Superexploitation and the Imperialist Drive of Capitalism: How Marini’s ‘Dialectics of Dependency’ Goes beyond Marx’s ‘Capital’ by Andy Higginbottom 2023, Volume 74, Number 11 (April 2023): 29-53 hƩps://monthlyreview.org/2023/04/01/superexploitaƟon-and-the-imperialist-drive-of-capitalism-how- marinis-dialecƟcs-of-dependency-goes-beyond-marxs-capital/ Topics: Economic Theory Imperialism Marxism Political Economy Places: Americas Europe Latin America United Kingdom p29 The publication in English of Ruy Mauro Marini’s The Dialectics of Dependency, fifty years after its original release in Spanish, has been a long time coming. 1 The work, which has now been released with an extensive introduction by Amanda Latimer, is among the most important contributions to Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century and is, if anything, even more relevant today. Marini’s thought was directed at the fight for socialism in Latin America. 2 His pathbreaking analysis argued for the necessity of emancipating the working class through revolution and acting against, not in alliance with, the bourgeoisie. He analyzed the state of capitalism in Latin America, with its distinct characteristics of underdevelopment and a different relationship to the world system of capitalism than Western Europe and the United States. Marini positioned his argument for socialism in the dependency paradigm, by which he understood that the capitalist underdevelopment of Latin America contributes to the development of the imperialist economies. The dependency relationship is expressed as the transfer of value from the poor, subordinated countries to the rich, dominating countries. Marini’s original contribution was to explain the social relations of production at the root of international value transfer, thereby developing a distinct labor theory of imperialism that is the foundation of Marxist dependency theory. Marini identified the “super-exploitation” of labor as the fundamental social relation of capitalist underdevelopment. This is not his only strategic concept—his systematic analysis links labor superexploitation with unequal international exchange, the idea of a fractured internal market, and the concept of subimperialism; but this paper focuses on superexploitation. 3 Labor superexploitation conceptually captures the real condition of the working class in Latin America. It involves three elements: low wages, long hours, and intense work to the point of exhaustion. Above all,