and then Marxist socialism also have not always turned out quite as its proponents since Lenin and Stalin hoped, or as its marginalist and then cold warrior antagonists feared. As it turned out, the development of socialism everywhere has become, or rather remained, the really existing "socialism" of development. Often it even lacked the sometimes dubious virtues of capitalist development. Yet "socialist development" retained most of the vices of inequity / inequality, and therefore also of inefficiency, environmental degradation and the alienation of man, not to mention woman, against which Marx inveighed. (An old joke in the socialist countries: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is just the opposite. A new even more cruel joke there: Communism/socialism is the most painful road from capitalism to capitalism). Let me now take up my story again at the end of World War II.
If anthropology was the child of imperialism and colonialism (Gough 1968, Asad 1975), then the new development thinking was the child of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. It developed (not the least at MIT) as a part and parcel instrument of the new postwar American hegemony. American ambitions extended over the ex-colonial world in the South and against both the real old Western colonialism and the perceived threat of new Eastern colonialism and imperialism. At the end of World War II, the "newly emerging" "young nations" - like millenarian China and India! - came of post semi/colonial age. Simultaneously and not independently, the First New Nation (Lipset's title), the United States, ascended to neo-imperial hegemony. That is when development studies came into their own, and the new development ideology swept the world. The Chinese Communist peasant victory among one quarter of the world's population in 1949 put the fear of God in many minds. They feared its extension or indigenous repetition in newly independent India, self-liberated Korea, and elsewhere. A decade later, the Cuban Revolution would revive this same fear again. Developing a more harmless alternative became a matter of the greatest urgency, especially in the newly hegemonic United States.
These circumstances and new American need help explain the significant changes in the development of development thinking and terminology in the 1950s and since. They followed the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine and his Point Four Technical Aid Program. The wartime and early postwar major writings on development issues had been mostly by Europeans, like Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse, Myrdal, and Singer and then by the Latin American Prebisch. These soon found themselves embattled and overcome by the more conservative and more neo-classical theses from American pens. For the general public at the same time, new euphomisms for the subject peoples and countries were launched to replace previous ones as each became unpalatable or impolitic: "colonial" and "backward" was replaced by "undeveloped" and then by "underdeveloped." More recently that was replaced again by "less developed" (LDCs) or the better sounding but less accurate "developing" countries. Their models are now "new(ly) industrializing countries" (NICs).
Of course, the new American development of development theory also partook of American pragmatism and empiricism. "Science is Measurement" was engraved on the cornerstone of the University of Chicago building where I studied for my economics PhD. Development became increasingly equated with economic development, and that became equated de facto if not de jure with economic growth. It in turn was measured by the growth of GNP per capita. The remaining "social" aspects of growth = development were called "modernization," and the political ones "freedom."
The new United Nations commissioned five wise men to write out the American way of development (United Nations 1951). Americans with no previous Third World experience, like the neo-classical Jacob Viner, pontificated about development. All argued that development meant following step by step in our (American idealized) footsteps from tradition to modernity. The measure of it all was how fast the modern sector replaced the traditional one in each dual economy and society. That is, as long as, God and America forbid, there were no far-reaching structural reforms, let alone political revolutions. Of course, American instigated and supported counter-revolution and even invasion in Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon in 1958, etc. were Ok. That is where I demurred.
From Autobiographical Background to Chicago Economics
(With Apologies to the Reader, who may skip ahead)
To explain why and how I demurred and sought to do otherwise, it is time to insert some autobiography into the unfolding of this development story. My autobiographical reflections, however, may be of some interest and use to the reader also insofar as they will include when, where and how along the winding road I bumped into and rubbed shoulders or exchanged snubs with various personalities in the "development field" and how I debated with their thinking.
I may get the most personal parts of this autobiography out of the way first. However, they may help explain my parts in the political sociology of knowledge that follows. My pacifist novelist father had taken me out of Nazi Germany when I was four years old in 1933. In the 1950s, he wrote his autobiography under the title Links wo das Herz Ist (translated as Heart on the Left). I went to Ann Arbor High School and then to Swarthmore College. There, in part under my father's influence, I studied economics and became a Keynesian. In 1950, not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I started a Ph D in economics at the University of Chicago. I took Milton Friedman's economic theory course and passed my PhD exams in economic theory and public finance with flying colors. Despite that, I received a letter from the Chicago Economics Department advising me to leave, because of my unsuitability or our incompatibility.
I went on to the University of Michigan and studied for a semester with Kenneth Boulding and Richard Musgrave. I wrote a paper on welfare economics for Boulding, which proved that it is impossible to separate efficiency in resource allocation from equity in income distribution. [Later Ian Little would become famous for doing the same thing. Now (Little 1982) also pontificates on Economic Development and dismisses my writings on the same as unpersuasive]. I took the paper, for which Boulding had given me an A+, back to Chicago to get at least an MA out of them. First they made me cut the heart of the argument out of my paper, and then they gave me a C for it. Then I dropped out altogether. I became a member of the beat generation at the Vesuvius cafe in San Francisco's North Beach before Jack Keruac arrived there On the Road.
I was introduced to "development" and at the same time re-entered the University of Chicago through the back door by accident. This was the availability of a research assistantship in Bert Hoselitz's Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change at the University of Chicago. In Bert's absence on leave, the planner and acting director Harvey Perloff hired me only to tell me to his dismay that I am "the most philosophical person" he had ever met. He put me to work evaluating the early World Bank reports. I gave their reports on Ceylon, Nicaragua, and Turkey barely passing marks in my earliest publications (Frank 1955 a and b).
Also for reasons of financial circumstance, I then spent an interval at Chicago working on the Soviet economy (in a research project whose final client was the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Division!). As a result, I subsequently wrote my Chicago economics PhD dissertation on a comparison of productivity growth between agriculture and industry in the Soviet Ukraine. In this thesis, I independently worked out the concepts and measures of general productivity, which later came to be known as total productivity. I also stressed its role in measuring the contribution of "Human Capital and Economic Growth" in a journal edited and published at the University of Chicago (Frank 1960). In another journal there, I also published "General Productivity in Soviet Agriculture and Industry," which stressed the role of economic organization (Frank 1958). According to H.W. Arndt (1987:62), the idea of human capital was "almost single-handedly introduced into economics" by the then chairman of the Chicago economics department, T.W. Schultz, who subsequently was awarded the Nobel Prize.
It was this work of mine to which John Toye (1987:104) refers when he writes "the archetypical Western radicalized intellectual, who at that time [1970s] dominated development thinking was Andre Gunder Frank, the orthodox Chicago economist who abruptly became a Latin American revolutionary figure (compare Frank 1958 and 1972)." My ex-colleague and (ex?)friend at Michigan State, Paul Strassman (19xx) would later call me a "renegade" from Chicago economics.
Yet already at the University of Chicago, I spent more and more of my time studying and associating with the anthropologists. This helped me come to the same conclusion as my friend Bert Hoselitz (but I thought, independently of him) that the determinant factors in economic development were really social.
Social change, therefore, seemed the key to both social and economic development. I wrote about social conflict and favorably reviewed Albert Hirschman's Strategy of Economic Development in Bert Hoselitz's journal Economic Development and Cultural Change (Frank 1960). I conferred with him and Bob Lindblom about our convergent conflict studies. Hirschman would later recall this agreement also about unbalanced growth in his own autobiographical reflections, published in Pioneers in Development (Meier and Seers, eds. 1984). More recently, he suggested to me that I should do a similar autobiographical account myself.
From MIT's CENIS Politics to Mine
In 1958, I spent three months as visiting researcher at MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS) and met Ben Higgins, W.W. Rostow and the others. There Rostow wrote his Process of Development and later his Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, not to mention his work for the CIA there with Max Millikan. (See for instance Millikan and Rostow 1957 A Proposal. Key to an Effective Foreign Policy). Although Rostow and Co. dealt with Keynesian type macro economic and even social problems, they did so to pursue the neo-classical explicitly counter revolutionary and even counter reformist cold war ends, which were newly in vogue. The quintessimal modernization book, Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society: The Modernization of the Middle East, appeared at MIT' CENIS in 1958, while I was there. At the same time, Everett Hagen wrote his On the Theory of Social Change and David McClelland his Achieving Society there, and Ithiel de Sola Pool his right libertarian / authoritarian political works.
While I was unknowingly in this lion's den, Walt Whitman Rostow "confided" to me that since the age of 18 he made it his life mission to offer the world a better alternative to Karl Marx. I did not then understand what that was supposed to mean. After reflecting on the fate of really existing Marxism and socialism I may now be permitted to wonder why Rostow wanted to dedicate his life to offering an alternative to them. Moreover, in case that were not enough, he then proposed to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. I have often wondered since then what the Rostow parents would feel about the ideological and political development of the children they named after Walt Whitman and Eugene Debs. The first ideologist went on to plan his nuclear development policies in the Kennedy-Johnson White House basement, and the second super hawk represented the Reagan White House in the pre-Gorbachev era arms "control" talks. However, I may also ask how I came to propose an alternative "paradigm change from Rostow to Gunder Frank," as Aidan Foster-Carter (1976) called it.
I may pursue the answer. In 1959, I gave a paper on social change and reform through social conflict at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico. I also co-chaired the anthropological theory sessions with Margaret Mead. At a subsequent anthropology confererence, Maggie especially congratulated me on my delivery of a paper later published as "Administrative Role Definition and Social Change" (Frank 1963). The paper was subsequently reprinted in the business management text Studies in Managerial Process and Organizational Behavior, Turner et al 1972). Both papers were based on my earlier analysis in "Goal Ambiguity and Conflicting Standards: An Approach to the Study of Organization" (Frank 1958-59). I presented the same approach at a State Department training seminar for visiting Third world technicians.
From this idea about social change it was but a short step for me, if not for others, to jump to the political conclusion that the really important real factors in development are political. Since political change seemed difficult if not impossible to achieve through reform, the obvious answer therefore seemed to be the need to start change through political revolution. It became increasingly clear to me that all American, including my own, development studies and thinking therefore were not at all part of the solution to development problems. Instead they were themselves really part of the problem, since they sought to deny and obscure both the real problem and the real solution, which lay in politics.
To find out more about that, I went to Cuba in 1960, soon after the revolution. After that I briefly looked at political change in Kwame Nukrumah's Ghana (where I was disappointed to find little) and in Seku Toure's Guinea (where I mistakenly thought that I had found more and better). Then, I decided to be consequential: I quit my assistant professorship at Michigan State University. (I had lead an interdisciplinary development seminar there, and I had already complained about MSU training police forces in South Vietnam - many years before this CIA project would become a public scandal). So I went to find (out for) myself from the "inside" in the "underdeveloped" "Third" World itself. Since I decided I would never become an African, I went to Latin America, where acculturation seemed less daunting. Thacher Robinson gave me the money -and his confidence- to do so.
From Reform to Revolution in Latin America
In 1962, I left the United States and went to Mexico, and I wrote about the "Janus faces" of Mexican inequality. I saw internal colonialism there instead of separate sectors in a "dual" economy or society. In Venezuela, my friend Hector Silva Michelena told me I had written a Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark of American imperialism. Then, via Peru and Bolivia, I arrived in Chile. In Venezuela, the sociologist Julio Cotler (later at the Institute of Peruvian Studies in Lima), sent me to see his brother in law Jose Matos Mar in Peru. He in turn introduced me to Anibal Quijano, later my friend and neighbor in Santiago, while he wrote on marginalization and other matters at the CEPAL/ECLA Division of Social Affairs. But first Anibal gave me a letter to his friends Pepe and Erika Rodriguez in Santiago with instructions to introduce me to a lady there. They did, to Marta Fuentes.
We met and shared our concern for social justice, which would guide our concern for development with equity before efficiency. We married and had two children with whom, as with each other, we still speak Spanish. Together, but without consulting our children and at their cost, we embarked on the long - and as it turned out tortuous - road "to change the world." At least we sought to change some of its thinking in the name of equitable justice.
To begin with, I wrote a critique of an article on land reform by Jacques Chonchol. (Later he would direct agricultural development for the Christian Democratic Chilean President Frei and then become Minister of Agriculture for the Socialist Party President Allende). Chonchol had counselled, and later practiced, slow land reform. I argued for the necessity of fast agrarian and other revolution, to forestall counter-reform. This was probably my first explicit critique of reformism from a more radical perspective. Marta had serious reservations about my thesis then and completely rejects it now. I also foretold that any economic integration of Latin America would help foreign investors more than local ones. All three articles were published in Monthly Review in English and the first and second respectively also in Politica in Mexico and Panorama Economico in Chile. I started to direct myself first and foremost to a Latin American audience.
Upon marriage, we set off into the unknown. I wangled an invitation to a major conference on reformist structuralist vs. monetarist conservatism in Rio de Janeiro in January 1963. Albert Hirschman was there, but I arrived late because of visa problems and a bus stuck in the mud between the Brazilian-Uruguayan border and Puerto Alegre. By then, I wanted a curse on both their conservative and reformist houses. I increasingly saw the reformist house as no more than a remodeled capitalist one. I thought it was necessary to replace this one by a different socialist house instead. Just how much tearing down and rebuilding this change of houses might involve was less than clear.
This was the time of the Cuban revolution and President Kennedy's response through the reformist Alliance for Progress. At its Punta del Este meeting, Che Guevara called it an alliance for "the latrinization" of Latin America. These political issues of development put ECLA/CEPAL type structuralism on the political economic agenda. They called for some land, tax, administrative, educational, health (including latrines) and other reforms and/or social development. However, this agenda was more theoretical than practical. It was not designed to overcome the political obstacles to reform, but to maintain them. Development policy, not to mention praxis, remained too inequitable and too inefficient. Nor did its North and Latin American political sponsors have much confidence in their own announced policies: They offered reforms with one hand, and with the other they trained the Latin American armed forces against guerrillas and the police forces to repress popular demonstrations and to torture civilians.
I still welcomed any proposed reforms, but considered them insufficient if not altogether unworkable. I regarded this social development to be inadequately attractive, condemned the military and police repression of popular demands, and put my confidence instead in the Cuban way. Of course, Cuba was developing socially and visibly improving education, health, reduced race and gender discrimination, etc. It was not yet clear that this was the main forte of the Cuban way. No one yet knew that this social development was not being matched by or grounded on a concomitant development of its economic base. The inadequate or incorrect Cuban development of this economic bases would ultimately make the continued social development dependent on the aid of massive foreign subsidy.
In a sense, the Cuban experience has been a test of the Ted Schultz et al (and earlier my) thesis that the prior development of human capital through education, health, and improved social relations would then lead to social and economic development. The often remarked success of social development in Cuba and to a lesser extent in other socialist countries has not proven to be enough for viable economic development. On the contrary, Cuba and other socialist countries now have to rein in their social welfare states, because their insufficiently developed economies cannot afford them. Ironically, that is what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher argue at home as well. Indeed, all now argue that less social development is necessary for more economic development!
But to return to my story, after the 1962-63 Sino-Soviet split and their lengthy document debates, I also accepted the Chinese line, because it appeared more revolutionary. The line and praxis of the Soviet and Soviet aligned Latin American Communist parties were too reformist. Indeed, in praxis they were hardly distinguishable from "national bourgeois" and ECLA/CEPAL reformism. The only big difference was that the former did, and the latter did not, refer to American imperialism as an obstacle to development in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World.
I wrote an article on "Aid or Exploitation?" It countered the conservative claim of Lincoln Gordon, the American ambassador to Brazil (who was later implicated in and supportive of the 1964 military coup) that foreign aid helped Brazil much. The article also rebutted the more reformist reply that aid only helped a little, as Roberto Campos, the Brazilian ambassador to the United States (whom I met at lunch in Rio and who subsequently became minister of planning for the military government) had replied to Gordon. My article contained the then radical proposition and figures to show that Brazil and Latin America in fact were net capital exporters to the United States, which far from aiding them, thereby exploited them. At the same time, Hamza Alavi published a similar article about aid to Pakistan; and I began exchanging our writings and corresponding about them. The leading Rio daily Jornal do Brasil gave my article a whole page, and it was republished about a dozen times. The article created a political storm and led to my invitation to the Brazilian congress by Leonel Brizola and to their homes by other progressive parlamentrians.
We had moved to Brasilia for jobs (I in anthropology and Marta in the library) in the new university there. They were offered to me by its anthropologist founder-president Darci Ribeiro before he became Goulart's Interior Minister (Jefe da Casa Civil). (Later, after the military coup, I visited both Brizola and Darci in their Uruguayan exile. My relations with Darci became closer in Venezuela and Chile, where he advised Allende. Later Darci became lieutenant governor and Brizola governor of Rio de Janeiro upon Brazil's return to democracy. However, I always found their pragmatic political reformism insufficiently revolutionary).
In Brasil, I also wrote an article on the foreign investment "Mechanisms of Imperialism" to counter the gospel according to which the Third World needed foreign investment and capital. Received theory was that the principal obstacle to development was the shortage of capital. I countered this universally accepted supply side theory with the essentially Keynesian demand side argument that the real economic obstacle was insufficient market demand for productive national investment. The same kind of Keynesian and structrualist argument also underlay the policies of Brazilian and other nationalists, like Celso Furtado. However, I critizided Furtado, the founder of SUDENE, who was then Minister of Planning before the military replaced him by Campos. I argued that his and others policies of structural reform were insufficient to expand the internal market and generate development.
At the University of Brasilia, Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos Santos, and his wife Vania Bambirra were my students; and Marta was Vania's. None of us had yet thought of what would become our dependence theory. Of course, neither could we then know how Latin American and our political developments would later entangle our personal, intellectual and political paths through their exile in Mexico and Chile and after the coup in the latter, for Marini and me even in Germany. All three of them are now back at the University of Brasilia.
From Dualism to Dependence
(with apologies to Ben Higgins et al)
I wrote my first three theoretical works in Brasilia and later in Rio, where our first son was born in 1963. They were directed at once against development theory and policy derived from (or camouflaged by) neo-classical and monetarist development theory; against Keynesian and structuralist explanations; and against CEPAL/ECLA, Alliance for Progress, and orthodox Marxist and Communist party theory, policy and praxis. I put them all in the same sack. The reason was that, whatever their differences, they all shared the view that underdevelopment was original or traditional. They all posited that development would result from gradual reforms in dual economies/societies, in which the modern sector would expand and eliminate the traditional one. Like Foster-Carter (1976), Diana Hunt (1989:172) regards my critique as "an archtypal example of a paradigm switch." She wonders whether I had read or even heard of Kuhn's book, which was published the year before. I must have been writing Kuhnian prose without knowing it, since I certainly had not heard of it.
However, I quarrelled with these orthodoxies more about their vision of underdevelopment than with their idea of development itself. I did not then find it remarkable that all also shared an essentially similar vision of capital accumulation through industrial growth = development. Because, so did I! One of the subsequent critiques of my dependence paradigm change from Rostow to Gunder Frank was that I only turned orthodoxy on its head. Doing so evaded and rendered impossible any fundamental other sideways critique and reformulation, which I now regard necessary.
The first of the three works argued against dualism. It went into battle especially against the then left-right-and-center dominant version according to which Brazilian and Latin American (traditional) agriculture is feudal and that therefore capitalist reform was on the order of the day. Half the Portuguese version was published by Caio Prado Jr. in his Revista Brasiliense before the 1964 military coup closed it down. The English version was then included in Frank 1967. I also wrote a critique and auto-critique of a book to which I was a contributor. The critique, entitled "Destroy Capitalism - Not Feudalism," was first published in 1963 and reprinted in Frank 1969.
The second theoretical work in 1963 was a much farther ranging critique of received theories. It was revised in 1965-66. After a dozen rejections, it was finally published in 1967 in the student magazine Catalyst under the title "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment." The critique targeted the theories of all my former friends at Chicago, like Bert Hoselitz and Manning Nash, as well as acquaintances or not at MIT, like Rostow and McClelland. In particular, I rejected the notion of "original" underdevelopment, "traditional" society, and subsequent "stages of growth." I also rejected the analisys of development through neo-Parsonian social pattern variables and neo-Weberian cultural and psychological categories. I found this new sociology of development to be "empirically invalid when confronted with reality, theoretically inadequate in terms of its own classical social scientific standards, and policy-wise ineffective for pursuing its supposed intention of promoting the development of underdeveloped countries" (reprinted in Frank 1969:21). In the late 1960s and I suppose independently, Suzanne Jonas-Bodenheimer (19xx) wrote a similar critique. Since I was rejecting all dualism (also in another essay under the title "Dialectical, Not Dual Society," also in Frank 1969), I threw Ben Higgins' technological dualism in for good measure, although I confess that I never understood it well then and still don't now. Higgins argues (almost persuasively) that his version of dualism should never have been included in what I was trying to reject.
The third work in 1963 was an extension from the second in the same manuscript. I sought to develop an alternative reading, interpretation, and theory of the development of underdevelopment . I saw it as the result of dependence and as the opposite side of the coin (turning things on their head) of development within a single world capitalist system. All of these ideas and terms were in the original 1963 manuscript, which was not published until 1975 by Oxford University Press in India under the title On Capitalist Underdevelopment (Frank 1975). The 1963 manuscript began:
Underdevelopment is not just the lack of development. Before there was development there was no underdevelopment...[They] are also related, both though the common historical process that they have shared during the past several centuries and through their mutual, that is reciprocal, influence that they have had, still have, and will continue to have, on each other throughout history (Frank 1975:1).
The second chapter went on to examine "The History and Sociology of Underdevelopment" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (and even in the South of North America) after arguing:
Though it may be predicting if not prejudging our results a little, we may conveniently begin our inquiry with a historical experience which all, or certainly almost all, of today's underdeveloped areas have in common: their incorporation into and subsequent participation in the worldwide expansion of the mercantilist and/or capitalist system (Frank 1975:21)
The third and main chapter "On Capitalist Underdevelopment" began:
The central thesis of this essay may now be discussed in greater detail. My thesis is that underdevelopment as we know it today, and economic development as well, are the simultaneous and related products of the development on a world-wide scale and over a history of over more than four centuries at least of a single integrated economic system: capitalism....The interpretation of underdevelopment and development as the related mechanisms and products of the development of the single capitalist system over the centuries raises a host of theoretical, empirical, and terminological problems.
Some of these are examined in the theoretical section of this essay below under the following titles: (a) Capitalism and Feudalism - one does not universally follow the other; (b) Capitalism and Mercantilism - their unity is more important than their differences; (c) Capitalism and Colonialism/Imperialism - capitalism inevitably takes some colonial/imperial form, but the form changes with the circumstances; (d) Capitalism and Internal colonialism - essentials of the colonial relation inevitably occur within states as well as between them; (e) Capitalism and Exploitation/Diffusion...(f)Capitalism and Class vs. Stratification...(g) Capitalism and Development / Underdevelopment [setting out my main thesis]...(h) Capitalism and Socialism - socialism is the escape from the exploitation and underdevelopment...(i) Capitalism and Liberation- escape from underdevelopment and subsequent development is no longer possible for them as part of the capitalist system, and only liberation through socialist revolution offers that possibility (Frank 1975:43-44).
Today, I would have to significantly revise only the last two of these theses, and then only the half of them referring to what socialism can do.
Much of the historical material and many of the ideas in this manuscript were derived and then reformulated from other Latin American writers. These were particularly the Argentinean Sergio Bagu and the Brazilian Caio Prado Jr. Both recognized and appreciated my formulations. I similarly used and cited the writings of Celso Furtado and the Chilean Anibal Pinto (both of whom I met in Brazil). However, both always rejected my writings and me personally (especially the latter who spent years deriding and combatting what he called my "catastrophism").
In short, it was quite a task at the time first to pose these questions, then to rethink the answers, and finally to persuade others to rethink both. Yet a decade and a half later in England, my by then more or less fifteen year old sons were able to cut through to the heart of the matter in one fell swoop.
Both had the good judgement never to read any of my stuff or anything similar. Yet one day out of the blue, Paulo made his own discourse on imperialism and underdevelopment. It sounded to me like Marx, Hobson, Luxemburg, Lenin, Baran, and even Frank, rolled into one, although he had never read any of them. Paulo concluded with "if Latin America was a colony, it could not have been feudal" ! It took me years to figure this out, and I never arrived at so clear and convincing statement of it. About the same time in 1979 soon after we had arrived in England from Germany, my younger son Miguel observed "England is an underdeveloping country." I ran to my class to tell my British students, and their responses sounded stupefied or incredulous. After several years of British deindustrialization under the government of Mrs. Thatcher, which took office in 1979, I repeated Miguel's earlier observation to a later generation of students, who then reacted "of course."
Returning to my story in 1963, I also wrote a long (still available) letter to Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who would later become famous for his "Seven Erroneous Theses." In my letter to him, I criticized his work prior to these and set out the alternative dependency analyses I wanted to develop. Then, Stavenhagen made a place for me (without pay) at the UNESCO sponsored Research Center in Social Sciences in Rio, of which he was then a director. There I wrote the above cited 1963 manuscript, and Stavenhagen read it. When I finally published it, I thanked him for so doing. However, I certainly did not copy anything then or since from Stavenhagen's "Seven Theses" published in 1966, as Blomstrom and Hettne (1984) later mistakenly intepreted my acknowledgment to him.
At this Institute in Rio also, my name became Andre Gunder Frank. A librarian there asked me if the bibliographic references she had to publications by Andrew and to Andres were to the same author or not. I decided to avoid such problems in the future by dropping the last letter -- or letters, since in German and still in my passport the name is Andreas. The Gunder I had already acquired as a (slow) track runner in high school. My teammates so nicknamed me by cruel comparison with Gundar Haag, the Swede who then held five world records in middle and long distances. Unfortunately however, I did not know how the name is correctly spelled.
In 1963 also, at the Brazilian Anthropological Society meetings in Sao Paulo, I criticized my fellow round table participants Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Octavio Ianni, Mauricio Vinhas and others for their views on dual society and development. I argued for an analysis of the relations among these socio-economic sectors and of their dependence on the outside. On July 1, 1964, by then already back in Chile, I wrote an also still available 12 page single space mimeographed letter to a dozen friends in the United States recounting my political change of heart and my theoretical change of mind up to that time. I also set out a program of research and writing for the future, some but not all of which came to pass. (This private letter along with the published article on mechanism of imperialism was subsequently cited in a letter to me by the U.S. government as the ideological reasons and supposedly legal grounds for which I was then, and for 15 years more after that, inadmissible to the United States).
In 1964 in Chile also, I got a one month contract as a consultant to the Social Affairs Division of CEPAL/ECLA to write something for an upcoming conference on "participacion popular." I wrote a long manuscript, part in English and part in Spanish. But the United Nations insisted on deleting its name from all of this "excessively radical" essay before distributing some copies to the conference participants. My contract, of course, was not renewed. Yet the essay quoted all sorts of UN declarations and documents to support my argument that governments should introduce a few reforms to permit and encourage people, including supposedly marginal but really participatory ones, to work for their communities' self-development through politically self-empowering participacion popular.
Since the UN then would have none this, I subsequently published much of this essay in separate parts. One was on "The Indian Problem," which said that it was created by the economy and society as a whole (in Frank 1967). Another was on "Rural Economic Structure and Peasant Political Power" (in Frank 1969). The third was on "Urban Poverty in Latin America," also reprinted in Frank (1969) as "Instability and Integration in Urban Latin America." In this part, my "excessively radical" thesis was that it is possible to exaggerate the economic and socio-cultural importance of the urban-rural distinction. It may be useful, instead, to consider the distinction between what might be called the "stable" or well-structured and the "unstable" sectors of the economy; and the corresponding distinction between the "permanent" and the "floating" populations that are economically active or inactive in them.... [Both] exist in both the urban and rural environments...[and] probably share a fairly similar economic structure and cause. Possibly more alike still are the rural and urban incumbents in these relatively "unstructured" and "unstable" roles. Certainly, they come from substantially the same socio-cultural group, especially if the society is a multi-racial or multi-ethnic one; and often they are the same individuals displaced from one environment to the other (and sometimes back again). Moreover, they occupy a large variety of these roles simultaneously or in quick succession, shifting rapidly and easily among the "unstructured" roles, but not between these and the more "structured" ones (Frank 1969:277-78).
What bitter irony that this same unstructured and unstable "informal" sector was discovered in Kenya a decade later by the UN International Labour Organisation, five years after it too had fired me as excessively radical. After that, the informal sector became formally established at the ILO and even at the World Bank, as I will observe below. My office mate during my brief stay at CEPAL/ECLA had been Adolfo Gurrieri, who now is the Director of its same Division of Social Affairs for which we worked.
The upshot of all these theoretical and political reflections - and maybe of the unpleasant experiences in and with reformist institutions - was that continued participation in the same world capitalist system could only mean continued development of underdevelopment. That is, there would be neither equity, nor efficiency, nor economic development. The political conclusions, therefore, were to de-link from the system externally and to transit to self-reliant socialism internally (or some undefined international socialist cooperation) in order to make in- or non-dependent economic development possible. I hardly considered and left for crossing-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it how such post revolutionary economic and social development would then be promoted and organized, not to mention guaranteed. I also gave short shrift to how the necessarily not so democratic (pre) revolutionary means might or not promote or even preclude the desireable post revolutionary end.
These early general ideas on dependent underdevelopment in the world as a whole then were my guides to more specific analyses. "The Development of Underdevelopment in Chile" was written there in 1964 at the invitation of Hugo Zemmelman for a special pre-election issue of the Socialist Party magazine Aurauco, of which he was editor. The issue was then devoted to a collection of Salvador Allende's speeches instead, and my essay remained unpublished for several more years. It had also been solicited by Jim O'Conner for Studies on the Left, but its publication there was then vetoed by his co-editors, especially Eugene Genovese. He regarded the essay as far too radical then. Later as colleagues in Canada, he also regarded me personally as far too radical, vide his comments on me in his book In Red and Black, not to mention an even more uncomradely article in our university newspaper (see Genovese 1968).
The following "the personal is political" anecdotes from 1964 in Santiago, Chile perhaps reveal a different side. I wrote a letter to the editor of the progressive daily La Ultima Hora defending Cassius Clay for changing his name to Mohammed Ali for black nationalist and religious reasons. I submitted an article to the same paper predicting an imminent military coup in Brazil, but they published instead one by their own editor-owner Clodomiro Almeyda (later to become Allende's foreign minister) saying that all was well in Brazil. The coup came three weeks later. When it did, I recommended to the Socialist-Communist FRAP alliance that it should engage the Brazilian Paulo Freyre, whom I had met in Brazil when he was only known in its Northeast, to work in the 1964 FRAP presidential campaign in Chile. FRAP paid no attention, but the Christian Democratic election winner, Eduardo Frei, subsequently engaged the then also Christian Democratic Freyre to work for him. Since then, Freyre has probably done more to promote self development than perhaps anyone else in the world.
In the meantime, I went to the Santiago airport to pick up Fernando Henrique Cardoso when he arrived as a Brazilian exile. On several occasion since, he told me that he appreciatively still regards this as more important and unifying than our supposed differences.
In 1964 we went to Mexico and in 1965 I wrote "The Development of Underdevelopment in Brazil" there. Then, in 1966 I wrote the more general "The Development of Underdevelopment," whose original title continued "...and the Underdevelopment of Development." The essays on Chile and Brazil, along with some others, became my first book Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Frank 1967). However, I had to pass literally untold trials and tribulations before I was finally able to get it published in English in 1967, French in 1968, and Spanish only in 1970. The preface argued that "it will be necessary instead scientifically to study the real process of world capitalist development and underdevelopment" and that "social science must be political science" (Frank 1967: xii,xiv). The emphasis was in the original, which was dated (commemorating the Cuban Revolution) on July 26, 1965. However, someone at the U.S. publisher changed the date of the preface from 1965 to 1966 to make it less distant from the long delayed date of publication at the end of 1967.
From Generalization to Critique and Application
In Mexico also, I initiated three new departures. I was the first professor at the National School of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico to dream up and teach a course on economic (under)development of Latin America. I was the first person to publish an accounting of Latin America's external payments and receipts, which distinguished between services and goods. However, first I had a hard time to persuade the editors of Comercio Exterior, who had first rejected my "unorthodox" accounting procedures, to accept this innovation. With this new accounting, I clearly demonstrated that the Latin American current account deficit was due to a large deficit on service account, especially from financial service payments. These exceeded Latin America's surplus on commercial account of excess exports over imports of goods (reprinted In Frank 1969). However, my "unorthodox" novelty itself subsequently became a new orthodoxy. It proved to be particularly useful in the now standard calculations of the ratio of debt service to export earnings. My third initiative was to organize prominent progressive Latin American economists to sign a statement on "The Need for New Teaching and Research of Economics in Latin America," based on its dependence (reprinted as Frank 1969 Chapter 4). I had drafted this statement with my colleague Arturo Bonilla and the Columbian Jose Consuegra, who later published it and dozens of my articles in his journal Desarrollo Indoamericano. As I recall, Celso Furtado refused to sign.
In Mexico, I also engaged in a number of debates about theoretical and political issues of development. At the School of Political and Social Science, whose director then was Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, I roundly criticized his recently published book La Democracia en Mexico for being scientifically and politically unacceptable (reprinted in Frank 1969). We only made up again years later. I also debated about capitalism or feudalism (my title was "With what Mode of Production does the Hen Lay its Golden Eggs") in the Sunday supplement of a national newspaper with my Argentinean colleague, Rodolfo Puiggros. My main message was that "if we are to understand the Latin American problematique we must begin with the world system that creates it and go outside the self-imposed optical and mental illusion of the Ibero-American or national frame" (Frank 1965 translated in Frank 1969:231). At the same time in Chile, Luis Vitale was also arguing against the thesis of Latin American feudalism.
Then along the same lines, I began work on a "History of Mexican Agriculture from Conquest to Revolution." However, I eventually ( in 1966 in Canada) wrote up only the first century of the same. My then still very controversial thesis was that since the Conquest Mexican agricultural (under) development was commercially driven and affected by transatlantic economic cycles. I used the data of important previous analyses by the French writer Francois Chevalier (1970, original in 1952) and the American historical geographer Woodrow Borah (1951) to turn their own theses up side down. I sent the manuscript to Borah; and he wrote me that, because I did not use primary sources, my history was not worth publishing. So I did not -- until over a decade later (Frank 1979). Then Borah wrote a review of the book, saying that it should not have been published -- because it was old hat. Indeed, as Leal and Huacuja (1982) demonstrate, in the meantime further historical research and analysis had converted my far out unorthodoxy of the 1960s into the orthodoxy of the 1980s. Before leaving Mexico, I also did some practical community development work in the field.
In Mexico also, on my way to Cuba which would never accept us, our second son was born. Gerrit Huizer was the first to appear at the hospital. Since then, he worked with and wrote about peasants all over Latin America and other parts of the world (Huizer 1972). Still now, he is helping with comments on this essay and my other ones on social movements. Alonso Aguilar and Fernando Carmona befriended me professionally, politically and personally. I vistited Ben Higgins in Cuernavaca. American friends visited me, like the sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz and the anthropologists Rick Adams, Bob Adams, Norma Diamond, and June Nash; years later, she would also stop by again in Chile. I also saw Harry and Beatie Magdoff in Mexico before they joined my editor, friend and helper Paul Sweezy at Monthly Review. Magdoff then arranged for a financial grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation to keep our bodies and souls together and to permit my writing these things in Mexico, where the University paid me too little and too late. I met Jim Cockcroft when he sold me a washing machine that did not work to wash our second son's diapers. However, it did "work" to bring him and me and our mutual friend, Dale Johnson, whom I had met in Chile, together enough to write a tripple barrled joint book, Dependence and Underdevelopment:Latin America's Political Economy. However, long distance coordination among the authors and problems with publishers delayed publication until 1970 in Spanish and 1972 in English.
In 1966 we went to Montreal, Canada for lack of another job in Mexico. Bert Hoselitz came to visit in Montreal after reading and declining to publish the still unpublished "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology," which criticized Bert, Ben and others so much. (Someone once said that I had really wanted to kill my father figure Bert. But then it was also said that Fidel Castro made a revolution against the Yankees, because they would not accept him as a major league baseball pitcher).
In 1967, we returned for a vacation to Santiago, Chile. There I found my exiled Brazilian friends Theotonio dos Santos, Vania Bambirra and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and his Chilean co-author Enzo Faletto. The latter had been Marta's friend since the 1950s, and in 1964 he commented on my Chile manuscript as duly acknowledged in my preface. The Peruvian Anibal Quijano (who had brought us together in 1962) also arrived in Santiago. All were now critically reading and discussing Regis Debray's recently published guerrilla focus pamphlet Revolution in the Revolution. His and my French publisher Francois Maspero claimed that my book provided the "scientific" basis for Debray's.
My Brazilian exile and Chilean friends in Chile were then also writing their own dependence books. Cardoso and Faletto (1979) wrote their Dependence and Development in Latin America. Later some "historians" and comentators outside Latin America would jum to the unwarranted conclusion that my writings were inspired by them, and others that their book was written in answer to mine. Neither was true, although Enzo Faletto had read my chapter on Chile in 1964, as noted above. Dos Santos wrote various articles on dependence. However, Theotonio always maintained rather reformist leanings. Nonetheless, others called his writings and mine, and later also those of my other Brasilia friend Ruy Mauro Marini, "new" dependence writings. Supposedly, they led to more "revolutionary" conclusions than Cardoso and Faletto's version of dependence. They and Quijano were working in departments of ECLA/CEPAL (and ILPES), whose inwardlooking Latin American industrialization program was running out of steam. Therefore, Prebisch himself now recommended more radical reforms, and his younger co-workers all the more so.
A couple of years later and also in response to some early critiques of my own writings by Theotonio and others, I still argued that these reforms did not go far enough. That was in my Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment, which I advertised as a swan song of dependence theory. It was written in Spanish and published in that language in eight different country editions beginning 1970 before being translated into a half dozen other languages, including Japanese and into English as Frank (1972). In this regard, I remember my argument with Oswaldo Sunkel, another CEPAL stalwart with first structuralist and then dependence positions. Oswaldo insisted that his and my positions were the same, and I insisted that they were not. The irony is that after repeated other meetings between us, two decades later Oswaldo now claims that we no longer share our by now changed views; and I think that we now do.
On the return trip from Santiago to Montreal in 1967, I finally got my first opportunity to visit Cuba. I went as Monthly Review correspondent to the first conference of the stillborn OLAS (Organization of Latin American Solidarity). I met Jose Bell Lara, then the guiding spirit of Pensamiento Critico. He published many of my articles there, and still comes to vistit us in Holland. We used to agree about most everything, but now I find his views excessively provincial. In January 1968, I went to Cuba again, this time as invited delegate to International Congress of Intellectuals in Havana. I would go once again in 1972 as a member of the jury for the literary prize (in my case in the essay category) awarded annually by the Casa de las Americas, Cuba's premier cultural organization. We had a falling out, first because they blamed me for the prize being declared vacant that year and secondly because I criticized them for taking insufficiently revolutionary positions regarding political literature. Later, my fellow jury member, the Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardinal (who would still later become revolutionary Nicaragua's Minister of Culture) published part of our private conversation in the memoirs of his Cuba trip. He quoted me as saying that our host organization, the Casa de las Americas, "was shitty before, and is moreso now." I was never invited back to Cuba and only went again in 1981 as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Second Congress of Third World Economists (because I had been the same at the first one in Algiers in 1976, where I told Celso Furtado to his visible dismay that by then we both had nothing useful left to say).
In 1968 via "May 1968" in Paris, where I first met Samir Amin, I returned to live in Chile. Marta and the children went first, and I followed after signing on for an ILO project there. On arrival at the airport, I was detained and taken into town to see the head of the political police and his almost foot high file about the supposedly subversive threats I posed. He told me that "sociologia" and "socialismo" were all the same to him and sent me back out to the airport to be put on the next plane out. None left, however, before Pedro Vuscovic from CEPAL/ECLA (and later the controversial Economics Minister of Allende) brought the latter out to the airport to bring me back in under his authority as president of the Senate and therefore second in command in the country. The ILO then made a deal with the Minister of the Interior to withdraw me again. I refused to go; I was fired after a month by the ILO; and I got a job at the University of Chile. After repeated additional interventions by Allende, I received permission to remain in Chile.
However revolutionary anyone may or may not have been (or thought him/herself to be) then, it is evident looking back now that no one then, of course, was sufficiently "revolutionary" to incorporate the special dependence of women into our general dependence theory or to "subvert" the established patriarchal order of society. I will have to return to this matter below.
From Production of Dependence to its Consumption
(with apologies to my friend Fernando Henrique Cardoso)
So far I have reviewed some of the economic, sociopolitical and personal context of some of the conflicting, cooperating and compounding production of dependence theory. Cardoso said we should not use the term "theory" but only "approach." However, Cardoso then also talked and wrote about the consumption of dependence theory. Dependence "theory" prospered, despite early and continued rejection, resistance, and attacks. This "alternative" approach found little favor with the orthodox right, some of the structuralist reformist left, the Soviet aligned Communists, Trotskyists, and soon also the Maoists. Nonetheless, dependence was "consumed" in Latin America and elsewhere.
In Latin America, dependence (and I) were enshrined at the Latin American Congress of Sociology in Mexico in 1969 under the presidency of Pablo Gonzalez Casanova. He was the same person whose book I had criticized four years earlier in Mexico and who in between had been rector of the National University there. At the congress of Latin American economists in Maracaibo, Venezuela, resistance was much fiercer. Indeed, I was run out of town. In 1965 already I had sent the above mentioned letter to about 100 economists about the need for new (read dependence) economics teaching and research in Latin America. However, students and political groups and parties, and eventually some of the press, all over the continent took up and fought about the battle cry of dependence. Eduardo Galeano told me that without my book he could not have written his own best selling Open Veins of Latin America. Of course, the one word reason for all this consumption of dependence was Cuba and the progress of its revolution and attempts to copy it elsewhere.
Dependence theory and writing, including mine, also made a notable impact on and through the "theology of liberation," which was and still is spread through Catholic Church groups in Latin America. Although we have never met, the Peruvian "founder" of liberation theology, Gonzalo Gutierrez, acknowledged this influence in writing. The Chilean Jesuit Gonzalo Arroyo babtized my sister in law's children and took the occasion to invite me to participate in his seminar at the Catholic University of Chile. We have been friends ever since. The Canadian theologian Christopher Lind (1983: 158) claims that the Canadian Confrerence of Catholic Bishops "appropriated the analysis of Andre Gunder Frank on the basis of his ethics, not his Marxism."
Moreover, dependence "theory" was also consumed elsewhere - in North America, Western Europe, and by slower and lesser degrees in Africa and Asia, but hardly in the socialist countries. There was also a one word reason for that consumption: Vietnam. The war and Vietnamese resistance and successes after the 1968 Tet offensive against the United States and its client government in the South mobilized people everywhere. The interest was of course especially great among potential draftee students and other young people in the United States itself. An (perhaps any) alternative to orthodoxy about the Third World could only be welcome and was soon consumed by social scientists as well.
As thirdworldism prospered in the West and in the South as well, my writings on dependence et al were published in over twenty languages. These publications now include well over 100 different editions of my books (the first of which sold some 100,000 copies); chapters in over 100 anthology volumes edited by others; and over 500 versions of articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many were reprinted a dozen and more times. Of course, I refer to only a small portion of these publications here. There were also objections to and critiques of my writings. For instance, one writer complained about "Gunder Frank being exalted to authoritative status in [Bipan Chandra's] Presidential Address...at the Indian History Congress" and another sought "to fire a red warning flare [against] importing Gunder Frank into Africa."
Nonetheless, the academic and more popular political use of dependency writing, including mine, spread around the world. The Social Science Citation Index has recorded citations to my writings in about 3,000 journal articles by others. These journals represent two dozen different academic fields and regional specializations in the social sciences and humanities, and they are published in as many different countries. 2,000 of these citastions were in the decade 1976-1985. Most of these citations were to my 1960s writings on dependence. Since then, the number of citations has declined to about 100 a year. Moreover, the references to my writings has gradually been shifting from the earlier ones on dependence to more recent ones on world system and economic crisis.
From Critiques of Dependence and Gunder Frank...
Academic and policy debates on equity and efficiency in economic development were going on elsewhere since the mid 1970s. On the left, dependence theory succumbed to the coup in Chile, as we will see below. Right, center and left (Social democratic, Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist and other) critiques abounded. In 1972, I reviewed some 100 of them dedicated totally or partially to my own writings. The critique that would become most celebrated was that of Ernesto Laclau, who charged that I had falsely confused the capitalist "mode of production" with the capitalist system." (Ironically, two decades later two Indian "Marxists" sought sustenance in this Laclau critique for their own critique of my later writings on social movements, without realizing that Laclau had in the meantime become even more of an enthusiast of social movements).
The list of critiques of my writings on dependence was updated in 1977, but it has continued growing to well over 200 critiques since, and the 1972 reply is reprinted as "Answer to Critics" in Frank (1984, Chapter 24). A sample of some of these "critiques" was that I was a "theorist of an anarchic left, provocateur, diversionist, confusionist, divisionist ... pseudo-marxist." For one side, I was the principal "ideologist of terrorism in Latin America" and for the other a "cat's paw of the CIA." One of my honorable academic critics went so far as to say in a public lecture in Poland that I had been in charge of exterminating Jews in a Nazi concentration camp there during World War II. (We may recall that at war's end, I was 16 and still in high school in the United States). Recurrent more academic critiques were that my analysis was supposedly "circulationist" (demand side?) instead of "productivist" (supply side?) and therefore insufficiently - or altogether un - Marxist. Indeed, a lively but fruitless debate ensued over whether I am an Orthodox Marxist, a Neo-Marxist, or neither. My answer has always been "none of the above," for I never laid claim to any of these labels, nor did I wish to assent to or to dissent from any such. (For my 1972 disclaimer, see Frank 1984:259). More sober and friendlier critiques included "The Underdevelopment of Gunder Frank" by the Venezuelan Armando Cordova's. We have been friends ever since.
Very few of the often extremely esoteric academic and/or very interested political critiques hit the nail and weaknesses of dependence "theory." The latter have, however, become (part of) my own later auto-critique: 1) real dependence exists, of course, and more than ever despite denials to the contrary. However, dependence "theory" and policy never answered the question of how to eliminate real dependence and how to pursue the chimera of non- or in-dependent growth. 2) Dependence heterodoxy nonetheless maintained the orthodoxy that (under)development must refer to and be organized by and through (nation state) societies, countries or regions. However, this orthodox tenet turns out to be wrong. 3) I turned orthodoxy on its head, but I maintained the essence of the thesis that economic-growth-through-capital-accumulation equals development. Thereby, the socialist and dependence heterodoxies locked themselves into the same traps as the development orthodoxy. Therefore, I precluded any real alternative definitions, policy and praxis of "development." 4) In particular, this orthodoxy incorporated the patriarchal gender structure of society as a matter of course. However much I may personally have been against male chauvinism, I thereby prevented examination of this dimension of dependence.
...To Dependency Alternatives from the Left
Supposedly progressive critiques of dependence and more-of-the-same replacements came form the left. Some came in the form of inward looking involution, which proposed to study all kinds of micro problems and regions and their "modes of production." The hope was better to analyze the local class structure, and thereby to learn how to change it. These critiques were largely stillborn as the world economic and political crisis itself changed the nature and direction of the struggle (of which more below). A more sophisticated version of these critiques, made for the same purpose as he later told me, was the critique of the "neo Smithianism" of Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein by Bob Brenner (19xx). I went to Los Angeles to discuss this critique with him. Although we still disagree, we have remained personal friends ever since. The other main line of critique was an outward looking extension of dependence, which sought to analyze the whole world system (of which also more below). This line of analysis, in which I particpated myself, generated little practical policy. Most analysts of the world system hinked behind its rapid crisis generated transformation, although some also sought to predict its future development (e.g. Amin and Frank 1974, "Let's not Wait for 1984!" of which also more below). Other alternatives, variants, or combinations, of the early analyses of dependence were to investigate the "tripple alliance" among foreign and national capital and the national state (a la Evans 1979) or to make comparative studies of the internal and external conditions in some European and overseas settler economies. These sought to explain how these economies avoided dependent peripheralization and underdevelopment (Senghaas 1985).
In the meantime, modernization "theory" was also increasingly self destructing. It did so with a little help from us, more from its friends, and most from the supposedly modernizing people themselves, who responded by revolting against their changing conditions in the course of world accumulation and development. Even Henry Kissinger pronounced modernization bankrupt after the Ayatollah Khomeini defeated the super modernizing and super armed Shah of Iran in 1979. Khomeini used nary a bullet and renounced the goals of Western style modernization and "development."
Continued in Part 3
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