André Gunder Frank: A (Neo) Marxist Critique of Brazilian Developmentalists

Abstract

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, various currents of Brazilian social thought clashed in a struggle for cultural and political hegemony over how the process of development and industrialization should be carried out in a country like Brazil, which was still predominantly agricultural. Among these currents, ECLAC and liberalism played a decisive role. On the contrary, Marxist currents remained on the margins of this debate, especially after the 1964 coup d’état. This article seeks to revive the Marxist tradition and the critiques of the “developmentalists” in the analysis carried out by André Gunder Frank on the nature of incipient Brazilian capitalism and its dependent and peripheral nature, attributing the main reasons for these two characteristics to preferential relations with US capital and a lack of a social structural classes analysis.