There are two sentences written by Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986) in two milestone moments of his intellectual career and, simultaneously, of the situation of Latin America in the global capitalist economy that are worth noticing. The first one was formulated in the context of an enormous restructuring of global capitalism at the beginnings of the second post-war, where the new established architecture of international institutions led to the Golden Age of central capitalism, a unique phase of growth and industrialization:
Why not search for our own principles when even traditional principles are suffering a severe process of critical revision? (Prebisch 1944, quoted in Mallorquín 2005, 384; authors’ own translation)
It reflects Prebisch’s ambition of setting up an original theoretical framework that accounts for the specificities of Latin American economies and what development strategy should follow. This was a task that he carried on tirelessly forward over the next four decades.
When he wrote the second sentence, it had been well over a decade since capitalism had suffered the crisis that ended the Golden Age, while Latin America arrived at a situation of fragility—that dragged long ago—inaugurating what was later known as the ‘Lost Decade’:
Although in recent years I have tried to critically review my own thinking, to renew it to response for the changes that have taken place and collect the thought of others, I have not been able to dispense the center-periphery concept in which my first ideas of theoretical renovation materialized. I believe that it continues to be valid even when it is necessary to continue efforts to incorporate new elements, give it greater coherence, and gather the disperse fragments in a systematic presentation. (Prebisch 1981, 29; authors’ own translation)
Both sentences share, however, the same nature: the challenge of building an analytical framework to interpret and orient development strategies for Latin America in the global capitalist economy, recognizing the center-periphery relations implied in its functioning.
From this challenge, Prebisch and an important group of intellectuals nucleated in the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (and the Caribbean; henceforth ECLAC) gave birth to an original theoretical contribution, not limited to economic development and policy, but also to the social sciences in general, denominated as Latin American Structuralism. According to one of its major exponents, it was the only effort of creating a body of thought on economic policy that had emerged within the developing world (Furtado 2003).
Even when not all its members considered themselves as ‘structuralists’, the origin of the concept lies in the effort of analyzing the dynamics of capitalism and of Latin America from a structural perspective. Such perspective did not deny the theoretical frameworks imported from the center, but rather creatively rearticulate them to generate a novel interpretation of the opportunities and challenges to development in Latin America within the global structure of center-periphery relations.
An ‘originality of the copy’, as denominated by Cardoso (1977), that did not appeal to the notion of structure as an abstract field of static logical relations, as in European structuralism—particularly, as in Levi Strauss’ structuralism, but rather attempted to understand the peripheral condition through a methodological apparatus that recognized the diachrony and the historical specificity of the region and the way in which non-economic factors affected economic models. Hence, differently from French Marxist structuralism, Latin American structuralism was idiosyncratic and ‘historical’, even when one can recognize different sources of inspiration in each member of the school in the combination of structure and process (Boianovsky 2015).
The introduction of historical trajectories and the proper combination of structure-process in the analysis also distinguishes the approach from Anglo-Saxon structuralism. In the latter, the analysis of underdevelopment consists of identifying structural ‘rigidities’ that impede the proper functioning of free markets (Arndt 1985). Its point of departure was to revisit the assumptions of neoclassical theory that were inadequate to understand backward economies and modify them to adapt the general theory to that peculiar cases (Arndt 1988).
From such structural-historical analysis of Latin American development emerged the need to promote structural change, based on what the center had and the periphery lacked, that is, on an industrialization capable of mitigating internal social and productive inequalities, and simultaneously accomplish a better international insertion.
The possibility of structuralism to advance the theoretical and empirical arguments that grounded the necessity and the form of structural change in a peripheral context became the cause of the temporal distance between the two challenges launched by Prebisch. The first challenge may be interpreted as the trigger of what eventually was an invaluable collection of knowledge for understanding the obstacles and tasks for the development of the periphery in the world-system. The second challenge continues to weigh like a dagger among Latin American social scientists, a challenge that is today even more relevant considering the last 20 years of political and economic variations in the region.
Latin America inaugurated the twenty-first century with big expectations given non-minor political changes that started in Venezuela with the ascent of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution, the election of Lula da Silva of the Worker’s Party in Brazil in 2002, together with the rise of left or center-left governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, and Paraguay. Although variegated in origins and forms, such experiences coped a great part of the region and formed what has been denominated as the ‘Pink Tide’ (Chodor 2015).
Such governments pushed forward the creation of macro-regional institutions such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bank of the South, and reinforced the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR). These institutions reflected the will to construct an autonomous space associated with the need to promote an alternative project beyond the neoliberal hegemony that dominated in the nineties.
The governments of the pink tide attempted to recover several principles widely promoted but hardly accomplished, such as equality in the most unequal region of the world, the deepening of democracy after fragile transitions from military regimes, and the expansion of civil and social rights to ethnic and minority groups historically relegated. And it did so by opposing the omnipotent free-market ideology that the Washington Consensus imposed.
The inspiring Latin American setting, accompanied by sustained output growth and reduction of poverty and inequality, began progressively to crumble at the beginning of the second decade of this century. Brazil experienced a singular coupe d’état by parliamentary ways, Argentina moved from a neo-developmentalist project to a conservative one, while Venezuela has gone through external and internal deterioration that weakens its government against the opponents of the Chavist legacy. Such stage of regression broke the institutional support of the main representatives of the Latin American pink tide.
Notwithstanding the causes that have given rise to the retreat of the pink tide, which are still a matter of discussion among scholars, it is interesting to stand out this institutional regression as a manifestation of the historical difficulties that the region has had to constitute a political bloc with a regional integration mode alternative to that promoted by central countries, specifically the United States. Indeed, it is important to highlight that the main regional institution of South America, MERCOSUR, has now been transformed, under the leadership of Brazil and Argentina, into an operating center to dismantle neo-developmentalist projects, to weaken and isolate the political projects that resist the current neoliberal turn, and to reorient the integration process toward a complementation with the Pacific Alliance. And this retreat is within a context of uncertainty awakened by the undefined strategy of President Trump and the expansion of China in the region.
This new setting of Latin America resumes the discourse of the Washington Consensus, associated with the need and benefits of integrating to the international market and the avoidance of populist management, but still contains the same historical unresolved problems: primary or semi-industrialized economic structures, fragile positions in global value chains, social and spatial heterogeneities, that in conjunction reproduce income and wealth inequality and low long-run growth.
The vertiginous changes experimented in the region in the last 40 years or so must be understood within the context of a larger transformation scenario. We are referring to the process of global restructuring of capitalism by the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies. Such restructuring implied a qualitative change of the links between global processes and national trajectories. Enabled by technological progress, a new temporal-spatial logic of reproduction of capitalism emerged, based on increasing financialization and fragmentation of production. However, this new logic left unaltered the hierarchical center-periphery structure of the capitalist system, notwithstanding the evidence of some cases of development within the periphery, specifically in East Asia, and the recent rise of China as a contesting power to US hegemony.
Within this complex setting, the following questions are in order: what are the factors that weaken the development of the periphery? What is the relevance of center-periphery categories for the analysis of development? What role do geopolitics and geoeconomics have in understanding the different trajectories of the periphery? What is the role of the State and in what form it must be implicated? What are the possibilities of building a consistent and enduring development policy within the periphery, specifically Latin America? What is the importance of industrialization and industrial policy for development in the periphery? How does financialization impact in the periphery and what types of financial policies are required? Such questions demand, in turn, an enveloping question: which analytical tools are required for a proper answer?
Neither Prebisch’s thought, his founding idea of center-periphery and Latin American structuralism in general, nor the reality in which such ideas took place have been static. Indeed, in the mid-seventies, there was a process of crisis and restructuring of capitalist accumulation on a global scale, whose mutations are still under discussion today. Prebisch’s second sentence consequently invites us to reflect on the validity of structuralist thought and the center-periphery analysis. Hence, it demands to ask: in what way has structuralism responded to the changes of its dynamic reality?
As a general answer, we sustain that the theoretical heritage of structuralism is of great relevance to reflect on Latin American development in the current vertiginous process of capitalist transformation. Despite the passage of time, and considering the criticism and rejection received, center-periphery analysis is still relevant, especially when combined with the notion of structural heterogeneity. Such articulation allows a proper analysis of the limits and distortions of the ‘peripheral’ accumulation process, based on the study of internal socio-productive structures, the international insertion, and how different actors (and their interests) are embedded in power relations both inside and outside the peripheral national spaces.
On the internal side, structuralism identified a heterogeneous social structure that enhances, contrary to the center, a heterogeneous productive structure associated, in turn, with an imitative and exclusive consumption pattern. Such dynamic was the cause of the inability to transform the pattern of accumulation that would, on the external side, allow a change in the traditional specialization pattern based on exports of primary goods, as well as avoid a passive assimilation of foreign technology and capital imposed by transnational companies.
Both internal and external processes cannot be understood if not properly located within a framework of power and conflictive relations, commanded by domestic oligarchies in alliance with transnational companies.
Based on this theoretical framework, during the seventies, a leading group of structuralists opened a rich debate about ‘development styles’. Such debate was intended to delve with the Latin American style, especially focusing on what type of structural change was required and what was the political viability to pursue it.
However, as warned by Prebisch in the second sentence cited above, the durability and usefulne...