Criticize A. G. Frank’s ‘development of underdevelopment’. (2019)
Andre Gunder Frank argued in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) that underdevelopment is produced, not inherited: a metropolis–satellite chain drains surplus upward from the remotest village to the world metropolis, so satellites advance only when those links weaken. The thesis reoriented the sociology of development, but half a century of criticism has dismantled most of its machinery.
The theoretical criticism: capitalism misdefined
- Ernesto Laclau showed that Frank identifies capitalism with production for a market, not with wage labour and relations of production. On that definition Latin America’s slave plantations and the encomienda are capitalist, and the concept ceases to distinguish anything.
- Robert Brenner (1977) named the result “neo-Smithian Marxism”: if trade rather than class relations explains development, the dynamic of capitalism — the compulsion to raise productivity — drops out of the analysis.
The missing class and the missing state
- Frank’s exploiters and exploited are nations, not classes, so internal structures — landlordism, caste, the agrarian question, the state — become irrelevant: an odd outcome for a Marxist theory, and the reason India’s mode of production debate could not be settled with his tools.
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto replaced the flat model with associated-dependent development: industrialisation does occur under dependency, its shape set by internal class alliances and state capacity. Dependency is a situation, not a law.
The empirical refutation
- The weak-link hypothesis is inverted by the evidence: South Korea and Taiwan industrialised while intensely linked to the United States and Japan, and China became the world’s largest manufacturer by integrating rather than delinking.
- India’s trajectory is decisive: growth accelerated after the 1991 liberalisation, not during the relatively delinked decades before, and software services grew by selling into core markets.
- Bill Warren (Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism) argued that imperialism spread capitalist relations and with them the possibility of development — overstated, but Frank cannot answer it.
Methodological and normative criticisms
- The theory risks being unfalsifiable and circular: any growth in the periphery is redescribed as dependent development, any stagnation as proof of the drain.
- It is economistic: culture, religion, gender and ecology are absent. Maria Mies showed that the unpaid subsistence labour of women in the periphery is a form of appropriation Frank’s national accounting cannot see.
- Its prescription has failed: autarky and delinking produced stagnation rather than autonomy, and Frank himself later abandoned Eurocentric world-system chronology in ReOrient (1998).
What survives
- The historical core is sound. Colonial extraction was real and quantitatively enormous — Utsa Patnaik estimates a transfer of nearly $45 trillion from India to Britain between 1765 and 1938 — and no theory of development can ignore it.
- The asymmetry of value capture persists in new form. India’s record $99.2 billion merchandise trade deficit with China in 2024-25 reflects dependence on imported intermediates, and UNCTAD’s A World of Debt 2025 records developing countries paying a record $921 billion in net interest in 2024. The chain has moved from colony to contract and creditor.
Conclusion
Frank’s model should be criticised as a mechanism and retained as a question. Its determinism, its exchange-based definition of capitalism and its dismissal of domestic politics do not survive scrutiny; its insistence that global structure rather than national culture explains much of the world’s inequality remains a necessary corrective.