On the Critique of the Dependency School

By Faris Hakim

There is a dangerous theoretical trap that much of the left falls into: to begin with Marx’s tools and end with Bismarck’s results. The dependency school did not stumble into this trap by accident, but by virtue of a structural methodological flaw at the very core of its project, a flaw that leads it to diagnose global capitalism with precision while proposing a remedy that reproduces it under a different face. This article is not a rejection of everything the school achieved. André Gunder Frank, Arghiri Emmanuel, and Samir Amin exposed what had long remained hidden: that underdevelopment is not an original condition but a produced outcome, and that development in the center and underdevelopment in the periphery are two sides of a single coin. But a correct diagnosis does not guarantee a correct prescription, and the prescription here is wrong in a way that deserves to stand openly on trial, because theoretical error at moments like these is no academic luxury but a material obstacle before any real possibility of emancipation.

The point at which the dependency school collapses is not in its analysis of the global capitalist system, but in a single question it evades answering with any clarity: who is the historical agent capable of transforming this structure? Samir Amin, the most developed and profound of the school’s representatives, falls here into a glaring structural contradiction. When he analyzes the economy of the capitalist center, he deploys a rigorous class vocabulary: the accumulation of capital, the exploitation of labor power, surplus value, structural contradictions that nothing can resolve but a reorganization of the relations of production themselves. But when he turns to speak of the periphery, the principal agent shifts automatically from class to nation, from class struggle to confrontation with hegemony, from the proletariat to “the peoples.” Two different analytical systems operating within a single text, without Amin offering any theoretical justification for the split, because an honest answer to this question would dismantle his thesis from within.

Arghiri Emmanuel, in his theory of unequal exchange, which he developed in his 1969 book *L’Échange Inégal*, demonstrates convincingly that wealthy states benefit from international trade at the expense of poor ones, through a mechanism of divergent wages that permits a systematic transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the center. But his implicit solution is to correct this exchange through tariff protection and independent national development: a reformed national capitalism rather than a transcendence of capitalism itself. He begins with Marx and ends with Friedrich List. As for André Gunder Frank, who in his 1967 book *Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America* established the thesis that underdevelopment is a produced historical outcome rather than an original condition, he pushed this logic along a path that makes the exit from dependency conditional on rebuilding the periphery’s relationship to the world system through the national state, which is in essence a nationalist capitalism administered through the state, even if he did not name it as such. Samir Amin, for his part, pushes this logic to its explicit conclusion in the project of “delinking” from the world system, which he developed in his 1990 book “Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World”, yet he never confronted its logical consequences with sufficient frankness.

This contradiction, shared by all three, is neither a stylistic slip nor an individual shortcoming. It is the inevitable result of refusing the question of the class agent. When you do not answer “who transforms?”, you find yourself compelled to answer with the nation, because it is the only available bloc once you have abandoned class. And when you place the nation in the position of class as the historical agent, you do not merely reformulate the analysis; you reorient the entire politics. Suddenly the national bourgeoisie, the class that history has proven again and again prefers compromise with imperialism over the mobilization of workers, becomes a potential partner in the “national front.” Suddenly the suppression of strikes becomes acceptable under the conditions of the battle. Suddenly the worker who demands his rights becomes an obstacle before the project of liberation.

“The workers have no country.” Marx and Engels’s sentence in the Communist Manifesto is not a romantic slogan but a precise materialist diagnosis of the working class’s location within the relations of production, a location that makes its structural interest lie in the abolition of exploitation, not in the preservation of the national state that administers and reproduces it. The working class in Egypt and the working class in Germany share one essential thing: both sell their labor power to whoever owns the means of production, and both produce a surplus that is systematically extracted from them. This shared reality is not annulled by geographic borders, nor by the disparity in living standards between center and periphery, even as Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange makes plain that this disparity is not natural but produced, through specific structural mechanisms operating within the very same capitalist system.

The historical result of substituting the nation for the class is not a theoretical hypothesis but a documented record written in blood. The military council executes the martyred workers Khamis and al-Baqri, and then Nasser proclaims national liberation and raises the banner of dignity and sovereignty. The popular fronts swallow the working class and silence it in the name of the great battle, and then negotiate with imperialism when they weaken, surrendering the very thing they had claimed to protect. This trajectory repeated itself in Cairo, Dakar, Jakarta, Baghdad, and Khartoum, in every place where national liberation rested on freezing the internal class struggle in the name of national unity.

Yet this error was not the exclusive property of the Nasserists. It was the error of the Egyptian Stalinist left itself before it was theirs, and it was a devastating error precisely because it did not come from outside but sprang from the theoretical interior of the project itself. The Egyptian Communist Party, which struggled for decades and endured Nasserist repression in the prisons of the Oases, ended in 1965 by voluntarily dissolving itself and enrolling its members in the Arab Socialist Union, that is, in the bureaucratic apparatus of the very state that had imprisoned them the day before. This was not merely a political defeat but a complete theoretical collapse, for it revealed that the Egyptian Stalinist left in the end possessed no genuine conception of class independence that might allow it to stand against a state speaking the language of liberation and sovereignty. The Stalinist logic of inevitable stages, which makes national liberation a precondition of social liberation, led its adherents by necessity to accept the leadership of the national bourgeoisie as embodied in the army and the state; and once you accept that leadership, you no longer possess any independent criterion by which to criticize it, nor any limit at which to stop.

This same logic is what reproduced itself on 3 July 2013, but this time in a cruder and more revealing form. When the army carried out its coup, it was not only the Nasserists who stood beside it: the nationalist, pan-Arabist, and Stalinist left stood with them too, in all their shades, from the Tagammu Party to the remnants of the Egyptian Communist Party and its offshoots, welcoming the “correction of the revolution’s course” at the hands of the very army whose bureaucratic-military character was shaped by the July 1952 regime. And what matters most is that this position was neither a deviation from their principles nor a betrayal of their history, but a faithful and consistent application of the very logic of the dependency school: when you place national sovereignty above the class struggle and make the national state the bearer of the project of liberation regardless of its class nature, you have thereby surrendered yourself in advance to whoever holds the state. And when the army seizes it and raises the banner of sovereignty and confrontation with the foreign conspiracy, you possess, from within your own logic, no theoretical instrument of resistance, because you have already emptied the concept of liberation of all class content. And when the Rabaa massacre took place in August 2013, and more than a thousand were killed within hours, most of them fell silent or absented themselves, because their ideological structure possessed no tools with which to condemn a state they had placed in the position of the historical agent of liberation. Class independence, once lost, is not recovered with slogans; and when it goes, there goes with it the capacity to say no at the moment when no is an existential necessity.

The paradox at the heart of the dependency school is that it was born to explain the failure of the national liberation projects of the 1950s and 1960s, yet it ended by furnishing the theoretical cover for their repetition. When Amin says that “delinking” is the solution, he is implicitly saying: try the same prescription again, but with greater seriousness. And the question the school does not answer is: who will carry out this delinking? The unstated implicit answer is always the state, that is, a military or party bureaucracy that undertakes to represent the interests of the people, speaks in their name, and rules in their stead. And this is precisely what produced Nasserist, Ba’athist, and Soviet state capitalism: bureaucracies that began with the slogans of liberation, accumulated privileges in the shadows, reproduced exploitation under a different face, then collapsed and opened the door to Western capitalism on terms worse than those that prevailed before liberation.

Trotsky’s opponents, whether Nasserists, Stalinists, or dependency theorists, present permanent revolution as a utopian adventure that ignores objective conditions and leaps over inevitable historical stages. This distortion reveals more than it conceals, for permanent revolution is in essence not a narrow revolutionary strategy but a methodical rejection of the mechanical materialism that transformed Marxism from the science of liberation into the science of successive inevitable stages. Marx himself, in his final letters to Vera Zasulich, warned against turning his historical analysis of Western Europe into a rigid universal theory through which every society must pass in the same sequence. Trotsky seized upon this warning and developed it against a Stalinism that reproduced mechanical materialism in a still more rigid form, all the more serviceable to the ruling bureaucracy. He demonstrated that the uneven and combined development of capitalism in the belated countries makes it impossible to repeat the European path, and that the bourgeoisie in these countries, organically bound to the world market and far more fearful of mobilizing the masses than of foreign hegemony, is structurally, not merely politically, incapable of accomplishing the tasks of independence and comprehensive development. Hence the inevitable conclusion: either the working class leads by itself, or an alternative leadership arrives from the military or party bureaucracy; and what this alternative leadership produces is always a counter-revolution clothed in revolutionary discourse and the slogans of liberation. And what matters most is that permanent revolution resolves the problem of bureaucracy at the root rather than the branches, because it does not delegate the working class to a party that represents it, nor to a state that speaks in its name. When the class is itself the direct, organized agent at the very sites of production, the circle that produced Stalin, Nasser, and al-Assad at different stages of the same bureaucratic logic is broken.

Here the essential difference between scientific socialism and the dependency school appears in its clearest form. The dependency school asks: how do we build an independent national state capable of confronting foreign hegemony and achieving development within the global capitalist system or on its margins? Scientific socialism asks a radically different question: how does the working class liberate itself from every form of exploitation, including its own national state that administers it? The two questions never meet, because they do not proceed from the same class location nor serve the same material interest. The dependency school never distinguished with sufficient clarity between socialism and state capitalism, and on many occasions it defended the latter as a form of resistance to the former. In doing so it contributed to the distortion of the concept of socialism, turning it into a slogan to be worn by any regime in need of revolutionary legitimacy, from Nasserist Cairo to post-independence Algeria to African regimes of which nothing remains today but their apparatuses of repression and their IMF debts. More dangerous still, this distortion corrupts not only the theoretical analysis but the very capacity of the working class to conceive a genuine alternative beyond the framework of the national state, and this is the most dangerous form of hegemony of all: not direct repression, but the impossibility of imagining a way out.

The question that the opponents of permanent revolution always throw out, “where has your theory ever been realized?”, conceals a latent fallacy. Socialism in its precise sense, the self-emancipation of the working class and its actual power over its means of production and its direct political decision, has never surpassed luminous moments that were swiftly crushed: the Paris Commune, seventy-three days and then drowned in blood; the Russian soviets, before they were gradually swallowed by the Bolshevik bureaucracy that turned them into a décor for centralized power; scattered moments in the history of the workers’ movement that were never given time enough to prove their capacity to build a stable order. What was tried in the twentieth century and called socialism was, for the most part, state capitalism with a socialist discourse. And the difference is not ideological but materially specific: under state capitalism, surplus value is extracted from the workers and accumulates in the hands of a ruling bureaucracy instead of an individual capitalist, and this does not change the nature of exploitation, only the identity of the exploiter. Socialism has not been defeated. It has not yet been tried. And the difference between those two sentences is the difference between despair and revolution.