Assess critically A. G. Frank’s theory of ‘development of underdevelopment’.

Assess critically A. G. Frank’s theory of ‘development of underdevelopment’. (2023)

Andre Gunder Frank, in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), inverted modernisation theory’s founding assumption. Poor countries are not undeveloped, waiting at an original starting point; they are underdeveloped — a condition actively produced by the very process that developed the West. Development and underdevelopment, in his phrase, are “opposite faces of the same coin”.

The thesis: underdevelopment as an outcome, not a stage

• W. W. Rostow’s stages assume every society begins traditional and climbs one ladder. Frank replied that the periphery has been inside world capitalism since the sixteenth century, so no pristine traditional stage exists to begin from.
• Building on Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth (1957), he located the fault in expropriation of the economic surplus: generated in the periphery, appropriated elsewhere, never reinvested at home.

The mechanism: the metropolis–satellite chain

• A chain of metropolis–satellite relations runs from the world metropolis through national capitals and provincial towns to the remotest landlord and peasant; at every link surplus is drained upward, so each satellite is exploited from above while exploiting below.
• Two hypotheses follow: satellites develop most when links with the metropolis are weakest — Frank cited Latin American industrial growth during the Depression and the World Wars — and regions once most tightly tied to the metropolis are the most underdeveloped today, like Brazil’s exhausted sugar zones.
• The prescription is delinking, since national bourgeoisies are compradors tied to the metropolis.

Its strength: the Indian evidence

• Colonial India fits closely. Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory (Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901) anticipated the mechanism, and Utsa Patnaik has since estimated the transfer at nearly $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938.
• Deindustrialisation — Bengal’s textile crafts collapsing as Lancashire rose — shows underdevelopment being manufactured rather than inherited; A. R. Desai read Indian nationalism as its political product.
• The pattern persists: UNCTAD’s State of Commodity Dependence 2025 finds middle and western Africa still earning over 80% of export revenue from primary commodities.

The critique

• Ernesto Laclau delivered the sharpest blow: Frank defines capitalism by exchange rather than by relations of production, which makes sixteenth-century hacienda slavery capitalist and empties the concept. Robert Brenner generalised this as “neo-Smithian Marxism”.
• There is consequently no class analysis: nations, not classes, exploit one another — a strange result for an avowedly Marxist theory, leaving caste, landlordism and state capacity unexamined.
• The weak-link hypothesis fails empirically: South Korea, Taiwan and China grew fastest while most tightly linked to the core, and Bill Warren held that imperialism spread capitalism rather than arresting it.
• Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto supplied the productive correction — associated-dependent development, in which industrialisation occurs within dependency, its shape set by internal class alliances and the state.
• It explains failure better than it prescribes success: delinking has a poor record, and Frank’s stagnationism cannot account for India’s growth after 1991.

Conclusion

Frank’s achievement is historical rather than predictive: he made the poverty of the South a question about the history of the North and forced sociology to treat colonialism as a cause. The mechanism he proposed, however, is too flat. Cardoso’s formulation — dependency is a situation to be analysed historically, not a law of motion — is the one that survives the evidence.