From the National-Bourgeoisie to the Dependency Interpretation of Latin America

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s Latin America experienced a series of modernizing military coups and the shift of its intellectuals from a nationalist to an associated-dependency interpretation of their societies and economies. In the 1950s two groups of public intellectuals, organized around the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Santiago, Chile, and the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had pioneered thinking about Latin American societies and economies (including Brazil’s) from a nationalist standpoint. The idea of a national bourgeoisie was key to this interpretation. The Cuban Revolution, the economic crisis of the 1960s, and the military coups in the Southern Cone, however, opened the way for criticism of these ideas from a new perspective—that of dependency. By rejecting the possibility of a national bourgeoisie, two versions of the dependency interpretation (the “associated” and the “overexploitation”) also rejected the possibility of a national-development strategy. Only a third version, the “national-dependent” interpretation, asserted the need for and the possibility of a national bourgeoisie and a national strategy. Yet, it was the associated-dependency interpretation that was dominant in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and this may explain the subordination of Latin America to the Washington consensus since the late 1980s and the ensuing low rates of growth.