Imperialism and Marginality in Latin America

One of the problems that has been dealt with at greatest length in the social research on Latin America during the last decade is that of marginality. The ideas and images that have been circulated under this heading are so contradictory and vague, especially because of their frequent misuse in the press and in the most banal political jargon, that Jose Nun (1969a) is completely justified in saying that marginality is one of those commonly used concepts of which one can ask, and from which one can derive, almost anything one wishes. For this reason, it is not easy to remove the rubble and clearly establish the limits of this research field in the difficult process of being correctly defined. However, after ten years of debate and concrete research carried out by many of the leading investigators of various theoretical positions from Latin America and other countries, enough information has accumulated to make it possible to assert that a discussion of ''marginality today refers to a well-defined problem: What happens to the relative surplus population produced by the movement of capital, according to historically necessary laws, and what are the conditions and mechanisms involved in producing it, when capitalist accumulation is characterized by the full predominance of monopoly capital and by the maturation of the internationalization of capital under the control of its monopolistic centers; when this internationalization involves the articulation within a system of different accumulation modalities-both the most developed forms of intensive accumulation, characterized by the predominance of technical production over human labor, and sectors in which primitive forms of extensive accumulation still link capital and precapital under the hegemony of the former; when, simultaneously and *Anibal Quijano, Director of the Peruvian journal Sociedad y Poiftica, is best known for his studies of dependency and of the Peruvian reality. This article is a translation of the introduction to his book Imperialismo y marginalidad en Am6rica Latina (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1977). Peggy Westwell is a journalist who has spent many years in Latin America. 76