Andre Gunder Frank

The Development of Underdevelopment

We cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the majority of the worlds population who suffer from underdevelopment without first learning how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present underdevelopment. Yet most historians study only the developed metropolitan countries and pay scant attention to the colonial and underdeveloped lands. For this reason most of our theoretical categories and guides to development policy have been distilled exclusively from the historical experience of the European and North American advanced capitalist nations.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Ten theses on social movements

Abstract Social movements (SM) mobilize social power appealing to morality, justice, survival and identity. Most “new” SM are not new, but have new features, particularly more womens participation. They are cyclical and related to long political economic cycles. SM are mostly middle class in the West, popular/working class in the South, and both in the East. Some SM compete or conflict; others overlap in membership or permit coalitions. Most SM seek more autonomy and not state power, which tends to negate them. Most SM are more defensive and temporary than offensive. But they are important agents of social transformation, because their praxis reinterprets participatory democracy in civil society and “transition to socialism.” Since SM create their own scripts en route, standard outside prescriptions seem inappropriate.

Transforming the revolution : social movements and the world-system

In this successor volume to the widely read Dynamics of Global Crisis, the authors engage in a provocative discussion of the history and contemporary dilemmas facing the movements that are variously described as antisystemic, social, or popular. The authors believe that these movements, which have for the past 150 years protested and organized against the multiple injustices of the existing system, are the key locus of social transformation.

Bronze Age World System Cycles [and Comments and Reply]

This essay explores the geographical extent of the world system and dates its cyclical ups and downs during the Bronze Age and, in a preliminary way, the early Iron Age. The scope of these twin tasks is exceptionally wide and deep: wide in exploring a single world system that encompasses much of Afro-Eurasia, deep in identifying systemwide conomic and political cycles since more than 5,000 years ago.

Dependence Is Dead, Long Live Dependence and the Class Struggle: An Answer to Critics

The mark of an important contribution, whether in the natural or the social sciences, is not that it reveals some eternal truth. It is, rather, that existing knowledge and analysis are put together in new ways, raising questions and offering conclusions which allow and force friends and enemies alike to push their own research and analysis into different areas. -Doug Dowd, referring to C. ivright Mills.

No escape from the laws of world economics

The artificial division of the world into ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ does not correspond to the reality of contemporary world development; the real struggle is between the US, the EC and Japan, as the world is becoming increasingly divided into three or more blocs. But nothing can ensure independence from the process of world economic development and history: neither ‘policy’ nor ‘ideology’. For all regimes, democratic and non‐democratic alike, it is dependence within the global system which establishes the framework for policy and political practice. Even the ‘choice of the people’ is determined by economics. The development of political social democracy in the West has been much less the cause than the consequence of success within the capitalist world‐economy. As long as the debt burden continues and mounts, the debt‐ridden economies of the South will suffer and their democratic development be prevented or threatened. The same is valid for Eastern Europes new or aspiring democracies. But freedom of ...

Latin American development theories revisited: A participant review essay

Bjorn Hettne, Development Theory and the Three Worlds. London: Longman; New York: John Wiley, 1990. Pp.296. Diana Hunt, Economic Theories of Development: An Analysis of Competing Paradigms. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989. Pp.363. Cristobal Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelop‐ment. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Pp.294. Jorge Larrain, Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency. Oxford: Polity Press 1989. Pp.252. David Lehmann, Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post‐war Period. London: Polity Press, 1990. Pp.234.

Nine Theses On Social Movements

2. Social movements display much variety and changeability, but have in common individual mobilization through a sense of morality and (in)justice and social power through social mobilization against deprivation and for survivial and identity; 3. The strength and importance of social movements is cyclical and related to long political-economic and (perhaps associated) ideological cycles. When the conditions that give rise to the movements change (through the action of the movements themselves and/or more usually due to changing circumstances), the movements tend to disappear;

The Development of Underdevelopment: A Reprint

We cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the majority of the worlds population who suffer from underdevelopment without first learning how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present underdevelopment. Yet most historians study only the developed metropolitan countries and pay scant attention to the colonial and underdeveloped lands. For this reason most of our theoretical categories and guides to development policy have been distilled exclusively from the historical experience of the European and North American advanced capitalist nations.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Multilateral Merchandise Trade Imbalances and Uneven Economic Development

Contrary to orthodox international trade and national development theory, the uneven development of world capitalism was not accompanied by balanced trade (or growth) but rested in fact on a fundamental imbalance of international trade between the developing metropolis and the underdeveloping, colonialised, countries. Except for the years of worst depression in the metropolis, the latter had a constant but growing trade deficit and the underdeveloped countries a trade surplus during the classical imperialist period of world capitalist development at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The almost exclusive theoretical and empirical interest in the balance of payments, and obsession with the mechanisms that make it balance, has cast a ‘veil of money’ over the underlying merchandise imbalance of trade whose role, which we believe is fundamental in the process of uneven capitalist development and underdevelopment, has remained all but unperceived. (For this reason also the following discussion can be no more than the preliminary formulation of research hypotheses that demand empirical investigation and theoretical reformulation.)