Latin America is currently facing the most important regional challenge since the twentieth century: to try to put an end to its peripheral condition in the face of the possible transition to a new Global Order headed by the Chinese competitive State. The decline of the neoliberal mode of development of the United States has implied the following points: (i) questioning of the market sphere as the most efficient space for the representation of social interest, as well as for the solution of a set of problems on the national scale such as housing, health, education, employment, among others; (ii) questioning of the explanatory and predictive capacity of neoclassical economic theory as the theoretical core of neoliberalism; (iii) questioning of the United States (and its neoliberal mode of development) as the representative of progressive forces and the head and guide of an international system of State hegemony; (iv) questioning of the Smithian free market and Ricardian free trade, particularly the so-called law of comparative advantages on the basis of which the Global North has maintained and deepened the peripheral status of the underdeveloped regions; and (v) growing divergence of the spheres of productive and financial capital, in which the latter has been increasingly involved in uncertain and speculative activities.

It is in this complex current scenario, and throughout the unfolding of the new long cycle of capitalism or Knowledge Capitalism, that Latin America has debated between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism as forms of insertion in this new phase of the capitalist mode of production. The region’s commitment to neoliberalism, particularly during the 1990s, allowed proponents of this school of thought to speak of a period known as the Great Moderation (1980–2007). According to their reasoning, the region enjoyed increasing stability in prices and GDP levels, as well as lower real volatility and lower inflation levels, as a result of the implementation of the macroeconomic toolkit contained in the Washington Consensus. Even during the period between 2002 and 2007, Latin America experienced an average growth rate of 3.7 per cent, higher than that recorded during the 1970s and in stark contrast to the contraction of ‒0.8 per cent during the 1980s and the meagre economic growth of about 1.8 per cent on average in the 1990s. This difference in average growth rates allowed the refloating of the neoclassical ‘convergence’ idea of the underdeveloped world moving towards the living standards of the most industrialised economies – other words, a supposed success of the neoliberal ‘consensus’.

However, at the beginning of the new century, the profound processes of neoliberal privatisation of State enterprises and the absence of consolidation of endogenous industrial cores led progressively to deindustrialisation and an increase in poverty and social vulnerability. The neoliberal crisis manifested itself at the top of society with exchange rate devaluations that had their most complete expression in Brazil and Argentina with the cancellation of the Real and Convertibility Plans respectively; while at the bottom, a series of mobilisations of social discontent reached its climax in Argentina with the cry ¡Que se vayan todos! (‘All of them must go!’).

This crisis led to neodevelopmentalist experiments in the Latin America region, with the best examples once again in Argentina and Brazil. The social discontent of the subaltern groups enabled the State to move back from moderate forms of politics such as Lulismo in Brazil to more radical politics such as Chavismo in Venezuela, allowing the deployment of wide-ranging social policies aimed at reducing poverty and vulnerability. However, neodevelopmentalism did not manage to disrupt the relationships of social forces within Latin America nations, much less achieve the long-awaited structural change, resulting in a wasted decade to overcome Latin America’s dependence on and underdevelopment as compared with the Global North.

It is precisely this discussion on dependency and underdevelopment, as two situations that have been overcome neither by neoliberalism nor by neodevelopmentalism, that Felipe Antunes de Oliveira addresses in Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias. The author argues that both neoliberalism as a market utopia, and neodevelopmentalism as a State utopia, have failed to break the peripheral situation of the Latin America subcontinent, proposing the rescue of dependency theory to explain the process of ‘unequal and combined economic development’ (in the Marxist sense) in Latin America.

The proposal is highly relevant for at least two reasons: because of the current questioning of the explanatory and predictive capacity of neoclassical economics as the theoretical core of a declining neoliberal modality; and because of the current historical moment through which the Latin America reality is passing into a new global order with no apparent theoretical or practical compass.

During Fordism–Keynesian, a rich academic and scientific production arose from the structuralist school of thought in Latin America’s intellectual sphere that provided support for the import substitution industrialisation strategy. Now we are navigating the region with a shortage of philosophical, theoretical, academic and intellectual proposals and discussions to support the search for a path of development in the current context of global dispute. Antunes de Oliveira’s theoretical contribution belongs within this broad framework. Taking up this challenge, he proposes replacing the concept of development of the neoclassical current of thought, understood in terms of the convergence of GDP per capita of backward countries with developed ones. The challenge takes on a higher dimension in view of the need to transcend the conception of development put forward by Marx in the prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where he states that No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed.

Antunes de Oliveira thus follows the approach of permanent revolution expounded by Trotsky in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930). In Trotsky’s view, a society should not necessarily wait for the full development of the productive forces contained in it to give way to historical change, but rather the subaltern classes should maintain a strategy of seizure of power regardless of the lack of structural conditions. Moreover, in The Curve of Capitalist Development (1923), and from a long-term cyclical temporal perspective, Trotsky, in opposition to the economicist approach of Nikolai Kondratiev, posits that development is determined not by the internal dynamics of the system but by the external conditions that constitute the structure of capitalist evolution.

This situation means that backward countries do not necessarily go through the same stages of development that developed countries have passed but can potentially compact stages due to the combination of the advanced with the backward, allowing them to jump to more advanced stages, following a strategy of social reproduction and economic development. In order to overcome neoliberal and neodevelopmentalist perspectives, and basing himself on Trotskyist thought, Antunes de Oliveira proposes to understand development as an open, unequal and combined process, resulting from the interaction of international dynamics and social change.

From this point of reference, the author proposes the construction of a theoretical perspective based on the enrichment of a series of concepts formulated by the main exponents of the Latin America dependency school of thought, such as Ruy Mauro Marini’s super-exploitation of labour and sub-imperialism, Theotônio dos Santos’ fascist dependency, and Vânia Bambirra’s ‘dominated–dominant classes’. The explanatory capacity of this theoretical lens is tested in the case studies of Argentina and Brazil. From Antunes de Oliveira’s perspective, the overlap between the evolution of international capitalism and the conflict within the national social fabrics has resulted in a specificity in the development process in Latin American countries that can be understood as unequal and combined dependent development.

Although the theoretical matrix proposed by the author strengthens the explanatory capacity of dependency to understand the determinants of Latin America development as unequal and combined, the question of the necessary conditions for structural change remains unanswered, for which Andre Gunder Frank’s ultimate argument is used: social revolution. However, the revolutionary movement passes through a transcendental problem: that of hegemony. It is therefore essential to incorporate the theoretical contribution of Antonio Gramsci, for whom structural change occurs within the ‘historical bloc’. This is the result of the set of social forces in constant struggle, cohesive under the hegemonic capacity of a social group that is not only dominant but also leading in terms of its ability to guide the rest of the social fabric ideologically and culturally around a national development project thus resulting in a variety of development modalities in which unequal and combined dependent development is possible but with a profound structural change, as I show in Knowledge Capitalism and State Theory. A ‘Space–Time’ Approach Explaining Development Outcomes in the Global Economy (2021).

In sum, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias contributes to an open and necessary discussion on the course of Latin America development in an uncertain scenario for the continent, where the central question is: continuity or revolution? And more specifically, which revolution?