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| Andre
Gunder Frank : 'Prophet in the Wilderness' (1929 -2005) |
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Andre Gunder Frank
(1929 - 2005) |
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Andre
Gunder Frank, perhaps the most prolific and controversial
Development Economist and Sociologist of the post-war
era, best known as the author of 'Dependency' theory,
died on Saturday in Luxembourg, age 76, after a long
battle against cancer. His opus includes some 40 books
and nearly a thousand articles and other pieces, in
numerous languages, spanning fifty years of global political
and economic development. His life and work was full
of movement, argument, and counter-argument. Always
ahead of his time, his |
achievement was to repeatedly stand tradition and received
theory on their head in field after field (especially
Economics, Development Studies, Sociology, and History)
and issue after issue. Decades later, many of his ideas
have now been generally accepted as events proved his
analysis and predictions accurate: the stubborn persistence
of Third World poverty and 'underdevelopment' despite
foreign investment and because of unmanageable debt-servicing
imposed by foreign creditors; the failure of 'really
existing capitalism' in much of the Third World as well
as the failure of 'really existing socialism' in the
former 'Second World' (including China) and their re-integration
to global capitalism and subsequent partial 'Third-Worldization';
the reappearance of persistent structural economic crisis
and imbalance in the West (including Japan and the US)
and in global capitalism as a whole and the ineffectiveness
of Keynesian and fiscal stimulatory means to redress
this; the polarising and fragmenting consequences of
'globalization', rendering national states largely incapable
of offering real solutions and giving rise to new social
movements on global scale that now carry forward the
hope for progressive change and at the same time of
new rightist, nationalist, ethnic and religious fundamentalist
movements that may eventually undermine the democratic
culture needed by the former; and finally, a profound
rejection of traditional 'Eurocentric' theories and
understandings of global development and world history
in favour of an alternative 'humanocentric' world-historical
perspective which views the 'rise of the West' to global
dominance as occurring very 'late' and likely to be
temporary, and in fact already passing into 'history.'
He was born Andreas Frank, in Berlin, the son of a pacifist
novelist who took him into exile at age four to escape
Hitler's Germany. The 'Gunder' was added by his high
school team mates as a cruel jibe about his slowness
on the track field, by comparison with a then famous
Swedish runner, Gundar Haag. (As Gunder later explained,
'Unfortunately, I did not know how the name was spelled.')
His youthful experiences in Hollywood, USA exposed him
to his father's circle, which included Thomas Mann and
Greta Garbo. He became a Keynesian while studying economics
at Swathmore College, but by the end of his PhD at the
University of Chicago (begun in 1950) he had rebelled
against his monetarist tutor Milton Friedman and against
all Development thinking of US origin, which he saw
as 'part of the problem' rather than the solution. His
rejection of mainstream economics, in favour of an 'equity
before efficiency' approach focussed on the importance
of social and political factors, turned him into a maverick
who spent the next fifty years energetically and cogently
challenging established wisdom and policy on 'development'
around the world. His early work established the concept
of 'general productivity' (later known as 'total productivity')
and its centrality to measuring 'Human Capital and Economic
Growth' (1960). It was his 1967 publication of the essay
'Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology'
(rejected by a dozen journals) and his first book 'Capitalism
and Underdevelopment in Latin America' (also 1967) that
catapulted him to international fame, laying the basis
for what was to be known as Dependency theory, and its
later spin-off, World System theory.
The decisive turning point in his career came when he
visited Cuba in 1960 (Che Guevara wrote to Frank asking
him for help to transform Cuba's dependent economy)
and Ghana and Guinea in Africa. He spent the rest of
the 1960s living and working in Latin America, mainly
in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile and analysing their underdevelopment.
The Peruvian theorist Anibal Quijano introduced Gunder
to his wife of thirty years, Marta Fuentes, a Chilean
who shared his passion for social justice and dedication
to 'change the world'. His students at the University
of Brasilia included Theotonio Dos Santos and Ruy Mauro
Marini, both of whom later became Dependency theorists
in their own right. Frank's trenchant analysis of underdevelopment
in Brazil, Mexico and Latin America argued directly
against not only Keynesian and Monetarist economics
and 'Modernization' theory, but also against orthodox
Marxism and communist party theory and policy, as well
as criticising the 'indigenous' structural reformism
of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (once welcomed by Frank
at Santiago airport as he fled from the military coup
in Brazil in 1964 and later President of Brazil in the
1990s) and Raul Prebisch of CEPAL/ECLA, and the US sponsored
'Alliance for Progress'. His unrelenting attacks on
the inefficacy of existing policies and reformist ideas,
and his preference for political revolution (as in Cuba)
and socialism earned him a persona non grata status
in the US for fifteen years.
He and Marta lived in Santiago, Chile, during the Allende
years, where his ideas were coming into favour. Allende,
then President of the Senate, met Gunder at the airport
to prevent him being instantly deported. Thereafter,
their home became a centre of refuge and discussion
for intellectuals from across Latin America, until the
military coup by General Pinochet on September 11th,
1973 abruptly ended the socialist experiment, democracy,
and the lives of countless friends. It was another decisive
turning point in Frank's life and career. While Chile
became a monetarist 'heaven' run by Milton Friedman's
'Chicago Boys', Frank became (again) a political exile,
this time back to Europe (arriving back in Berlin exactly
forty years after fleeing Hitler's regime) and dedicated
the next twenty years to analysing the global crisis
and the rampant failures of neo-liberalism and 'Reaganomics'.
It was in this period that he moved beyond Dependency
theory, saying that while dependency itself was alive
and kicking in the world, its usefulness as a guide
to political action had come and gone ('Dependence is
Dead! Long Live Dependence and the Class Struggle',
1972). His subsequent work turned increasingly to analysis
of the 'global crisis of capital accumulation', in both
historical and contemporary perspective. His thinking
ran parallel to that of others working in the same track,
including his long time friend Samir Amin (who he met
in Paris during the 'events' of 1968), Giovanni Arrighi
(who first introduced the 'world system' approach to
Frank), and Immanuel Wallerstein, who in the 1970s together
developed the analysis known as 'World-Systems theory'.
Frank's copious work on 'the crisis' chronicled the
disastrous onset of 'market ideology' and the return
of 'efficiency before equity' in theory and policy.
He predicted (in 1974) that the Third World's response
to the global crisis would be predicated upon increasing
exports to world markets and that this transition to
export led growth would be organised under authoritarian
regimes (including in East Asia as well as Latin America),
while it would inevitably lead to a deeper global depression
and the amassing of gigantic unsustainable debts- i.e.
to the Debt Crisis and 'vastly increased foreign dependence'.
In the end, Frank felt that 'development' itself had
'all but disappeared' from discussion, replaced by 'only
economic or debt crisis management'. He continued to
analyse the tendencies of globalization, including the
replacement of productive investment by financial speculation
and the consequent increase in imbalances between regions
and countries of the world economic system. He argued
that increasing marketisation and privatisation as responses
to the crisis would only further exacerbate underlying
poverty, inequality, and marginalization, leading to
tremendous pressures on democratic political culture
and to the inexorable rise of both new progressive and
reactionary social movements to fill the void left by
the national state's incapacity and unwillingness to
deliver real change.
The final phase of his life and work saw him returning
to world development as the main subject of analysis,
but this time across all of world history. Working with
a co-author (Frank and Gills 1993) he offered an alternative
to Eurocentrism which placed the contemporary crisis
and globalization in a much longer historical perspective
based on the long cycles of world system development
going back not only centuries but even millennia. This
work led him to conclude, in his final radical rejection
of received theories, that we should be brave enough
to reject 'capitalism' itself as a 'scientific' concept,
as well as 'feudalism' and even 'socialism' as separate
'modes of production' nor should we any longer look
for any real historical 'transitions' between them.
He argued that 'too many big patterns in world history
appear to transcend or persist despite all apparent
alterations in the mode of production'. His final position
therefore encapsulated a lifetime of movement and critique,
including of his own previous positions. In his penultimate
and perhaps best work, 'ReOrient' (1998) and in the
unfinished 'ReOrient the 19th Century' sequel, he explored
the historical method in new directions, again challenging
received theory about the 'rise of the West' and the
supposed role played by the market and 'free' trade
as opposed to coercion and imperialism. His final analysis
of global development included the idea that it is the
system as a whole that is the inescapable framework
of both analysis and practice and that any 'de-linking'
from it at 'local' or national level is unrealistic,
nor will global development ever be 'uniform' across
the world. He felt that shifts in (temporary) competitive
advantage (not always achieved by non-coercive or 'market'
means alone) and the presence or absence of 'hegemonic
power' were historically persistent patterns that in
a sense define the long term development of the world
system. However, he always embodied the idea of both
'the pessimism of the intellect' as well as the 'optimism
of the will' and so left a final admonition – i.e. that
the real 'global majority', the disadvantaged of the
world, should and would act to protect their lives and
interests and to improve social existence. He believed
to the end that change for the better remains possible.
As a person, Gunder Frank was principled and uncompromising,
yet always willing to listen to the evidence and an
opposing argument, and even to accept that he was wrong
and to change his views. Above all, he was always courageous
and never afraid to be unpopular. He gave people the
answers they needed not the answers they wanted to hear,
even if they didn't always want to hear them. He could
be difficult at times but his life was always about
heart, and he was deeply caring and humane and had many
longtime friends. Within 24 hours of his death, his
family received a thousand email and other messages
of condolence and support from around the globe. He
was above all a generous man, both to his friends and
to his critics. He was combative intellectually and
thrived upon this approach, but he also possessed a
wonderful dry sense of humour, that endeared him to
all who knew him well. His attitude to life can perhaps
be summed up in his phrase, said to his third and final
wife, Alison, 'Only two people in this world are always
right- the Dalai Lama (who he met and liked, but didn't
always agree with) and me', followed by 'and only two
people in this world know how to load a dishwasher-
the Dalai Lama and me!' Gunder Frank is survived by
his two sons, Paul and Miguel and three grandchildren.
He was still working until two weeks prior to his death
in hospital in Luxembourg on Saturday the 23rd of April,
2005.
April 26, 2005. |
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