Dependent Capitalism and underdevelopment in the work of Florestan Fernandes

Abstract

This article focuses on the presentation of the nature, sense and meaning of categories of dependence and underdevelopment, as they are constructed at the work of Florestan Fernandes. From these categories, the author aims at qualifying the specific type of capitalism that emerges from the peculiar historical-social circuit of underdeveloped nations that have been born from invasion and conquest of territories of native populations of Latin America in the context of the expansion of the Western world. Trying to emphasize Florestan's thesis, according to which, although the Nation presents itself as the contextual and reference unit for the analysis of underdevelopment, dependence and correlated external patterns of domination, the operational nerve that links and organizes these phenomena are the structure and dynamism of class regime conformed to a model of domination and power struggle that establishes the limits of class struggle and, with it, the logic of social changes. Therefore, it is the supranational character of the autocratic and composite model of class domination, based on an articulation of articulations between the interests of the internal and external ruling classes, founded on the double distribution of the economic surplus, the element that allows us understand how imperialist domination and the condition of dependence are the back and the front of the same coin that always walk in order to profit better from underdevelopment.