ABSTRACT
There is nothing new about the practices of appropriation, economic supremacy and exploitation that are emerging as features of contemporary globalization. Sociological and political theory has been making sense of unequal global relations for centuries. The discourse of the Dependestistas, a largely Latin American development dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, offers significant insights into the historical origins of peripheral dependent social formations as they articulate with the more advanced industrialized social formations at the centre. They argue that this particular articulation between centre and periphery is not only economic in nature but fundamentally political. Peripheral economies manifest a particular pattern of ‘extraverted’ economic development, in which external exchanges undercut localized industry and perpetuate unequal distributions of wealth (Amin, 1974). Unequal exchange is entrenched through liaison groups that interlock the periphery and metropolitan societies. These unequal relations create hybrid classes at the periphery, with dual nationalities and corporate loyalties. They are the true engines of policy and drivers of new allegiances to world capitalism and multinational corporations (Petras, 1976).
