Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America [antikvár]

PREFACE I believe, with Paul Baran, that it is capitalism, both world and national, which produced underdevelopment in the past and which still generates underdevelopment in the present. The following studies were written at different times, in several countries, and for varying purposes and media."* Each of them is in its own way intended to clarify how it is the structure and development of capitalism itself which, by long since fully penetrating and characterizing Latin America and other continents, generated, maintain, and still deepen underdevelopment. The analysis in these studies centers on and emerges from the metropolis-satellite structure of the capitalist system. Though the characteristics, contradictions, and consequences of capitalism appear throughout, one particular feature of capitalist underdevelopment receives special emphasis in each essay. The historical essay on the underdevelopment of Chile places particular emphasis on the loss and misappropriation of economic surplus in the process of capitalist underdevelopment, to which Paul Baran called attention. The short essay on the "Indian Problem" in Latin America contends that the basis of this problem is the extension of the capitalist expropriation of surplus out to the farthest reaches of society. The contradictions of uneven development and of international as well as national and regional polarization, in turn, receive more detailed analysis in the study on the historical underdevelopment of Brazil. The monopolistic nature of the structure of capitalism, finally, forms the center of the analysis in the last study, on the underdevelopment of contemporary Brazilian agriculture. The persistence of these underdevelopment-generating contradictions of capitalism throughout the history of capitalist development emerges from all the studies. • It has for this reason not been possible to recheck certain local sources.