History of Dependency Theory is recalled in book

‘A teoria da dependência: do nacional-desenvolvimentismo ao neoliberalismo’ [Dependency theory: from national-developmentalism to neoliberalism], by historian Claudia Wasserman, narrates the trajectories of Ruy Mauro Marini, Vânia Bambirra, Theotônio dos Santos, and André Gunder Frank, revealing the mishaps of intellectuals who in the 1960s discussed the urgency of the Brazilian Revolution, were persecuted by the military dictatorship and exiled, and ultimately returned to Brazil looking for the marks of the past and struggling to re-integrate into a newly democratized society.

At a time when the Brazilian left lives another one of its recurring moments of defeat, this book, published by FGV Press, tells the story of a group of left-wing thinkers known as the Brasília Group, as the radical left of the Dependency Theory, as neo-Marxists, and as Trotskyists. They had their formulations about Brazilian society and Latin American societies, their readings of the particularities of the insertion of these spaces in the capitalist system, of the particular character that the class struggle had in those spaces marked by the colonial inheritance, slavery, and the subordination to the central metropolises of capitalism. Therefore, of the specific character that would be taken up by process of transition to socialism, the specificity of the Brazilian and Latin American Revolutions, made unfeasible by the history of economic and social-political ideas in Brazil.

The story of defeat told in this work is one of oblivion, addressing clashes in the intellectual and political arenas, and showing how knowledge cannot be separated from power relations, as a given group of thinkers had its production delegitimized, disqualified, so that its books are barely published or known, as their opponents won the dispute in the plane of ideas, among other reasons, due to occupying prominent positions of power both in the cultural and academic fields and in the political world.

Go to the FGV Press website for more information, in Portuguese, on the book.