Development and dependency: a new bibliographic research to be useful to the historical sociology of development

Abstract

A previous bibliographic research published in Análise Social made possible to arrive to the belief that the so-called technological progress is, by its nature, an agravating factor of «economic dependency». Besides Lenin himself had already a perfect consciousness regarding this point in his «Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism». But, before beginning the analysis of technological dependency, it is convenient to study the theory of dependency, under the same perspective that has been applied to it. One proceeds accordingly in the present article: concluding this part, one underlines the importance of, on one side, centering the «dependency» analysis in the dependent social formation themselves and in the struggle among the classes that takes place there, and, on the other side, getting back, at the theory level, the notion of articulation of production modes, in order to catch the way in which the combinatorial framework of the struggling classes in the «peripheric» countries is articulated with the capitalist mode of production, absolutely prevailing in the «centric» countries. After formulating, in this manner, the questions concerning «dependency» in general, one examines those concerning the new (or aggravated) technological dependency. Under this aspect, it is specially interesting to examine the concrete mechanisms through which the tchnological dependency is practised as a privileged relay of domination in general. Those mechanisms are concerned, above all, with the «imperfection of the technology market» and are leading inevitably to a certain «cost of technological transference». Once these two points were studied, then it becomes possible to conclude that the successive aggravation of technological dependency and that of dependency in general have their roots in the remarkable development of productive forces in the «center» of the worldly capitalist mode of production, that, in its turn, has in its core the institutionalization of wage pressures and social and economic security policies, i.e., the working-class pressure on the new capitalist machine.