Book review of: Vania Bambirra, (1978). Teoría de la dependencia: una anticrítica. Ediciones Era. México D.F.

Abstract

In her 1978 short book Teoría de la Dependencia: Una Anticrítica Brazilian scholar Vania Bambirra responds to the most prominent critiques during the middle of the ‘70s about Dependency Theory. In line with a fertile trend in Marxist critical literature, she attempts to turn critiques on its head, resulting in an anti-critique. Intending to systematically reply to the critics, the author unravels some of Dependency Theory’s basic tenets. The book is divided into three main parts. In the introductory first section, Bambirra contextualized Dependency Theory from a historical and theoretical point of view. In the second, and most important, section the author methodically reviewed the critiques of three prominent authors (Agustín Cueva, Octavio Rodríguez, and Enrique Semo) that had questioned Dependency Theory. In the third section, she provided some brief conclusions and expressed her validation of Dependency Theory as a tool to understand Latin America, and thus change its political reality in a socialist sense. This book is extremely valuable insofar as it contributes to the understanding of what Dependency Theory is and what it is not through juxtaposition with rival theoretical inclinations.