<blockquote>I take the dependency or uneven development paradigm essentially to involve assent to some version of each of the following related propositions:
1. Disparities in wealth between nations as a group are due fundamentally to asymmetries of economic and political power that are constitutive of the capitalist system of development, and indeed of world capitalism generally.
2. The asymmetries of economic and political power that exist between groups of nations cannot be removed or significantly ameliorated within the structures and strategic possibilities that are integral to the prevailing system of capitalist accumulation.6
(Kenneth Surin, "Dependency Theory's Reanimation in the Era of Financial Capital," Cultural Logic, 1998, <http://eserver.org/clogic/ 1-2/surin.html>)</blockquote>
Classical Marxists -- including the early Marx and the early Lenin -- held that capitalism had a historically progressive character, bringing capitalist development to backward countries, proletarianizing their populations, heightening social contradictions, and therefore also increasing possibilities of social revolution. The idea was that capitalist development was the seed of its own undoing. Dependency theory cast doubt upon capitalism's historically progressive mission in backward nations. In addition to (1) and (2) that Surin mentions, some dependency theorists thought that (3) the power elites of empires, more often than not, enter into alliances with backward (rather than progressive) segments of the ruling classes of backward nations, retarding their social and economic development (cf. Gabriel Palma, "Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?" 1978, <http://www.rrojasdatabank.org/ deppalma.htm>). It is no wonder that they thought so, since those were the days when Washington was bent on overthrowing or undermining secular progressive nationalist governments (e.g., in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan, etc.) which sought not so much to establish socialism as to develop their countries socially and economically still within the overall framework of capitalism.
(1) and (2) remain largely true, though less so than before due to the decline of Washington's power. (3) appeared to become irrelevant, not so much because Washington changed its policy as because Washington succeeded in destroying so many secular progressive nationalist forces that they began to disappear from the world stage. This may be changing now, though, in Latin America, where the successes of Bolivarian revolutionaries must be inspiring other Latin American leftists. The US-Iran relations will be important to watch, too: on one hand, Washington needs Iranian oil, which for instance helps make up for the energy deficit that it caused in Iraq; on the other hand, it (supported by Euro power elites) wants to deny Tehran nuclear power, itching to take the issue to the Security Council and put economic sanctions (!) on Iran -- can Washington still afford to do that?
The main reason that classical Marxists thought that capitalism had a progressive historical mission in backward countries was that empires exported capital to them, and classical liberal and Marxist analyses of imperialism rested upon this fact. Today, that is no longer true. The last empire, the United States, depends on massive import of capital, far from exporting it to further capitalist development in the rest of the world:
<blockquote>The U.S. economy has not just become a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up "all the world’s spare investible cash," in the words of University of California, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, but about one-third of that money comes from the developing world. To put this contribution in perspective: DeLong calculates that $90 billion a year, or one-third of the average U.S. current account deficit over the last two decades, is equal to the income of the poorest 500 million people in India. (John Miller, "Dollar Anxiety," Dollars & Sense 257, January-February 2005, <http:// www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2005/0105miller.html>)</blockquote>
That's despite the fact that the rate of return on foreign investment in the United States is not so good: "Americans secured a rate of return of more than 7 per cent between 2002 and 2004, compared with 3.4 per cent for overseas investors in the US. So, although US assets overseas are worth about $2,500bn less than foreign assets in the US, Americans still earn more than they pay out" (Christopher Swann, "US Current Account Deficit Puts a Cloud over Economy," Financial Times, <http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f21a427c-093b-11da-880b-00000e2511c8.html>, 10 August 2005). How long can this last? Not so long, says the Financial Times: "Economists believe that the US may start paying out more than it receives as early as the second or third quarter of this year. The investment income surplus of $36.2bn in 2004 had dwindled to $4bn in the first quarter of 2005" (Swann, 10 August 2005). I'd love to see a capable political economist write about this fascinating conjuncture for mrzine.org.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>