Dependency Theory in the Academic Self-Reports of the Brasília Group

Views of the 1964 Coup

The three intellectuals in this retrospective logic said that they had not been surprised by the military coup. According to Bambirra (1991: 21), “In mid-March 1964, I gave an ‘open class’ (which in Universidade de Brasília terminology meant a conference) for an extension course. In it, I strictly foresaw what was to come. Who would not have predicted it?” Dos Santos (1994: 24) tells us that after the coup he made a study of Brazil’s cyclical crises and found it predictable in those terms:

Thus, I placed the political process of 1961–1964 within the analysis of the capitalist accumulation process, of the social struggles rooted in it and of the perspectives and solutions proposed by the various social classes as a solution to the great crisis that was under way. This “great crisis” combined a crisis of a cyclical nature with another of a structural nature to produce a revolutionary situation. It also showed that the political alternative represented by the 1964 coup d’état was founded, above all, on the hegemony of big international capital over the Brazilian economy and that this hegemony took the form of repression, terror, and the physical, moral, and psychological elimination of the adversary in a context like that which led Germany, for example, to Nazism and Italy to fascism.

Another detail that is inescapable in the reports is their original interpretation of the coup. Dos Santos (1994: 24, 29), for example, makes a point of announcing that his analysis of the coup was quite different from the current ones. For him it was socialism and not the democratic transition that was the only viable alternative to fascism, and recognition of that “redirected Latin American social thought to a completely different theme from the one that prevailed until 1964–1966.” Marini (1990: 8) also insisted on listing all the respects in which he differed from contemporary intellectual positions:

Current interpretations of the 1964 coup, in addition to considering it more than a simple military intervention, presented it essentially as a result of the American intervention, a foreign body, in a way—or, as Leonel Brizola had said, a bolt out of the blue—to the internal logic of Brazilian life. My point of view was radically opposite: the action of the United States in Brazil had to be understood not as alien to the national reality but as a constitutive element of it and one that could only become effective (and, therefore, explained) in the light of the class struggle in the country, which had its roots in the economy and determined the political game—and of which the armed forces were fully a part.

The militancy of these intellectuals in the Marxist Política Operária (Revolutionary Organization for Workers’ Politics—POLOP) was decisive in sustaining these interpretations. According to Kameyama (2010: 13), the organization characterized the revolution in Brazil as socialist and

did not accept the premise that the first objective of the proletarian struggle was the formation of a “democratic nationalist” government. The Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party—PCB), on the other hand, defended the constitution of nationalist bourgeois governments as a result of its vision of the revolution in two stages. Likewise, the PCB rejected proposals to fight for a “popular government” along the lines of the positions of the Partido Comunista do Brasil (Communist Party of Brazil—PCdoB).

In this line of argument and criticism of the left-wing parties at the time, the POLOP documents rejected the existence of feudal residues and the supposed reformist intentions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and insisted on popular radicalization, which, in their view, was hampered by the left’s embrace of populism (see Sachs, 2010 [1960]). Marini’s militancy in the Chilean Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement—MIR) ⁶ emphasized the same expectations of a socialist revolution, rejecting the theory of stages.

Thus, in the 1990s, when Brazil was breathing the air of the 1988 democratic and citizens’ constitution, our three intellectuals emphasized their adherence to socialism, rejected the reformist stage, and stressed the idea that they had interpreted the 1964 coup differently from most Brazilian intellectuals.

Exile

When the 1964 coup occurred, Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra, among other University of Brasília professors, were dismissed and persecuted, and their names were added to a list of people wanted for subversion. Exile was one of the alternatives for Brazilian intellectuals to escape repression. Marini went into exile in 1965 after being arrested and tortured, and he described his journey to Mexico as follows (Marini, 1990: 7):

My stay in Brasilia was cut short by the 1964 coup. At that time, I was in Rio, where—knowing that I was wanted in Brasilia—I remained, which did not prevent my being summarily fired, with 12 other teachers, in the first measure taken by the dictatorship against the university. After escaping being arrested in May, in July I finally fell into the hands of CENIMAR [Navy Information Center]. In September, I benefited from habeas corpus from the STF [Supreme Court] (which military justice had previously denied). I was kidnapped by the navy and handed over to the army in Brasília because of another process that was under way there. I repeated the military justice–STF route and obtained, in December, a new habeas corpus, which this time was accepted, although only for a short time: had I not left the city, discreetly, hours after my release, I would have been arrested again. After a period of almost three months of hiding, when the police-military pressure on my comrades and my family increased to the point of forcing one of my brothers to go underground as well, I applied for asylum at the embassy of Mexico in Rio and traveled to that country a month later.

Bambirra and Dos Santos remained clandestine in Brazil until 1966, when they went into exile in Chile. According to Dos Santos (1994: 3),

In April 1964, I was summarily dismissed from the University of Brasilia, which led me to two years of hiding, spent in São Paulo, as national director of POLOP. In 1966 I was found guilty by the military court in Juiz de Fora as an “intellectual mentor of subversive penetration into the countryside.” For such a stupid crime I was sentenced to 15 years in prison. As a result, I was forced to seek exile in Chile.

Bambirra (1991: 21) described her first exile as follows:

After the coup was over, I returned to my office, in the Minhocão, the building where I worked. It was sad, in the literal sense of the word. The entire contents of my bookshelves and files . . . were spread out on the floor, with obvious marks of mud-soaked boots. The desk drawers, naked—not even the ballpoint pens and a necklace I had left there remained—finally, a chaos that warned us: “Don’t come back!” So, I left, but before that I passed through my classroom and read the “Declaration of Human Rights” to my students. It was a very sad farewell. The personal consequence of 1964 was our clandestine trip to São Paulo, where we stayed until 1966. We left there for exile in Chile.

In exile the three Brazilians adapted to new academic standards and obtained professional recognition. They created new networks of contacts and reinforced the ties among themselves. They continued to participate in leftist organizations and to develop their intellectual production, ⁷ especially their critique of developmentalism. However, the experience of exile also brought unpleasantness. In May 1968 Marini, who was already a renowned professor and researcher in Mexico, wrote an article for the Mexican newspaper El Día in which he praised the resistance to the dictatorship led by the Brazilian student movement. His article focused on the protests of organizations such as the dirétorios acadêmicos, the state student unions, and the national student union: “In May, enthusiastic about the actions of the Brazilian student movement, I wrote a full-page article in which I analyzed their motivations and programmatic definitions, their dynamics, and their combat tactics” (Marini, 1990: 13). For reasons that were never clarified, the article was published only in August, when the Mexican student movement had become particularly problematic for Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s regime. After October 1968, the events of Tlatelolco, added to the article he had published in August and some conferences he organized on the student movement, made Marini’s political situation in Mexico unsustainable. He was threatened by the undersecretary of government, in charge of controlling political asylum seekers, and practically invited to leave the country. In early 1969, the secretary of government who had ordered the Plaza de las Tres Culturas massacre, Luís Echeverría, was elected president of Mexico, and this hastened Marini’s decision to leave Mexico for Santiago de Chile. According to his memoir (Marini, 1990: 13–14), his attempts to remain in Mexico by negotiating with the authorities were futile; the episode interfered with his work at the Colegio de México and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where the authorities recommended that their administration prevent him from having contact with students. His request for authorization to leave the country for France was denied because of an agreement with the Brazilian dictatorship that prevented his relocation to an exile center. Although Chile was also in this situation, the intervention of Dos Santos and Bambirra resulted in his being allowed to go into a second exile there. He comments on the beginning of the Chilean exile as follows: “My entry into Chilean territory was made with some difficulty, circumvented by pressure from friends who were waiting for me—in particular Theotônio dos Santos and Vânia Bambirra—together with the intervention of politicians such as Senator Salvador Allende and the Universidad de Concepción and its student union” (Marini, 1990: 16).

In Chile Marini obtained a research and teaching job at the Instituto Central de Sociología of the Universidad de Concepción, where he received a fraternal welcome from other exiles and from the Federation of University Students, which had interceded in his favor. Located just over 500 kilometers south of the capital, Concepción was an industrial city with a strong working-class tradition and was the birthplace of the Chilean Communist Party. It was in this region, which was in turmoil because of the workers’ movements, that the Chilean MIR emerged in 1965. ⁸ In the late 1970s Marini accepted an invitation from the Centro de Estudios Socio-Económicos (Center for Socioeconomic Studies—CESO) of the Universidad de Chile and moved to Santiago. Regarding his reception there he says that the Popular Unity victory had drained the Chilean universities of the best cadres on the left, taking advantage of them for public administration, and allowed the absorption of younger staff and foreigners in exile or attracted by the originality of the political process (Marini, 1990: 18–19):

The CESO was, at the time, one of the main intellectual centers in Latin America. The majority of Latin American, European, and North American intellectuals, mainly from the left, passed through it, participating through lectures, conferences, roundtables, and seminars. . . . The political moment that the country was experiencing, which had made Santiago a world center of attention and pilgrimage of intellectuals and politicians, did the rest, in addition to encouraging the development of other academic bodies.

After the September 11, 1973, coup in Chile, the group was forced into a new exile, this time in Mexico. Dos Santos spent almost six months in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago until he obtained a safe-conduct to leave the country. The long stay at the embassy and the refusal of the Chilean dictatorship to grant him an exit visa even though he was Brazilian were explained by his being on a list of 10 people most wanted by the junta that had been installed on September 11 (Rollemberg, 1999: 178). ⁹ The Panamanian embassy in Chile became so crowded that the house that Dos Santos and Bambirra had bought to live in was transformed into an expanded embassy headquarters. This house was expropriated by the dictatorship in August 1974 and turned into a torture center for the National Intelligence Agency. Since 2002 it has been a center to commemorate the damages of the dictatorship. ¹⁰

Despite the difficulties posed by the Chilean and Brazilian dictatorships, the three Brazilians were able to “choose” their destinations according to their interests among the various job opportunities that came up. These opportunities were generally the result of the efforts of leftist groups spread across different countries—Argentines, Italians, Germans, and Venezuelans, among others. Dos Santos refers, for example, to the invitations he received when he was confined in the Panamanian embassy—full professorships in Panama and at the City University of New York, the New School for Social Research, and Howard University in the United States, at the Starnberg Institute in Germany, and at Laval University in Belgium. He then describes the reasons for not accepting them—the Chilean government’s refusal to give him safe-conduct to leave Chile and the U.S. government’s refusal to grant him a visa to enter the country. He also reports the moving solidarity of groups of intellectuals around the world exemplified by the pressure from politicians and a manifesto from intellectuals in the United States: “At the time, I was unable to thank all those who intervened with solidarity to save my life in Chile, often because I did not know who the authors of these initiatives were, sometimes because of the depression caused by the whole situation, which made us seek to forget everything about it” (Dos Santos, 1994: 39).

The solidarity and the recognition of his fellows are also mentioned by Marini (1990: 26): “These three months allowed me to feel the impressive solidarity of my friends, particularly Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Italians, and, at the same time, to see—not without surprise—the prestige that I enjoyed in Latin America and Europe.” Bambirra (1991: 44), for her part, puts it this way:

[In Panama] I was able to confirm the international prestige that we had acquired, above all, in the university environment, arising from our work. There was solidarity but not only that. Many fellows in the same political situation did not even receive an invitation; they arrived like intruders in the countries where they went. We received many job offers in several countries.

Even considering that the academic self-reports were produced with the intention of showing positive intellectual recognition, the reports corroborate the idea that exile, despite its paralyzing, disturbing, and depressing effects, definitely did not mean the disintegration of these writers’ academic, intellectual, and political contacts. On the contrary, exile seems to have stimulated the formation of networks of political solidarity, personal support, and academic recognition. According to Denise Rollemberg (1999: 299), “Exile was also experienced as an expansion of horizons. It promoted the discovery of countries, continents, political systems and regimes, cultures, peoples, persons.” The three intellectuals “discovered” Latin America, critically reviewed the arguments typically framed by the Brazilian problem, renewed their political guidelines and strategies, and took a more critical and skeptical look at the entire subcontinental context. Ángel Rama (1998: 235), studying the exile of other Brazilian intellectuals at the same time, made the following comment that serves to clarify the “discovery” to which I refer:

Despite the common attributes of Latin-American countries, there weren’t many cultural or political communications among Brazil and its neighbors. These intellectuals discovered the existence of Hispanic America not only in its political singularities but also in its cultural ways: while on the one hand Mario Pedroza in Chile, Ferreira Gullar in Buenos Aires, Darcy Ribeiro in Montevideo, and Francisco Julião in Mexico became ambassadors of an unfamiliar culture to similar anti-imperialist groups, on the other they gained experiences of unknown cultures. I think that an imaginative and talented book like Darcy Ribeiro’s The Americas and Civilization would have been impossible without the long years of exile that allowed him to travel and live for years in various countries and areas of the continent.

In their eagerness to reorganize their lives in all areas—personal, family, professional, and political—from places that seemed inhospitable because of cultural and even idiomatic differences, our intellectuals more often came into contact with their colleagues in the host countries and found solidarity and support there. The isolation or loneliness that is always mentioned in relation to intellectual work was necessarily diluted by the experience of exile. The intellectual was pulled out of his comfort zone and confronted with an extreme situation in which he was forced to dialogue more, to understand the other and, above all, be understood. The scope of intellectual and political projects in these situations was broader than that experienced in nontraumatic social situations. The situation of exile helped to establish a new agenda that included discussing the paths of redemocratization, the future of socialism, dependency, the characteristics and directions of peripheral capitalism, and the Cuban experience. It created an area of supranational reflection that allowed them to overcome the framework of research on each country, bringing together their political, theoretical, and research concerns and adapting them to the global and, above all, Latin American space, with Marxism as theoretical support.

The Mexican universities welcomed these Brazilians after their stimulating experience in Allende’s Chile. Santos was incorporated as a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and as a professor in the university’s Graduate School of Political Science and Faculty of Economics and Philosophy. In 1975 he became coordinator of the doctoral program in economics and in 1978 head of the university’s postgraduate division, remaining in these positions until his return to Brazil (Martins, 1998: 4). Bambirra was hired as a researcher at the university’s Institute for Social Research and then, in 1977, became a full professor in its Faculty of Economics, where she would remain until her return to Brazil. Marini became a visiting professor at the Center for Latin American Studies, a division of the university’s Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, and worked actively in the establishment of and as a contributor to Cuadernos Americanos from 1974 on. He also wrote for the Sunday supplement of Excelsior and for El Sol de México and El Universal. In 1977 he took on the supervision of dissertations at the Graduate School of the National School of Economics, in addition to responding to requests for classes and conferences in various units of the university and founding the Center for Information, Documentation, and Analysis on the Latin American Movement.

Most of the intellectual production of Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra was developed during these years of exile, where their relationships and encounters were intense. Bambirra (1991: 60) summarizes the experience as follows: “Having graduated in Brazil, developed in Chile, and consolidated myself as a social scientist in Mexico, I cannot help but recognize that this whole experience was definitive. It is in this sense that I say, as an academic—and only in that sense—’blessed exile!’” The marks of these multiple exiles were imprinted on all of the group’s intellectual products and debates. The return to Brazil after the amnesty was marked, in contrast to the period of exile, by obstacles to their professional integration.

Obstacles Upon the Return to Brazil

The Brazilian intellectuals who left the country after the 1964 coup were able to return after the enactment of the Amnesty Law of August 28, 1979. ¹¹ Marini made his first return trip after the amnesty in December 1979, but his final return took place only in mid-1984. Santos returned in January 1980, and Bambirra, after fulfilling some international commitments along with Herbert de Souza, returned in March of the same year. The debate about redemocratization predominated in Brazilian society. The country was ruled by the military under the command of General João Batista Figueiredo. The AI5 [Institutional Act 5] was revoked in January 1979, the Amnesty Law was enacted in August, and in December the New Organic Law on Political Parties reinstituted multiple parties and paved the way for the creation of parties that contemplated the diversity of opponents of the regime.

Readaptation on returning to the country was more difficult than adapting to the Chilean and Mexican environments. In addition to personal and family problems, ¹² there was difficulty in adapting to a different university and a new political culture and in dealing with the same theoretical dispute about the development of Brazilian capitalism on which they had already been challenged by the Brazilian intellectual mainstream. Upon returning to Brazil, Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra realized that they had been defeated both politically and intellectually. ¹³ They had gone into exile in the heyday of the debates about the Brazilian Revolution and the transition to socialism. In their Chilean exile they had had direct contact with a socialist experience, and in Mexico they had been offered autonomous academic environments that were open to alternative political experiences. When they returned to Brazil they had to adapt to a more cautious intellectual environment that was discussing the transition to socialism less and less. This environment required them to adhere to the institutional path and abandon the insurrectionary or reformist alternatives ¹⁴ that had prevailed among some left-wing intellectuals in the period immediately before the military coups and shortly after the intensification of authoritarian regimes.

These intellectuals returned to a country marked by the call for redemocratization as the axis of all political and ideological trends. Engaged art gave way to the appreciation of pure aesthetics; intellectuals committed to social causes gave way to intellectuals committed to more diffuse or very particular causes. Marini (1990: 36) describes the change in the profile of intellectuals that occurred between the dictatorship and the transition process as follows:

Most of the left-wing Brazilian intellectuals collaborated, more or less consciously, with official policy, closing the way for the dissemination of the themes that agitated the Latin American left in the 1970s. . . . In Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the competition for resources . . . reconstituted the intellectual elite on totally new bases, without any relation to those that— founded on political radicalization and the rise of mass movements—had sustained it in the decade of the 1960s. . . . Whatever, this was the country into which I had to reintegrate.

Dos Santos (1994: 60) also refers to the difficulties he faced on his return to Brazil and attempts an explanation:

In 1979 in Mexico, I had organized a debate on the return of democracy in Brazil in the Postgraduate Division of Economics at the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], in which we brought in several Brazilian social scientists. In this debate, I started to feel that my return would not be so well received. There were great divergences between my view of the democratization process in our country and the economic-social and, above all, economic implications and what prevailed among most social thinkers in Brazil.

All three had great difficulty resuming their university careers. The university had changed enormously. ¹⁵ According to Marini (1990: 37–38), the cultural policy of the dictatorship imposed a change of course on certain university circles:

This policy would have been less successful . . . if more and more intellectuals had not been co-opted by the system, including those who were in opposition to the regime. . . . Left-wing intellectuals, even those who occupied positions in academic centers, . . . established around themselves a network of protection against the harassment of the dictatorship and used their influence over the allocation of funds and scholarships to consolidate what they had achieved, acting on the basis of extreme group criteria. However, what originally appeared as self-defense and solidarity had, over time, become an irresistible vocation for corporatism, complicity, and the desire to exclude everyone . . . who threatened the power of the people and groups that benefited from this process. It proved beneficial . . . to monopolize and personalize the ideas that flourished in the intellectual life of the region, first adapting them to the limits established by the dictatorship. . . . After the 1974 Chilean coup, European social democracy began acting on the Latin American intellectual scene, preceded by the North American research foundations and accompanied by the cultural institutions financed by the churches and by the Christian Democrats.

In fact, Marini’s reintegration into the Universidade de Brasília, requested since 1979, was completed only in 1987 thanks to the intervention of the rector, Cristóvão Buarque, and the history professor Geralda Dias. Before that, in 1984, he was a professor at the Fundação Escola de Serviço Público do Rio de Janeiro (FESP), directed by Santos. While there he attempted to create a graduate course in public administration, but it was rendered infeasible by “lack of resources [and] the defeat of Darcy Ribeiro in the elections for governor of Rio” (Marini, 1990: 39). He was dismissed from the foundation in 1986 as an immediate result of the state elections. Again with the encouragement of Darcy Ribeiro, he sought to create a center for national studies at the Universidade Estadual de Rio de Janeiro, but “the resistance created by the university led . . . the project, which had managed to remain untouched throughout Brizola’s term, to fail.”

Dos Santos and Bambirra developed a graduate project at the request of the Department of Economics of the Universidade Católica de Belo Horizonte, where they were honored by the graduate students and actively participated in academic life. Even so, without any explanation from the rector, the graduate program was canceled. Unemployed, they were appointed by Moniz Bandeira to create and implement a graduate course at the Bennett Institute of Education in Rio de Janeiro, but this project did not survive (Dos Santos, 1994: 4):

The 1979 political amnesty brought me back to Brazil. Here I did not find the same solidarity that I obtained with the fraternal peoples of Chile and Mexico. The dictatorship still dominated the Brazilian academic environment, and I was able to obtain only unstable positions as a CNPq [National Council of Scientific and Technological Development] scholarship holder or in temporary academic positions as a professor at PUC [Pontifical Catholic University] in Belo Horizonte and the Bennett Institute.

Bambirra (1991: 37) failed to be hired as an assistant professor of American history at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in 1985 despite her qualifications in that area, which she found a “vexing experience” and “the only setback suffered to date in [her] academic career.” Asked about the reasons for it, she mentioned the difficulties of writing in Portuguese after so many years outside Brazil and the fact that “the doors were all closed . . . because we were Marxists, Marxists and Leninists. There was a particular anti-Leninism that ended up becoming anti-Marxism because Lenin was confused with Marxism. I remember that we returned to Brazil at the height of Eurocommunism, and, after all, it wasn’t Lenin who died, it was the Eurocommunists” (interview, Porto Alegre, December 5, 2012).

Thus the difficulty for the former exiles of being reintegrated into academic environments was related to the transformations of higher education in Brazil at that time, the adaptation of academic elites to the authoritarian regime, the co-optation of left-wing intellectuals through the financing of research, scholarships, and the promotion systems of university careers. But also, as Bambirra says, there was an obstacle to a certain type of thinking within the university. It may be a simplification on her part to say that the ban was on Marxism itself. In fact, there was a more widespread crisis in the social sciences and humanities—a crisis that affected historians, sociologists, economists, and political scientists and overturned confidence in the modernity paradigm. European intellectuals had begun to reject the rationalist foundations of theories of social knowledge—the metanarratives, the notion of totality, and the belief in progress. The rejection of periodization, global interpretations, and the primacy of economic and social analysis opened the way for the analysis of discourse, daily life, and mentalities and the predominance of cultural studies.

Dos Santos (1994: 60) also refers to this obstacle to the group’s ideas in the cultural environment contextualized above:

These divergences were manifested, above all, in the article by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and José Serra criticizing the thought of Ruy Mauro Marini. . . . This article ended with a very harsh statement that it was necessary to reject these ideas so that they would not penetrate Brazilian youth. It was a reaction to the influence that our thinking had achieved at the international level, when a school was already identified within dependency theory in which Ruy Mauro Marini, Vânia Bambirra, and I were considered outstanding figures and which had a deep view of the limits of a dependent economy for leading our country to development and democracy. This critical vision that we represented did not sound good in a Brazil that wanted to democratize without transforming its economic and social structure and therefore was attempting a democratic project that was strictly limited to the political sphere and the sphere of formal recognition of the citizenship of a hungry and illiterate people. Our view of the limits of dependent development, of its concentrating and marginalizing tendencies, of the social impact of this type of development sounded like a dissonant voice. This was perhaps the main reason that I found, on my return to Brazil, extreme restrictions on my rearticulation into the Brazilian reality.

In the article by Cardoso and Serra (1978) that Dos Santos mentions, Marini’s theses are criticized, and although I did not find the passage he cites, the authors’ aversion to the ideas of the entire Marxist dependency group is clear. ¹⁶ The interdiction experienced by Marxist intellectuals in universities in the mid-1980s and early 1990s was consistent, deliberate, and inspired by the crisis of Marxism, on the one hand, and the various projects of redemocratization, on the other. A new reality determined by the defeat of the leftist convictions of the 1960s was accompanied by new demands in the professional areas occupied by intellectuals, ¹⁷ and the relocation of intellectuals and artists in this new reality was influenced by these new values, hierarchies, and needs.

The widespread contempt for the insurrectional route in the new Latin American cultural context and the return of pluri-partisanship in Brazil took Dos Santos, Bambirra, and Marini back to political-party militancy. Dos Santos and Bambirra were militants in the Partido Democrático Trabalhista (Democratic Labor Party—PDT) and Marini a sympathizer without party affiliation. ¹⁸ This meant that they were identified with the radicalism of Brizola, Darcy Ribeiro, and others at a time when most of the left was in favor of conciliation, and this contributed to the difficulty of their professional reintegration. They did not adhere to the thesis that a bourgeois revolution had to precede the socialist revolution. They rejected the possibility of autonomous development of peripheral capitalism, and they considered, as did Lenin, that the gap between central and peripheral economies could not be reduced within the capitalist system. Thus, they disagreed with the theoretical models derived from social democracy or Eurocommunism and adhered to the only political proposal that rejected more conciliatory and bourgeois solutions and, at the same time, had some electoral density. ¹⁹ The so-called socialism-of-color program formulated by Darcy Ribeiro and linked to the PDT was more advanced and radical than that of any of the existing traditional parties, whereas the newly created Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party–PT) seemed an unattainable, utopian and overly basic adventure in addition to being very new and having a limited following.

The link with Darcy Ribeiro established in Brasilia between 1961 and 1964, the approach to the PDT and the militancy on the Lisbon Meeting, the risk that Brizola represented for the “new left” and for “social democracy,” the PT critique of Brizolist populism, the presence in the universities of many PT members (among them the São Paulo sociologist Florestan Fernandes), and the rapid reintegration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso into the intellectual and political circles of the time of the democratic transition further contributed to the aforementioned isolation of the radical or Marxist authors of dependency theory. Even so, Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra maintained their intellectual dynamism by organizing seminars and debates, giving courses, and participating in research projects funded by the FESP, the FLACSO, and the United Nations University, among others. During Brizola’s term as governor of Rio de Janeiro, Bambirra headed several public agencies and engaged in various activities related to the development of social policies based on sociological research that did not result in systematic contributions to the literature (Bambirra, 1991: 40): “We had many projects and hopes. We knew we would encounter difficulties. We just didn’t imagine that, from a professional point of view, they would be so big. If the academic aspect were the only factor behind the return, until the reintegration into the UnB [University of Brasília] almost a decade later, undoubtedly the return was a disaster.”

In the 1960s they had left a country divided between the defense of an economy regulated by the public sector (national developmentalism) and the defense of an economy regulated by the market (liberalism), dichotomous interpretations of the way to carry forward the mode of capitalist production in Brazil between 1940 and 1980. While in exile, they produced interpretations seeking to demonstrate the fallacy of both these bourgeois propositions. Finally, they returned in the 1980s to a country where the only way out of the economic crisis seemed to be neoliberalism, which meant maximally defending the free market and an open economy. Neoliberalism was worse than liberalism, which was worse than national developmentalism, and this was not what they advocated for Brazil.

The confrontation between liberal and neoliberal, nationalist and statist currents in relation to Brazilian and Latin American capitalism had prevailed since the 1930s–1940s and remained fierce into the beginning of the twenty-first century. The old controversies around the theme took on a new guise and some new persons among politicians and intellectuals. The issue of peripheral capitalism and the dispute between different views on the possibilities of its development are still present in the political arena. Therefore, Munck (1981: 162) is right in saying that “dependency theory has not died. It still permeates the analysis and theory of the left. . . . That is why the ideological struggle against this theory is not something of the past; it is an urgent task for today.” Although the concrete situations of dependency have changed significantly since the time of the formulation of that theoretical framework, the “theory” was not an attempt to explain the relations of domination and subordination between countries but a way of understanding the particular functioning of peripheral societies and pointing to possible solutions to the problems arising from this way of functioning.

In fact, there is still a dispute between those who attempt to apply dependency theory and those who disapprove of it. The criticisms of the theory have provoked reanalysis and self-criticism. The recent prominence given to Bambirra before her death in 2015, the publication in Portuguese of texts by Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra, the holding of congresses, the formation of study centers linked to dependency theory such as the Núcleo de História Econômica da Dependência Latino-americana of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 2012 and the Instituto de Estudos Latino-americanos of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in 2004, and the production of Master’s and doctoral theses that have this theory as their main subject are evidence of the validity of disputes regarding peripheral capitalism and the rehabilitation of dependency theory for explaining the countries of Latin America and the peripheral world.

Controversies Over Authorship of Dependency Theory

Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra were different from other advocates of so-called dependency theory in that they claimed a relationship between dependency and Marxism. A clue to the group’s ideas and implicit positions appears in the introduction to the issue of Latin American Perspectives entitled “Dependency and Marxism.” According to its editor, Ronald Chilcote (1981: 3), “Students of dependency have struggled over the past decade to integrate their ideas with a theory of Marxism.” The struggle to which he refers is represented by the members of the Marxist current of dependency theory as follows:

According to Bambirra (1977: 4), the group’s idea of the theoretical and political antecedents of the concept of dependency came from a “vast controversial historical tradition within Marxist thought throughout its evolution.” For Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra the issue was not just explaining the relationship of domination and subordination between countries and pointing out possible solutions to the problems arising from this relationship but also developing a theory based on Marxism that would explain the particular functioning of peripheral societies. To this end, they formulated strategies for adapting the general laws of capitalist development to the reality of underdeveloped countries. Among these strategies was the creation of concepts especially for explaining the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production in the periphery such as superexploitation of labor, subimperialism, and the development of underdevelopment.

Marini (1991 [1973]: 193) emphasized the need to situate the whole (the capitalist system) and the parts (the dependent economy):

The fundamental task of Marxist dependency theory is to determine the specific rules that head the dependent economy. This presupposes placing its study in the broader context of the laws of development of the system as a whole and identifying the intermediate degrees by which these laws are specified. This is how the simultaneity of dependency and development can be understood.

Bambirra (1977: 27) argued that “to be a Marxist is to be a creator” and proposed that, while the works of writers such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg could be used to understand capitalism in Latin America, the use of specific concepts developed by Latin American authors would be required to understand dependency. The theoretical and methodological differences between the analysis of Marini, Dos Santos, and Bambirra and those other writers resulted in the attribution of qualifiers to them by some of their opponents and controversy over the authorship of so-called dependency theory. Among the qualifiers were “Marxist theory of dependency,” “radical current of dependency theory,” “left wing of dependency theory,” “neo-Marxist,” and “Trotskyist,” the first two of which they accepted.

The denomination “left wing of dependency theory” was first mentioned by Agustín Cueva (1979: 15–39). His intention was to attempt to understand the “left side of dependency theory . . . its main assumptions and its tortuous development,” and he concluded that dependency theory had triggered the opening of a “Pandora’s box”—“an omnimodal theoretical axis within which authors from the ECLAC school to the neo-Marxists could move” (39). In calling the group “neo-Marxist” he intended to distance it from classical Marxism. In his view, the wide variety of aspects that the concept of dependency mobilized ended up rendering the theory inoperative.

The term “neo-Marxist” was also applied to Dos Santos and Marini without explanation by Guido Mantega (1997: 25), who added in a footnote: “As a rule, these thinkers are framed in the role of dependency theory more in terms of the object of analysis, the dependent societies, than in terms of the theoretical approach, the diagnosis, and the political project, which, in my view, was very far from the central theses of this theory ”(25 n. 13). His insistence on separating the Brasilia group from the development of dependency theory and Marxism, classifying them as “neo-Marxists,” and on referring to Fernando Henrique Cardoso and others as the true representatives of the theory of dependency is inconsistent with their intellectual production. Ricardo Bielschowsky's (2000) O pensamento econômico brasileiro (1930 -1964): O ciclo ideológico do desenvolvimentismo made brief mention of Marini and Santos, calling them “Trotskyists,” and its bibliography did not include a single work by Bambirra.

A 1978 study by Gabriel Palma brought up an issue that was no longer being debated and deserved more detailed examination. Palma (1978: 882) sought to understand the Marxist analysis of Latin American societies as part of the theory of imperialism and also recognized three approaches to dependency: one initiated by André Gunder Frank and continued by the “CESO school” (particularly by Dos Santos, Marini, Caputo, and Pizarro), which sought to build a theory of underdevelopment; another found mainly in the work of Sunkel and Furtado, whose basis was a critique of the ECLAC perspective on peripheral development with regard to the obstacles to national developmentalism; and yet another that privileged the analysis of “concrete situations of dependency,” a more empirical approach led by Cardoso. For him the original contribution of dependency theory was creating a methodology for analyzing concrete situations of underdevelopment.

In any case, the conflict over the authorship of dependency theory reflected a conflict between political projects for the country. In his self-report Santos (1994: 30) observes:

I do not want to enter here into the debate about who started “dependency theory.” Fernando Henrique Cardoso and André Gunder Frank frequently claim authorship. I am named by several authors as its founder. In fact, like any movement of ideas, “dependency theory” was a collective product, the result of the crisis in the import–substitution industrialization model and populism in Latin America. Within the movement, different currents and differentiated orientations were formed that separated over time.

Bambirra (1991: 22) also discusses the differences between the currents brought together by the term “dependency theory.” According to her, one trend was common to all currents:

The basic “historical-structural” definition has become common, explicitly or implicitly, to all of the theorists who can be considered part of the “dependency” current. (I will not enter here into the controversy of who defined the concept in the first place, as this is not the point in any way.) However, what distinguished the specific focus of our team—similar, for example, to that of Ruy Mauro Marini, who was then living in Mexico—was the use of the methodology and categories of Marxist analysis and, more than that, the creation of new analytical categories essential to understanding and explaining new phenomena that had not been experienced and therefore had not been thought about by the Marxist classics. We used Marxism with familiarity. We thought we were, more than using its theoretical and methodological tools, recreating it as we incorporated new concepts into it. This is the essence of Marxism, as I always understood its historical conception. It was not really about desecrating it but about opening new analytical paths and rejuvenating it.

According to Marini (1991 [1973]: 194), the differentiation between currents and orientations of dependency theory has as its starting point the methodological question that he is keen to highlight: “It is by advancing in this direction that we will accelerate the birth of the Marxist theory of dependency, freeing it of the functional-developmentalist characteristics that adhered to it during its gestation.” The phrase suggests, therefore, that for Marini dependency theory was born “Marxist” and had been “impregnated” with functional-developmentalist thinking at the beginning of its path.

In this sense, according to the Brasília group the dispute over the origin of dependency theory involved a “deviation” from the bases of the initial theoretical framework represented by the functionalists and developmentalists. Thus, the term “Marxist” allowed the Brasília group to differentiate itself from the currents that, although present from the beginning, were responsible for this “deviation.” In addition, Marini, Santos, and Bambirra accepted the denomination as “radicals” and began to use it themselves. However, it is worth noting that the word “radical” carried a pejorative meaning in the Brazilian political environment, which was praised as positively conciliatory, and this partly explains the isolation that these intellectuals suffered when they returned to Brazil after the amnesty. Thus, in spite of having produced diagnoses, interpretations, theories, and sociological models about Latin American societies and Brazilian society in particular, the Brasilia group did not receive proper recognition, mainly because of its political and theoretical opposition to the academic mainstream and the hegemony of the ideas of other, more conciliatory intellectual groups.

Supplemental Material