[Marxism] Robert Brenner versus the dependency theorists

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ten years after Monthly Review published André Gunder Frank's 
"Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America", Robert Brenner 
wrote an article in the July-August 1977 New Left Review that took 
aim at the "dependency school" associated with Paul Sweezy, Paul 
Baran, Samir Amin and André Gunder Frank. All of these authors were 
readily identifiable with Monthly Review, but Brenner attacked 
Immanuel Wallerstein as well, who was seen much more as a "world 
systems" theorist than a dependency theorist. Whatever differences 
existed between the dependency and world systems theories, they were 
united in their belief that capitalism was responsible for the 
development of underdevelopment in the 3rd world.

The proximate cause of Brenner's article was to refute Paul Sweezy's 
analysis of the origins of capitalism. In the 1950s, Sweezy debated 
Maurice Dobb in the pages of Science and Society over the "transition 
to capitalism question". In "Studies in the Development of 
Capitalism" Dobb put forward the argument that capitalism developed 
through a combination of changes in the British countryside 
(enclosure acts, etc.) and colonialism in the New World. Strongly 
influenced by the historian Henri Pirenne, Sweezy took the position 
that a revival of trade with Asia was primarily responsible. Sweezy's 
analysis influenced A.G. Frank as will be evident in Brenner's polemics below.

Brenner adopted Dobb's basic thesis but dropped the part about 
colonialism. Indeed, he was so emphatic about capitalism originating 
in the British countryside that he was positively hostile to any 
analysis that looked to "primitive accumulation" in the New World. In 
other words, he found the analysis of Baran and Frank that I have 
posted here over the past month or so to be outside of Marxism 
insofar as they supposedly put the struggle between nations over that 
of the class struggle. Basically, Brenner was arguing from the 
standpoint of classical Marxism against "Third Worldist" 
deviations-at least that is the way he saw it.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/robert-brenner-versus-the-depency-theorists/


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