Lost and Found: Bourgeois Dependency Theory and the Forgotten Roots of Neodevelopmentalism

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211037341
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Felipe Antunes de Oliveira
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles: Reflections on Historical Thought

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211037341

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 242, Vol. 49 No. 1, January 2022, 36–56

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211037341

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

36

Lost and Found

Bourgeois Dependency Theory and the Forgotten Roots

of Neodevelopmentalism

by

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira

Neodevelopmentalism emerged in Brazil and Argentina in the aftermath of the demor-

alization of the Washington Consensus. Although its intellectual proponents place it

within the long tradition of Latin American developmentalism, an important theoretical

origin of neodevelopmentalism—dependency theory—has so far been ignored. The term

appeared for the first time in 1978 as an expletive in the heated controversy between Ruy

Mauro Marini and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and José Serra in the Revista Mexicana

de Sociología. Breaking with the supposition that underdevelopment could be overcome

only through social revolution, Cardoso and Serra embraced a perspective of long-term

social transformation based on class alliances with fractions of the national bourgeoisie

and international capital. This perspective was gradually weakened and finally aban-

doned in favor of full-fledged neoliberalism when Cardoso became president of Brazil in

1994, only to be resuscitated by so-called pink-tide administrations after 2002.

O neodesenvolvimentismo surgiu no Brasil e na Argentina após a desmoralização do

Consenso de Washington. Embora seus proponentes intelectuais o coloquem dentro da

longa tradição do desenvolvimentismo latino-americano, uma importante origem teórica

do neodesenvolvimentismo - a teoria da dependência - até agora foi ignorado. O termo

apareceu pela primeira vez em 1978 como um palavrão na polêmica acalorada entre Ruy

Mauro Marini e Fernando Henrique Cardoso e José Serra na Revista Mexicana de

Sociología. Rompendo com a suposição de que o subdesenvolvimento só poderia ser

superado por meio da revolução social, Cardoso e Serra abraçaram uma perspectiva de

transformação social de longo prazo baseada em alianças de classe com frações da bur-

guesia nacional e do capital internacional. Essa perspectiva foi gradualmente enfraque-

cida e finalmente abandonada em favor do neoliberalismo completo quando Cardoso se

tornou presidente do Brasil em 1994, apenas para ser ressuscitada por administrações

da chamada maré rosa após 2002.

Keywords: Neoliberalism, Neodevelopmentalism, Dependency theory, Pink tide,

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ruy Mauro Marini

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is a lecturer in international development and global governance at

Queen Mary, University of London. His articles have appeared in the Monthly Review, Globalizations,

the Journal of International Relations and Development, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs,

and the Revista de Economia da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. He thanks the Abstract

Discussion Group at the University of Sussex’s Department of International Relations for early

comments on this research project. He also thanks the members of the panel on contemporary

perspectives on dependency theory at the Historical Materialism Conference in London in 2018

for their very useful feedback. Although he is a Brazilian civil servant, his views do not reflect the

official positions of the Brazilian government.

1037341LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211037341Latin American PerspectivesAntunes de Oliveira / Dependency Theory and Neodevelopmentalism

research-article2021

Antunes de Oliveira / DEPENDENCY THEORY AND NEODEVELOPMENTALISM 37

The recent rise of the extreme right in Latin America is prompting some

writers to cast a benign eye on the neodevelopmentalist experiments under-

gone in Brazil and Argentina between 2003 and 2015. By siding with Lula in

Brazil and Kirchner in Argentina, part of the left has tacitly endorsed the

opposition between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism, falling into a

discursive trap. Indeed, at least since the demise of the revolutionary-Marxist

stream of dependency theory in the late 1970s, various versions of liberalism

and developmentalism have shared a duopoly of legitimate development dis-

courses in Brazil and Argentina. Based on a reified distinction between states

and markets and on unfulfilled promises of catch-up capitalist development,

the sharp division between (neo)liberalism and (neo)developmentalism

leaves no room for oppressed social groups to assume protagonism in defin-

ing their own development priorities. If this protagonism is to be recovered,

it is time for Latin America’s radical tradition of anticapitalist development

thought to be reclaimed.

Neodevelopmentalism is not simply the most recent reincarnation of the

Latin American classical developmentalism whose intellectual foundations lie

in the heterodox structuralism of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado.1 One of the

most important roots of neodevelopmentalism has so far been ignored:

Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s reformist dependency theory. Indeed, the term

“neodevelopmentalism” appeared for the first time in 1978 as an expletive in

the heated controversy between Ruy Mauro Marini (1978) and Cardoso and

Serra (1978) in the pages of the Revista Mexicana de Sociologia (for a review see

Hadler, 2013). This controversy was the culmination of a long debate about the

capitalist development possibilities of Latin America and marked the final

split of dependency theory into diametrically opposed revolutionary-Marxist

and bourgeois-Weberian schools.

As presciently noted by Marini, the reformist stream of dependency theory

represented by Cardoso and Serra came to the rescue of the discredited devel-

opmentalist thesis at a critical moment. The exhaustion of the state-led phase

of import substitution in the 1960s2 and the subsequent rise of murderous cap-

italist dictatorships backed by the United States (Gill, 2004) seemed to dispel

any illusions about the potential of progressive, anti-imperialist alliances

between the working class and the national bourgeoisies. In the 1970s, the soci-

ological backbone of developmentalism was broken. When even modest social

mobility seemed to threaten the privileges of national bourgeoisies, they

quickly stepped back from progressive development perspectives and revealed

their deeper, historical connection to both international capital and the tradi-

tional oligarchies (Bambirra, 1978: 104). The crisis of classical developmental-

ism confirmed Frank’s (1969) disjunctive “underdevelopment or revolution.”

Acutely spelling out the only real options for Latin American peripheral socie

ties, Frank and the first generation of Marxist dependency theories emptied the

core promise of developmentalism, the perspective of capitalist catch-up (see

Antunes de Oliveira, 2017; Bambirra, 1974; 1978; Dos Santos, 1970; 1977; 1978).

In a nutshell, Latin American ruling classes proved incapable of severing

their umbilical link to archaic structures of political domination based on a

subordinated integration into the international market. Therefore, they could

not lead broad social alliances with organized labor aiming at an autonomous