A produção da relação centro e periferia no pensamento econômico: das teses marxistas do imperialismo capitalista às teorias da dependência

Abstract

This thesis makes an historical retrospective of the production of the centre-periphery relationship in economic thought during the period from the early years of the twentieth century and the early 1970s, basing the research on the contributions of the authors, and schools thought associated with them, which interpreted the capitalist development as being characterized by contradictions and conflicts, causing a deep gap between the material conditions of the world population, and able to produce an hierarchical structure of global economic relations such as those relationships between the centre and the periphery of the world capitalism. Authors, from different approaches, that built a critique against aggressively form of expansion of the bourgeois accumulation process over the remote regions of the planet, those that would later compose the vast periphery of worldwide economy. Thus, are analysed the works of the first marxist theorists of the capitalist imperialism, the historical-structuralist approach of "ECLA", the debate between marxist thinkers about the existence of an unequal exchange in world trade relations between rich and poor countries, and, finally, the two strands of dependency theory, marxist and sociological, whose efforts represented an important moment for the Latin American peripheric condition and whose formalization and interpretations remain still very current. In our view, this analysis framework, based on the existence of an economically rich centre and a vast poor periphery, represents the theoretical perception of the concrete existence of the concentration and centralization of global social production, but lacked understand how this asymmetry was conceptualized by different currents of critical economic thinking, and how they ended up settling around of the centre-periphery structure as the unit of analysis. This is the main objective of this thesis.