Writing Notes: What is Caribbean Dependency Thought? Part One

Caribbean Dependency Thought (CDT) is a part of a broader international currents of radical thought.

Dependency thought in the anglophone Caribbean emerged in the early post-colonial period of the 1960s and 1970s.

It attributed the problems of development to the region’s continuing economic, cultural, and epistemic dependence on the metropolitan world, and it called for an extension of political decolonization to these spheres.

Its influence diminished after the 1970s, but in recent years there has been a revival of interest in light of the growing disenchantment with neoliberal orthodoxy.

Central issue at the time was questions related to the types of development strategies which should be pursued after independence and the kind of international alliances to be made.

Independence defined

A major topic of debate was whether independence should be interpreted merely as a change of legal status (constitutional) or as an opportunity for more radical social and economic changes that addressed the legacy of colonial rule.

Cold War Ideologies introduced

Overshadowing this was the ideological competition of the Cold War, introduced into the region by a series of events, including the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the growth of social and political unrest in several territories.

The goal of CDT was to create a home-grown development model that avoided the “false choice” between the capitalist and socialist paths.

New World Group

Established in Guyana in 1962, it grew into a pan-Caribbean intellectual movement with a stated mission to change the way of thinking and living in the area. This movement was the principal progenitor of CDT.

New World thinkers argued that the root of the Caribbean development problématique lay in epistemic dependence.

Epistemic Dependency - the reliance of regional elites on “imported” concepts and theories of limited relevance to actual conditions in the region.

For the New World Group (NWG), change in the Caribbean would have to begin at the level of ideas.

The practice of the New World movement centred on the preparation and discussion of papers and the publication of journals and pamphlets. However, direct political action was eschewed.

Economic Dependence

Caribbean Structuralism

Caribbean structuralism drew on the Latin American structuralist tradition pioneered by Prebisch (1950) and of the succeeding generation of structuralist writers. However, the Caribbean version was informed by an acute sense of the dependence that resulted from the small size, high degree of openness, and recent colonial past of Caribbean economies.

NWG developed a body of work documenting and analysing the asymmetrical relationships of Caribbean economies with the rest of the world in trade, investment, finance, and technology; the low degree of inter-industry relations within the economies; and the limited ability of governments to plan and influence economic activity.

Dependency was also applied to the study of particular sectors of the economies, for example:

“Monetary Dependence” – where the local currency is tied to a metropolitan currency and the banking system is foreign-owned, with negative effects on economic stability and development (Thomas 1965)

“Fiscal Dependence” – where Caribbean public finances were reliant on foreign loans and grants (Odle 1975)

“Technological dependence” –a consequence of foreign direct investment and the strategies of multinational corporations in Caribbean economies

Historical/Institutional/Structural Approach: The Plantation School and Multinational Corporations

Historical and institutional influences were held as the major factors explaining the structure and functioning of the contemporary economy.

The chief historical influence was the nature of the economy established during the era of slavery in the Caribbean, and the chief institutional influences were those of the joint stock trading companies set up under mercantilism, the slave plantations they created, and the multinational corporations of the modern era.

For Best and Levitt (1969), the plantation economy exists across historical time and across sectors.

For Beckford (1972), it exists across space: plantation economies are those economies in the Third World where plantation agriculture is the dominant activity.

For Girvan (1974) it was the operations of multinational corporations in the region, which had become structured around the export earnings and fiscal revenues generated by the exploitation of mineral resources by foreign companies, characterized as “mineral-export economies”.

Converesly, the dual economy model (1954) of their economic predecessor Lewis posited that the growth dynamic lies in the capitalist sector, which reinvests its surplus and eventually absorbs the traditional sector.

Plantation theorists argued that multinational corporations ended up draining capital from the local economy through repatriation of profits, and promoted dependency on imported intermediate inputs and on capital-intensive technology. This was why the policy of promoting foreign investment had failed to solve the unemployment problem.

Dependency as Peripheral Capitalism

Beliefs of World-Systems theorists Frank (1967), Amin (1974) and Wallerstein (1979) argued that the historical development of capitalism since the 15th century has resulted in a single, interconnected world capitalist system with developed “centres” and underdeveloped “peripheries.”

Dependency as proposed by World Systems Theory is NOT Classical Marxism as it believes peripheral economies are incapable of independent development

Neiter is it structuralism as its unit of analysis is at the global, rather than national level.

It can also be argued that Best and Levitt’s (1975) theory of plantation economy was essentially a theory of peripheral capitalist development in one of its concrete formations.

Best and Levitt (1975) approach differed from classical Marxist analysis of capitalism on two fronts:

(1)    Marxist historical materialism is a determinate system in which capitalist development obeys certain historical laws, while Best and Levitt employed a method of a posteriori historical interpretation

(2)    Marxist analysis was centred on the role of relations of production, while the Best and Levitt models of plantation theory focused on relations of exchange

Social and Political Theory of Dependency

Beckford analysis how race and class made the plantation society a sort of ‘special case’ in the history of social formations. He posited black labour in plantation society takes the place of the proletariat in classical Marxism, and class exploitation takes the form of black dispossession.

The use of the Marxist categories of class was vigorously and consistently opposed by Best, who argued that in Caribbean society the relevant divisions were those of “tribe” or “ethnicity.”