Dependency: a formal theory of underdevelopment or a methodology for the analysis of concrete situation of underdevelopment?

Abstract

The initial stimulus for this paper came from a workshop on dependency organized in the Latin American Centre, St. Antony's College, Oxford, by my colleagues Rosemary Thorp and Sanjaya Lall, of the Institute of Economics and Statistics, and myself. I shall attempt to demonstrate that to the analysis of each of these three phases in the relationships between the advanced and peripheral countries in the capitalist world postulated above there corresponds a particular analysis of the development of capitalism in backward nations. The first, essentially that of Marx and Engels, analyses capitalism as a historically progressive system, which will be transmitted from the advanced countries (through colonialism, free trade, etc.) and which will spread through the backward nations by a continual process of destruction and replacement of pre-capitalist structures. As a result of this process a series of new capitalist societies would arise, whose development would be similar, in the post-colonial period, to that of the advanced countries themselves? This, then, would be followed by the development of the series of contradictions inherent to the capitalist system, which would tend to lead to a higher system of development.