ABSTRACT
Ernesto Laclau has made an attack on Frank which, while accepting the critique of dualist doctrines, refuses to accept the categorization of Latin American states as capitalist. He accuses Frank of confusing the two concepts of the "capitalist mode of production" and "participation in a world capitalist economic system." The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of production, the so-called "industrial revolution," was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which defined this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. In any case, the local capitalist classes—cash-crop landowners and merchants—turned to the state, not only to liberate them from non-market constraints but to create new constraints on the new market, the market of the European world-economy. The state-machineries of the core states were strengthened to meet the needs of capitalist landowners and their merchant allies.
