Francisco Weffort and the Dependency Theory: Populism,Class,and Nation

Populism and Dependency in the Latin American Political Lexicon

The period from 1960 to 1970 was one of great intellectual effervescence in the subcontinent, fueled by the spiral of political radicalization that followed the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the developmentalist crisis that had characterized the preceding decade, and the wave of military coups that especially affected the countries of the Southern Cone. In this context, the notion of dependency gained new theoretical status as a key concept for reinterpreting the historical and social formation of Latin American countries. Between the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, a myriad of intellectuals returned to the concept/notion of dependency in the interpretation of the specific forms of subordinate incorporation into world capitalism of the countries of the Latin American periphery (see Frank, 1992: 32).

There was a concern, in this new context, to offer responses to the developmentalist crisis spread by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in which intellectuals such as Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra, André Gunder Frank, Ruy Mauro Marini, Florestan Fernandes, and Anibal Quijano started to talk about “dependency” relationships as an alternative to underdevelopment and import-substitution industrialization. ³ Because the documents on this theme were not uniform in their theoretical bases, diagnoses, and conclusions, instead of “dependency theory” it is perhaps more appropriate to talk about theories of or approaches to dependency. These were some of the general terms in which intellectuals identified with the democratic field—in many cases with socialist and Marxist currents—moved among various Latin American countries, many in exile in the second half of the 1960s and facing the challenge of thinking about the, social, and political reality in international and regional terms. This was therefore an intellectual condition that went beyond purely scientific goals. ⁴

Alongside the problem of dependency in this environment was that of populism, a concept with which several writers sought to characterize the political forces that, having dominated the scene in several countries at the height of national developmentalism, were being violently evicted by military coups. The concept of populism made its debut in Latin American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, under the influence of modernization theories, to account for the singularity of the forms of incorporation of the popular strata into the public sphere, which violated the standards of representative democracy and the usual party divisions of Western Europe. ⁵ Characterizing modernization as the transition between two radically distinct types, “traditional society” and “modern society,” functionalist sociology identified the problem in Latin America as the failure of institutional mechanisms to promote the integration and channeling of the dizzying mobilization of the popular strata in political life in the modernization process. On the one hand, these classes were experiencing a “revolution of expectations” in their consumption, cultural, and political patterns promoted by regional economic development (Di Tella, 1969: 82; Germani, 1973: 175). On the other hand, because of the frustration of the prospects of autonomous political integration and the absence of traditions of self-organization, they had become available for manipulation by populist leaders (Di Tella, 1969: 87). Populist movements emerged from the confrontation of these popular masses with civil and military elites interested in transforming the existing order by channeling popular mobilization “from the top down” (Germani, 1973: 172–173). These movements were characterized by strong popular support, the heterogeneity of their social bases, and a vague antiestablishment ideology (Di Tella, 1969: 85–86).

In Brazil in the 1950s, the perspective of the sociology of modernization, which associated populism with a stage in the political development of society, found some affinity with the perspective of Brazilian intellectuals with nationalist inclinations. An example is the unsigned article, generally attributed to Hélio Jaguaribe (Cadernos do Nosso Tempo, 1954), on Adhemarism (in reference to the São Paulo politician Adhemar de Barros) as a personalist relationship between leader and masses. Another is that of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1961), who in the early 1960s approached populism as a personalist relationship between a political leader and an unorganized working mass to be overcome by “ideological politics.” ⁶ It is possible to say that, in the middle of 1963, when Weffort wrote his article on mass politics (1965a; 1965b) and criticized the perspective of “preideological politics” for the treatment of populism, he was at the antechamber of the birth of the Latin American intellectual movement rivaling this “modernizing” perspective, which we can call “dependentist.”

Thus, when the criticism of modernization theory began to gain momentum in the second half of the 1960s and the concept of dependency achieved centrality among Brazilian intellectuals, it found an ally in the use of the concept of populism. In the thesis published in April 1964, the same month in which the military coup ended the experiment of João Goulart’s reformist nationalism, ⁷ Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1964: 86–91) developed Weffort’s arguments on populism in Brazil at length and explicitly. He used Weffort’s (1965a: 86, 87) analysis of the limits of the “passive presence” of the popular masses in Brazilian politics from the 1930s on. Mass politics was strengthened in cases where the mass was unable to become a class and the popular movements and leftist parties rejected “retrograde populist politics” in favor of “an ideological policy” (1965a: 91)

A little later, in his work with Enzo Faletto, with whom he systematically developed the dependency argument, Cardoso began to think of populism as based on changes in patterns of capitalist accumulation and the consequent restructuring of classes. In this essay, written in 1966–1967, the idea arose that the conditions for “developmentalist populism” emerged from the crisis of the “outward development pattern”—represented by the primary export economies—and the transition to the “inward development pattern,” centered on import-substitution industrialization (see Cardoso and Faletto, 1970: 94). This new pattern of accumulation led to a “developmentalist alliance” of industrial and worker-popular sectors capable of sustaining industrial investment and the wages of industrial workers (95). Populism was a specific “model” of development (103),

the link through which the urban masses mobilized by industrialization—or expelled from the agrarian sector as a result of their transformation or deterioration—are bound to the new power scheme, and it becomes a mass politics that seeks to encourage the maintenance of a relatively limited political participation scheme based mainly on a weak union structure that has not affected the rural masses or the whole of the urban popular sector.

The crisis of this link occurred with the advent of “associated dependency,” in which the association of multinational capital with local capital deepened, generating a break with the developmentalist arrangement and at the same time increasing popular pressure in the framework of populist politics. In their conclusion, Cardoso and Faletto argued that the crisis of populist experiments was not the opposition between dependency and development—the poles between which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were divided—but the redefinition of these two terms, with the strong presence of “external interests” in production for the domestic market and new political alliances focused on the support of urban populations and social groups linked to industrial production (141–142).

In this context, Les Temps Modernes published the special issue mentioned above, in which Cardoso and Weffort participated with individual texts. Cardoso (1968) wrote “Bourgeois Hegemony and Economic Independence: Structural Roots of the Brazilian Political Crisis,” in which he applied the central arguments of his research with Faletto to the Brazilian case and discussed the criticism of the idea of a national bourgeoisie interested in the country’s economic independence. Weffort’s article to the same issue, “Populism in Brazilian Politics,” was written in Chile, where he was a member of the ILPES technical staff and was therefore in direct contact with the discussions of issues related to dependency (Weffort, 1968b [1967]). ⁸ It is no coincidence that the term “dependency” appeared in the opening sentences of this article, as part of an initial definition of populism: “[Populism] was also one of the manifestations of the political weaknesses of the dominant urban groups when they tried to replace the oligarchy in the political domain of a traditionally agrarian and dependent country, at a stage when the possibilities for national capitalist development seemed to exist” (1968b [1967]: 50, emphasis added). ⁹ Here, Weffort characterized populism as dependent on the incorporation of the popular masses into the state in the context of a crisis of the liberal-oligarchic order. Expansion—or democratization—“from the top” of the state order was made possible by the relative fragility of the dominant urban groups in a society that was historically agrarian and dependent but envisioned the possibility of building a “national capitalism.” There is, therefore, a link analogous to that of Cardoso and Faletto—the interpretation of populism as a political phenomenon based on the crisis of the primary export economy that was structured by and produced the structuring of national developmentalist policy and the state.

Discussing the reasons for the fragility of the Brazilian industrial bourgeoisie as a class at the time of the 1930 Revolution, Weffort (1968b [1967]: 53) quotes Celso Furtado and says that the crisis of the primary export economy “appeared as a simple reflection of the decrease in the stimulus of the foreign market, and government policy consisted, in essence, of transferring to the country as a whole the losses that the external crisis had caused in coffee agriculture, our main export product.” The appropriation of Furtado’s (1964) argument about the role of the state in protecting coffee prices during the 1930s was part of the argument that the dependentist-ECLAC diagnosis of the transition from an “outward development” toward “an inward development” and that the foreign market had played a determinant role in triggering the agrarian crisis.

For Weffort, the key aspect of populism was the notion of dependency that resided in the idea that the industrial bourgeoisie and, in fact, the dominant social groups, the urban middle classes, the regional oligarchies, and the primary exporters were unable to play a leading role at the head of the state in contexts of crisis and transition. Precisely in these contexts, favorable situations would open up for the emergence of a “pacted” situation or state—the establishment of a new (albeit precarious) balance between divergent interests that would allow the state relative autonomy in relation to the social classes and the chief executive, who would begin to play the role of arbitrator (Weffort, 1968b [1967]: 63). This pact could not, however, be considered in terms of the Marxist concept of Bonapartism. It was an agreement mainly with urban social groups of the popular classes (62), and it was dependent because of the way in which the Latin American countries developed, ¹⁰ which contributed to the emergence of various forms of political participation. For Weffort, it took specific forms that, properly investigated, challenged the thesis of the passivity or absence of ideology of the Brazilian popular classes (65).

Thus, to explain the acute crisis of the state in Brazil in the early 1960s, Weffort pointed to two concomitant processes. The first one was linked to the crisis of the populist pattern of political domination. Populism, he said, was characterized by two moments, one of ascent, in which the focus was on “mass manipulation,” and one of popular mobilization and a crisis of agreement, “when the urban-industrial economy [had exhausted] its capacity to absorb new migrants and the opportunities for economic redistributivism were limited” (1968b [1967]: 70). This limitation of opportunities took the form of the exhaustion of the capacity to deal with the pressures of participation as industrialization reached its limits because of the parasitic presence of the export of primary products in the pacted situation. The stagnation of intrabourgeois development, in turn, was fundamental to Brazilian industry’s becoming increasingly dependent on foreign capital and therefore unable to formulate its own policy and politics.

A few months after writing the article for the French magazine, Weffort returned to the notion of dependency in his doctoral thesis (1968a: 21). Here dependency appeared as a notion that combined political autonomy and economic dependency, thus identifying the constitution of Latin American countries, of which this was the “basic specificity,” as essentially ambiguous. His focus in the thesis was the “mobilizing” phase of populism—“the conditions of the political emergence of the popular classes”—and included the “peculiarities of political and dependent social formation in Latin America” and their decisive role in this process (22–23). In that same month, on April 14, 1968, a radicalized strike broke out in the city of Contagem, “outside the union’s boundaries” (Weffort, 1972a: 37), with a strong movement of occupations and confrontations. The strike expanded, with its peak on April 22 and the mobilization of 15,000 workers across the state of Minas Gerais. Then, in May, major student revolts at the international level, especially in France, had a strong impact on the “ideological and political climate” and on the “student movements in Guanabara” (75). “There were many who thought about the historical possibility of a reversal of the traditional relations between students and the working class” in “a new era of social movements” (75) In this climate, in July, a new strike movement involving 6,000 workers broke out in the region of Osasco, in the state of São Paulo, also with occupations and confrontations. These events had a strong impact on Weffort’s ideas, especially on some of the elements of his 1966–1967 argument on populism, in the context of their proximity to the notion of dependency. He wrote at length about this cycle of struggles in Brazil of 1971–1972, introducing his idea that it represented an “internal rupture of populist unionism” in contrast with the union movement of the 1950s (87).

These reflections seem to have contributed to the development of a critical attitude toward the application of the concept of dependency to Latin America and, in particular, toward the use of this concept by Cardoso. Populism was seen no longer just as an electoral alliance between leader and masses but also as a set of union practices in their relationship with the state—finding a difficult place within the analytical matrix centered on the idea of dependency. The 1968 worker and student strikes and the new wave of political protests at the international level, added to the new cultural and political environment emerging among Brazilian democratic, revolutionary, and socialist intellectuals, seemed to point to the need to expand the study of populism and, at the same time, embark on new inquiries about internal-external dependency relations. ¹¹

Class, Nation, and the Limits of Dependency

In November 1970 Weffort presented “Notas sobre a ‘teoria da dependência’: teoria de classe ou ideologia nacional?” at the Second Latin American Seminar for Development ¹² in Chile under the Popular Unity government. ¹³ His was commented on by Cardoso in “Teoria da dependência ou analyses concretas de situações de dependência.” Their texts were published in modified versions the following year in Estudos CEBRAP. ¹⁴ Weffort’s (1971: 9–10) critique had two main themes: the concept of dependency and the idea of Europe as a model for the history of social and political formation in the periphery. In the first part, he discussed the ambiguity of the concept of dependency with respect to class and nation. In his opinion, these uses could not be reconciled without dependency’s becoming an ideological defense of the perspective of underdevelopment. His argument was political, a reflection on the concrete “relationship between classes and nations in the development of capitalism in Latin America” alternative to the idea of “external dependency” (6). “If national bourgeoisies failed or did not exist,” he said, it would be worth asking about “the role of the topic of the nation in the scope of political and ideological relations between classes” (6, emphasis added). The different approaches to dependency, even in their best formulation proposed by Cardoso and Faletto, had come to fulfill an ideological function in defending an alleged national independence without the “concomitant rupture of (internal) relations of class domination” (9n).

In his response, Cardoso admitted that the debate on dependency had taken on an ideological cast that made it difficult to achieve a balanced and nuanced appreciation of the various contributions. ¹⁵ In his view, it was “useless to enter into a discussion when it has already assumed an ideological connotation that is so strong that it is difficult to analyze the texts and ideas on which it is based” (Cardoso, 1971: 27). Despite this, he reiterated that the use of the concept in his work was intended as a critique of the economism and evolutionism of conventional development theories.

Weffort’s 1967 essay covered a wide range of historical cases that Cardoso and Faletto sought to bring together and interpret as the key to the center-periphery relationship, for which assessment of the political capacity of “local producers” was essential. This argument was presented in the two “elements” according to which Cardoso and Faletto (1970: 42–48) sought to “abstract the concrete course” of the history of the Latin American countries:

a) From the point of view of the whole world capitalist system . . . relating to the periphery through the need to supply raw materials . . . the hegemonic center fundamentally controlled the commercialization of the periphery, but it did not replace the local economic class that had inherited its productive base from the colonial period. . . .

b) From what we have said, it may be inferred that the rupture of the colonial pact allowed the strengthening of national producer groups, since the new hegemonic pole did not interfere with and, on the contrary, in certain cases, could even stimulate the expansion of the national productive system. This strengthening depended on the capacity of local producers to organize a system of partnerships with “local oligarchies” that would allow the promotion of the national state.

It was precisely the argument based on an economic relationship of control of the periphery by the “hegemonic center,” combined with the study of internal matters focused on local bourgeoisies and their capacity for political partnerships, that Weffort made the target of his criticism. In his response Cardoso at once distanced himself from the economic and sociological language with which he had discussed dependency in 1967, seeking to formulate his hypotheses in historical and procedural terms, and shifted his analysis of national environments to a relational dimension that was less evident in the 1967 essay. He then presented as assumptions (1971: 29) that

a) the analyses of the process of establishing the periphery of the international capitalist order must explain the dynamics of relationships between social classes at the internal level of nations (in the case of situations of dependency maintained starting with the creation of such national states).

b) the external constraints—the international capitalist mode of production, “imperialism,” the foreign market, etc. (that is, both the economic and the political aspects of capitalism)—reappear structurally inscribed both in the articulation of the economy, classes, and the state with the central economies and with the dominant powers and in the articulation of these same classes and in the type of economic and political organization that prevails within each situation of dependency.

The parallelism of the two sets of propositions is remarkable. It is possible to suggest that Cardoso was attempting to qualify his interpretation of dependency, reducing the significance of the sociological scheme and emphasizing its historicist dimension. The initial definition of the periphery as a source of raw materials controlled by the center is replaced by the idea of an analysis centered on the “dynamics” of the relations between social classes within nations. The “rupture of the colonial pact” as a result determined by the “strengthening of the capacity of national producers” and their partnership with local oligarchies to form the state emerges as an “external condition” that structures the possible political and economic relations between classes both between and within nations.

In his critique of Cardoso’s work, Weffort had discussed the spread of the concept of “structural dependency” of the Latin American countries in relation to the central countries in the postwar period. For him the use of the expression was initially intended to forge a new concept, not just a “new label” for the “old idea of a semicolonial country,” but the initial ambiguity of this initiative was not overcome. For this reason, dependency had come to fulfill an “ideological” function, alongside terms such as “nation” and “nationalism.” The latter were, in his view, notions that were outdated historically and politically and therefore ideological as opposed to elements for the development of a class theory.

To this end, Weffort proposed to proceed with a concept that considered two levels of categorical separation, one between class and nation and the other between theory and ideology. This epistemological split overlapped the political proposal that the working classes—particularly in Brazil—marked a rupture with the populist commitment of unions. In other words, the 1968 strikes expressed, in his view, the emergence of a “true”—or, at least, a more original—consciousness of the historical process in contrast to the “false”—or limited—consciousness of dependentist intellectuals associated with the modernizing paradigm. He questioned the use of “global” categories that tended —given their inaccuracy— to homogenize the historical realities of Latin American countries, among them the notions of “underdevelopment,” “national development,” and, possibly, “dependency.” The notion of dependency had the merit of formulating a set of specific problems regarding the relations between the nation and social classes and the relations of production in Latin American capitalism (1971: 12). However, its intrinsic and insoluble ambiguity prevented it from offering renewed responses to the problem of Latin American development and thus from promoting a new theoretical-practical unity. This ambiguity does not dissolve the distinction made by Cardoso and Faletto between the “external dependency” approaches—referring to political relations between Latin American societies and the core countries—common to ECLAC and dependentist thinking, which also involves class structure and relations of production in each country. In his view, it was not enough to privilege “structural dependency” over “external dependency” to address relations between social classes in a dependent context, since the practical effect of this choice would be to deny the political problem of dependency.

Despite the criticism in important sections of the first version of Weffort’s text—transcribed by Cardoso in his commentary ¹⁶ —the political scientist’s attitude toward the notion of dependency was not rejection, which would appear only in his final version. Comparison of the two shows substantive changes in Weffort’s arguments against the theoretical possibilities of dependency and, more important, an initial attempt at reform or at least localization of the concept of dependency in a theoretical approach to social classes. The first version, prepared in November 1970 (quoted by Cardoso, 1971: 37, emphasis added), read as follows:

And at the general, supranational level, at the level of production relations, the issue of the possibilities for capitalist development in Latin America must be posed in the same way, because it is at this level that it may be possible to find some theoretical place for “dependency theory.” In other words, it is at this level that “dependency theory” may appear as an explanatory theory and that one can obtain some understanding of its inability to go beyond national premises. As much as people talk of internal dependency, it is inevitable to return to the question of external dependency. In other words, “dependency theory” seems to revolve around some kind of theory of imperialism. The issue is to find out what kind of theory.

In contrast, the second version, revised for publication (Weffort, 1971: 19–20, emphasis added), read:

It is at the level of production relations, where there is no reason to assume that the national form is necessary, that the issue of the possibilities of capitalist development (and alternatively the issue of the possibilities of the socialist revolution) in Latin America must be placed. Likewise, it is at this level that it would be possible to try to find some theoretical place for the “national problem” pointed out by “dependency theory.” Furthermore, it is at this level that the problems proposed by “dependency theory” can find a solution in some really explanatory theory. It is also where you can get some suggestions to understand the concessions made to the “classic models” and their national premises. At this point, what seems to me necessary (as much as there is talk of internal dependency) is to return to the old question of external dependency. In other words, in fact “dependency theory” revolves around some kind of theory of imperialism. The question is: what kind of theory? Socialist or radical petty-bourgeois?

In the 1970 version, Weffort raised the question of possibilities for the development of capitalism in Latin America on a “supranational” level, the only one at which it might be possible to control the relations of production and dependency theory could appear as an “explanatory theory.” The issue then was what kind of broader theory would address it. In the 1971 version, the idea of the supranational plan was suppressed and production relations were defined as those for which “there is no reason to assume that the national form is necessary.” At the level of production relations, a “theoretical place” could be found for the “national problem” pointed out by “dependency theory.” In the new formulation, the problems proposed by dependency theory found their solution in some “really explanatory theory.” In opposition to the nationalist, petty-bourgeois, and radical dependency theory, it was necessary to return to the problem of “external dependency” and develop a socialist theory.

For Cardoso, Weffort was completely disregarding his efforts of 1966–1967 to detach himself from the economism and evolutionism prevailing among Latin American intellectuals and analysts, including Brazilians, whether they were ECLAC or Marxist. More important, he did not seem to consider it necessary or effective to use the language of these intellectuals and face the dilemmas of development in their own field, which could not be done without incorporating a good deal of ambiguity into the texts on dependency. Weffort perceived an evolutionary and economic “continuity” of the notion of dependency in relation to reformist “developmentalism” and “nationalism” that Cardoso sought to remove in favor of a relational and historical dimension of the concept. It remained, then, to defend the adopted strategy, the language dispute, and the “developmentalist” lexicon.

In his defense against Weffort’s critique, Cardoso argued that he had not intended to replace “external dependency” or “imperialism” with another abstract concept, nor had he proposed a totalizing “dependency theory.” His objective had been more modest, that of promoting a turning point in analyses of development in the Latin American countries. This point consisted precisely in the relational principle of dependency (“one who depends usually depends on something and is conditioned rather than conditioning”), capable of creating a set of theoretical and analytical problems in which the determinations could be understood as essentially reciprocal (Cardoso, 1971: 32, emphasis added):

The intention to boost the notion of dependency to the category of a totalizing concept lacks any sense. And, strictly speaking, it is impossible to think of a “dependency theory.” There may be a theory of capitalism and classes, but dependency, as we characterize it, is nothing more than a political expression, in the periphery, of the capitalist mode of production on international scale.

Weffort had wavered between the defense of Cardoso and Faletto’s original contribution to the problem of capitalist development in Latin America and criticism of maintaining the “external/internal” binomial as the basis for reflecting on dependency. In his view, although it was possible to agree with the idea of “the existence of economically dependent and politically independent nations,” dependency, incapable of devising a strategy to solve it. had maintained “the reproduction of the problem in terms of the concept” (Weffort, 1971: 13).

The debate between Cardoso and Weffort ended in an impasse. The concept of dependency had definitely challenged conventional development theories, but in doing so it was incapable of being disengaged from its language and political assumptions. The political and practical demand for a socialist and class theory of capitalist development in the periphery, in turn, did not find fertile ground.

Final Considerations

This study has sought to reconstruct the different phases of the relationship between Francisco Weffort’s political thought and the problem of dependency. In creating a Latin American political lexicon centered on the categories of “dependency” and “populism,” the Brazilian political scientist incorporated a dependentist perspective into his analyses of populism, especially under the influence of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who used Weffort’s concept of “populism” in his interpretation of “dependency.” In a second stage, however, during the period of intense international worker and student strikes, in 1968, Weffort shifted his concern from populism as a leader/mass relationship to the relations between workers, unions, and the state. This inflection, in turn, was accompanied by successive attempts to criticize dependentist perspectives in general, to the point of comparing opposing ideas of dependency with a possible class analysis of development in Latin America.

A first explicit attempt to move away from “dependency” appeared in November 1970, in the debate with Cardoso in Chile. In the published version of this exchange in April 1971, Weffort added words to the argument that it was impossible for dependency to offer a class alternative for understanding development. In the same period, in March 1971, he presented an analysis of the strikes of Osasco and Contagem that was the result of “Brazilian social history research” that he was developing at the time in the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Weffort, 1972a: 3). ¹⁷ It now emphasized the novelty of these strikes in relation to the union practices and dynamics consolidated in Brazil before 1964. To this end, he pointed out that “the workers’ movement must be seen not only as dependent on the history of society but also as the subject of its own history and, as such, capable of influencing society. It is above all from this second historical perspective that a study of the 1968 strikes appears relevant” (10). It was also in this communication that he presented, possibly for the first time, the idea of “populist unionism” (27) to refer to union practices with which he believed the 1968 strikes had broken.

In the following year, Weffort (1972b) defended a thesis which had as its object the emergence and crisis of populist unionism in Brazil between 1945 and 1964. Thus, the controversy with Cardoso coincided with the establishment of a new research agenda in which the autonomy-heteronomy binomial of the Brazilian working class acquired centrality. Weffort’s (1972b: v, x) criticism now focused on the shortcomings of modernization theory, classical Marxism, and dependency theory in recognizing the transition from heteronomy to popular autonomy:

The problem of autonomy-heteronomy of worker and union behavior is the main core of this study. . . . The proposal for a critique of this comparative procedure [of modernization theory and classical Marxist theory] is perhaps the greatest virtue of so-called dependency theory. . . . However, leaving aside the critical results, the fact is that from this side it has not progressed much toward positive knowledge of social classes in underdeveloped countries.

Dependency theories, in particular, despite sharing criticism from functionalist and classical Marxist perspectives, ended up reproducing the limits of these intellectual traditions by adopting the nation as an assumption in relation to class behavior. In addition, they marked the limits of the way social classes had been analyzed up to that time: “It is interesting to observe how the two tendencies, especially ‘classical Marxist theory’ and ‘dependency theory,’ change, almost without mediation, from propositions of a structural character on the positions occupied by the classes in the social structure to propositions of a psychosocial character that seek to characterize attributes of individual conduct directly” (Weffort, 1972b: xi).

The reorientation of Weffort’s research agenda toward union history in Brazil and his activity as a researcher throughout the 1970s are therefore best understood in terms of this key change of perspective. The formulations regarding populist unionism emerge from the critique of dependency and the need to extend populism beyond the essentially electoral mass-leader relationship. It was necessary to find an object in which the activity of the popular classes could be expressed independently by breaking with the previous formulas. This is why it is curious that in an introductory note to O populismo na política brasileira, a collection of his reflections on the subject published at the end of the 1970s, Weffort (1972b: xi) minimized the presence of dependency theory in his thinking as “rhetorical.” As we have said, reconstruction of the direction of his articles shows, on the one hand, that the place of dependency in Weffort’s formulations on populism, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, was not superficial at all. It also shows that the theoretical and analytical interpretations of populism contained therein are neither unequivocal nor continuous.