The rise of the Latin American far-right explained: dependency theory meets uneven and combined development

ABSTRACT

Latin America is once again passing through a crisis. The so-called ‘pink tide’ of progressive governments gave place to a brown wave of peripheral-fascism. Short-range explanations for the ‘ebbing’ of the pink tide abound in the literature. They focus on the shortcomings of moderate-left administrations, failing to account for the cyclical nature of capitalist crises and for the authoritarian character of the administrations now coming to power. In search of a comprehensive, long-range explanation, this paper goes back to the core question posed by dependency theory half a century ago: is capitalist development even possible in Latin America? The key to answer this question – a concept of development that captures non-converging transformation – was not available to seminal dependency writers such as Frank, Marini, Bambirra and Dos Santos. In this paper, I suggest that the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) allows for a renewed engagement with dependency's core problem. Conversely, the dependency literature can enrich the analysis of UCD with valuable mid-range concepts, such as ‘super-exploitation’, ‘dominated-dominant’ classes and ‘peripheral fascism’. After establishing the theoretical basis for a political economy of UCD, the paper illustrates the potentialities of this comprehensive theoretical perspective by providing and alternative narrative of the end of the pink tide and the rise of the brown wave in Latin America.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• uneven and combined development
• dependency theory
• pink tide
• peripheral fascism

Disclosure statement

The author is a Brazilian civil servant. His views do not reflect the official position of the Brazilian government.

Notes

1. The term ‘brown wave’ or ‘brown tide’ makes reference to the colour associated with the rise of fascism in Europe during the interwar period (Toland, 1992: 259). It has been recently proposed by Professor Ben Selwyn (2018) to describe the new far-right administrations in Latin America, in contrast with the term ‘pink tide’.

2. IELA – UFSC. Their webpage amasses valuable contemporary contributions to dependency theory, mainly in Portuguese and Spanish. See http://www.iela.ufsc.br/

3. See also Marini, Sader, Santos, Martins, and Valencia (2009) for a series of articles by distinguished contemporary Latin American thinkers in honour of Marini. Currently, there is an exciting debate going on between Claudio Katz (2017) and Jaime Osorio (2017) on the contemporary validity of Marini’s concept of ‘super-exploitation’ of labour.

4. This is not to suggest that Marx’s political economy is inherently ‘developmentalist’ or ‘colonial’. Indeed, as Anderson (2016) shows, Marx can also be read as an important early critic of capitalist colonialism. The point here is simply that the full potential of historical materialist political economy to explain uneven development trajectories within capitalism would be untapped by later Marxist writers, such as Marini.

5. For example, see the recent work of Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza (2015, 2017).

6. I would like to wholeheartedly thank Theotonio dos Santos for the long interview that he graciously gave to me. His perspective was very important to clarify some aspects of the original formulations of dependency theory that had so far escaped me. At the very time I was writing this section, I was surprised by the news of Dos Santos' passing, on the 27th of February 2018. I decided to leave the references to his life in the present, as a tribute.

7. Both Prebisch (1981) and Furtado (1996) would later come to recognize the limitations of the early ECLAC theses on the transformative powers of industrialization.

8. The concept of sub-proletariat, meaning the fraction of the working class that never managed to be fully integrated into the modern capitalist economy, is originally proposed by Paul Singer (2002/1973), and has been recently recovered by Andre Singer in his influential account of ‘Lulism’ in Brazil (2012).

9. In a speech at the University of Texas before his recent visit to Latin American countries, for instance, the former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly said that ‘In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad and the leadership can no longer serve the people’ (BBC News, 2018).

10. See Antunes de Oliveira (2017) for a contemporary interpretation of Frank (1966).

11. For notable exceptions, see Chilcote (1974); and Kay (2010).

12. There is no space here for a full review of Marx’s concept of development. While some authors identify its deterministic and Eurocentric aspects (Landes, 1998; Nisbet, 1969; Said, 1979), based mainly on texts such as the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique Political Economy (Marx, 2010a/1859), others paint a more nuanced picture, evoking later texts (Selwyn, 2014; Shanin, 1983; Pradella, 2015). The debate itself is an indication that a consistent definition of ‘development’ is missing in Marx’s original writings. The term ‘development’ is used by Marx in quite different and not always reconcilable ways. This is not to say that it is impossible to derive a theory of development from Marx’s ideas. It clearly is. To quote just one recent outstanding example, Kevin Anderson (2016a) convincingly shows how important elements of the post-colonial critique were already present in Marx’s writings on the periphery of global capitalism. The point is that the contradictory ways Marx approaches the concept of development unfolds in a long confusion within the Marxist literature, including the Marxist dependency theory.

13. This is one of the key points of Rioux’s (2014) and Teschke’s (2014) critique of UCD. In my view, the incompleteness of the contemporary UCD framework should be taken as an open invitation for historical research and further theoretical specification.

14. For pioneering attempts at international political economy analysis drawing on contemporary U&CD, see Morton (2011) and Germann (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is an Associate Researcher in International Development at the University of Sussex. He is a member of the Centre for Global Political Economy and the Uneven and Combined Development Research Group at the same University. His previous publications have appeared in the Monthly Review, The Conversation and the Revista de Economia da UFSC.