From “dependency” to “decoloniality”? The enduring relevance of materialist political economy and the problems of a “decolonial” alternative

ABSTRACT

Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest. One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once prominent in the field of development. We critically review the dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical inquiry into development, namely decoloniality. One of our core contributions is to clarify what makes the decolonial tradition substantially distinct from dependency and other traditions in development thought. We locate decoloniality in the context of the “cultural turn” that swept through social theory from the 1970s. Our paper problematises decoloniality’s critique of Modernity as inherently colonial and oppressive and finds that its core features are idealism and the strong risk of cultural relativism. We assert that the substantive commitments of the dependency tradition are its strength and reject the equivalence drawn by decolonial theorists between “Eurocentrism” and belief in Enlightenment values and methodologies. Drawing on the work of Samir Amin, we emphasise the need for development theory to retain an analytic focus on a materialist analysis of global capitalism; we echo Amin’s critique of culturalism and endorse his defence of universalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• political economy of development
• decoloniality
• dependency theory
• culturalism
• universalism
• history of economic thought

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the insightful comments from the two anonymous peer reviewers. We would also like to extend thanks to regular interlocutors who have played some role in the development of this piece. These include Anye Nyamnjoh, Josh Platzky-Miller and Tafadzwa Tivaringe. We also thank the editor of this special issue, George Hull, for his insights and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a recent review of trends in development studies see Sumner (2022).

2. See recent reviews and engagements in Chilcote and Salém Vasconcelos (2022), Salém Vasconcelos and Chilcote (2022), Kvangraven (2021), Valencia (2017) and Kufakurinani et al. (2017).

3. Economics remains largely committed to neoclassical orthodoxy and its internal variations. Mainstream development economics has, led by the work of Banerjee and Duflo (2009), become increasingly enamoured with randomised control trials (RCTs), a method that problematically presents itself as “post-ideological” and “empirical” (for critical commentary see Kabeer 2019; Kvangraven 2020; Deaton and Cartwright 2018). Inertia within economics largely persists despite pressures from various “rethinking” student and academic movements and notable academics including most prominently Thomas Piketty (2013), Chang (2010), Skidelsky (2020) and others. Within development economics, some efforts are underway to make space for critical political economy and theoretical alternatives to the mainstream (see for example Reinert, Ghosh, and Kattel 2016, Ashman, Newman, and Tregenna 2022 and new blog https://developingeconomics.org/).

4. We follow Bhambra (2014, 120) to argue that though there are finer differences between the two traditions (see Colpani 2022 for discussion), they are united by their central commitment to resist “forms of epistemological dominance.”

5. In making this distinction between dependency and structuralism we depart from Kvangraven (2021, 80–81) who bundles the two together. We think it is also useful to emphasise the distinctiveness of the dependency critique to accentuate the efforts of self-proclaimed scholars to critically engage and finally break with what Margarita Fajardo terms the “Cepalino project” (for discussion of this break see Fajardo 2022, 140–164).

6. This was a definition embraced by Immanuel Wallerstein and incorporated into his World Systems theory (Wallerstein 1974). For notable criticisms of this definition see Laclau (1971); Brenner (1977).

7. Some claim that Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto are closer to the classical Marxist tradition (Leys 1996; Hunt 1989) which included Robert Brenner, Anthony Brewer, Ernst Laclau, Bill Warren, Gavin Kitching, John Sender, Sheila Smith, Colin Leys and Meghnad Desai among others. Others insist that their system is reformist Weberian in character (Valencia 2017) as compared to the Marxist interpretation of dependency provided by Rui Marini. Fajardo’s detailed analysis of the intellectual history of dependency thinking further clarifies that while Cardoso was attracted to Marxism intellectually, he never embraced it as a political project (Fajardo 2022, 152), a fact that his tenure as president of a neoliberalising Brazil reveals. We follow Heller, Rueschemeyer, and Snyder (2009) in identifying Chibber’s (2004) Marxian-inspired interventions as being an advance on Cardoso and Faletto’s system, while taking its best qualities on board. See Chibber (2005) for critical engagement with the classical Marxist conception of the developmental powers of the “national bourgeoisie.”

8. Fanon (1961) followed the neo-Marxian proposition that a developmental capitalist class, while previously emerging in North American and European history, would fail to emerge in postcolonial Africa. Scholars, particularly in the US social theory and Afro-pessimist readings, read Fanon as a theorist primarily concerned with the psychology of racism. Yet the new interpretations of Fanon detach the author from his context, political commitments and indeed the content of his thought (for recent critical commentary in this vein see Davis 2022; Táíwò 2022).

9. This is not to say that the question of “unequal exchange” is not worth studying and that inequalities between North and South have dissipated. For an interesting empirical study see Hickel, Sullivan, and Zoomkawala (2021).

10. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that the “cultural turn” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020, 38), remains wedded to a “Euro-North American-centric modernist discursive, historical and structural terrain,” or put plainly, remains too embedded within allegedly European conceptual frameworks. We, however, cannot make sense of his attempt to dissociate decoloniality from postcolonial theory on this basis. Rather we suggest that though emerging in different contexts and having disparate original themes, decoloniality is substantively connected to postcolonial theory (see Bhambra 2014; see also Smith 2022). For a dual critical engagement of postcolonial and dependency theories see Kapoor (2002).

11. Those listed include Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyrere, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Moses Kotane, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara and Chris Hani (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndlovu 2022, 7).

12. In his seminal How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and citing C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney argues that treating “race” as causally primary is more dangerous than economism (Rodney [1972] 2018, 117–119). These lines are important to place in conversation with the thesis, first articulated by Said (1979), developed by Robinson (1983) and taken to the potentially “dangerous” extremes that so worried Rodney and James in contemporary strands of decolonial theory (Colpani 2022), that a primordially racist European culture drove the colonial and imperial project.

13. We suggest that Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Morgan Ndlovu’s engagement (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndlovu 2022, 3) with Chibber’s (2013) critique of postcolonial theory embodies the problematic way in which the idea of internalised racism can be deployed. Instead of offering up a critique of Chibber’s core claims and arguments, it is maintained that Chibber simply fails to “appreciate any thought beyond that which emerged in the European Enlightenment in general and classical Marxism in particular.” Why Chibber defends the Enlightenment despite postcolonial criticism is not engaged – to reject postcolonial theory and its claims is to express “fidelity to Eurocentrism.”

14. The project of excavating and acknowledging the contributions of Africans to modernity is an important project, particularly to combat colonial apologist narratives that legitimate conquest by arguing that invention and ingenuity is a European trait or that Africa has no history. We agree that the erasure of Africa’s localised pre-colonial history is a form of epistemic injustice which ought to be attended to in schools, universities, museums and the like. However, decoloniality construed as “Africanisation” is likely to run into issues, particularly where that involves a search for an “authentic” African culture, see Smith and Tivaringe (2016) and Táíwò (2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Nassen Smith

Michael Nassen Smith is a Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town and a doctoral candidate in Sociology at York University Canada. His research interests include the political economy of development and economic and political thought.

Claire-Anne Lester

Claire-Anne Lester is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University. Her research focus is critical legal theory, transitional justice and political thought.