Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution

by André Gunder Frank

In his second book, Andre Gunder Frank expands on the theme presented in his influential study Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. It is the colonial structure of world capitalism, in his view, which produced and maintains the underdevelopment characteristic of Latin America and the rest of the Third World. This colonial structure penetrates everywhere in Latin America, forming and transforming all its features in obedience to its own imperatives and thereby imposing upon the region those characteristic features of poverty and backwardness which are not primarily the remnants of an ancient "feudal" past but the direct products of capitalism. This development of underdevelopment will persist, Frank argues, until the people of Latin America free themselves from world capitalism by means of revolution.

Genres: Nonfiction

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

André Gunder Frank was Professor of Development Economics and Director of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) and Reflections on the World Economic Crisis (1981).

Reviews

[Sinan Öner]

Andre Gunder Frank's "Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution" is one of the best books about Latin America in social sciences. Frank searchs and thinks about different Latin American countries' histories in his book. Frank works on the political and social histories of Latin American nations. Frank's methodology is a Marxist methodology which contain different concepts and questions to comprehense Latin American history. For Frank, Latin America's main question is choosing between "underdevelopment and revolution".