The Global South Between Dependence and Hope

Pero aquí abajo, cerca de las raíces,

es donde la memoria

ningún recuerdo omite

y hay quienes se desmueren

y hay quienes se desviven

y así entre todos logran

lo que era un imposible,

que todo el mundo sepa

que el sur, el sur también existe

— Mario Benedetti, El Sur También Existe

• • •

There is a question that haunts the three continents.

It is not why we are poor — because we are not poor. Latin America, Africa, and Asia hold the world’s minerals, oil, lithium, fertile soil, forests, rivers, and labour. The question is not about scarcity. It has never been about scarcity.

The question is: where does the wealth go — and who decides how it is distributed?

It goes into copper extracted in Chile and refined in Hamburg. Into cobalt mined by children in Congo and soldered into batteries in Seoul. Into soybeans grown on land that was once the Atlantic Forest and crushed into animal feed in Rotterdam. Into code written at three in the morning in Bangalore and sold under a brand registered in Delaware. Into oil pulled from beneath the Orinoco and priced on a trading floor in London by people who have never seen Venezuela on a map.

It goes, above all, into numbers. Into financial flows that cross borders at the speed of light and leave behind unemployment that lasts a generation. Into debt payments that consume the budgets of hospitals and schools. Into capital flight — the quiet, legal, devastating movement of wealth from the countries that produce it to the countries that accumulate it.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a structure. It has a history — five centuries long — and a logic that can be studied, measured, and named.

This Substack is an attempt to build a Tricontinental Political Economy: the Political Economy of the Global South adequate to the present moment — a moment suspended between the deepening of dependency and the real possibility of overcoming it.

The classical political economists of the three continents — Marini and Bambirra in Latin America, Samir Amin and Walter Rodney in Africa, De Silva, Patnaik, and the Bandung generation in Asia, and Marxist economists of the North with the capacity to understand the particular situation of the peripheral nations as Paul Baran — understood that the global economy is not a level playing field on which nations compete according to their talents. It is a hierarchical system, constructed over centuries of colonial extraction, in which some regions produce the world’s wealth and others accumulate it. They called this structure dependency, and they spent their lives mapping its mechanisms: unequal exchange, super-exploitation of labour, surplus transfer, technological subordination, the role of comprador elites in sustaining extraction from within.

Their work was buried under decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. The Washington Consensus insisted the problem was us — our institutions, our corruption, our failure to “get the fundamentals right.” Development economics became a branch of management consulting: fix the business climate, attract foreign investment, liberalize the capital account, and growth will follow. It did not follow. What followed was deindustrialization, debt crises, structural adjustment, and the largest peacetime transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich countries in human history.

But the world that produced the Washington Consensus is itself in crisis. The Western-led accumulation project that has structured the global economy since Bretton Woods is fracturing under the weight of its own debts, contradictions, and declining productive capacity. The United States, which in 1995 owed the rest of the world the equivalent of 26% of its GDP, now owes 112%. France has gone from 46% to 232%. The turn to finance is, as Arrighi taught us, the autumn of every hegemonic cycle: the sign not of strength but of a power that can no longer sustain its dominance through production and must resort to leveraging the structural privilege of its currency and its institutions. And as that hegemony declines, it does not accommodate — it intensifies. Sanctions, trade wars, military interventions, the weaponization of the dollar: what is called “Hybrid World War” waged by a declining empire against the emergence of a multipolar order.

In this interregnum — between the old order that is dying and the new one that is struggling to be born — the conditions for building something different are more favourable than at any point in half a century. China’s rise has demonstrated that industrialization and sovereign development are possible outside the Western core. The BRICS, for all their contradictions, have opened cracks in the institutional architecture of dollar hegemony. The return of industrial policy in the Global North itself is an involuntary confession that the neoliberal model has failed on its own terms.

But favourable conditions are not the same as transformation. The structures of dependency do not dissolve because the hegemon weakens. They have to be dismantled — consciously, politically, from below — by the social forces that have the most to gain from sovereign development and the least to lose from confronting the interests that keep the periphery chained to subordination.

That is what this Substack will do. Follow the surplus — across every dimension through which it is produced, extracted, transferred, and accumulated — and map the conditions under which the transfer can be reversed.

Dependency is not one thing. It is a structure with many faces — commercial, technological, financial, productive, distributive — each reinforcing the others, each operating at a different phase of the capital cycle, each with its own institutional architecture and its own beneficiaries. Why do countries that export copper, soy, and oil remain poor while countries that import them grow rich? Why does Argentina collapse under 42% external debt while France accumulates 232% without a crisis? Why do Latin American bourgeoisies reinvest only 15% of the economic surplus while China reinvests 36%? Who controls global value chains — and why can’t peripheral firms move up? Where does the surplus go when it leaves — and through what channels?

These questions cannot be answered one at a time. They are dimensions of a single structure, and they demand a framework capable of seeing the whole: the mechanisms of extraction and the state capacities required to resist them, set against the geopolitical conjuncture — the crisis of US hegemony, the rise of the BRICS, the new imperial belligerence — that both constrains and enables transformation. Each series of notes published here will take up one or more of these dimensions, always with the same method: rigorous theory, empirical evidence constructed from the standpoint of the three continents, and the political question that dependency theory has always insisted on asking — not just how does the system work? But what would it take to change it?

The first series of notes, which begins next week, opens one window into the financial dimension: how the economic surplus is diverted from productive investment, how capital flees the periphery, and how the debt-flight-crisis cycle operates as a permanent mechanism of subordination. But this is only a beginning. The programme is long, the questions are urgent, and the answers — as the classical dependency theorists understood — are not merely academic. They are political.

There is a line from Eduardo Galeano that never quite leaves me:

Our wealth has always generated our poverty in order to feed the prosperity of others.

That sentence contains the entire programme of this Substack. The wealth is real. Poverty is produced. And the transfer has a direction, a history, and beneficiaries with names and addresses.

The loss was never accidental. But neither is it permanent. In the cracks of a dying hegemony, something else is being built — unevenly, contradictorily, against enormous resistance. This Substack is one small contribution to the intellectual work that transformation requires.

The title of this project names the two poles of our present: the tricontinental perspective lives between dependence and hope. Dependence is the structure we inherit — five centuries of extraction made automatic by interest rate differentials and credit ratings. Hope is not optimism. It is the recognition, grounded in evidence and in the historical record of struggle, that the structure can be broken — and that it has been broken before, by the same peoples who are told, every day, that the problem is them.

Welcome. Let’s follow the surplus.

Emiliano López is a researcher at CONICET-Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Chief Economist at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Contact: emiliano@thetricontinental.org
X: @GsEconomist