Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina

To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014. 

I had an argument with my best friend a few days ago. This might be a strange way to start this post, but it is related. She hinted that trying to deal with Brazil’s problems while living in Australia, as I am doing during my PhD, sounds “fake”. This comment touched on a fundamental point: bringing Latin America to the conversation, in Oceania, is not easy – we are, literally, worlds apart. However, as a revival of Marxist Dependency Theory asserts, we must insist on not just learning about the periphery but also on how to bring about transformational possibilities. This is particularly relevant when U.S. hegemony is being challenged and the BRICS are becoming too big to be ignored.

Within this context, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias by Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is a contribution to be highly celebrated. I am so glad we had the opportunity to read it in the Past & Present Reading Group. At times, it felt like discussing politics in a bar in São Paulo (Vila Madalena!), leading to those moments when you can be deep and frank.

Two sentences help illustrate the book’s main message. Lula da Silva continually urges “We must end hunger”, while Javier Milei relentlessly screams “Viva la libertad, c*****!” (or “F****** long live freedom”). They represent two paths of development that Brazil and Argentina have been alternating between in the last three decades: neodevelopmentalism and neoliberalism. Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff and the Kirchners have followed the former. Carlos Menem, Fernando de la Rúa, Fernando Collor de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Mauricio Macri, Jair Bolsonaro and, currently, Javier Milei, the latter. All of them had (have) development in mind. However, they come from contrasting approaches: the neodevelopmentalists emphasize the role of the state; the neoliberals, the role of the market. Antunes de Oliveira argues that both strategies are utopian because too much expectation is put in the state’s or the market’s capacity to address a country’s torments on the periphery of the capitalist system, inevitably subordinated to the core. As the author poses it: on one hand development is crucial for concrete changes whereas, on the other hand, development “as capitalist catch-up” carries with it conditions (p. 6).

The term “the whip of external necessity” is recurrent in the text. This is how Leon Trotsky synthesised the impositions of capitalism on less developed, “backward” countries, forcing uneven and combined development, blending old and contemporary elements. Attempts after attempts to “go ahead” without fully succeeding are abundant in the book, making a compelling case: you can almost hear the pages shouting “the whip of external necessity” or, indeed, “dependency”. By bringing Marxist Dependency Theory to the arena, following key works by Ruy Marini, Vania Bambirra and Theotônio dos Santos, Antunes de Oliveira aims to offer non-Eurocentric “building blocks” to construct a theory of “uneven and combined dependency” (p. 64), a phrase first coined by Gerardo Otero, Gabriela Pechlaner and Efe Can Gürcan. As Vania Bambirra states, “Developed countries and peripheric countries form one historical unity, which made the development of some possible and the backwardness of others inexorable”. Ruy Mauro Marini adds that the main character of Latin American economies is the split between the production and circulation of commodities. Production in the periphery is guided by the world market and transnational capital, realization is mostly external, therefore peripheric workers are not vital as consumers. They can be paid below their necessary needs, they can be super-exploited, as long as there is a surplus population of workers to replace them easily.

Given its centrality to the book, the concept of labour super-exploitation, which is crucial to Marini´s work, is only once briefly defined (p. 64):

Super-exploitation means that working classes’ wages act as the primary adjustment variable in times of crisis, regularly falling below the level of basic social reproduction, with systemic economic effects.

The word “super-exploitation” appears in the book several times, but it is not further analysed, which weakens the concept. It leaves a question mark about how exactly super-exploitation differs from “exploitation” in itself. Clearly, the working class was less exploited during the terms of the Workers’ Party, as the minimum wage increased; or exploitation was enhanced during Macri’s government, through wage restraint. It is not obvious, however, how this refers to Marini’s notion of “super-exploitation”. Antunes de Oliveira does explain super-exploitation more comprehensively in previous works. However, those not aware of the theory would benefit from an expansion of it here. It would have been beneficial to deal, in the book, with critiques of the concept, such as super-exploitation being not unique to peripheric countries, or what exactly defines the value of labour power, and therefore how the extraction of surplus value beyond workers’ necessary needs could be quantified. Leda Paulani talks about these issues, noting that at the end of his life, Marini recognised that with neoliberal globalization, labour super-exploitation was spread to all corners of the world. The periphery, however, continues to be more affected than the Global North, given the structural deficiencies, reprimarization of their economies and an abundant reserve army of labour. Marcelo Carcanholo argues that the restructuring of production and the explosion of financialization were new routes that capital found to solve its crisis in the 1970s, with the periphery becoming even more dependent on the core through surplus remittances, technological innovations, and the expansion of fictitious capital. Rubens Sawaya argues similarly, stressing the role of transnational capital in the industrialization and deindustrialization of Brazil and Argentina. He brings Marx to the fore to remind us that the power to control prices globally is related to the composition of capital, technology and monopolisation, and gives an example: Brazil dominates soybean production. However, all the technology used for it – from the seeds to machines and royalties – is provided by transnational corporations, with commercialization controlled by global traders.

Intertwining theory with the empirical parts of the book would have reinforced, therefore, what these key essential terms – labour super-exploitation and the whip of external necessity – refer to because, otherwise, they run the risk of becoming redundant words. In the chapter on Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Antunes de Oliveira notes how in his first term as president, Cardoso implemented his “bourgeois version” of dependency theory, the one he had defended in his famous book with Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, also previously featured in the Past & Present Reading Group. This is unpacked by Antunes de Oliveira to refer to Cardoso’s vision that dependent capitalist development was possible and would happen through the internationalization of the domestic market, opening it up for foreign capital. In his second term as president, Cardoso let aside his past life and fully embraced neoliberalism. Deep inside, however, both his foreign investment phase and his Washington-consensus venture were part of the same game.

Antunes de Oliveira’s methodology is based on discourse analysis, which he argues gives an understanding of class interests behind neoliberal and neodevelopmental policies. Most of us in the reading group, however, thought that this was not fully achieved. There are mentions of “fractions of the ruling class”, “fractions of the working class”, and “fractions of national capital”. Yet it would have been helpful to understand the makeup of these fractions. Antunes de Oliveira leaves no doubt, though, about which demographics struggle the most in dependent peripheric countries: lower social classes, Black and Indigenous people enduring the contemporary consequences of colonisation and slavery, women suffering from patriarchy, and the LGBTQIA+ community subjected to discrimination. These groups witnessed improvements in their lives during progressive governments but without such changes becoming structural. As Antunes de Oliveira notes, there is a strong debate disputing the degrees of neoliberalism attached to neodevelopmentalism and how this has contributed to “dependent fascism” under Bolsonaro and Milei.

Narrowing the focus to Brazil there is one last important remark to make. Antunes de Oliveira does not discuss in detail the impact of Operation Car Wash – there is only a short footnote. Yet the seven-year-long corruption inquiry moved tectonic plates: it was responsible for illegally imprisoning Lula and forbidding him to be a candidate in the 2018 elections (he was leading the polls against Bolsonaro). It dismantled Brazil’s construction sector, weakening the fraction of the bourgeoisie that supported the Workers’ Party government. It particularly targeted Petrobras, Brazil’s majority-state-owned oil company that had recently discovered the pre-salt layer of carbon deposits, which can turn Brazil into an oil superpower. Operation Car Wash was also conducted in conjunction with the United States. Cables released by Wikileaks indicate reasons for discontent with the Workers’ Party: a move away from the U.S. and closer to BRICS and Latin American countries; not following neoliberal policies properly; Brazil’s oil sovereignty and the pre-salt layer of deposits; involvement with Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, etc. As Carlos Eduardo Martins writes in the preface of the 2011 edition of Theotônio dos Santos’ classic Imperialismo y Dependencia, dos Santos saw the BRICS as an opportunity to build a historical bloc with enough power to crack U.S. hegemony, to move towards a more economically democratic system. For Marini, who died before the BRICS were formed, a means of breaking away from dependency would be through the creation of a Latin American supranational state. Would Marini see the BRICS like dos Santos did, as an opportunity to escape dependency, or would he see the BRICS as subimperialist?

By highlighting the above points, my intention is not to reduce the importance of Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina. Rather, my point is that breaking away from the imperialist merry-go-round requires collective effort. Reading, as a group, Antunes de Oliveira’s book is part of that collective intellectual social labour. For that and all, Felipe, obrigada!