Dependency theory argues that European development was based on actively underdeveloping non-European societies by extracting their resources and surplus value through colonialism and unequal trade relations. This created a global hierarchy with wealthy core nations and poorer peripheral nations. Dependency theorists believe underdevelopment was generated by the development of capitalism itself, not due to the periphery's isolation or internal failings, and that true development can only be achieved by breaking from the capitalist world system. World-systems theory shares similarities in analyzing global core-periphery relations but emphasizes long-term comparative analysis of societies within the global system.
The document discusses the social and economic impacts of communism and capitalism in four nations: Vietnam and Laos as communist nations, and England and Canada as capitalist nations. It provides background on each nation's economic system and history, and discusses how communism influenced Vietnam and Laos through collectivization of farms and industries after they came to power in 1975. Theories like Marx's labor theory of value are used to explain how communism transformed the previously agrarian economies into centralized, state-run systems focused on production rather than international trade.
This document provides an overview and introduction to Dependency Theory. It discusses:
- The origins of Dependency Theory under Raul Prebisch in response to unequal economic growth between rich and poor countries.
- Core propositions of Dependency Theory including that underdevelopment results from external influences that favor rich countries over poor ones in a dependent relationship.
- Debates around whether dependency results more from capitalism or disparities in power between countries.
- The policy implications of Dependency Theory, which rejects growth models based on rich countries and favors self-reliance over greater integration into the global economy by poor states.
Is it possible accomplishing the national development independentFernando Alcoforado
The failure in promoting economic and social development of almost all peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the world must be attributed to the fact that the governments of these countries outline strategies to promote national development dissociated from the evolution of the capitalist world-system. In his book Unthinking Social Science, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein states that it is necessary to review the current paradigms of social sciences and going to think otherwise in the XXI century. Wallerstein argues for the adoption of a new theoretical and methodological framework in social science based on analysis of the capitalist world-system to understand how each national system it is inserted in order to promote their economic and social development. The new theoretical analysis of the economic system of a nation taking into account the capitalist world-system proposed by Wallerstein is opposed to the current Cartesian method approach that formulates the development of the national economic system of isolated and dissociated form of the analysis of the insertion of the national economy in the world capitalist system.
dependency and
world-systems theories
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Dependency approaches emerged out of Latin
America in the 1960s in reaction to moderniza-
tion theories of development. Dependentistas
attributed the difficulties of development in
the global South to the legacies of the long
history of colonialism as well as contemporary
international power relations. This approach
suggested that international inequalities were
socially structured and that hierarchy is a cen-
tral feature of the global system of societies.
The world-systems perspective is a strategy
for explaining social change that focuses on
whole intersocietal systems rather than single
societies. The main insight is that important
interaction networks (trade, information flows,
alliances, and fighting) have woven polities
and cultures together since the beginning of
human social evolution. Explanations of social
change need to take intersocietal systems
(world-systems) as the units that evolve. How-
ever, intersocietal interaction networks were
rather small when transportation was mainly a
matter of hiking with a pack. Globalization, in
the sense of the expansion and intensification of
larger interaction networks, has been increasing
for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.
The intellectual history of world-systems
theory has roots in classical sociology, Marxian
political economy, and the thinking of the
dependentistas. But in explicit form the world-
systems perspective emerged only in the 1970s
when Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, and
Immanuel Wallerstein began to formulate the
concepts and to narrate the analytic history of
the modern world-system.
The idea of the whole system ought to mean
that all the human interaction networks, small
and large, from the household to global trade,
constitute the world-system. It is not just a
matter of ‘‘international relations’’ or global-
scale institutions such as the World Bank.
Rather, at the present time, the world-system
is all the people of the earth and all their
cultural, economic, and political institutions
and the interactions and connections among
them. The world-systems perspective looks at
human institutions over long periods of time
and employs the spatial scales that are required
for comprehending these whole interaction sys-
tems.
The modern world-system can be under-
stood structurally as a stratification system
composed of economically, culturally, and mili-
tarily dominant core societies (themselves in
competition with one another), and dependent
peripheral and semiperipheral regions. Some
dependent regions have been successful in
improving their positions in the larger core/
periphery hierarchy, while most have simply
maintained their peripheral and semiperipheral
positions. This structural perspective on world
history allows us to analyze the cyclical features
of social change and the long-term patterns
of development in historical and comparativ.
The document discusses several theories related to development and underdevelopment, including neoliberalism, dependency theory, and world systems theory. It provides background on the key figures and concepts within dependency theory, such as Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It also summarizes Wallerstein's world systems theory, which divides countries into cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries. Modernization theory is discussed as well, including its assumptions about development as a progressive, homogenizing process. Criticisms of these theories are noted, such as that development is not necessarily unidirectional and traditional and modern values can co-exist.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIOLOGYAGENDAS FOR THETWENTY-FIR.docxpbilly1
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIOLOGY:
AGENDAS FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
JOE R, FEAGIN
University of Florida
The world's peoples face daunting challenges in the
twenty-first century. While apologists herald the globaliza-
tion of capitalism, many people on our planet experience
recurring economic exploitation, immiseration, and envi-
ronmental crises linked to capitalism's spread. Across the
globe social movements continue to raise the issues of
social justice and democracy. Given the new century's
serious challenges, sociologists need to rediscover their
roots in a sociology committed to social justice, to cultivate and extend the long-
standing "countersystem" approach to research, to encourage greater self-reflection
in sociological analysis, and to re-emphasize the importance ofthe teaching of soci-
ology. Finally, more sociologists should examine the big social questions of this
century, including the issues of economic exploitation, social oppression, and the
looming environmental crises. And, clearly, more sociologists should engage in the
study of alternative social futures, including those of more just and egalitarian soci-
eties. Sociologists need to think deeply and imaginatively about sustainable social
futures and to aid in building better human societies.
WE STAND today at the beginning ofa challenging new century. Like
ASA Presidents before me, I am conscious
of the honor and the responsibility that this
address carries with it, and I feel a special
obligation to speak about the role of sociol-
ogy and sociologists in the twenty-first cen-
tury. As we look forward, let me quote W. E.
B. Du Bois, a pathbreaking U.S. sociologist.
In his last autobiographical statement, Du
Bois (1968) wrote:
Direct correspondence to Joe R. Feagin, De-
partment of Sociology, Box 117330, University
of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, (feagin®
ufl.edu). I would like to thank the numerous col-
leagues who made helpful comments on various
drafts of this presidential address. Among these
were Hernan Vera, Sidney Willhelm, Bernice
McNair Barnett, Gideon Sjoherg, Anne Rawls,
Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill, Patricia
Lengermann, Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, Tony
Orum, William A. Smith, Ben Agger, Karen
Pyke, and Leslie Houts.
[TJoday the contradictions of American civi-
lization are tremendous. Freedom of politi-
cal discussion is difficult; elections are not
free and fair. . . . The greatest power in the
land is not thought or ethics, but wealth. . . .
Present profit is valued higher than future
need. . . . I know the United States. It is my
country and the land of my fathers. It is still
a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still
the home of noble souls and generous
people. But it is selling its birthright. It is
betraying its mighty destiny. (Pp. 418-19)
Today the social contradictions of Ameri-
can and global civilizations are still im-
mense. Many prominent voices tell us that it
is the best of times; other voices insist that it
is the worst of t.
This article aims to analyze the genesis of the wealth and poverty of nations and to point out solutions for poor nations to develop. The world began to face many years ago with the existence of very few rich countries that present advanced economic and social development alongside the vast majority of poor countries with precarious economic and social development. Many ask: what is the explanation for the central capitalist countries having reached a high level of economic and social development and the other countries not? There are several answers to this question. One of them is that the core capitalist countries have developed essential competences to promote economic, scientific and technological development. But the main answer is that the central capitalist countries accumulated a large volume of capital during colonialism from the 14th to the 17th centuries and imperialism from the 18th to the 20th centuries with the looting they carried out in the countries they dominated and also in the current stage of neoliberal globalization. The relationship of dependence of poor, peripheral and semi-peripheral countries on world capitalism will only come to an end with the disappearance of the capitalist world system and the adoption throughout the world of a new model of society that ensures economic and social progress for all countries and not just for a very few countries. This new model would require the existence of a world government to ensure the functioning of a new world order that guarantees equity in the development process of nations and the implementation of the Welfare State along the lines of that practiced in Scandinavian countries with the necessary adaptation to each country because it is the most successful social system ever implemented in the world..
1966 frank-development of underdevelopmentHira Masood
This document discusses the historical development of underdevelopment in colonial and post-colonial societies. It argues that:
1) Colonial powers established hierarchical systems of metropoles (capital cities) and satellites (surrounding rural areas and towns) to extract resources from colonies and direct economic surplus to the colonial center.
2) These metropolis-satellite relationships structured the entire economic, political, and social systems of colonies, and persisted after independence. National capital cities became metropoles over surrounding satellites.
3) Rather than being isolated or traditional, all parts of colonial and post-colonial societies were thoroughly penetrated and shaped by their incorporation into the capitalist world system through extraction of surplus by metropoles at various levels
The document discusses the social and economic impacts of communism and capitalism in four nations: Vietnam and Laos as communist nations, and England and Canada as capitalist nations. It provides background on each nation's economic system and history, and discusses how communism influenced Vietnam and Laos through collectivization of farms and industries after they came to power in 1975. Theories like Marx's labor theory of value are used to explain how communism transformed the previously agrarian economies into centralized, state-run systems focused on production rather than international trade.
This document provides an overview and introduction to Dependency Theory. It discusses:
- The origins of Dependency Theory under Raul Prebisch in response to unequal economic growth between rich and poor countries.
- Core propositions of Dependency Theory including that underdevelopment results from external influences that favor rich countries over poor ones in a dependent relationship.
- Debates around whether dependency results more from capitalism or disparities in power between countries.
- The policy implications of Dependency Theory, which rejects growth models based on rich countries and favors self-reliance over greater integration into the global economy by poor states.
Is it possible accomplishing the national development independentFernando Alcoforado
The failure in promoting economic and social development of almost all peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the world must be attributed to the fact that the governments of these countries outline strategies to promote national development dissociated from the evolution of the capitalist world-system. In his book Unthinking Social Science, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein states that it is necessary to review the current paradigms of social sciences and going to think otherwise in the XXI century. Wallerstein argues for the adoption of a new theoretical and methodological framework in social science based on analysis of the capitalist world-system to understand how each national system it is inserted in order to promote their economic and social development. The new theoretical analysis of the economic system of a nation taking into account the capitalist world-system proposed by Wallerstein is opposed to the current Cartesian method approach that formulates the development of the national economic system of isolated and dissociated form of the analysis of the insertion of the national economy in the world capitalist system.
dependency and
world-systems theories
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Dependency approaches emerged out of Latin
America in the 1960s in reaction to moderniza-
tion theories of development. Dependentistas
attributed the difficulties of development in
the global South to the legacies of the long
history of colonialism as well as contemporary
international power relations. This approach
suggested that international inequalities were
socially structured and that hierarchy is a cen-
tral feature of the global system of societies.
The world-systems perspective is a strategy
for explaining social change that focuses on
whole intersocietal systems rather than single
societies. The main insight is that important
interaction networks (trade, information flows,
alliances, and fighting) have woven polities
and cultures together since the beginning of
human social evolution. Explanations of social
change need to take intersocietal systems
(world-systems) as the units that evolve. How-
ever, intersocietal interaction networks were
rather small when transportation was mainly a
matter of hiking with a pack. Globalization, in
the sense of the expansion and intensification of
larger interaction networks, has been increasing
for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.
The intellectual history of world-systems
theory has roots in classical sociology, Marxian
political economy, and the thinking of the
dependentistas. But in explicit form the world-
systems perspective emerged only in the 1970s
when Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, and
Immanuel Wallerstein began to formulate the
concepts and to narrate the analytic history of
the modern world-system.
The idea of the whole system ought to mean
that all the human interaction networks, small
and large, from the household to global trade,
constitute the world-system. It is not just a
matter of ‘‘international relations’’ or global-
scale institutions such as the World Bank.
Rather, at the present time, the world-system
is all the people of the earth and all their
cultural, economic, and political institutions
and the interactions and connections among
them. The world-systems perspective looks at
human institutions over long periods of time
and employs the spatial scales that are required
for comprehending these whole interaction sys-
tems.
The modern world-system can be under-
stood structurally as a stratification system
composed of economically, culturally, and mili-
tarily dominant core societies (themselves in
competition with one another), and dependent
peripheral and semiperipheral regions. Some
dependent regions have been successful in
improving their positions in the larger core/
periphery hierarchy, while most have simply
maintained their peripheral and semiperipheral
positions. This structural perspective on world
history allows us to analyze the cyclical features
of social change and the long-term patterns
of development in historical and comparativ.
The document discusses several theories related to development and underdevelopment, including neoliberalism, dependency theory, and world systems theory. It provides background on the key figures and concepts within dependency theory, such as Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It also summarizes Wallerstein's world systems theory, which divides countries into cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries. Modernization theory is discussed as well, including its assumptions about development as a progressive, homogenizing process. Criticisms of these theories are noted, such as that development is not necessarily unidirectional and traditional and modern values can co-exist.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIOLOGYAGENDAS FOR THETWENTY-FIR.docxpbilly1
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIOLOGY:
AGENDAS FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
JOE R, FEAGIN
University of Florida
The world's peoples face daunting challenges in the
twenty-first century. While apologists herald the globaliza-
tion of capitalism, many people on our planet experience
recurring economic exploitation, immiseration, and envi-
ronmental crises linked to capitalism's spread. Across the
globe social movements continue to raise the issues of
social justice and democracy. Given the new century's
serious challenges, sociologists need to rediscover their
roots in a sociology committed to social justice, to cultivate and extend the long-
standing "countersystem" approach to research, to encourage greater self-reflection
in sociological analysis, and to re-emphasize the importance ofthe teaching of soci-
ology. Finally, more sociologists should examine the big social questions of this
century, including the issues of economic exploitation, social oppression, and the
looming environmental crises. And, clearly, more sociologists should engage in the
study of alternative social futures, including those of more just and egalitarian soci-
eties. Sociologists need to think deeply and imaginatively about sustainable social
futures and to aid in building better human societies.
WE STAND today at the beginning ofa challenging new century. Like
ASA Presidents before me, I am conscious
of the honor and the responsibility that this
address carries with it, and I feel a special
obligation to speak about the role of sociol-
ogy and sociologists in the twenty-first cen-
tury. As we look forward, let me quote W. E.
B. Du Bois, a pathbreaking U.S. sociologist.
In his last autobiographical statement, Du
Bois (1968) wrote:
Direct correspondence to Joe R. Feagin, De-
partment of Sociology, Box 117330, University
of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, (feagin®
ufl.edu). I would like to thank the numerous col-
leagues who made helpful comments on various
drafts of this presidential address. Among these
were Hernan Vera, Sidney Willhelm, Bernice
McNair Barnett, Gideon Sjoherg, Anne Rawls,
Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill, Patricia
Lengermann, Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, Tony
Orum, William A. Smith, Ben Agger, Karen
Pyke, and Leslie Houts.
[TJoday the contradictions of American civi-
lization are tremendous. Freedom of politi-
cal discussion is difficult; elections are not
free and fair. . . . The greatest power in the
land is not thought or ethics, but wealth. . . .
Present profit is valued higher than future
need. . . . I know the United States. It is my
country and the land of my fathers. It is still
a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still
the home of noble souls and generous
people. But it is selling its birthright. It is
betraying its mighty destiny. (Pp. 418-19)
Today the social contradictions of Ameri-
can and global civilizations are still im-
mense. Many prominent voices tell us that it
is the best of times; other voices insist that it
is the worst of t.
This article aims to analyze the genesis of the wealth and poverty of nations and to point out solutions for poor nations to develop. The world began to face many years ago with the existence of very few rich countries that present advanced economic and social development alongside the vast majority of poor countries with precarious economic and social development. Many ask: what is the explanation for the central capitalist countries having reached a high level of economic and social development and the other countries not? There are several answers to this question. One of them is that the core capitalist countries have developed essential competences to promote economic, scientific and technological development. But the main answer is that the central capitalist countries accumulated a large volume of capital during colonialism from the 14th to the 17th centuries and imperialism from the 18th to the 20th centuries with the looting they carried out in the countries they dominated and also in the current stage of neoliberal globalization. The relationship of dependence of poor, peripheral and semi-peripheral countries on world capitalism will only come to an end with the disappearance of the capitalist world system and the adoption throughout the world of a new model of society that ensures economic and social progress for all countries and not just for a very few countries. This new model would require the existence of a world government to ensure the functioning of a new world order that guarantees equity in the development process of nations and the implementation of the Welfare State along the lines of that practiced in Scandinavian countries with the necessary adaptation to each country because it is the most successful social system ever implemented in the world..
1966 frank-development of underdevelopmentHira Masood
This document discusses the historical development of underdevelopment in colonial and post-colonial societies. It argues that:
1) Colonial powers established hierarchical systems of metropoles (capital cities) and satellites (surrounding rural areas and towns) to extract resources from colonies and direct economic surplus to the colonial center.
2) These metropolis-satellite relationships structured the entire economic, political, and social systems of colonies, and persisted after independence. National capital cities became metropoles over surrounding satellites.
3) Rather than being isolated or traditional, all parts of colonial and post-colonial societies were thoroughly penetrated and shaped by their incorporation into the capitalist world system through extraction of surplus by metropoles at various levels
Karl Marx argued that a society's economic structure determines its social and political structures. He believed that in capitalist societies, there are two main classes - the bourgeoisie who own the means of production, and the proletariat who must sell their labor. A society's mode of production shapes its social relations, politics, and people's consciousness. Globalization today is facilitated by international agreements and organizations that promote free trade between nations through reducing trade barriers. While free trade aims to improve living standards, critics argue it can negatively impact poorer countries.
Center and Periferies in Europe – The inequalities dinamics since 1990GRAZIA TANTA
The document discusses the rising inequalities within Europe since 1990 as a result of capitalism. It outlines several key developments that have contributed to the formation of centers and peripheries on the continent, including periods of economic growth and crisis; the rise of neoliberalism; globalization and the relocation of industries; rising debt, speculation, and inequality; and resulting population changes and migration patterns. These dynamics have led to decreasing populations in many Eastern and Southern European countries, while populations in Western countries like France and Spain increased at higher rates, revealing the unequal impacts of capitalism across Europe.
The document discusses dependency theory, which argues that resources flow from poorer "periphery" states to enrich wealthier "core" states. It originated in reaction to modernization theory. There are two perspectives on dependency - the capitalist view that it facilitates development, and the socialist view that it is a form of imperialism that enriches core states. Key aspects of dependency include globalization, free markets, surplus value flowing to core states, political and technological control by core states, and neo-colonialism. While it was influential in the 1960-70s, dependency theory has lost some influence with the growth of some developing economies, though still impacts anti-poverty campaigns.
This document provides an overview of Marxist theories of international relations. It discusses key concepts in Marxism like the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and how Marx viewed economic factors as decisive in politics. It also summarizes variants of Marxist theory like dependency theory and world systems theory. Finally, it discusses the rise and fall of communist states in the 20th century and the effects Marxist thought had in shaping socialist movements and the Cold War global order.
This document provides an overview of three major development theories: modernization theory, dependency theory, and world systems theory.
1. Modernization theory emerged in the 1950s and viewed development as a linear process where traditional societies modernize by adopting Western values like industrialization, capitalism, and secularism. It was criticized for being ethnocentric and ignoring that development can occur through different paths.
2. Dependency theory arose in the 1950s-1960s as an alternative to modernization theory. It argues that underdeveloped countries are not backward but rather dependent on developed countries that exploit them as suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials. This hinders their development and benefits core nations.
3. World systems theory,
The document traces the history of the international right-wing political shift since the 1960s. It describes how American capitalists influenced politics in the US and Britain by funding think tanks and campaigns to promote free market ideology. This ideology was then exported to other countries through institutions like the IMF and WTO, pushing policies like privatization and deregulation. The result has been increased power for American corporations and a weakening of nations' ability to pursue independent economic strategies, leading to a new form of neo-imperialism dominated by US interests in the late 20th century.
This document provides an overview of a lecture on the debate over an integrated world system. It discusses arguments for and against world integration from economic and moral perspectives. Supporters of free trade argue nations should specialize in what they produce best and trade freely. Others argue weaker economies need protection initially and prefer regulated cooperation between developed and developing regions. Critically, some argue European domination and imposed economic systems historically disadvantaged developing areas due to exploitation and failure to respect local laws and peoples. Overall, the lecture frames the debate between full integration versus regulated independence in international political economy.
Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will A Respons.docxkarlhennesey
Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the
Will? A Response to Gunder Frank*
Henry Bernstein and Howard Nicholas
The contribution of the work of Andre Cunder Frank to debates
about the nature of Third World ‘underdevelopment’ over the past
twenty years is well known, and its significance widely acknow-
ledged. The arguments that he has consistently put forward have
been assimilated into the broad mainstream of contemporary anti-
imperialist ideology. Also well known are a number of criticisms of
the approach of Frank and other writers of the ‘dependency’
school. The extension of Frank’s influential version of dependency
theory to the current recession in the world economy and its effects
for the Third World, provides an opportunity to reconsider his
position, with particular reference to its political and ideological
implications. This is the principal focus of our response, which we
begin with a brief resume of Frank’s main theses and of criticisms
of their theoretical and methodological bases.
FRANK’S THESIS A N D ITS CRITIQUE
The following points summarize the main themes and conclusions
of Frank’s argument.
1 . Frank’s theory is concerned, above all, with the distribution of
the surplus product (or ‘economic surplus’, Frank 1975) between
*A. Gunder Frank: ‘Global Crisis and Transformation’, Developmen1 ond Change.
Vol. 14. 3 , 3 2 3 - 4 6 .
Developmenr and Change (SAGE. London. Beverly Hills and New Delhi).
Vol. 14 I 1 983). 609-624
610 Henry Bernsrein and Howard Nicholas
countries or groups of countries. National economies compete to
maximize surplus appropriation, and the extent to which they are
able t o d o so rests on their possession (or lack of possession) of
certain types of monopoly power in international economic
relations. Successful surplus appropriation is the key condition
of accumulation and hence development, although other factors
also have a role, for example, adequate levels of effective
demand and technical change.
2. While all countries were originally ‘undeveloped’. the advanced
capitalist countries (DCs) were able t o achieve a path of
(‘normal’) capitalist development denied to the countries of the
Third World (UDCs). The two categories can be grouped in
terms of ‘metropole’ and ‘satellite’ or ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.
3. The UDCs were actively underdeveloped as a consequence of
their forced integration with the capitalist world economy,
through which they became exporters of primary products (and
also sources of effective demand for exports from the DCs). The
economies of UDCs are locked into a structural relation of
dependence on those of the DCs, whose reproduction needs they
are compelled to satisfy. This occurs through a variety of
mechanisms - international trade (unequal exchange), invest-
ment, aid, technology transfer, transfer pricing etc. - the result
of which is a ‘drain’ of surplus from UDCs t o DCs, thereby
restricting the accum ...
1976 amin s unequal development - an essay on the social formations of peri...Durlabh Pun
This document provides an overview of precapitalist social formations and modes of production. It distinguishes between five main modes of production: 1) primitive-communal, 2) tribute-paying, 3) feudal, 4) slaveowning, and 5) simple petty-commodity. Most precapitalist societies combined multiple modes of production, with one typically dominant. The tribute-paying mode was most common, occurring across Asia, Africa, Europe and pre-Columbian America. Feudal and slaveowning modes usually occurred peripherally to central tribute-paying formations. Long-distance trade linked independent social formations and allowed surplus transfers between them. Analysis of a social formation requires examining surplus generation,
Global Political Economy: How The World Works?Jeffrey Harrod
These are the slides which are displayed by the lecturer Jeffrey Harrod in the on-line Lecture Course "Global Political Economy: How the World Works" which is available free on his website http://www.jeffreyharrod.eu/avcourse.html.
The purpose it to make the slides available to download which at the moment cannot be done from the on-line lecture. Many of the slides provide data which may be useful in presentations and research papers. Other slides are the points addressed in the lecture.
The course covers all the material conventionally found in courses on international political economy. The approach is critical and realist and seeks to understand or explain
power rather than functions which surround the world economy.
The lectures and slides cover investment, trade, finance , migration and labour paying special attention to the multinational corporation and the agencies of states as the central power players in the global economy.
This document discusses several key concepts in feminist economics, including:
- Economics is a social subject defined by interactions between people, not just technical expertise. Debates over economic issues are deeply political.
- Social reproduction, including the organization of caring labor and gender relations, is as fundamental to society as more traditional forms of production.
- Unpaid domestic and care work predominantly done by women frees up men's time and labor for control in the public sphere. Gendered moral codes reinforce women's responsibility for care work.
- Data collection often fails to fully account for the scope and nature of unpaid care work, especially childcare, obscuring its contribution and gendered dimensions.
The precarious future of the nation state (3)GRAZIA TANTA
C – Capitalism’s Thirty Glorious Years
13 – The reformulation of the political thinking and the Keynesian splendour
14 – The reconstruction of infrastructures and the beginning of European integration
15 – Supra-national institutions shape globalization
16 – The decolonization and decline of colonizing nations
17 – Workers acceptance of the capitalist order
Bradford 2013 population and development shortJohn Bradford
1. The document provides a history of theories of social and economic development from the 19th century to modern times.
2. Early theories like social Darwinism and modernization theory viewed development as progressive and believed all countries progressed through similar stages of development.
3. Dependency theory and world systems theory emerged as criticisms, arguing that development was dependent on relationships with colonizing powers and that the causes of underdevelopment were external exploitation.
4. World systems theory specifically proposed a global capitalist system divided production between a wealthy core, semi-peripheral middle ground, and exploited peripheral zones in a unequal and hierarchical relationship.
The ending of capitalism have been subject to predictions that anticipated an end, but it has prevailed and has strengthened; apparently has more strength and staying power now than before
This document discusses the history of how consumption and consumers have been understood within theories of capitalism. It argues that while early theorists like Adam Smith and Marx acknowledged the importance of consumption, they focused more on production and the relations of capital and labor. The role of consumers and consumption in driving capitalism was not fully explored until later theorists like Weber, Veblen, and Bourdieu examined how goods are used for status and cultural capital. The document then discusses how historical research in the 1980s further illuminated the origins of mass consumer society but did not fully incorporate Bourdieu's insights into cultural capital and status. It argues consumption has become a core driver of capitalism only in the late 20th century.
This document summarizes key ideas from two works: Frank's "The Development of Underdevelopment" and Dos Santos' "The Structure of Dependency". Frank argues that modernization theory, which views underdevelopment as a natural phase, is deficient because it ignores how colonialism altered development paths in the Third World. Underdevelopment was intentionally created through exploiting resources and transferring economic surplus to Western nations. Dos Santos identifies three historical forms of dependency - colonial, financial-industrial, technological-industrial - and how they structurally limit industrial development and reproduce inequality in dependent nations under foreign capital's control.
Dominance-Dependence and World Systems Approach views of developmentnigelcato
Dependency theory and world systems theory view development differently than traditional models. They argue that poor countries are not "behind" rich countries, but remain poor due to their role in the global capitalist system. Core dominant countries exploit poorer peripheral countries by controlling their economies and imposing patterns of resource use that benefit core nations at the expense of development in poorer countries. Elites within peripheral nations also maintain dependencies that uphold this unequal system.
CHAPTER 12 THE NORTH-SOUTH GAP CHAPTER OVERVIEW .docxcravennichole326
CHAPTER 12
THE NORTH-SOUTH GAP
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Chapters 12 and 13 address the issues and concerns related to the disparities in wealth
and power between the industrialized countries in the global North and the more typically
less industrialized countries in the global South. Chapter 12 presents an overview of the
more left-of-center theories that seek to explain this phenomenon, whereas Chapter 13
examines the situation from a more classical liberal perspective.
The chapter forcefully asserts the dire prospects of people who are confronted with abject
poverty—a kind of poverty unknown to most citizens of the United States—and details
the consequences. The current state of the global South is described, including the
challenge to provide even basic human needs, hunger, urbanization, and the role of
women in development. The difference between migrants and refugees is discussed, and
the issue of human trafficking is raised.
Theories of the accumulation of wealth—how it occurs and who has been able to control
the process—are presented. A comparison between capitalist and socialist approaches is
offered, and world-system theory is explained.
Finally, the chapter addresses the impact of imperialism on the global South, both at the
time of imperialism and to the present day. The history of world civilizations, and
dominance of European civilization, is provided, along with a history of imperialism.
The effects—both positive and negative—of colonialism are described and the current
situation of postcolonial dependency is discussed. Poverty and lack of access to basic
human resources are prime causes of revolutions, and communist revolutions during the
Cold War are discussed. The changes to governments after revolutions are analyzed,
with the conclusion that, in many cases, they are not too different, at least in the long-run.
CHAPTER 13
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Chapter 13 examines the issue of economic development from a more capitalist
perspective. One simple measure of economic development is per capita GDP. Using
this measure, the successes and failures of the South as a whole and, more importantly, of
its regions and countries, can be analyzed.
The discussion then turns to the experiences of a variety of countries in the global South.
First, the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) are discussed. In particular, the success
of the four tigers of East Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—are
described. Second, the Chinese and Indian experiences are discussed. Finally, brief
descriptions of a variety of other countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the
Middle East are provided.
No single model of success emerges from the discussion of these countries’ experiences.
However, the authors identify several common themes concerning trade, the
concentration of capital, authoritarianism, and corruption. With respect to trade, two
...
The big problem’s name is capitalism, not globalizationGRAZIA TANTA
There are those who consider that globalization must ridden by capitalism, and those who believe that nationalism must replace globalization all the while accepting capitalism. Two ways, one winner: Capital.
This document discusses the concept of global stratification and divides. It describes how societies have historically stratified groups through factors like class, economic status, and race. This stratification led to power imbalances that disadvantaged some groups. In the modern world, global stratification still exists between countries, referred to as the "global divide". The document reviews several theories for explaining global stratification and outlines the historical divisions of the world into the First, Second, and Third Worlds during the Cold War era. It also summarizes the key perspectives of the influential Brandt Report and subsequent analyses on addressing global economic inequalities.
Aggression - Applied Social Psychology - Psychology SuperNotesPsychoTech Services
A proprietary approach developed by bringing together the best of learning theories from Psychology, design principles from the world of visualization, and pedagogical methods from over a decade of training experience, that enables you to: Learn better, faster!
Karl Marx argued that a society's economic structure determines its social and political structures. He believed that in capitalist societies, there are two main classes - the bourgeoisie who own the means of production, and the proletariat who must sell their labor. A society's mode of production shapes its social relations, politics, and people's consciousness. Globalization today is facilitated by international agreements and organizations that promote free trade between nations through reducing trade barriers. While free trade aims to improve living standards, critics argue it can negatively impact poorer countries.
Center and Periferies in Europe – The inequalities dinamics since 1990GRAZIA TANTA
The document discusses the rising inequalities within Europe since 1990 as a result of capitalism. It outlines several key developments that have contributed to the formation of centers and peripheries on the continent, including periods of economic growth and crisis; the rise of neoliberalism; globalization and the relocation of industries; rising debt, speculation, and inequality; and resulting population changes and migration patterns. These dynamics have led to decreasing populations in many Eastern and Southern European countries, while populations in Western countries like France and Spain increased at higher rates, revealing the unequal impacts of capitalism across Europe.
The document discusses dependency theory, which argues that resources flow from poorer "periphery" states to enrich wealthier "core" states. It originated in reaction to modernization theory. There are two perspectives on dependency - the capitalist view that it facilitates development, and the socialist view that it is a form of imperialism that enriches core states. Key aspects of dependency include globalization, free markets, surplus value flowing to core states, political and technological control by core states, and neo-colonialism. While it was influential in the 1960-70s, dependency theory has lost some influence with the growth of some developing economies, though still impacts anti-poverty campaigns.
This document provides an overview of Marxist theories of international relations. It discusses key concepts in Marxism like the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and how Marx viewed economic factors as decisive in politics. It also summarizes variants of Marxist theory like dependency theory and world systems theory. Finally, it discusses the rise and fall of communist states in the 20th century and the effects Marxist thought had in shaping socialist movements and the Cold War global order.
This document provides an overview of three major development theories: modernization theory, dependency theory, and world systems theory.
1. Modernization theory emerged in the 1950s and viewed development as a linear process where traditional societies modernize by adopting Western values like industrialization, capitalism, and secularism. It was criticized for being ethnocentric and ignoring that development can occur through different paths.
2. Dependency theory arose in the 1950s-1960s as an alternative to modernization theory. It argues that underdeveloped countries are not backward but rather dependent on developed countries that exploit them as suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials. This hinders their development and benefits core nations.
3. World systems theory,
The document traces the history of the international right-wing political shift since the 1960s. It describes how American capitalists influenced politics in the US and Britain by funding think tanks and campaigns to promote free market ideology. This ideology was then exported to other countries through institutions like the IMF and WTO, pushing policies like privatization and deregulation. The result has been increased power for American corporations and a weakening of nations' ability to pursue independent economic strategies, leading to a new form of neo-imperialism dominated by US interests in the late 20th century.
This document provides an overview of a lecture on the debate over an integrated world system. It discusses arguments for and against world integration from economic and moral perspectives. Supporters of free trade argue nations should specialize in what they produce best and trade freely. Others argue weaker economies need protection initially and prefer regulated cooperation between developed and developing regions. Critically, some argue European domination and imposed economic systems historically disadvantaged developing areas due to exploitation and failure to respect local laws and peoples. Overall, the lecture frames the debate between full integration versus regulated independence in international political economy.
Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will A Respons.docxkarlhennesey
Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the
Will? A Response to Gunder Frank*
Henry Bernstein and Howard Nicholas
The contribution of the work of Andre Cunder Frank to debates
about the nature of Third World ‘underdevelopment’ over the past
twenty years is well known, and its significance widely acknow-
ledged. The arguments that he has consistently put forward have
been assimilated into the broad mainstream of contemporary anti-
imperialist ideology. Also well known are a number of criticisms of
the approach of Frank and other writers of the ‘dependency’
school. The extension of Frank’s influential version of dependency
theory to the current recession in the world economy and its effects
for the Third World, provides an opportunity to reconsider his
position, with particular reference to its political and ideological
implications. This is the principal focus of our response, which we
begin with a brief resume of Frank’s main theses and of criticisms
of their theoretical and methodological bases.
FRANK’S THESIS A N D ITS CRITIQUE
The following points summarize the main themes and conclusions
of Frank’s argument.
1 . Frank’s theory is concerned, above all, with the distribution of
the surplus product (or ‘economic surplus’, Frank 1975) between
*A. Gunder Frank: ‘Global Crisis and Transformation’, Developmen1 ond Change.
Vol. 14. 3 , 3 2 3 - 4 6 .
Developmenr and Change (SAGE. London. Beverly Hills and New Delhi).
Vol. 14 I 1 983). 609-624
610 Henry Bernsrein and Howard Nicholas
countries or groups of countries. National economies compete to
maximize surplus appropriation, and the extent to which they are
able t o d o so rests on their possession (or lack of possession) of
certain types of monopoly power in international economic
relations. Successful surplus appropriation is the key condition
of accumulation and hence development, although other factors
also have a role, for example, adequate levels of effective
demand and technical change.
2. While all countries were originally ‘undeveloped’. the advanced
capitalist countries (DCs) were able t o achieve a path of
(‘normal’) capitalist development denied to the countries of the
Third World (UDCs). The two categories can be grouped in
terms of ‘metropole’ and ‘satellite’ or ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.
3. The UDCs were actively underdeveloped as a consequence of
their forced integration with the capitalist world economy,
through which they became exporters of primary products (and
also sources of effective demand for exports from the DCs). The
economies of UDCs are locked into a structural relation of
dependence on those of the DCs, whose reproduction needs they
are compelled to satisfy. This occurs through a variety of
mechanisms - international trade (unequal exchange), invest-
ment, aid, technology transfer, transfer pricing etc. - the result
of which is a ‘drain’ of surplus from UDCs t o DCs, thereby
restricting the accum ...
1976 amin s unequal development - an essay on the social formations of peri...Durlabh Pun
This document provides an overview of precapitalist social formations and modes of production. It distinguishes between five main modes of production: 1) primitive-communal, 2) tribute-paying, 3) feudal, 4) slaveowning, and 5) simple petty-commodity. Most precapitalist societies combined multiple modes of production, with one typically dominant. The tribute-paying mode was most common, occurring across Asia, Africa, Europe and pre-Columbian America. Feudal and slaveowning modes usually occurred peripherally to central tribute-paying formations. Long-distance trade linked independent social formations and allowed surplus transfers between them. Analysis of a social formation requires examining surplus generation,
Global Political Economy: How The World Works?Jeffrey Harrod
These are the slides which are displayed by the lecturer Jeffrey Harrod in the on-line Lecture Course "Global Political Economy: How the World Works" which is available free on his website http://www.jeffreyharrod.eu/avcourse.html.
The purpose it to make the slides available to download which at the moment cannot be done from the on-line lecture. Many of the slides provide data which may be useful in presentations and research papers. Other slides are the points addressed in the lecture.
The course covers all the material conventionally found in courses on international political economy. The approach is critical and realist and seeks to understand or explain
power rather than functions which surround the world economy.
The lectures and slides cover investment, trade, finance , migration and labour paying special attention to the multinational corporation and the agencies of states as the central power players in the global economy.
This document discusses several key concepts in feminist economics, including:
- Economics is a social subject defined by interactions between people, not just technical expertise. Debates over economic issues are deeply political.
- Social reproduction, including the organization of caring labor and gender relations, is as fundamental to society as more traditional forms of production.
- Unpaid domestic and care work predominantly done by women frees up men's time and labor for control in the public sphere. Gendered moral codes reinforce women's responsibility for care work.
- Data collection often fails to fully account for the scope and nature of unpaid care work, especially childcare, obscuring its contribution and gendered dimensions.
The precarious future of the nation state (3)GRAZIA TANTA
C – Capitalism’s Thirty Glorious Years
13 – The reformulation of the political thinking and the Keynesian splendour
14 – The reconstruction of infrastructures and the beginning of European integration
15 – Supra-national institutions shape globalization
16 – The decolonization and decline of colonizing nations
17 – Workers acceptance of the capitalist order
Bradford 2013 population and development shortJohn Bradford
1. The document provides a history of theories of social and economic development from the 19th century to modern times.
2. Early theories like social Darwinism and modernization theory viewed development as progressive and believed all countries progressed through similar stages of development.
3. Dependency theory and world systems theory emerged as criticisms, arguing that development was dependent on relationships with colonizing powers and that the causes of underdevelopment were external exploitation.
4. World systems theory specifically proposed a global capitalist system divided production between a wealthy core, semi-peripheral middle ground, and exploited peripheral zones in a unequal and hierarchical relationship.
The ending of capitalism have been subject to predictions that anticipated an end, but it has prevailed and has strengthened; apparently has more strength and staying power now than before
This document discusses the history of how consumption and consumers have been understood within theories of capitalism. It argues that while early theorists like Adam Smith and Marx acknowledged the importance of consumption, they focused more on production and the relations of capital and labor. The role of consumers and consumption in driving capitalism was not fully explored until later theorists like Weber, Veblen, and Bourdieu examined how goods are used for status and cultural capital. The document then discusses how historical research in the 1980s further illuminated the origins of mass consumer society but did not fully incorporate Bourdieu's insights into cultural capital and status. It argues consumption has become a core driver of capitalism only in the late 20th century.
This document summarizes key ideas from two works: Frank's "The Development of Underdevelopment" and Dos Santos' "The Structure of Dependency". Frank argues that modernization theory, which views underdevelopment as a natural phase, is deficient because it ignores how colonialism altered development paths in the Third World. Underdevelopment was intentionally created through exploiting resources and transferring economic surplus to Western nations. Dos Santos identifies three historical forms of dependency - colonial, financial-industrial, technological-industrial - and how they structurally limit industrial development and reproduce inequality in dependent nations under foreign capital's control.
Dominance-Dependence and World Systems Approach views of developmentnigelcato
Dependency theory and world systems theory view development differently than traditional models. They argue that poor countries are not "behind" rich countries, but remain poor due to their role in the global capitalist system. Core dominant countries exploit poorer peripheral countries by controlling their economies and imposing patterns of resource use that benefit core nations at the expense of development in poorer countries. Elites within peripheral nations also maintain dependencies that uphold this unequal system.
CHAPTER 12 THE NORTH-SOUTH GAP CHAPTER OVERVIEW .docxcravennichole326
CHAPTER 12
THE NORTH-SOUTH GAP
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Chapters 12 and 13 address the issues and concerns related to the disparities in wealth
and power between the industrialized countries in the global North and the more typically
less industrialized countries in the global South. Chapter 12 presents an overview of the
more left-of-center theories that seek to explain this phenomenon, whereas Chapter 13
examines the situation from a more classical liberal perspective.
The chapter forcefully asserts the dire prospects of people who are confronted with abject
poverty—a kind of poverty unknown to most citizens of the United States—and details
the consequences. The current state of the global South is described, including the
challenge to provide even basic human needs, hunger, urbanization, and the role of
women in development. The difference between migrants and refugees is discussed, and
the issue of human trafficking is raised.
Theories of the accumulation of wealth—how it occurs and who has been able to control
the process—are presented. A comparison between capitalist and socialist approaches is
offered, and world-system theory is explained.
Finally, the chapter addresses the impact of imperialism on the global South, both at the
time of imperialism and to the present day. The history of world civilizations, and
dominance of European civilization, is provided, along with a history of imperialism.
The effects—both positive and negative—of colonialism are described and the current
situation of postcolonial dependency is discussed. Poverty and lack of access to basic
human resources are prime causes of revolutions, and communist revolutions during the
Cold War are discussed. The changes to governments after revolutions are analyzed,
with the conclusion that, in many cases, they are not too different, at least in the long-run.
CHAPTER 13
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Chapter 13 examines the issue of economic development from a more capitalist
perspective. One simple measure of economic development is per capita GDP. Using
this measure, the successes and failures of the South as a whole and, more importantly, of
its regions and countries, can be analyzed.
The discussion then turns to the experiences of a variety of countries in the global South.
First, the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) are discussed. In particular, the success
of the four tigers of East Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—are
described. Second, the Chinese and Indian experiences are discussed. Finally, brief
descriptions of a variety of other countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the
Middle East are provided.
No single model of success emerges from the discussion of these countries’ experiences.
However, the authors identify several common themes concerning trade, the
concentration of capital, authoritarianism, and corruption. With respect to trade, two
...
The big problem’s name is capitalism, not globalizationGRAZIA TANTA
There are those who consider that globalization must ridden by capitalism, and those who believe that nationalism must replace globalization all the while accepting capitalism. Two ways, one winner: Capital.
This document discusses the concept of global stratification and divides. It describes how societies have historically stratified groups through factors like class, economic status, and race. This stratification led to power imbalances that disadvantaged some groups. In the modern world, global stratification still exists between countries, referred to as the "global divide". The document reviews several theories for explaining global stratification and outlines the historical divisions of the world into the First, Second, and Third Worlds during the Cold War era. It also summarizes the key perspectives of the influential Brandt Report and subsequent analyses on addressing global economic inequalities.
Aggression - Applied Social Psychology - Psychology SuperNotesPsychoTech Services
A proprietary approach developed by bringing together the best of learning theories from Psychology, design principles from the world of visualization, and pedagogical methods from over a decade of training experience, that enables you to: Learn better, faster!
Understanding of Self - Applied Social Psychology - Psychology SuperNotesPsychoTech Services
A proprietary approach developed by bringing together the best of learning theories from Psychology, design principles from the world of visualization, and pedagogical methods from over a decade of training experience, that enables you to: Learn better, faster!
You may be stressed about revealing your cancer diagnosis to your child or children.
Children love stories and these often provide parents with a means of broaching tricky subjects and so the ‘The Secret Warrior’ book was especially written for CANSA TLC, by creative writer and social worker, Sally Ann Carter.
Find out more:
https://cansa.org.za/resources-to-help-share-a-parent-or-loved-ones-cancer-diagnosis-with-a-child/
Covey says most people look for quick fixes. They see a big success and want to know how he did it, believing (and hoping) they can do the same following a quick bullet list.
But real change, the author says, comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out. And the most fundamental way of changing yourself is through a paradigm shift.
That paradigm shift is a new way of looking at the world. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People presents an approach to effectiveness based on character and principles.
The first three habits indeed deal with yourself because it all starts with you. The first three habits move you from dependence from the world to the independence of making your own world.
Habits 4, 5 and 6 are about people and relationships. The will move you from independence to interdependence. Such, cooperating to achieve more than you could have by yourself.
The last habit, habit number 7, focuses on continuous growth and improvement.
ProSocial Behaviour - Applied Social Psychology - Psychology SuperNotesPsychoTech Services
A proprietary approach developed by bringing together the best of learning theories from Psychology, design principles from the world of visualization, and pedagogical methods from over a decade of training experience, that enables you to: Learn better, faster!
Breathing : The Ultimate Healer For The Mind And BodyEmon62
Breathing is a natural function that all living things do regularly. However breathing properly help maintain and gives human beings control over emotion. Deep breathing can open up blood vessel and activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is the rest and digest function.
There are breathing technique that can help with regulating and calming the person. There are other methods to help take in more oxygen shown in this slide.
A key component is nitric oxide which opens up the blood vessel. In a person will have better circulation.
2. Dependency Theory
Marxism forms the philosophical and theoretical basis for a variety of neo-Marxist
theories that combine historical materialism with other critical traditions in thought.
- Examples include dependency and world systems theories
- The basic message of the dependency school draws on a theme, that European and
U.S. development was predicated on the active underdevelopment of the non-
European world, that is, making it less developed than it had been.
- For dependency theorists, Europe’s development was based on external destruction
rather than internal innovation—brutal conquest, colonial control, stripping non-
Western societies of their people, resources, and surpluses rather than single
mindedly undertaking the rational modernization of Europe (Galeano 1973).
- Indeed, dependency theory prefigures poststructuralism in that it brings into
question the nature of European “rationality” in committing these global atrocities.
From just such historical processes as these came a new global geography: a
European First World “center” and non-European Third World “peripheries.”
3. • The relationship between center and periphery assumed, for the Brazilian
geographer Theotonio dos Santos (1971: 226), the spatial form of
dependence, in which some countries (the dominant) achieved self-
sustaining economic growth while others (the dominated and dependent)
grew only as a reflection of changes in the dominant countries [Dependency
is] an historical condition which shapes a certain structure of the world
economy such that it favors some countries to the detriment of others and
limits the development possibilities of the subordinate economies . . . a
situation in which the economy of a certain group of countries is conditioned
by the development and expansion of another economy, to which their own
is subjected.
• The incorporation of Latin America into the capitalist world economy directly
through (Spanish and Portuguese) colonial administration but more subtly
through trade, asserted dos Santos, geared the region’s economies toward
meeting demands from the center rather than the needs of Latin America’s
people themselves, even when the main economic activities in the regional
economy were locally controlled.
4. • Dependence skewed the region’s social structure toward a small,
enormously rich, elite and a mass of poor peasants.
• Regional power was held by this “comprador” (collaborating,
intermediary) ruling class.
• In terms of development, the gains made from exporting products
sent to the center were used for luxurious consumption by the elite
rather than for domestic investment.
• But real power was exercised from external centers of command in
the dominant (“metropolitan”) countries. Dos Santos concludes that
dependence continues into the present through international
ownership of the region’s most dynamic sectors, multinational
corporate control over technology, and huge payments of royalties,
interest, and profits to corporations headquartered in New York
and London.
5. • The basic impetus behind this dependency theory derives from two main
sources.
• In the United States a school of neo-Marxist thought centered on the
socialist journal Monthly Review developed a theory of “monopoly
capitalism,” referring to the dominant form of social organization of the
20th century.
• Beginning in the late 19th century, this school argues, large corporations
increasingly took over, or outcompeted, small companies.
• The resulting monopolization restricted competition, and corporations
accumulated large surpluses from the attendant excess profits, with the
consequence that capitalist economies tended toward under consumption
and economic stagnation—as was true with the theories of imperialism
mentioned earlier.
• Economic crises were avoided within the capitalist countries by
stimulating individual consumption through advertising, while collective
consumption (consumption by the society as a whole) grew through the
expansion of the military–industrial complex.
6. • In the Third World, stagnation was more typical than growth.
• Since, in these countries, typically the bourgeoisie was “parasitic”
(i.e., living off and harming the workers and peasants), the ultimate
solution was to break with capitalist imperialism.
• Paul Baran (1910–1964) and Paul Sweezy (1910–2004), leading lights
of the Monthly Review school, found dependency to be an irrational
kind of development (Baran and Sweezy 1966). Genuine
development could be achieved in Third World countries, they
maintained, only by withdrawing from the world capitalist system
and reconstructing economy and society on a socialist basis, as Cuba
and China were doing at the time.
7. • The second main source for the dependency school was critical radical
economic thinking in Latin America.
• The ideas of the United Nations Commission for Latin America and Raúl
Prebisch were criticized by the Latin American left, in that the former
ignored class relations.
• The kind of state intervention in the economy proposed by Prebisch and
the ECLA, involving the protection of infant industries through tariff
remedies, could end up subsidizing the profits of the local bourgeoisie, with
consumers paying vastly higher prices for the subsidized commodities (at
one time the tariff on refrigerators imported into Mexico was 800%!).
• A more radical dependentista (dependency) position was pieced together
by such writers as Osvaldo Sunkel (1972), Celso Furtado (1963), Fernando
Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979), and Theotonio dos Santos (1970) and
popularized in the English-speaking world through the writings of Andre
Gunder Frank.
8. • Frank was a leading critic of (conventional) development economics and modernization
theory.
• His perspective entailed criticism of the “dual society” thesis, which stated that
underdeveloped societies had a dual structure of modern and traditional sectors,
each with its own characteristics and dynamic.
• “Underdevelopment,” Frank (1966: 18) wrote, “is not due to the survival of archaic
institutions and the existence of capital shortage in regions that have remained
isolated from the stream of world history.
• On the contrary, underdevelopment was and still is generated by the very same
historical process which also generated economic development: the development of
capitalism itself.”
• In this view, the development of the states at the center of the capitalist world
economy had the effect of underdeveloping the states of the periphery.
• For Frank, attributing underdevelopment to lingering traditionalism rather than the
advance of capitalism was a historical and political mistake. Rather, world capitalism
destroyed or transformed earlier social systems even as it came into existence,
converting them into sources of its own further development (Frank 1969a).
• For Frank, the economic, political, social, and cultural institutions of the
underdeveloped countries resulted from the penetration of capitalism rather than
being original or traditional
9. • Frank focused on the metropole–satellite (or center–periphery) relations he found
typical of Latin America.
• The underdevelopment of peripheral capitalist regions and people, he said, was
characterized by three contradictions:
- the contradiction of the monopolistic expropriation of economic surplus,
- the contradiction of metropolis–satellite polarization,
- and the contradiction of continuity in change.
- Frank drew on Marxist analyses of the class expropriation of surplus value, especially
Paul Baran’s (1960) version, that emphasized the potential surplus (accumulable
surplus value) that could be produced if excess consumption by the middle and upper
layers of society were eliminated and unproductive workers and the unemployed
were put to work.
- Frank argued that external monopoly resulted in the foreign expropriation, and thus
local unavailability, of a significant part of even the actual economic surplus produced
in Latin America. So, the region was actively underdeveloped (made less developed)
by not producing at its potential and losing its surplus (source of investment capital,
in Marxist theory) to Europe and North America.
- Using a case study of Chile, Frank (1969b: 7–8) described the pattern of surplus
movement as a massive, spatial expropriation system reaching into the most remote
corners of the region:
10. Chilean Economy
• The monopoly capitalist structure and the surplus expropriation/
appropriation contradiction run through the entire Chilean economy, past
and present.
• Indeed, it is this exploitative relation which in chain-like fashion extends
the link between the capitalist world and national metropolises to the
regional centers (part of whose surplus they appropriate), and from these
to local centers, and so on to large landowners or merchants who
expropriate surplus from small peasants or tenants, and sometimes even
from these latter to landless laborers exploited by them in turn.
• At each step along the way, the relatively few capitalists above exercise
monopoly power over the many below, expropriating some or all of their
economic surplus. . . . Thus at each point, the international, national, and
local capitalist system generates economic development for the few and
underdevelopment for the many.
11. • This idea of a chain of surplus transfer over space was further developed in Frank’s
second contradiction, whereby center and periphery become increasingly polarized
as capitalism developed the one and underdeveloped the other in a single historical
process. In this perspective, only a weaker, or lesser, degree of metropole–satellite
relations allowed for the possibility of surplus retention and local development.
These two contradictions suggested a third to Frank, namely, the
• continuity and ubiquity of structural underdevelopment throughout the expansion
of the capitalist system—that is, surplus was continually extracted from the
peripheral countries, in ever new forms, from the first days of the global capitalist
system to the present day.
• From this perspective, the “development of underdevelopment,” Frank generated
several more specific hypotheses that could be used in guiding development policy.
In contrast to the world metropolis, which was satellite to no other region, the
development of national and regional metropolises was limited by their dependent
status—
• For example, local metropoles such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, or Buenos Aires, Argentina,
could only achieve a dependent form of industrialization. Real development meant
separating from the global capitalist system in a more autonomous (wholly self-
reliant) economy. Similarly, in a hypothesis directly opposed to the finding of
modernization geography that development was spread through contract with the
metropolis
12. • Development was spread through contract with the metropolis, Frank hypothesized that the
satellites experienced their greatest development when ties to the metropolis were
weakest—historically during wars, geographically in terms of spatial isolation.
• In fact, for Frank, development could occur only when the links with global capitalism had
been broken.
• By extension, regions that had the closest ties to the metropole in the past were the most
underdeveloped in the present—Frank found this confirmed by what he called the “ultra-
underdevelopment” of the sugar-exporting region of north-eastern Brazil and the mining
regions of Bolivia.
• In summary, underdevelopment in Frank’s theory was not an original condition of Third World
societies.
• Nor did it result from archaic institutions surviving in isolated regions.
• Nor even did it stem from Third World irrationalism. Instead, underdevelopment was
generated by the development of the center.
• In particular, underdevelopment in the periphery resulted from the loss of surplus
expropriated for investment in the center’s development (Frank 1969b, 1979).
• Frank’s analysis (together with other work emanating from the Third World, constituting what
came to be known as dependency theory) pointed to the need for social revolution in
countries experiencing the development of underdevelopment.
• His article on “The Development of Underdevelopment” published in Monthly Review was
seen by the U.S. government as constituting a security threat, and he was sent a letter from
the U.S. attorney general telling him that he would not be allowed reentry into the United
States (Editors of Monthly Review 2005).
13. • An immediately evident weakness in Frank’s theory resided in its failure to
specify the exact economic mechanisms of surplus extraction.
• In some cases the mechanisms of surplus extraction are obvious—for
example, European, North American, or Japanese corporations owning land,
factories, and forests in Latin American countries could withdraw surplus as
rent or profits, or banks in New York or IFIs in Washington lending capital to
peripheral states could withdraw surplus as interest.
• But what if peasant producers owning their own land and producing cash
crops for export to center markets?
• Here the beginning of an answer was provided by Arghiri Emmanuel in the
“theory of unequal exchange.”
• Like the ECLA economists, Emmanuel argued against classical (Ricardian)
trade theory, which claimed the international division of labor and the
comparative advantage system of trade brought advantages to all
participants.
• Specifically, Emmanuel argued that trade made poor countries poorer and
rich countries richer.
14. • Emmanuel assumed the perfect international mobility of capital but also the immobility
of labor among countries—hence, wage rates persistently differed greatly among regions.
• Peripheral countries exported agricultural products, which entailed large quantities of
cheap rural labor, while importing industrial products, which entail small amounts of
expensive urban labor.
• This set of circumstances caused the terms of trade to favor the higher-cost products of the
center while devaluing the lower-cost exports of the periphery.
• Peripheral countries were prevented from achieving development because they sold their
goods at prices below their values (the socially necessary labor embedded in the products),
while rich countries sold goods at prices above their values.
• For Emmanuel, unequal exchange (through trade) was a hidden mechanism of surplus
extraction and a major cause of the economic stagnation in the periphery.
• Samir Amin (1976: 143–144) estimated the amount of surplus transferred from poor to
rich countries via unequal exchange to be 1.5% of the product of the rich countries but
15% of the product of the poor countries, an amount he found “sufficient to account for
the blocking of the growth of the periphery.”
• From the perspective of the dependency theorists, the peripheral countries have borrowed
back their own surplus from the rich countries to finance “development schemes.”
• The geopolitical implications of this finding are significant, namely, that Third World
countries should be “forgiven” their debts because First World countries already owe them
the money.
• Or, pushing this interpretation further, it is the First World countries that should be seeking
forgiveness!
15. • There were other, more serious, criticisms of Frank.
• The Brazilian economist Fernando Cardoso (1982) found Frank’s notion of the
development of underdevelopment to be a neat play on words but not very helpful in
concrete terms.
• In Latin America, he maintained, multinational corporations invested in modern
industrialization while supposedly traditional sectors (agriculture, mining) operated in
technically and organizationally sophisticated ways, and both were parts of an advanced
yet dependent form of capitalist development.
• However, he added, in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico spatial and sectoral
dualism emerged, composed of both advanced economies tied to the international
capitalist system and backward sectors, characterized as “internal colonies.”
• Multinational corporations were interested in at least some prosperity for dependent
countries because of the markets these countries could provide.
• But the Latin American countries remained heavily dependent for technology on the
United States.
• In contrast to Frank’s universalism, Cardoso wanted to look at specific situations in
particular parts of the Third World where development and dependence could be found
in tandem.
16. • On becoming president of Brazil in 1995, Cardoso had the government adopt a
neoliberal development posture that could be seen to reflect his criticisms of
“dependency.”
• Dependency theory was holistic in that it attempted to place a country into the
larger (global) system.
• In its simple form, it stressed the external causes of underdevelopment rather
than causes internal to a peripheral society.
• Emphasis was placed on economic rather than social or cultural interactions.
• In Frank’s version the accent was on regions, spaces, and flows (“circulation”)
rather than class.
• For most theorists dependency and underdevelopment were synonymous,
although Cardoso, for example, thought that at least dependent forms of capitalist
development could be achieved.
• Finally, dependency theory was politically radical, with most adherents
proclaiming the need for some kind of socialist revolution, although a purely
nationalist politics (merely altering a peripheral country’s relations with the world
capitalist system) could also emerge from the more spatial versions of the
dependency perspective.
17. World-Systems Theory
• World-systems theory has obvious affinities with the dependency school in its interest in centers
and peripheries.
• But it had antecedents too in a theory of history named after Annales: Economies, Societies,
Civilisations, a journal founded in 1929 by French historians Lucian Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc
Bloch (1886–1954).
• Dissatisfied with conventional history for being too isolated and unrealistic, the Annales school
sought to remake the discipline by employing a comparative method that took in long periods of
time, focusing on the specific differences and similarities among the societies then existing.
• The French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), who believed that genre de vie (way
of life) mediated between people and nature in determining which of nature’s possibilities came
to be realized (through “environmental possibilism”), allied himself with a school of historical
thought that privileged the geographic component in its regional histories, geo-histories, and
studies of transportation.
• The main themes of the Annales school were social history, especially of the material conditions
of working people; structural factors or relative constants; the long term is the appropriate time
frame for analysis in the social sciences; and, while this was not a Marxist (modes of production)
school of thought, a strong interest in how the economy, society, and civilization interact.
• Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the most famous of the school’s second-generation scholars, was
particularly interested in structural limitations on material and economic life, the great “slope of
historical change” (those lasting centuries), regional histories, and the sudden breakup of ancient
ways of life in the 19th century (Braudel 1972, 1973).
18. • This view was found to be suited to the study of the long term history of the people of the
Third World and the sudden changes thrust on them by contact with the First World.
• A more obvious connection with development theory was forged by the sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–), an English-speaking representative of the Annales school.
Wallerstein (1979) retained the broad spatial reach and long historical time span of Annales
scholarship by treating world history as the development of a single system.
• By “system,” Wallerstein meant a geographic entity with a single division of labor that made
all sectors or areas dependent on the others via interchanges of essential goods.
• The historical past was characterized by mini systems, spatially small societies, each with a
complete division of labor and a single cultural framework, as in early agricultural, or
hunting and gathering, societies.
• But the recent integration of the last mini systems, such as the hill tribes of Papua New
Guinea or the bushmen of the Kalahari, into the capitalist world system meant that small
systems no longer existed.
• World systems characterized by a single division of labor—yet, multicultural systems—had
long been dominant, in Wallerstein’s view.
19. • The outstanding example, for Wallerstein, is the capitalist world economy, in which
production is for profit and products are made to be sold on the market.
• In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as profits can be made, and
producers innovate to expand the profit margin—hence, the secret of capitalist success is
the pursuit of profits.
• In the past, world economies held together by strong states tended to become world
empires, as with China, Egypt, or Rome.
• Surplus was extracted from peasants by political coercion (state force).
• These politically dominated systems, Wallerstein thought, tended to become unstable
because states (governments) ran everything. With the rise of capitalism, by contrast,
power passed to the private owners of means of production and to the market, with the
state guaranteeing the political conditions for capital accumulation.
• The capitalist worlde economy resisted various attempts to create world empires (e.g., by
Britain and the United States) and capitalism (organized economically through markets)
has therefore proven to be a lasting way of regulating and coordinating global production
(Wallerstein 1979, 1980, 1988).
• Within the world system there are, for Wallerstein, three main economic zones: core,
semi-periphery, and periphery. Countries making up the core have efficient, complex
production systems and high levels of capital accumulation.
20. • Core states are administratively well organized and militarily powerful, while
peripheral countries have the opposite characteristics.
• The semi-periphery combines elements of both.
• World systems theory saw spatial relations among zones as exploitative, that is,
involving the flow of surplus from periphery to core, as in dependency theory.
• For world systems theory most of the surplus, accumulated as capital in the core,
is derived from local sources (the exploitation of local workers).
• But adding peripheral surplus reduces the level of class and interstate conflict in
the core (Chase-Dunn 1989).
• For the periphery, loss of surplus means that capital needed for modernization is
not available.
• In the periphery, the system of intense labour exploitation at low wage levels
shapes class relations and fosters political conflict.
• Semi-peripheral states function to prevent political polarization in the world
system while collecting surplus for transmission to the core (Shannon 1989: ch. 2).
21. • For Wallerstein, the capitalist world economy originated in 16th-century Europe
during an era of increased agricultural production for growing urban markets.
• At the ultimate core of the developing world capitalist economy, in England, the
Netherlands, and northern France, a combination of pastoral and arable production
required high skill levels and favored free agricultural labor (yeoman farmers).
• The periphery of this early world system—eastern Europe and increasingly the
Americas—specialized in grains, cotton, and sugar, together with bullion from
mines, all activities favoring the use of coerced labor (either a kind of serfdom that
Wallerstein calls “coerced cash crop labor” in eastern Europe or slavery in the
Americas).
• In between lay a variety of transitional regions, mainly former cores degenerating
toward peripheral status, making high-cost industrial products, giving credit,
dealing in specie, and using sharecropping in the agricultural arena (e.g., northern
Italy).
• Whereas the interests of capitalist landowners and merchants coincided in the
development of the absolute monarch and a strong central state apparatus in the
core, ruling class interests diverged sharply in the periphery, leading to weak states.
• Unequal exchange in commerce was imposed by the strong core on the weak
peripheries, and the surplus of the world economy was thereby appropriated by
the core (Wallerstein 1974, chs. 2 and 3).
22. • From this geo-sociological perspective, Wallerstein outlined the main
stages in the history of the world capitalist economy as follows:
1. The European World economy emerged during the extended16th
century (say, 1450–1640). The crisis of feudalism posed a series of
dilemmas that could only be resolved through geographic expansion of
the division of labor. By the end of the period, northwest Europe had
established itself as core, Spain and the northern Italian cities declined
into the semi-periphery, and northern Europe and Iberian America
were the main peripheries of the developing world system.
23. 2. Mercantilist struggle during the recessionary period of 1650– 1730 left England
as the only surviving core state.
3. Industrial production and the demand for raw materials increased rapidly after
1760, leading to geographic expansion of frontiers in what now became truly a
world system under British hegemony. Russia, previously an important external
system, was incorporated into the semi-periphery, while the remaining areas of
Latin America as well as Asia and Africa were absorbed into the periphery. This
expansion enabled some former areas of the periphery (the United States and
Germany) to become at first semi-peripheral, and then eventually core, states.
The core exchanged manufactured goods with the periphery’s agricultural
products. The concentrated mass of industry created an urban proletariat that
became an internal threat to the stability of the core of the capitalist system—with
the industrial bourgeoisie eventually having to “buy off” this threat with higher
wages. This development also solved the problem of what to do with the
burgeoning output from the new manufacturing industries .
24. 4. World War I marked the beginning of a new stage characterized by revolutionary turmoil
(the Russian Revolution ended that country’s further decline toward peripheral status) and
the consolidation of the capitalist world economy under the hegemony of the United
States instead of Britain.
• After World War II, the urgent need was expanded markets, met by reconstructing
western Europe, reserving Latin America for U.S. investment, and decolonizing southern
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
• Since the late 1960s, a decline in U.S. political hegemony has increased the freedom of
action of capitalist enterprises, now taking the form of multinational corporations.
• The world system thus has structural-spatial parts (center, semiperiphery, periphery)
that evolve through stages of alternating expansion and contraction. Within such a
framework, Wallerstein argued, comparative analyses of both the whole system and the
development of its regional parts can be accomplished.
• World systems theory thus places regional development dynamics in a wider global
context.
25. • Updating this perspective to contemporary times, Christopher Chase-Dunn and
Bruce Lerro, in Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present
(2013) re-examine world history in terms of, first, hunter-gatherers, and then
horticulturalists, agricultural states, and industrial capitalist societies in turn
forming, flourishing, and finally declining, with the authors drawing their
evidence largely from archeology, ethnography, linguistics, historical documents,
statistics, and survey research in striving for a complete global synthesis.
• While the world-systems perspective originated primarily in sociology, it soon
spread to such other social science disciplines as political science, history,
geography, anthropology, and archaeology.
• During the early 1970s, conventional social, political, and economic science
viewed the “wealth of nations” as reflecting mainly the cultural
accomplishments of the leading First World nations (as with the modernization
of western Europe).
• But a rapidly growing group of social scientists recognized that national
“development” could only be understood contextually in relation to the outcomes
of local interactions with an aggressively expanding European-centered “world”
economy.
26. - Over the past 500 years, the people of the world had become linked into
one integrated unit, the modern “world system,” even though earlier there
had been smaller inter-societal networks that had existed for millennia.
- According to world-systems theorist Chase-Dunn: The modern world-
system is understood as a set of nested and overlapping interaction
networks that link all units of social analysis—individuals, households,
neighborhoods, firms, towns and cities, classes and regions, national states
and societies, transnational actors, international regions, and global
structures.
- The world-system is all of the economic, political, social, and cultural
relations among the people of the earth. Thus, the world-system is not just
“international relations” or the “world market.” It is the whole interactive
system, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
- All boundaries are socially structured and socially reproduced, as are the
identities of individuals, ethnic groups, and nations. . . . For any particular
group it is the whole nested network with which it is interconnected that
constitutes its “world-system.”
27. • Systemic interaction is routinized so that the connected actors come
to depend, and to form expectations, based on the connections.
• Basically, present-day world-systems theory may be summarized as
follows. The current world-system is characterized by a power
hierarchy in which powerful and wealthy “core” societies dominate
and exploit weak and poor “peripheral” societies.
• In the current system, the so-called advanced or developed countries
constitute the core, while the “less developed” countries are in the
periphery. Rather than developing along the same paths taken by
core countries during earlier periods (an assumption of
modernization theory), today’s peripheral countries are instead
structurally constrained to experience developmental processes that
reproduce their subordinate status.
28. • It is the whole system that develops, not simply the national societies that are its parts.
• Core and peripheral countries generally retain their positions relative to one another over
time, although there are individual cases of upward and downward mobility in the core–
periphery hierarchy.
• Between core and the periphery is an intermediate layer of countries referred to as the
“semi-periphery,” combining features of both, located in intermediate or mediating positions
in larger interaction networks (Chase-Dunn and Grimes 1995: 389).
• World-systems theory sees spatial relations among zones as exploitative, involving the flow
of surplus from periphery to core (as in dependency theory).
• For world-systems theory most of the surplus, accumulated as capital in the core, comes
from local sources through the exploitation of local workers.
• But adding peripheral surplus reduces the level of class and interstate conflict in the core
countries (Chase-Dunn 1989). For the periphery, the loss of surplus means that capital
needed for modernization is never available.
• In the periphery, the system of intense labor exploitation at low wage levels shapes class
relations and fosters political conflict. Semiperipheral states function to prevent political
polarization in the world system while collecting surplus for transmission to the core
(Shannon 1989: ch. 2).