Earlier this year in Davos, the new Argentinian President, Javier Milei, defended what he called “libertarianism”, a model characterised, according to him, by “private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation(…)”.
From a critical political economy perspective, the statement is laughable, of course. Doesn’t he know that markets are created through violence and political intervention? Doesn’t he know that Adam Smith himself saw the dire human consequences of the division of labour brought to the extreme?
Those objections are, however, beside the point. Milei is not a critical political economist. Instead, he is the leader of a peripheral country. His discourse does not need to be theoretically sophisticated or historically accurate. All he needs to do is to politically mobilise his electorate and promise better days.
In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2023, President Lula complained that “we have not corrected the excesses of market deregulation and the support for the minimum state”.
Again, from a critical political economy perspective, it is easy to criticise this crude defence of the state. Doesn’t he know that actually existing states were created through a top-down process of exclusion? Doesn’t he know that, in Latin America, the state has historically been captured by dominated-dominant ruling classes and continues to play a key role in the enforcing of super-exploitation of labour over racialised working classes?
But these objections are also, of course, beside the point. Lula is not interested in Marxist theories of the state. He had just won a crucial election against peripheral-fascism. Understandably, he needed to rally his political base and denounce neoliberalism.
A critique of market and state utopias
My book, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina, went to press before the election of Milei, and a few months after Lula’s 2023 UN Speech. The empirical focus of the book, therefore, is not Lula’s third term, nor Milei’s administration. Nevertheless, when listening to these more recent speeches, it is impossible not to hear the echo of three decades of political clash between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism in Argentina, Brazil, and most of Latin America. This is exactly the core of the book. With important differences in emphasis and styles, we have seen similar arguments being made by Carlos Menem, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Mauricio Macri, on the neoliberal side, and Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, Dilma Rousseff and Lula himself on the neodevelopmentalist side. Jair Bolsonaro’s peripheral-fascism seems to be a partial outlier, although in economic terms his administration clearly sided with the neoliberal camp.
In simple terms, neoliberals preach a form of market utopia, in which market forces should be freed from the nefarious influence of the state. Neodevelopmentalists sell some kind of state utopia, according to which the state can rise above class struggle and tame international forces if only its capabilities are wisely mobilised. Ever repeated and never fulfilled promises of development, simply understood as capitalist catch-up, unite both camps.
Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina analyses three decades of development discourses in both countries, mapping the political impasse generated by the impoverished political economy debate between neoliberals and neodevelopmentalists. Because the perfect market and the perfect state never materialise in reality, neoliberals and neodevelopmentalists continue to clamour for further market liberalisation or further state intervention. Failure to achieve the idealised view of development they share can always be explained away as unforeseen hindrances to the well-functioning of the market or the state, or, alternatively, as unfortunate external shocks.
Going beyond the level of political discourses, the book also shows how different macroeconomic and foreign policies are enabled by neoliberal and neodevelopmentalist views. And here a key distinction emerges. Whereas neoliberal policies tend to squarely favour capital owners, neodevelopmentalist policies are often contradictory, at times favouring unstable coalitions between labour and capital. This explains the better overall result of neodevelopmentalist policies for the working class in Brazil and Argentina, although eventual gains were intrinsically limited, giving way to bitter disappointment.
Reclaiming dependency theory through uneven and combined development
The political economy debate in Brazil and Argentina has not always been dominated by the clash between (neo)liberalism and (neo)developmentalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, a real theoretical alternative disputed the political space with mainstream development perspectives. Dependency theory questioned the ultimate goal of capitalist catch-up development, as well as market and state idealisations. Authors such as Ruy Marini, Theotônio Dos Santos, and Vania Bambirra clearly mapped structural barriers to Latin American capitalist development, such as the super-exploitation of labour and the prevalence of dominated-dominant ruling classes. As a result of centuries of colonialism, both markets and states in Latin America were perceived as rigged against the interests of the working classes.
In my book, I reclaim the revolutionary dependency theory tradition, revisiting some key 1970s debates. I show how, in the 1970s and 1980s, Cardoso abandoned the dependency ship and returned to developmentalist ideas, a move that stands at the very origin of neodevelopmentalism. Recovering key concepts coined by Marini and Bambirra, I demonstrate through five detailed case studies that the super-exploitation of labour and the dominated-dominant character of Brazilian and Argentinian ruling classes continue to largely explain the dependent development dynamics in both countries.
Engaging with the postcolonial and postdevelopment critiques of dependency theory and development analysis in general, I reframe dependency theory through a new reading of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD). Indeed, a fundamental limitation of the first generation of dependency scholars was their inability to conceptualise development beyond the prospect of capitalist catch-up they so vividly denounced. Building on the work of Justin Rosenberg and many other IR scholars who have been pushing UCD into new directions, I use UCD as a new definition of development. Accordingly, I suggest that development is better understood as the interplay between social disputes and international pressures and opportunities.
Instead of failure to develop, uneven and combined dependency
This redefinition of development allows me to go beyond the ever-repeated analysis of development failures that dominate the Brazilian and Argentinian mainstream political economy debates.
Neoliberals keep blaming development failures on insufficiently free markets. A case in point is Frederico Sturzenegger’s claim that Macri’s neoliberal administration failed because of the “excess of populism”. Neodevelopmentalists, on their side, often complain that peripheral ruling classes do not behave as the modernising elites they were supposed to be. Both sides also keep blaming external shocks for unfortunate economic results.
Contrastingly, instead of looking at the recent Brazilian and Argentinian economic history in search of failures that could be potentially corrected by further neoliberal or neodevelopmentalist reforms, I show how the development that actually happened is explained by the interrelation between international pressures and class struggle, reproducing essential dependent traits.
My final political claim, following in the footsteps of Marini, Bambirra and Dos Santos, is that neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism are intrinsically unable to deliver on their ever-repeated promises of development, and the only way to overcome dependency is through the dethroning of dominated-dominant ruling classes.
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