ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FROM A MARXIAN PERSPECTIVE

JUAN EDUARDO SANTARCANGELO

Barcelona

Conferencia; HISTORICAL MATERIALISM BCN - THINKING EMANCIPATION. RADICALITIES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN A POLARISED WORLD; 2019

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM BCN

Economic development as a discipline began to be studied systematically in the 1950s after the Second World War. Although there were many different explanations throughout history about the causes of backwardness and underdevelopment, the most realistic and sophisticated approaches were based on the classical political economy, and in particular on Marx. Such are the cases of Imperialism, Dependency theory, or Unequal exchange; all theories that have in common the key role of profits in combination with specific forms of exploitation, disputes of power between countries, which end up in enormous inequalities in the living conditions of the population. The rise of neoliberalism during the 1970s not only generated a social, political and economic transformation around the globe; but also, it produced the gradual abandonment of these approaches from the core of the debates regarding economic development. The purpose of this paper is to account for the transformation that economic development theory experienced from its origins to the present; to analyze the implications of the abandonment of Marxian theories such as Imperialism, Dependency theory, and Unequal exchange; and to determine the current validity of these theories in order to understand the challenges that underdeveloped countries have.