Brazilian Marxist Political Economy:

from antiliberal structuralism to dependency theory and beyond

Abstract

This article presents the trajectory of Brazilian Marxist Political Economy, describing how Latin American and Brazilian thought broke with liberal Political Economy in the first half of the 20th century and evolved into the current debate on contemporary geopolitics. The most notable contribution of Brazilian Marxist Political Economy is the so-called Marxist Dependency Theory. Although it is a local creation aimed at analyzing Brazil’s reality within its insertion in the Latin American continent, it is in fact a powerful tool for analyzing world geopolitics and guiding anti-imperialist action anywhere in the world. In light of the current transformations in geopolitics in the first decades of the 21st century, Brazilian Marxist political economists are studying and debating how Brazil should relate to China as the latter advances toward becoming a quasi-central or even fully central economic system.