Andre Gunder Frank: <BR>Practical Strategies For Social And Economic Development

Practical Strategies For Social And Economic Development

Interview by Tony Simmons

Aurora: How did you first come to be interested in the problems of development? What particular experiences contributed to your disillusionment with the more orthodox theories and models of development?

Frank: The orientation and driving force of my interest and work in Third World development problems has derived from my passionate concern with justice, which preoccupied me already as a child and motivated me in high school. When I arrived at the Research Center for Economic Development and Cultural Change at the University of Chicago in 1953, my first boss there said I was the most philosophical person he had ever known. In a recent Canadian commentary, Christopher Lynn, then at the Toronto School of Divinity, published an article on “The Ethics and Economics of Canada’s Catholic Bishops” in The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory in 1983, in which he devoted half the article to arguing—rightly or wrongly, I can’t say—that I have had considerable influence on the Conference of Canadian Catholic Bishops and on their ethical reflections on the economic crisis and their work with northern people, northern development, and native peoples. The main point that Lynn makes is that the Canadian Catholic Bishop’s Conference has been interested in what Lynn calls the ethics of my work rather than what he calls the Marxism of my work. Incidentally, I’ve never claimed to be a Marxist, non-Marxist, or anti-Marxist. It’s never been of major concern to me what label or heritage is attached to my work. I started out with this concern for justice and human rights, in other words, an ethical position.

Aurora: What would you regard as the key concepts in your overall approach to the study of international development, and have any of these concepts undergone major changes during the course of your more recent work?

Frank: The importance of the central theme of the world economy and of its interdependence, I would say, has become ever stronger. What has changed is my belief, which was largely implicit in the idea of dependence, that a state of independence, or at least non-dependence, could be achieved through de-linking from the world economy through concerted political actions in Third World countries or regions. On this last issue, I suppose I have changed the most, especially since the coup in Chile. Experience has shown it to be extremely difficult, if not impossible for voluntarist political action to de-link particular countries from the world economy.

This evolution in my thinking and, perhaps, conduct with regard to praxis was accompanied by an evolution, or a coming around full circle, in my social scientific approach. As a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago, I came to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the Chicago economics approach. Because of my sense of justice, I drifted from the economics department to the anthropology department as I came to believe that, in questions of development and underdevelopment in the Third World, so-called social factors are more important than economic ones. I then became persuaded that behind the social factors lay political and ideological factors and that the kinds of political solutions the development profession were proposing, or which were implicit in our social science, were part of the problem rather than part of the solution. So I left the United States and went to Africa in 1961 to get first-hand exposure to those political changes which might provide a key to changing the social factors. I quickly realized that I would never become an African, however; so in 1962 I departed for Latin America, where I believed it would be less difficult to acclimatize socially, culturally, and politically. This was the period of the early years of the revolution in Cuba, and I was influenced like so many others in the reaffirmation of my belief in the possibilities and necessities of political change which the Cuban example promised.

It was during this period in Latin America that I came again to see the importance of economic and historical factors in the process of development and underdevelopment. I came to realize that these economic factors are imbedded in a world-wide economic system with a long history, and I argued that only significant political change could free any people from these economic and historical determinants. Indeed, in 1965 in the preface to my first book, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, I pointed to the need for a theory and analysis of the structure and development of the capitalist system as an integrated unit on whole-world scale. The idea was, and still is, to understand the determinants of and in this system in order to be able to formulate and execute practical policy in response. At the time, the only remedy for the “development of underdevelopment,” as I called it, that participation in the world capitalist system engendered appeared to be politically to opt out of this system and for socialism. But my motivation for this scientific and political work in Latin America was my long standing ethical concern with justice and human rights. This concern led me to focus my scientific and personal attention in turn to essential economic, then social, then political economic, and then again economic—but now in the world economy— factors.

But it was the political failures to achieve the necessary economic and social changes in Latin America—especially the failure of the Allende government in Chile, which used our dependence theory to little avail—as well as the failure of Maoism in China which made me increasingly observe the difficulties of escaping the dominance of the world economy. Moreover, in 19721 observed that this world economy had entered a new phase of long economic crisis, which already then appeared much more determinant of political consequences than subject to policy control, let alone avoidance. This realization led me to write Crisis: In the World Economy and Crisis: In the Third World and other books and articles on this world economic crisis.

Aurora: It has also been observed that while Marxian and neo-Marxian approaches to the problems of social and economic development provide a useful framework for historical, comparative, and macro-structural analysis, they do not offer much in terms of practical strategies for the immediate problems of development. Critical social science has yet to develop a clear policy-oriented dimension, and its conclusions cannot always be readily translated into practical strategies for economic and social development. In this sense, it has often been said, it tends to eschew the need for piecemeal social engineering for wholesale structural transformation. However, in view of the failures of monetarism in many parts of the world, this orthodox critique of Marxist theory may have lost much of its former appeal.

Perhaps you could comment on the policy uses of critical theories vis à vis more orthodox theories of development and give some examples of cases in which critical theories have provided a practical strategy for economic and social development.

Frank: Monetarist policy in Chile, as well as in Argentina, Uruguay, Israel, Thatcherite Great Britain, and Reaganite United States, has imposed terrible costs on working and other poor people, and especially on those it has made unemployed. It has not remedied any of the structural problems of these economies or avoided the deepening of the economic crisis internationally or nationally. This failure of political economic policy in the face of largely uncontrollable world economic developments is also true of Keynesianism, which monetarism replaced. The Keyensians claim that the post-war expansion was a result of the successful application of Keynesian policy. They put the cart before the horse. It was the post-war economic expansion following the previous economic crisis from 1913 to 1940 that spelled the success of Keynesian policy. As soon as the expansion ran out by the 1970s, when the present economic crisis began, this spelled the failure and bankruptcy of Keynsianism and brought about its replacement by monetarism as the dominant economic theory and ideology. The Third World version of Keynesianism—that is, import substitution for the internal market—was also replaced by monetarism and supply-side economics in the form of export promotion. In the North, the whole supply-side policy of tax cuts, which it was thought would automatically produce an economic expansion, was of course a miserable failure in both the U.S. and Britain and indeed in the world as a whole. The 1979-82 recession was even more severe than the 1972-75 recession and did not respond in any way whatsoever to these monetarist and supply-side remedies. Both Reagan and Thatcher promised to reduce the budget deficit and get government off our back in Britain and the United States. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the role of government measured by government expenditures as a per cent of the GNP has very substantially increased. So this is an indication that the so-called practical policies of orthodoxy, whether Keyensian or monetarist, have failed to provide practical solutions for the problems of the advanced industrial economies; while in the Third World, monetarism has lead to the terrible tragedies that we are now aware of in Africa and to the debt crisis in Latin America.

So these failures of orthodox theories and policies, including modernization theory in the Third World, offer a comparative context for your question and my answer about the practicality of policies and recommendations of critical theory, related to dependency and world systems. Dependency theory certainly has had all kinds of practical applications, even my own formulations of it. I remember in 1972 in Chile that a UN conference on trade and development was held in Santiago in 1972 and that the term “development of underdevelopment” began to be bandied around by the delegates there. That was a sign for me that it was time to go on and indeed, that same year I wrote an article entitled, Dependence is Dead, Long Live Dependence. Of course, the world economic crisis and the military regimes it brought on in Latin America and elsewhere then rendered dependency theory devoid of practical policy relevance. But the aggravation of the world economic crisis, and particularly its manifestation through the Third World debt crisis seems to have made Keynesian and dependency analysis more policy relevant again.

So dependency theory and what we may call “world systems theory” certainly generate practical political, economic, and social policies, strategies, and tactics. The question is how successful these are. Here, I am less optimistic. Although not a pessimist, I am an optimist with experience. Experience has shown that these policies are about as unsuccessful as the policies associated with more orthodox theories. Then the question becomes “What is to be done?” and all I can suggest is a general approach. The general approach is to look at what is happening in the world economy as a whole. In Canada, for instance, I submitted a brief to the MacDonald Commission on Challenges and Choices for Canada, part of which has been reprinted in a book published by the University of Ottawa Press called Canada and the New International Division of Labour. In this brief I discussed the development of the world economic crisis, and my suggestions for Canada were to try to ride with the stream in world economic development and specifically, to try to do what Canada did once before when Britain was declining and the United States was arising as a hegemonic power. Canada drew some benefit from a sort of a middleman role between the two as it switched its allegiance from the first empire to the second one. I suggested that maybe this is the time for Canada to again act in a middleman’s role between the United States and Japan. Canada is in a particularly good position to do so. Canada should try to combine its natural resource advantages with high tech, that is to say, to specialize in the production of high-tech equipment, relying on both microcomputers and biotechnology for the mining, processing, and transformation of natural resources, not only for itself, but for the world market. Now you may not regard that as very critical in the sense of critique; but I think it is critical in the sense of reading where the world economy is going and trying to go in the direction the wind is blowing. That is why, in my brief to the MacDonald Commission, I suggested that the issue was not one of free-trade or no free-trade because Canada, with or without free-trade, stands to lose. The issue is that Canada should use the opportunities that the world economy offers to its own comparative advantage, and the same goes for every other place in the world.

Aurora: I would like to press you further on the question of political practice. Could you be more specific in describing to us the model of political and social change envisioned in your particular theory of world systems?

Frank: I think implicit in what both of us are saying is that we also want to be practical. I don’t want to say that I am or am not a Marxist. I want to be practical. To be practical we should look to see where the action is. Where is the action today? All around the world there is fast growth in what has been called the “new social movements” which have become the dominant moving force in society today. There is a vast activity among these social movements, which someone has compared to termites. Each has no power on its own, but an army of termites is often able to completely eat through the essential structure of a building or, in this case, of a society. What is notable about these social movements is that very few of them, with the exception of some nationalist ones, seek to capture state power. Instead of capturing state power, they seek to carve out for their members a different kind of social existence within the possibilities that are offered to them. Many of these social movements are more defensive than offensive, and in a place like Chile or Brazil or Africa, they seek little more than to provide for the physical survival of their members through soup kitchens, community organizations, and various kinds of cooperative action, which mobilize their members for self-help and for the affirmation of their own identity. That’s where the action is. And that is the place for the intelligent layman, as well as the intelligent or non intelligent social scientist, to look with regard to both policy formation and with regard to his or her own praxis, to join these people in their respective communities, however they are defined locally, ethnically, religiously, or what have you.

Aurora: Are these movements joined together by any notion of what social justice is, or are you simply suggesting that there is an innate kind of ad hoc reaction to injustice that prompts the formation of those kinds of organizations?

Frank: Since many of these social movements can be called single-issue movements, they don’t often embrace each other. The point is that these movements are writing their own political script as in the ad-lib street theatre. That’s perhaps the relevant analogy: you have this street theatre going on all over the world, and I suspect that what motivates them is the sense of injustice and oppression to which their members are subject by the society in which they live. I would be surprised if any of them have worked out an alternative conception of a just society. They are trying to carve out an alternative existence for themselves in this world society, without ever aspiring to change the society as a whole or to change the nature of the state within the society. That is perhaps one of their strengths and what permits them to increasingly mobilize some of their people. Of course, some of these movements are also backward-looking in that they want to revive the old values that are being eroded by modernity. Islam wants to go back to the golden age of Muhammed because after the seventh century, everything went to hell in a bucket, and in that sense; they are very backward looking. The evangelists in the United States want to go back to the traditional ways that they say are being eroded by the system in which they live. That may be a way to mobilize people, but not one sufficient to formulate policies for inserting their members into the evolving society of the future and into the international division of labour. For that you have also to be forward looking in regard to what you want to do and whether you want to ride with the stream to your benefit. Therefore, some understanding of the world system and of its structure and development can be of considerable aid for leaders and members of these various social movements.

Announcement

Andre Gunder Frank passed away from a lengthy illness April 23, 2005.

Books by Andre Gunder Frank

Critique and Anti-Critique: Essays on Dependence and Reformism. New York: Praeger, 1984.

The European Challenge. Crisis in the Third World. New York: Holmes &Amp; Meier Publishers, 1981.

World Accumulation 1492-1789. On Capitalist Underdevelopment. Bombay, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972.

Dr. Simmons is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Athabasca University. “Andre Gunder Frank has written widely on economics, social and political history, and contemporary development of the capitalist world system, the industrially developed countries, and especially the Third World and Latin America. His writings are associated particularly with the historical study of “development of underdevelopment” and “dependence” and recently also with the analysis of the present world economic crisis. His writings have been published in 21 languages and include 20 books.” [Taken from Critique and Anti-Critique.]

Announcement

Books by Andre Gunder Frank

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