Some five decades after its heyday, dependency theory is undergoing a surprising revival. The literature now available in English is way more diverse and deeper than it used to be just a decade ago. With a few honourable exceptions, until very recently teachers of dependency in Global North universities would largely rely on Andre Gunder Frank's classical texts of the 1960s or inaccurate summaries and encyclopaedia entries from authors with little knowledge of the vast Latin American dependency school, not to mention little patience for its nuances. Claudio Katz's newly translated book, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years, is first and foremost a great resource to teach dependency theory, offering a very valuable contribution to the current dependency revival.
The last decade saw the emergence or re-emergence of three distinct but deeply related streams of dependency scholarship. First, classical texts, in particular the Dialectics of Dependency, by Ruy Mauro Marini, were finally translated into English (Monthly Review Press, 2022). Relatedly, Latin American authors closely connected to the older generation of dependentistas, such as Carlos Eduardo Martins, Jaime Osório and Adrián Sotelo Valencia, also had some important works translated. Second, a new generation of authors – including Ingrid Kvangraven, Martín Arboleda, Mariano Féliz, Joana Salém Vasconcellos, Aldo Madariaga, Stefano Palestini, Sebastián Baeza-Gozáles and several others – began revisiting, expanding and re-signifying dependency concepts and ideas to tackle contemporary issues or intervene in contemporary debates.
Katz's book is part of a third strain of dependency literature, which in a way can act as a bridge between the previous two. Dependency Theory after Fifty Years is a comprehensive stock-taking of classical dependency theory, with particular emphasis on Marxist authors. The book thus belongs on the same shelf as Cristóbal Kay's landmark Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (Routledge, 1989), and Margarita Fajardo's more recent The World Latin America Created (Harvard University Press, 2022). It also largely overlaps with Cláudia Wasserman's A teoria da dependência: Do nacional-desenvolvimentismo ao neoliberalismo (FGV Editora, 2017), unfortunately still unavailable in English. All these books have in common the ambition to situate dependency ideas in their historical and intellectual context while engaging critically with them and explaining them to a larger audience. They form, therefore, a growing historiography of dependency ideas, giving substance to the claim widely repeated by the new generation of dependentistas that dependency theory is not a unified theory, but actually a diverse school of thought.
Within that historiography, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years stands out for a few distinctive features. First, Katz's clear, direct and accessible style of writing, based on very short, one- or two-page subsections, makes this book particularly useful as an introduction to dependency theory. Whereas it lacks the richer historical texture of Fajardo's The World Latin America Created, it does a great job of summarising and presenting key ideas and debates to new readers. Katz avoids common mistakes often seen in introductions to dependency theory written by non-specialists, such as confusing dependency theory and Latin American developmentalism, or presenting Fernando Henrique Cardoso's ideas as a progressive evolution of dependency debates. Furthermore, the book is also the first one in the English language to explore in any depth the work of Agustín Cueva, one of the early dependency authors, whose contribution is today all but forgotten, particularly outside Latin America.
The deep dive into the concepts of ‘sub-imperialism’ and ‘super-exploitation’ in Chapters 9–11 and the reflections about dependency theory and Marxist theory of value in Chapter 14 are the most theoretically sophisticated parts of the book, potentially sparking debates with other readings of Marini's seminal ideas. Beyond offering comprehensive definitions of these concepts, Katz dares to update them and apply them to contemporary geopolitical situations, tackling, for instance, the question about the putative sub-imperialist character of contemporary Brazilian capitalism (p. 174). The reconceptualisation of super-exploitation as the relatively lower remuneration of labour power in the global periphery (p. 197) is certainly controversial but has the merit of reviving a very fecund debate.
Dependency Theory after Fifty Years is, therefore, at once an accessible introduction and a sophisticated original reading of classical dependency theory. At times, however, these two aspects of the book coexist with some tension. For instance, Part 1 and Part 2 work better as an introduction to Marxism, dependency theory and surrounding ideas. The relationship between dependency theory and Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development is mentioned but not explored in any historical or theoretical depth and remains a big blind spot in the dependency theory historiography more generally. The fundamental absence in the book, however, is any engagement with the newer generation of dependency authors and key contemporary concerns such as extractivism, ecological destruction, patriarchal oppression, racialisation and coloniality. Although the book was originally published in Spanish in 2018 and the author is not really part of the first generation of dependentistas, he is somewhat closer to them than to contemporary dependentistas, who are generally more interested in taking inspiration from dependency ideas to intervene in the contemporary world than in the exegesis of classical dependency works. From this perspective, the book's title is quite accurate. Indeed, Katz does a stellar critical stock-taking of the first 50 years of dependency theory, sometimes even attempting some historical updating. Nevertheless, if readers are looking for insights to intervene in contemporary academic and political debates and for potential clashes, complementarities and overlaps between dependency theory and other contemporary theoretical perspectives, they will need to complement this book with some additional readings from contemporary authors.
In summary, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years is a mandatory book in any dependency theory collection and a very welcome teaching resource. With this translation, Katz offers to an English-reading audience a good taste of some of the highly sophisticated and original debates emerging from Marxist dependency theory. From now on, boring, repetitive or inaccurate dependency syllabi can no longer be blamed on the lack of literature in English.
