A New Dependency Theory Moment
Historical analogies are fashionable, in seemingly déjà vu times such as ours. It would be in vain to signal the inaccuracies of these analogies just for the sake of highlighting their imperfections. On the contrary, the more incongruous the analogies, the more we can learn from them.
Some of the analogies currently in vogue reference the end of World War I; others, the Bretton Woods negotiations that culminated in the July 1944 agreements. These two historical events bookmark related historical references that serve as sources for additional analogies: Fascism, Nazism, the New Deal, and the two World Wars; the Soviet Union holds a secondary role, if any.
The analogy of a “New Bretton Woods” or of a possible “Bretton Woods moment” had been circulating for quite some time when IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated in October 2020: “Today we face a new Bretton Woods ‘moment.’”[1] In that vein, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the General Assembly in February 2023 that “it is time for a new Bretton Woods moment.”[2] It is an analogy that calls for parties to skip the war and go directly into peace negotiations, something which everyone committed to peace and demilitarization of geopolitics should understand and actively support. Nevertheless, it remains an awkward analogy.
These Bretton Woods invocations coincided with global elite calls for a post-neoliberal order in October 2020.[3] From this perspective, the Bretton Woods analogy represents efforts to overcome a second crisis of liberalism– neoliberalism this time–avoiding the world conflict that followed the crisis of the 1920s and 30s. That is to say, despite the comparisons to the state of affairs of a hundred years ago, despite the troubled times of the present, despite the friend and foe divisions present in still-democratic countries today, the project, this time, calls for a transition within the order.
Neoliberalism’s rise
Interestingly, this call for a post-neoliberal order mimics a model largely seen as that of the rise of neoliberalism itself.[4] According to that generalized, now almost common-sense view, the neoliberal “project” was first produced between the 1930s and 1950s and then gradually “implemented,” as advocates occupied strategic positions in academia, in national economic policies and in international institutions.[5]
It is striking that there has been no similar previous history in the case of the current calls for a post-neoliberal reorganization of capitalism. Perhaps there will be a retrospective one, depending on who the winners of the current battles are, who knows. Such calls–to formulate a “project” to be later “implemented”–have only been issued very recently, especially after the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic. Another element of the analogy that is lacking in today’s disputes is the existence of the Soviet Union, which was of decisive importance in the making both of the New Deal/Welfare State orders and of the neoliberal project itself. The fall of the Soviet bloc had far-reaching consequences for the ideological battles from the 1990s on, the first being to squeeze liberal economics and social democracy into the same political space. That inelastic political space may account for much of the reason why current calls for a post-neoliberal reorganization come from within the establishment itself.
However, even understood as a transition within the established order, this characterization of neoliberalism’s rise and consolidation does not match the framework of current calls for a post-neoliberal order. Neoliberalism represented a transition within the order, but it presented itself an anti-establishment movement. Neoliberalism’s rise did not only involve the occupation of existing institutions, but also victories in major elections with a combination of “antisystem” tactics with “conservative racial and religious fury,”[6] as was the case with its most emblematic electoral victory, Ronald Reagan’s, in 1980.
Furthermore, neoliberalism did not just “hack” academia and the Bretton Woods institutions; it was not only a "project’ that was ‘implemented.” In its institutional dimension, it also emerged on a piecemeal, day-to-day basis, as a response to practical problems arising from dysfunctions of the New Deal and Welfare State models.[7] Arguably, major economic and political players actively sought for and created the dysfunctions.[8] Nonetheless, this interpretation fails to account for the New Deal and Welfare State models’ incapacity for corrective self-reforms.[9] Neoliberal solutions were available to be tested, and tested they were.[10]
The transition to a post-neoliberal order
This is a striking difference when we look at the current transition to a post-neoliberal order: serious difficulties in managing neoliberalism emerged without an available reformist framework for piecemeal, trial-and-error based corrections. It is crucial to explain why this is so--the present text is also a tentative partial explanation for some of it, at least--but it does not do away with the disturbing “Keynes and Bretton Woods” mantras that repeatedly appear as solutions that are not really such because they do not immediately translate into possible political alliances and/or concrete public policies that can be mobilized and tested in the present.
As occurred with the decline of the New Deal and the Welfare State models, in the current decline of neoliberalism major global players have already introduced and tested corrections. They have even been introduced in economic textbooks, albeit at a slow pace.[11] If the intention is to mimic neoliberalism’s rise and consolidation, trying to systematize ongoing changes in economic policy and in economic theory would be an important starting point. This would not mean holding proposals for new major reconfigurations at bay. It would just acknowledge that changes are underway, and that the effective understanding of their horizon and scope may help identify potential loci for intervention and establish development tendencies that delimit a logic space for political and technical innovation.[12]
Nonetheless, those calling for a post-neoliberal reorganization of capitalism remain committed to top-down projects despite the deep social roots neoliberalism has established.[13] Neoliberalism’s social victory did depend on institutional occupation and significant electoral victories. But these victories also shaped the subjectivation processes themselves, in that they gave a sense and a purpose to diverse and scattered anti-system impulses that became endurable, in both senses of the word. The then-dominant models of the New Deal and the Welfare State, already in decline, were not able to reconfigure to face the new situation.
Those deep social roots of neoliberalism are precisely one of the decisive mainstays of the neoliberal establishment in decline that seeks to reform itself. Neoliberalism’s victory over a New Deal or a Welfare State model was definitive, in that there is no return to those two previous models of society. That is the irreducibility of neoliberalism at the moment of its fall.
The still-dominant neoliberal forces feel strong enough to intend to control the transition to a post-neoliberal order. Neoliberalism’s deep social roots have evolved towards a political divide, at least in the still democratic countries, which means the “economistic” approach could not be more wrong and misleading.
The major political divide in these countries plays out as a sort of revival of neoliberalism’s rise. However, this time around, it comes with much more explicit authoritarian content on the part of a right-wing field that does not fear to ally itself with the far right. Antisystem impulses, which passed from the left to the right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, now lie with the far right. The transition within the order proposed by a new progressivism reflects the current hegemony of progressive neoliberalism turned into the establishment[14]. Right-wingers allied with the far right challenge this hegemony with political and electoral tactics that are similar–though much more violent and threatening–to those of their neoliberal predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s.
There are at least two legitimate heirs of neoliberalism--two ways of going beyond neoliberalism without leaving neoliberalism entirely behind. The present divide inherited the configuration of neoliberalism that Gary Gerstle described as a battle between “neo-Victorians” and “Cosmopolitans.”[15] New progressivism is a reconfiguration of progressive neoliberalism in one view of a post-neoliberal order, while the far-right defense of a neo-Victorian neoliberalism is another configuration of a post-neoliberal order. In the transition to a post-neoliberal order, the previous tension between neo-Victorians and Cosmopolitans have been reconfigured as a divide between a far right that seeks to normalize itself in alliance with a more traditional right camp on one hand, and a new progressivism that intends to reform neoliberalism, abandoning its doomed extremist versions, on the other.
This is a very different situation from the crisis of liberalism and its replacement by the New Deal and the Welfare State orders, and it is very different from the rise of neoliberalism itself. Shrinking the political space between a new progressivism that is the heir of progressive neoliberalism and the far right that appeal to their neo-Victorian predecessors prepares the typical blackmail logic that will ensure a transition within the order, no matter which side of the divide wins at each place, no matter how such victories play out at the end[16].
The divide is such that people on either side cannot imagine common ground with the other. Yet, shared common ground exists: Neoliberalism. What the two sides dispute is what to preserve and what to discard from the neoliberal period.
The blueprint for overcoming neoliberalism emerges as a call for neoliberal elites to convert to a new creed. It is an as-yet undefined creed, a work in progress, still largely a battlefield within the neoliberal establishment itself, but a creed, nevertheless; something that since the neoliberal era has usually been called “consensus.” Not surprisingly, therefore, Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, delivered a speech in April 2023 in which he defended exactly that: the necessity of forging a “new consensus.”
The roots of the intersection between the calls for a new Bretton Woods and those for a reorganization of capitalism beyond neoliberalism are found in ongoing deglobalization, a geopolitical reconfiguration that risks assuming a bellicose character. International relations risks militarization in the war years that have followed COVID-19, endangering democracy and the fight against the effects of climate change, while subsuming all sorts of inequality issues along the way. The current arms race threatens any sensible reform of international and multilateral institutions.
The mismatch between political and geopolitical divides
That said, the call for a new Bretton Woods comes from just one of the sides in this conflict: the new progressivism camp. Calls for a transition within the order toward a post-neoliberal reorganization of capitalism empowers proponents of economic theories considered as heterodox by the previous neoliberal mainstream without substantially altering the present “correlation of forces.” It serves as a transition within existing institutions.
Though championed by the new progressivism camp, the call to refound Bretton Woods involves much more than the still-democratic countries and their new progressive blocs. It is an attempt to beat the heirs of neo-Victorianism on national grounds by establishing new forms of global governance that would ultimately isolate them. However, to achieve that, the call must also be addressed to consolidated autocracies and one-party ruled countries, and to countries on the brink of becoming autocracies or one-party states. The main feature of the present situation is one of a mismatch between political and geopolitical divides.
The internal political divides faced by the United States and Western European countries today are not limited to national spaces; they are spread all over still- democratic countries, with global articulations and alliances. But there is no established order organizing the geopolitical divides, as could be said of the Cold War period, when even an independent group like the G77 of developing nations did not operate without explicit declarations of allegiance to one of the two sides of that divide. The transition to a post-neoliberal order within each country is itself the object of deadly battles.
This calls for a crucial distinction in the expression I have used so far indistinctively, that of “still-democratic countries.” In the case of countries of the Global South, this expression means that the mismatch between politics and geopolitics leads to a zero-sum game. For most countries in the Global South, being on the new progressivism side from a geopolitical point of view results in a lack of means to fight the far right on national grounds.
Neoliberalism’s legacy in the Global South
This is the legacy of neoliberalism in the still-democratic countries of the Global South. Let us take the case of Latin America. In the late 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the straitjacket of the Cold War loosened up a bit, the dictatorships that were the rule in those developing countries were facing severe state debt crises, and democratic movements were on the rise. That moment in which the so-called “import substituting industrialization” models[17] began to be replaced by “primary export” models, was also the beginning of re-democratization processes in the region.
So, with the notable exception of Chile, the first dictatorial laboratory of neoliberalism,[18] such democratization or re-democratization processes coincided with the rise and consolidation of neoliberalism. Even if they led to policies that, at first sight, seem incongruous with neoliberalism–as in the case of the increased tax burden faced in those countries in the last decades, for instance[19]–the fact remains that, in Latin America, democracy has also served as a prop for neoliberalism. In turn, neoliberalism now serves as a prop for the new social and economic forces that gained terrain within the neoliberal order and want to translate their acquired strength into political power, even if that requires assuming a far-right stance. Such forces claim to be anti-system, fighting progressive governments which are now identified with the establishment.
Such anti-system impulses identify with the far right, including more or less open supporters of previous military dictatorships in the region. In the case of Brazil, the far-right claims that these dictatorships should be considered “democracies.” A substantial part of the armed forces now prefers not to take power directly, as they did from the 1960s to the 1980s, but to support far-right candidates and participate in their governments when they win. This tendency is possible because of another neoliberal legacy in the region: the militarization of politics and of social life more broadly as a direct result of the implementation of the “war on drugs” security model.
The anti-establishment character of these far-rightish forces in Latin America often comes packaged in labels like “liberal,” “neoliberal” or even “libertarian.” This was only plausible because progressive governments in the region explicitly declared themselves to be fighting neoliberalism, categorically refusing the label of representatives of progressive neoliberalism. The anti-establishment character neoliberalism had in major capitalist countries during its rise in the 1970s has now enjoyed a second coming in Latin America, even as neoliberalism is in decline in the Global North.
There is no reason to attribute neoliberal intent to progressive governments in Latin America since they explicitly reject it. At the same time, since it is a global order, neoliberalism and its requirements overwhelm the intentions and the margins of action available to peripheral countries. Thus, despite all their efforts, Latin American progressive governments have become identified with progressive neoliberal governments worldwide, feeding the political divide, both in national and in global terms, whether these political forces like it or not.
Let us look at Brazil’s 2018 election, in which Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency. It was an election in which outsiders challenged and defeated the established powers. Agribusiness claimed the hegemonic position that had previously belonged to industry, based on its increased participation in the GDP in recent decades. At the same time, due to its continuous and impressive demographic growth, the evangelical electorate no longer accepted subordination to the Catholicism still dominant in official politics. The armed forces and police no longer intended to be subject to limitations on their participation in governments and control and accountability initiatives. Segments of the financial market, unhappy with the type of accommodation usually sought by large institutions in the sector, decided to join the rebellious alliance, demanding liberalizing reforms… and so on.[20]
This is not to say that these groups did not have power before. On the contrary, they had a lot of power; they were not outsiders in that sense. The difference is that they no longer seek to dictate policies only in their own sectors. They do not only want the Ministry of Agriculture, or the command of the Armed Forces under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense, and they do not just want the Central Bank. These groups want to govern according to a political program of their own. This project is certainly the expression of what, in Global North terms, could be described as a version of the neo-Victorian wing of neoliberalism, in alliance with the Brazilian authoritarian tradition; it is also, however, the ultimate result of neoliberal policies.
The globalization of the “comparative advantages” principle by neoliberalism produced deindustrialization and re-primarization of the economies in Latin America; Brazil is no exception. This is how neoliberalism has turned most of Latin America into a neo-extractivist region.[21] Although some countries in the region have managed to maintain some of their industry, the general picture is the dismantling of “import substitution industrialization,” the only actual, self-reliant, autonomous, development attempt. However, the current margin for action is much smaller than it has been in the past. This directly affects any project of maintaining democracy as a still-meaningful form of life, and not as some one-party rule within “a fully democratic system," as Nayib Bukele declared El Salvador had become after his landslide re-election as president, in February 2024.
The scant margin for action derives from the neo-extractivist position itself. If one is to defend democracy and fight the far right, it is not possible to give up neo-extractivism, since it is the only resource you have to avoid economic disaster, bearing in mind that the far right will go for neo-extractivism wholeheartedly, without reservations or hindrances, and that they will use the results to their political advantage. At the same time, if one does not give up neo-extractivism, the new alliance led by the far right has already won, since their program is already victorious.
Still-democratic countries in the Global South cannot afford to uncouple or decouple from autocracies and one-party rule economic partners. Deglobalization in the uncoupling way is reserved only for countries that can afford it, such as the United States vis-à-vis China, or as Germany did regarding Russia. “Friendshoring” as a trade policy and as a national security policy is reserved only for those countries which can afford to choose who their friends are.
New Bretton Woods for the Global South
So, for the time being at least, international concertation is required for a possible exit from this cul-de-sac. One that would alleviate national debt and find new sources of funding for a meaningful ecological transition. This is what a new Bretton Woods moment could mean for those still-democratic countries in the Global South.
In the medium and long term, it seems that there are two main possible developmental trends. On the one hand, the current deglobalization process offers a unique opportunity for many countries of the Global South to revert the deindustrialization and the reprimarization of their economies brought about by neoliberalism. It will take time, and it will not be by any means a total uncoupling from traditional trade partners, but it may reshape the correlation of forces on national grounds and that may allow for some democratic rule to survive. It may also rebalance the political chessboard to challenge the current hegemony of neo-extractivism that is the most visible face of decades of neoliberalism.
But even if reformist efforts regarding international funding institutions like the IMF or the World Bank succeed at some point, and in some measure, that will come at a price. Geopolitical alignment could be one, even if it is a price that still democratic countries in the Global South cannot afford–particularly if they require adopting a “new consensus” regarding the post-neoliberal reorganization of capitalism in the Global North.
On the other hand, an effective post-neoliberal order might not be equally possible for all countries. It remains to be seen how much of neoliberalism’s existing institutional ties will actually be broken, even in central countries. When one thinks, for example, of the so-called budget crisis in Germany, in December 2023, the impression is that these constraints are still firmly established and operating. The strict precepts of budgetary austerity established in the constitutional reform carried out by the Grand Coalition of the Merkel government in 2009 remain in force and will not be easily removed. The same applies to Javier Milei in Argentina. The IMF endorsed the first, classically neoliberal austerity measures taken by Milei’s government in November 2023. [22]
Neo-extractivist countries may well be inextricably trapped in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism might coexist in unequal extents for a long time, stratified according to the power and relative autonomy of each country. The energy transition itself could take the risky path of a similar unequal pace depending on a country’s belonging to either the Global South or to the Global North–which, by the way, is the aspect in which this distinction makes more sense than any other. That is not to mention the possible coexistence of democratic progressive post-neoliberal orders with authoritarian post-neoliberal orders, or the coexistence of still democratic neoliberal orders with authoritarian and still neoliberal orders.
A transition to a post-neoliberal reorganization in two paces would come together with the persistence of two elements of the neoliberal arrangement against which the new progressivism has risen: inequalities at a level of systemic risk for any capitalist political order that is not based on repression, and imminent environmental collapse. If progressive post-neoliberal orders are limited to central countries, it is the very idea of a post-neoliberal order that ceases to make sense as a global reconfiguration of capitalism, boosting systemic risks.
A Dependency Theory analogy
Assuming that international relief for democracies in the Global South will actually come through and that a meaningful ecological transition will at least effectively start, these countries remain as unprepared, in terms of theoretical and practical tools, as four decades ago, when neoliberalism was on the rise. It is imperative that the struggle for meaningful reform of global governance, of global economic governance in particular, comes with a concerted effort to produce such tools.
There is a decisive precedent in the production of such theoretical and practical tools. Since its origins, in the 1960s, Dependency Theory aimed at the understanding of the specific position developing countries occupy in the world’s economy and politics, especially from the focus point of Latin American nations. In the case of Latin America, Dependency Theory is closely associated with import substitution industrialization and with the “structuralism” typical of the work developed by the ECLA (Economic Commission for Latin America, later expanded to include the Caribbean as ECLAC), of the United Nations, from 1947 on.[23] Differentiating between the two is as important as maintaining their intimate ties. [24]
A renovated Dependency Theory must renew economic theory and policy and avoid an economistic stance to understand how neoliberalism works, to accurately descry the current possible development tendencies of a post-neoliberal reconfiguration of capitalism. At the same time, a renewed Dependency Theory should be understood as a global platform for research and collaboration. In this way Dependency Theory could develop new tools for accounting for the present global forms of capitalist integration.[25]
These would be the intellectual requirements, in my view, for the Global South to engage in discussions on the calls for a new Bretton Woods, for a post-neoliberal reorganization of capitalism. However, this will only be possible if the negotiations around new pacts and agreements are carried out in a way that does not freeze the present correlations of forces. That is to say, if claims to justice for and from the Global South are heard and implemented.
“Import substitution industrialization” and Dependency Theory are tools that were not available during the Bretton Woods negotiations; they only came to be afterward. They are pillars that today, once more, are lacking for Global South countries to enter into negotiations for the building of a new economic global governance, or for any other levels of governance for that matter. But they were already available when the NIEO, the New International Economic Order, was proposed by developing countries in 1974.[26] The Global South should look to 1974 rather than 1944 as a reference for its action. If capitalism is to be reorganized according to a post-neoliberal model, there is no doubt that it will require a new economic paradigm. However, in order for it to allow demands for justice to have their fair share in the process, in order for it to allow countries to choose democracy, it will have to include much more than a new economic paradigm. From the point view of the Global South, the openness to such claims will also depend on the development of its critical counterpart, that is to say, a renovated Dependency Theory that may account for current domination patterns and possible means to fight them; a theory in which decolonization efforts include not only South-North dependency, but also dependence within the Global South itself.
Such a theory will not be the work of one group of researchers alone, just as it will not be the product of a single region of the world; it must come from the collaboration of a whole network. It should be seen as a platform for collaboration, oriented by a shared past reference and a common goal rather than a search for a unique formulation, as Dependency Theory has always been, in fact.
So, since analogies are fashionable, let us add a call for a new Dependency Theory moment to the call for a new Bretton Woods moment. As in the case of the original Bretton Woods conferences, this collective global effort may also take longer than it should to take shape. But if there is one thing that the distance between the urges of the present and the shortcomings of action should not lead to, it is inaction.
Bibliography
Carlos Alba Vega; Gustavo Lins Ribeiro; Gordon Mathews (eds.), La globalización desde abajo, la otra economía mundial, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/El Colegio de México, 2015
Giuliano Amato, Antitrust and the Bounds of Power: The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy in the History of the Market, Oxford: Hart, 1997
Mario Arriagada Cuadriello, “IMF’s Summer of Discontent?,” The Ideas Newsletter, January 25, 2024
https://theideasletter.substack.com/p/imfs-summer-of-discontent?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Serge Audier, Néo-libéralisme(s), une archéologie intellectuelle, Paris: Grasset, 2012
Mauro Boianovsky, “Contributions to economics from the ‘periphery’ in historical perspective: The case of Brazil after the mid-20th century”, in: Ricardo Bielschowsky; Mauro Boianovsky; Mauricio C. Coutinho, A History of Brazilian Economic Thought: From Colonial Times through the Early 21st Century, London: Routledge, 2023
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, N. York: Columbia University Press, 2019
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics, Nova York: Columbia University Press, [1977]1995
Enrique Cárdenas; José Antonio Ocampo; Rosemary Thorp, “Introduction,” in: Enrique Cárdenas; José Antonio Ocampo; Rosemary Thorp (eds.), An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, vol. 3 (Industrialization and the State in Latin America: The Postwar Years), Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000
Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011
François Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française: Histoire d'une idéologie politique, Paris: Demopolis, 2007
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Fiscal Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, 2023
Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023
Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in: Steve Fraser; Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989
E. V. K. FitzGerald, “ECLA and the Theory of Import Substituting Industrialization in Latin America,” in: Enrique Cárdenas; José Antonio Ocampo; Rosemary Thorp (eds.), An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, vol. 3 (Industrialization and the State in Latin America: The Postwar Years), Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000
Elies Furio-Blasco, “Du développement économique au développement de la connaissance. Une étude comparative des ouvrages de Albert O. Hirschman”, Cahiers d'économie Politique, vol. 1, n° 42, 2002
Verónica Gago, La razón neoliberal: Economías barrocas y pragmática popular, Madri: Traficantes de Sueños, 2015
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022
Eric Helleiner, Forgotten foundations of Bretton Woods: International development and the making of the postwar order, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014
________. “A Bretton Woods moment? The 2007-2008 crisis and the future of global finance”, International Affairs, vol. 86, no. 3, 2010
Albert O. Hirschman, “A Dissenter’s Confession: Revisiting the Strategy of Economic Development,” in: Gerald M. Meier; Dubley Seers (Eds.), Pioneers in Development, Paris: Economica, 1984
Arlie R. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, N. York: The New Press, 2016
Stuart Holland, Towards a New Bretton Woods, Nottingham: Spokesman, 1994
Jane Ihrig; Scott Wolla, “Let’s Close the Gap: Revising Teaching Materials to Reflect How the Federal Reserve Implements Monetary Policy,” Working Paper, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS), October 2020:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020092pap.pdf
Claudio Katz, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022
Joseph L. Love, “The Rise and Decline of Economic Structuralism in Latin America: New Dimensions,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 40, No.3, October 2005
________. “The Origins of Dependency Analysis”, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1990
Marcos Nobre, Limits of Democracy: From the June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil to the Bolsonaro Government, Cham: Springer, 2022
________, “Depois da ‘formação’. Cultura e política da nova modernização”, revista piauí no. 74, November 2012
Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992
Jurgen Reinhoudt; Serge Audier, The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neo-liberalism, Cham: Palgrave, 2018
Dylan Riley; Robert Brenner, “Seven Thesis on American Politics,” New Left Review, no. 138, Nov/Dec 2022
Dani Rodrik, “Premature Deindustrialization”, Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016
________, “Understanding Economic Policy Reform,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 34, no. 1, 1996)
Alfredo Saad Filho, “The Rise and Decline of Latin American Structuralism and Dependency Theory.” In: Jomo, K.S.; Reinert, E.S. (eds), The Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought Have Addressed Development, London: Zed Books and New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2005
Hagen Schulz-Forberg, “Crisis and continuity: Robert Marjolin, transnational policy-making and neoliberalism, 1930s–70s”, in: European Review of History, vol. 26, no. 4, 2019
Hagen Schulz-Forberg; Niklas Olsen (orgs.), Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Harvard: Harvard UP, 2018
Leslie Stein, “Dependency Theories and Underdevelopment,” Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 1979
Jake Sullivan, “Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution,” April 27, 2023
Maristella Svampa, Neo-extractivism in Latin America. Socio-environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019
Katherine Tai, “Ambassador Katherine Tai Remarks at the National Press Club on Supply Chain Resilience”, June 2023
https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/speeches-and-remarks/2023/june/ambassador-katherine-tais-remarks-national-press-club-supply-chain-resilience
Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, N. York: Viking, 2018
World Economic Forum; Klaus Schwab, “We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era,” October 12th, 2020
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/10/15/sp101520-a-new-bretton-woods-moment
[2] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-02-06/secretary-generals-briefing-the-general-assembly-priorities-for-2023
[3] “We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era” (World Economic Forum; Klaus Schwab 2020).
[4] (Denord, 2007; Audier, 2012; Reinhoudt&Audier, 2018; Slobodian, 2018; Brown, 2019, Schulz-Forberg, 2019; Schulz-Forberg&Olsen, 2014 and Gerstle, 2020, among others)
[5] One should not underestimate the influence of Quinn Slobodian’s 2018 The Globalists in the establishment of this way of thinking. Just to quote a passage from among the many others in which this project/implementation framework clearly appears: “I do aim to shed light on a number of moments where neoliberal thought was translated into policy or institutional design through partnerships with politicians, bureaucrats, or businesspeople. As a political project, the many real-world effects of neoliberalism are documentable. One can write their histories. This book offers one such history by putting the neoliberal project into a broader framework than other scholars have provided to date” (Slobodian 2018, p. 24).
[6] (Gerstle, 2022, pp. 119-120)
[7] (Denord, 2007, Schulz-Forberg, 2019)
[8] Following the analyses by Giuliano Amato (1997), Collin Crouch (2011, p. 66), for instance, stresses that “US administrations became particularly susceptible to Chicago reasoning and its tolerance of oligopolies at precisely the moment in the 1970s when German and Japanese imports were beginning to hurt US manufacturing, and corporate lobbyists were arguing that greater corporate size would help confront this competition”.
[9] Even if one can argue that what finally disappeared was the social mainstay for such models: “Keynesianism’s crisis led to its collapse rather than to adjustments being made to it, not because there was something fundamentally wrong with its ideas, but because the classes in whose interests it primarily operated, the manual workers of western industrial society, were in historical decline and losing their social power. In contrast, the forces that gain most from neoliberalism – global corporations, particularly in the financial sector – maintain their importance more or less unchallenged” (Crouch 2011, p. 1).
[10] “Neoliberalism did not enter European policy-making in an overnight coup at some time in the late 1970s. Self-declared early neoliberalism was not an abstract ideal held by a handful of economists. It coexisted in contentious, yet productive relationship with the policy mix of the New Deal and Keynesianism from the very beginnings of European integration. Marjolin walked among all three approaches, at times sacrificing the price mechanism temporarily within sectors of the economy if he deemed this necessary for the common good. When the failure of politics in the 1970s meant that a major paradigm shift was necessary, he was among those who began to conceptualize contemporary neoliberalism, after efforts at other alternatives were exhausted” (Schulz-Forberg 2019, p. 692).
[11] (Ihrig&Wolla, 2020)
[12] As Adam Tooze (2018), for instance, has shown in the case of the trial-and-error series of measures introduced by central banks, governments, and multilateral institutions to address the world economic crisis of 2007-2008.
[13] As Verónica Gago (2015), Carlos Alba Vega et al. (2015), and Arlie R. Hochschild (2016) have shown in different contexts.
[14] Despite referring only to American politics and making it clear that they present theses in their text that are still exploratory by nature, Riley and Brenner (2022) point to a distinctive characteristic of the current situation, that of the impossibility of identifying today’s new progressive field with socialism or social democracy or with neoliberalism. The authors propose the term ‘neo-progressivism’ as perhaps more adequate to describe it because they see the Biden administration’s policy as a kind of re-actualization of the American ‘progressivism’ of the late 19th century. It would require a separate discussion at length to show that the ‘new progressivism’ of the current situation goes far beyond this idea of ‘neo-progressivism’. In a nutshell, however, it could be said that what distinguishes the current new progressivism is both the fact that it is the direct heir of progressive neoliberalism, and the structuring role it has – together with its necessary counterpart, a right-wing camp that does not fear allying itself with the far-right – of today’s politics in still democratic countries, and not only in the United States.
[15] “Every political order contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among the constituencies that it must manage; the neoliberal order was no exception in that regard. One such contradiction has already been noted: that which existed between those who saw neoliberalism as a strategy for enhancing rule by elites and those who saw in it a pathway toward personal emancipation. Another lay in the uneasy coexistence within the neoliberal order of two strikingly different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life. One, which I label neo-Victorian, celebrated self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption (…). The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order, which I label cosmopolitan, was a world apart from neo-Victorianism. In market freedom, it saw an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free from tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles” (Gerstle 2022, pp. 12-13).
[16] Given the magnitude and breadth of the problem, the major consequences of this political straitjacket to the present and future of social struggles cannot be addressed within the limits of this text.
[17] On the limits of the label and for a more precise account of what it embraces, see Cárdenas et al. 2000.
[18] (Edwards, 2023)
[19] As in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, in comparison with OECD countries: “Since the early 1990s, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean have undergone significant changes in the level and structure of their tax revenues. At least until the COVID-19 pandemic, the countries of the region had increased their tax collection, on average, by some 7.4 percentage points of GDP, from 15.3% to 22.7% (simple average). Latin America and the Caribbean was the region that most increased its tax burden in GDP terms over that period, which also enabled it to narrow the gap with the OECD countries, whose tax revenue levels are higher, but have not changed substantially in recent years” (ECLAC 2023, p. 50).
[20] (Nobre 2022)
[21] (Svampa, 2019)
[22] (Arriagada Cuadriello, 2024)
[23] For an overview, see Love 1990.
[25] Although the problem cannot be addressed within the limits of this text, it must be said that a re-actualization does not just mean adapting Dependency Theory to present circumstances. Fruitful re-actualizations of Dependency Theory must surely address the identification of neoliberalism and neo-extractivism in many parts of the Global South as the most salient difference that should be taken into account relative to the three decades after the end of World War II. At the same time, renewed Dependency Theory in all its variants must take into account not only the self-criticism produced from the 1980s on, but also new criticism regarding what today appear to be its shortcomings.
[26] Helleiner (2014, p. 274) claims that “NIEO attracted critics not just from the neoliberal camp. From the left, neo-Marxist ‘dependency’ thinkers argued that the global capitalist system was not reformable in the way that NIEO advocates suggested. They critiqued the NIEO project as a strategy of ‘the Third World bourgeoisie’ designed simply to promote state-led capitalist industrialization (much as Marx had critiqued List) and they urged instead a more radical ‘de-linking’ from the capitalist Bretton Woods system altogether”. It is important to notice at least two things here. First, Dependency Theory has many versions, including the two quoted by Helleiner (Amin and Dos Santos). Regardless of the great importance of these two names for dependency thinking, there is a lot of disagreement among dependency theorists themselves, there is not one, but some Dependency Theories. And this is rather an advantageous feature of this intellectual field, in my view. Secondly, despite or because of the critique, Dependency Theory played an important role in shaping NIEO itself. As, for instance, Leslie Stein (1979, p. 64) correctly stresses, Dependency Theory “permeated the thinking of LDC [Least Developed Countries] spokemen who were instrumental in embodying within the 1974 U.N. Declaration of a new international economic order, the view that dependence was the central feature of the current international economic system”. Last but not least, an organized, politically oriented post-capitalist alternative is not at sight presently. That does not mean that it is a position that should be neglected. If not in the name of a historical horizon in which it could acquire significant political weight in the future, at least in consideration of the fact that its present relative weight in the public debates is greater than its organizational and institutional weight.
 | A guest post by
|