Critique and anti-critique: essays on dependence and reformism

"Since the late 1960s the world has witnessed the election of Chile’s first Marxist president, followed by the bloody defeat of Allende’s program for a peaceful transition to socialism; the victory of the Vietnamese and Kampuchean revolutions, followed by war among these countries and China; the intensification of the struggle against imperialism in Central America and elsewhere in the Third World; and, in the industrialized West, the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism on the right and of Eurocommunism and Mitterand’s attempt to reintroduce Keynesianism against the stream from the left—all within the context of an ever more manifest global economic, social, political, and ideological crisis in the world as a whole and in the Third World in particular. As an originator and main spokesman of dependency theory, Andre Gunder Frank has participated in theoretical, ideological, and political controversies about these and many other contemporary issues. Some of these political issues, as Frank observes in his preface, “are partially hidden below the surface of the social scientific argument.” His earlier pieces were written “to contribute to the Revolution ... to assimilate the Latin American Revolution and the inspiration it finds in the Cuban Revolution.” In the face of growing conservatism and reaction in much of the world over the past 15 years, however, Frank has evolved from revolutionary hope and critique of reformism to an acceptance of reformism here and there as the lesser evil to reaction. Following his earlier essays collected in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (1969), the present collection spans the past decade and a half, from receding hope to growing concern. Written increasingly from the defensive in the heat of intellectual and political battles, Critique and Anti-Critique represents Frank’s critical participation in theoretical and political debates and his response to the many critiques that his own writings have provoked in the United Sifter, Western and Eastern Europe Latin America, and Asia. Although these essays are scholarly, they are never a cold, dispassionate, purely academic discourse; many are addressed to both academic and wider audiences. Speaking openly and writing frankly about the prospects of combatting dependence and battling for revolution or reform, Frank is sure to inflame the debates anew. Including the heretofore unpublished introduction and bibliography of his monumental but stillborn 1969 reader on dependence and underdevelopment in the Third World, Critique and Anti-Critique provides an informed scholarly look at and extensive information about the contemporary crisis and transformation of the world as a whole and the political struggles in the Third World in particular."