Amanda Latimer | Kingston University, London (original) (raw)

Edited volume by Amanda Latimer

A foundational essay of class struggle published in English for the first time. Considered one... more A foundational essay of class struggle published in English for the first time.

Considered one of the most important intellectuals in Latin American social thought, Ruy Mauro Marini demonstrated that underdevelopment and development are the result of relations between economies in the world market, and the class relations they engender. In The Dialectics of Dependency, the Brazilian sociologist and revolutionary showed that, as Latin America came to specialize in the production of raw materials and foodstuffs while importing manufactured goods, a process of unequal exchange took shape that created a transfer of value to the imperialist centers. This encouraged capitalists in the periphery to resort to the superexploitation of workers – harsh working conditions where wages fall below what is needed to reproduce their labor power. In this way, the economies of Latin America, which played a fundamental role in facilitating a new phase of the industrial revolution in western Europe, passed from the colonial condition only to be rendered economically “dependent,” or subordinated to imperialist economies. This unbalanced relationship, which nonetheless allows capitalists of both imperialist and dependent regions to profit, has been reproduced in successive international divisions of labor of world economy, and continues to inform the day-to-day life of Latin American workers and their struggles.

Written during an upsurge of class struggle in the region in the 1970s, and published here in English for the first time, the revelations inscribed in this foundational essay are proving more relevant than ever. The Dialectics of Dependency is an internationalist contribution from one Latin American Marxist to dispossessed and oppressed people struggling the world over, and a gift to those who struggle from within the recesses of present-day imperialist centers—nourishing today’s efforts to think through the definition of “revolution” on a global scale.

Monthly Review: https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-dialectics-of-dependency/
NYU Press: https://nyupress.org/9781583679821/the-dialectics-of-dependency/

Papers by Amanda Latimer

Dialéctica de la dependencia: a cincuenta años, edited by Jaime Osorio & Mathias Seibel Luce. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Xochimilco: UAM, pp. 391-474., 2023

Una introducción a la vida, la obra y el contexto social del marxista brasileño Ruy Mauro Marini ... more Una introducción a la vida, la obra y el contexto social del marxista brasileño Ruy Mauro Marini para un público anglófono. Este capítulo apareció por primera vez en Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (Monthly Review, 2022), y fue traducido al castellano por Patrick Kane para el presente volumen.

El volumen completo está disponible aquí: https://biblioteca-repositorio.clacso.edu.ar/xmlui/bitstream/handle/CLACSO/248971/Dialectica-dependencia.pdf?sequence=1

forthcoming, Decolonising Then and Now. Edited by Radha D'Souza & Sunera Thobani. Bloomsbury.

For more than two generations, disunity within the global working class has been one of the key f... more For more than two generations, disunity within the global working class has been one of the key factors behind the weakening of class-based politics. While in the neoliberal period, the structural roots of disunity (e.g., multiple tiers of rights, pay and security) intersect at times with vectors of oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, and nation, the embedding and leveraging of divisions within the working class has been central to strategies of capital accumulation in all moments of imperialism. While today’s decolonial projects often rely on a concept of intersectionality from the ‘post’ moment of the 1990s, which may or may not recognize class as a key vector, earlier generations worked to build movements of working peoples that moved deliberately across the lines that had been surgically implemented in colonial divide and rule policies, without leaving the particular behind.

This paper examines the treatment of difference in the construction, exploitation and emancipation of the working class in the theoretical work and praxis of three such figures from mid-20th century Americas: the Guyanese ‘guerrilla-intellectual’ Walter Rodney and feminist organizer Andaiye; and from Brazil, Ruy Mauro Marini, a founder of Marxist dependency theory. All three drew attention to the rending of workers in international, racialized and gendered divisions of labour in the effort to exert greater rates of exploitation, particularly at moments of systemic transition. However, both the divide and control of the colonial political economy and the materiality of race gave rise to a new politics to meet this challenge, particularly in Guyana: autonomous organizations but also tactical alliances between sections of the class to oppose superexploitation, neocolonialism and dictatorship. This paper attempts to draw lessons from these experiences for class-based organizing today.

The Dialectics of Dependency by Ruy Mauro Marini, edited by Amanda Latimer and Jaime Osorio (Monthly Review), 2022

Ruy Mauro Marini was one of the intellectual giants of 20th century Marxism, having produced one ... more Ruy Mauro Marini was one of the intellectual giants of 20th century Marxism, having produced one of the most theoretically rich and rigorous accounts of capitalist development and underdevelopment in Latin America, at the heart of which he convincingly located labor superexploitation. Regardless, his work would remain unread and unavailable for much of the latter part of his life.

The objective of this chapter is to put the life and work of Ruy Mauro Marini in its social context, particularly for first-time readers in the global North. The span of his life covers some of the most intense periods of class struggle in Latin America’s twentieth century; in all of this revolutionary and then counter-revolutionary turmoil, Marini took part in revolutionary organizations throughout the continent, transplanting his political focus with every new thrust into exile, but moving consistently in the direction common to the generation of 1968 in the Third World, which positioned its pursuit of socialism in the particular histories and social composition of their respective social formations and, by necessary extension, in the worldwide struggle against imperialism.

The essay also visits Marini’s seminal contributions to a series of debates on the roots of Latin American underdevelopment. Finally, it draws heavily on Marini's own memoirs, writings, as well as tributes and testimonials written by former students, friends and comrades.

Forthcoming in S.M. Bâ & I. Ness (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Globalizations 11(1)

This article examines the significance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from the poi... more This article examines the significance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from the point of view of Brazilian workers in the hemispheric movement against the accord. This movement constituted a moment when workers positioned as competitors in the regional labour market attempted to organize in such a way as to confront the structural conditions of labour that have accompanied neoliberalism. It also illustrates the need for instruments of struggle that recognize both the particularity of Southern working class formation, and the interdependent relation between the well-being, wages and working conditions of workers in the Global North and South.

The trajectory of trade negotiations between the European Union and the Comunidad Andina de Nacio... more The trajectory of trade negotiations between the European Union and the Comunidad Andina de Naciones can be seen as an expression of the contemporary character of dependency between the two regions and of the conflict between competing strategies of integration within the Andean region itself. The first strategy reinforces current patterns of accumulation in the area of three "strategic openings" (primary and raw materials, services, and the state), the expansion of rights for Northern investors, and the state violence that has accompanied the internationalization of Colombian and Peruvian capital over the past few years. The second strategy, while mired in the class-based constraints that accompanied earlier experiments with "inward-looking development," positions regional integration as an alternative to neoliberalism and integration with Northern blocs dominated by imperialist interests.

Talks by Amanda Latimer

While capitalism has always relied on the segmentation of the labour process and labour markets, ... more While capitalism has always relied on the segmentation of the labour process and labour markets, such processes were respatialized and intensified with the global reorganization of production beginning in the 1970s. In single (and often the most profitable) global production chains, we find the most advanced and the most dramatically ‘backwards’ modes of surplus value combined, even to and including superexploitation and new forms of slavery. In Brazil, technological, organizational and finance-related ‘innovations’ driving the most dynamic sectors have enhanced accumulation but also reintroduced these ‘backward’ forms, all the while swelling the reserve army, now peopled by those precariously cycled through formal employment and spat back out again. Meanwhile, the instruments of struggle associated with the age of the nation-based mass worker (where s/he existed) have not caught up to this challenge.

This paper is intended to think through these issues by reflecting on the work of two activist-intellectuals from Caribbean and Latin American Marxism. In their own contexts, Walter Rodney and Ruy Mauro Marini attempted to come to terms with the specific role of Southern labour in global accumulation strategies at a pivotal moment in the global re-organization of production, with the shift from unfree to free labour at the height of classical imperialism. Rodney (1981) discussed the racialized division of labour instituted by the British planter class in Guyana which polarized classes of emancipated African slaves and Indian indentured workers, despite the parallel between each group’s experience of subjugation in and displacement from the labour process. Marini (2005) provided the most rigorous discussion to date of the role of superexploited Southern labour in equally racialized global strategies of accumulation, looking at how the recourse to superexploitation in Brazil effectively subsidized the cost of foodstuffs and primary materials in Britain, enabling the shift from absolute to relative surplus labour in the mid-19th century.

Both authors insisted that such supposedly backward forms of surplus value were inherently ‘modern’ due to their centrality to global accumulation in imperialist times. Both insisted on the need to reckon class relations within and across national borders, in keeping with the regime of accumulation shaped by imperialism. And ultimately, both read the shape of struggle through these objective conditions, moving between the particular conditions of oppression and the necessity of unified national and international class struggle. Rodney was at once a Pan-Africanist who insisted on the necessity for Afro-Caribbean revolutionaries to ‘ground’ their struggles in the history and oppression of one another; and a Marxist who rejected Guyana’s communal politics, which had "been used by the colonialists ... to split the progressive movement and prevent the people from securing their rightful shares" (Mohamed 2010). Similarly, with the bankrupting of democratization at the hands of Brazil’s first neoliberal governments, Marini argued the only way forward was through the struggle for working class unity across national boundaries; what social movements today are calling the "integration of the peoples." Such ideas are timely contributions to the effort to create an international working class response to the current crisis.

One of the key challenges to the study of Brazilian capitalist development has been how to interp... more One of the key challenges to the study of Brazilian capitalist development has been how to interpret the survival of ‘backward’ forms of exploitation which, in combination with surplus value generated through higher degrees of worker productivity, often form the basis of the most dynamic economic sectors. This combination of rates of exploitation in single production chains has long been a characteristic of Brazil’s insertion in the global economy. However, in the context of the ‘new consensus’ around export-oriented development, there has certainly been a revival of surplus value extracted by means of super-exploitation (as defined by Ruy Mauro Marini) in (certain) labour-intensive stages of production, as well as forms of unfree labour tantamount to slavery. At issue for the Brazilian labour movement is how to interpret and confront this so-called developmental ‘lag’; or alternatively, how to struggle for working class unity in a scenario which (despite falling unemployment rates, etc.) continues to be shaped by the neoliberal crisis of labour which struck in the 1990s. This paper reflects on the struggle for unity amongst Brazilian workers on the issue of the grounds of Brazilian development in the movement against the FTAA.

This paper examines the significance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from the point... more This paper examines the significance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from the point of view of Brazilian workers in the hemispheric movement against the accord. Organized labour’s response to the FTAA in Brazil was shaped by a structural and existential crisis at the end of productive restructuring in the 1990s which resulted, not only from the degradation of work conditions and labour rights, but also a qualitative shift in the composition and enormity of Brazil’s relative surplus population. However, the free trade debate recast this crisis of labour as solution: the “surplus population” was simply redefined in terms of Brazil’s relative advantage in “cheap labour” and thus, as a crucial component of the exit strategy to a regional crisis of accumulation. However, the specific role of Southern low wage labour in global accumulation strategies also became sidelined in popular – and even Marxist – theories of “globalization;” particularly those which posit a general commensurability between the structural position of workforces of the North and South respectively in the global economy. While not new, this position effectively guts the possibility of an honest foundation on which to build a new international of working class solidarity.

This paper examines the response of Brazilian workers to the FTAA in light of the analysis of the role of the surplus population in buttressing unequal terms of trade in earlier periods of Brazilian dependent development, as discussed by the Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini. It then examines the play of tensions between the “general and particular” in the North-South alliance of workers and movements mobilized against the FTAA, in which activists were increasingly forced to reckon with the suggestion that, “If North America is a laboratory of free trade arrangements, Latin America is a laboratory of superexploitation.”

Translations by Amanda Latimer

This book analyses the processes, mutations and trends currently characterising the world of work... more This book analyses the processes, mutations and trends currently characterising the world of work that are bound up within the deep contradictions of a global capitalist system troubled by systemic crisis, where the old Fordist and Keynesian state order has been substituted by a minimal, pro-business neoliberal State founded on the intensive restructuring of economic and productive systems and work organisation, characterised by labour deregulation, flexibility, super-exploitation and social precariousness. This is a work that illustrates the paradigmatic transition from social and labour relations based on job security, comprehensive collective agreements and guaranteed social rights, towards new social relations that find their technical, political and organizational roots in job insecurity, work rotation and monumental social insecurity, generally expressed in the systemic and growing loss of social and labour rights by workers the world over.

First published in Spanish by the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la UNAM and Editorial Miguel Ángel de Porrúa as Los rumbos del trabajo. Superexplotación y precariedad social en el siglo XXI, Mexico, 2012.

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