A long walk with Andre Gunder Frank.

• Date: 22 June 2005
• Author: Bush, Rod
• Published date: 22 June 2005
• Author: Bush, Rod

IN THE EARLY 1980S, I TRAVELED TO MEXICO CITY WITH A TEAM OF SCHOLARS AND activists from the Institute for the Study of Labor and Economic Crisis (ISLEC) to attend a meeting of the World Congress of Sociology. There we met Andre Gunder Frank, who had been a mentor for most of us at ISLEC. Outside of the conference, some of us spent a good deal of time with him walking the streets of Mexico City, searching (often in vain) for places that he remembered from an earlier time there. Although we had learned much from his ideas about world-systems analysis and the development of underdevelopment, politically and intellectually I was closer to the romantic radicalism that he had espoused during the 1970s. With all of the presumptuousness of those who have recently discovered the truth, we lectured to him about his pessimism and cynicism concerning movements in power.

At 35, I was probably the youngest of the ISLEC team, but had come to study Gunder's work via my experience in the Black Liberation Movement. Though the internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement is certainly linked to Pan Africanism, there is a broader internationalism that had been inspired by Gunder and others who had come to intellectual, political, and moral maturity while laboring...