development, making it more difficult for industrialization and sustained
development to take place.
Industrialization did not produce national or independent development,
with an accumulation of capital under national control, self-sustaining eco-
nomic growth, increased employment and growing levels of income, con-
sumption and welfare (Bernstein, 1982). Rather, it was accompanied by
increased foreign control. The peripheral economy is characterized by firms
and sectors which are not highly integrated among themselves but which are
linked into networks centring on the developed capitalist world.
One controversy within dependency theory concerned the impact of cap-
italismon a ‘peripheral’ society. Frank argued that once an unbroken chain
is created between rich and poor countries a complete and total capitalist
system is brought into existence. Societies that become integrated into hier-
archies of core–periphery relations are not backward in the sense of having
pre-capitalist relations of production. Rather they become part of the capital-
ist system and in the case of Latin America had been since the sixteenth cen-
tury when the mercantilist economies of Spain and Portugal had implanted
the seeds of capitalism. Peripheral societies may be subordinate in their
relations with richer countries but nevertheless they are part of an extended
system of capitalist relations.
It was thus a myth to claim that the problems of peripheral countries
could be attributed to the retention of pre-capitalist economic and political
relationship in a ‘dual’ society of progressive and traditional economies,
namely feudal forms of political authority and economic structure (Frank,
1969b, ch. 1). The so-called feudalistic institutions were as much the prod-
uct of capitalist development as the more obviously modernized capitalist
sectors.
This was to interpret capitalism in terms of trade and exchange rather than
relations of production. Incorporating a society into a network of world trade
was sufficient for it to be designated capitalist. Chile and other Latin
American countries have been plagued by an ‘open, dependent, capitalist
export economy’ since the sixteenth century (Frank, 1969b, p. 5). This of
course has implications for the analysis of the political situations in such
countries. The political relationships that we associate with capitalism –
namely liberal democracy based on the institutions of private property,
freedom of contract, and political rights – should have accompanied the incor-
poration of those societies into a capitalist world system.
The concept of disarticulationattempts to distinguish between forms of
international dependency. One developed capitalist economy may be
dependent upon another. Therefore it may be thought that dependency is not
90 Understanding Third World Politics