Dependency, Modes of Production, and the Class Analysis of Latin America

For a quarter of a century Latin America has been the fulcrum of development theories. From the Economic Commission on Latin America's (ECLA) reformist structuralism to the dependency perspective and analyses of modes of production, each radical reformulation of the Latin American dilemma has ushered in a new approach to underdevelopment in general. The reason for this is clearly contextual. By the mid-twentieth century the region effectively represented the highest of underdevelopment and its attendant contradictions, economic, political and social. This made it a natural source for theories based on an originally innovating but now generally accepted premise: underdevelopment is not a traditional state, nor a stage in a standard development process, but a distinct historical condition for which neither bourgeois nor Marxist theories of unilinear evolution afford explanations or solutions (Frank, 1971: 27-30). The experience of the structuralist reforms of the 1950s and 1960s was the catalyst of this new thinking. Their contradictions were a mirror of the Latin American situation. On the one hand, they embodied a notion that Latin American history was shaped by the international division of labor and unfavorable terms of trade (Furtado, 1970). On the other hand, they were a last attempt to realign this history with a standard model of capitalist development through Keynesian forms of intervention: state planning, import substitution industrialization and agrarian reform. The radical inference of their failures, in Brazil and Chile particularly, was that history could not just be rerouted through the existing state apparatus. If significant change were to be achieved, this history had to be broken out of by revolutionary means and in the revolutionary direction which Cuba was already pioneering. Hence both the main post-structuralist approaches set out, at least in principle, to examine class relations and struggles. From the premise that