ABSTRACT
After distinguishing the dependency literature from the structuralist theory of Latin America and its strategy of import substituting industrialization (ISI), this chapter specifies the sources, Marxist and non-Marxist of the dependency position as per major and lesser dependentistas; and mentions major discontinuities of dependency thinkers with past traditions in Latin America or elsewhere, from ‘liberal’, and ‘structuralist’, ‘vulgar Marxist’ ideas of development. It states the major general propositions and tenets of dependency theory revolving round the basic concepts of core-periphery of dependency theory, its typologies such as those by J. T. Roberts, Robert Packenham, Cristóbal Kay, and Robert Gilpin and their variances, centring on the destiny of development in the periphery, suggesting, however, that dependency thinkers of different schools frequently overstep their limits, not always defining dependency all too differently, and even among themselves frequently disagree about the causes of dependency. The chapter analyses the strategies suggested by Frank (severance from the capitalist system and social revolution) and Cardoso (development and capital accumulation, even if ‘dependent’) to end this dependency. In critique and evaluation, it is shown that modernization theorists, whom dependentistas branded as providers of a façade for Western countries’ exploitation of the less developed countries (LDCs), counter-attacked it as ‘a propaganda fragment of Marxist revolutionary ideology’, and Marxists too critiqued the methodology of dependency studies that locate the expropriation of surplus in the registers of exchanges between countries and not in the relations between classes in the production process.
