André Gunder Frank: Biography Of This Economist And Sociologist
André Gunder Frank was a rather peculiar sociologist and economist basically due to the fact that unlike what many of his neoliberal colleagues at the University of Chicago thought, he tended towards neo-Marxism.
Born German, raised American, matured as a Latin American and died in Luxembourg, his life is that of a person in constant movement, in contact with different socioeconomic realities and critical of how developed countries prevented underdeveloped countries from advancing.
Below we will delve into the life of this researcher and We will see his thoughts and works through this biography of André Gunder Frank
André Gunder Frank’s life took place in a lot of countries. Born in Germany, emigrated and raised in the United States, his identity and thinking would be shaped by traveling again, this time in Latin American countries. As an economist and sociologist, he developed a world-renowned theory, his dependency theory which helped him explain why the less developed countries of his time were unable to progress economically.
Gunder Frank’s thought belongs to the neo-Marxist current of economic sciences and, in fact, he considered himself a radical economist. It is not surprising since there are many economists, both of his time and today, who do not see the world beyond their neoliberal logic. Gunder Frank’s writings were not very well received among North American economists, but they were received in Latin America in the 1960s, coinciding with the years in which this economist lived in South America.
Early years
André Gunder Frank was born in Berlin, then the Weimar Republic, on February 24, 1929 His youth was turbulent since he witnessed the rise of Nazism, which forced his family to travel to Switzerland and establish his new residence there. With the outbreak of World War II his family left Europe, moving to the United States. It would be in this new country where young André would attend high school.
As the years went by, it was time to choose a university major, choosing economics and entering the University of Chicago In 1957 he would obtain a doctorate at that institution, presenting an excellent thesis in which he delves into agriculture in the Soviet Union, bringing out his thinking on economic matters.
At that time the University of Chicago was one of the most important centers in the field of economics as a science and, in fact, the emergence of a group of neoliberal thinkers was taking shape. Curiously, Frank, whose neo-Marxist ideas were totally contrary to those of that group, would hold debates with them and further reaffirm his ideas.
After finishing his studies, André Gunder Frank decided to travel to Latin America to witness first-hand what was happening there. He traveled and lived in several Latin nations, including Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Gunder Frank was impressed by the economic, social and political reality of these states and became actively involved in leftist movements in the region.
Of all the Latin countries that he visited, Chile was the one that marked him the most He would settle in that nation in 1967 and held frequent meetings with Chilean academic circles. In fact, his wife Marta Fuentes was Chilean, something that made it easier for André Gunder Frank to join the intellectual life of the South American country.
Being in those countries Frank He shared his Marxist theses from the North American intellectual scene with the leftist movements Furthermore, he warned them of the dangers of neoliberal thinking that was gaining strength, especially at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, especially at the hands of Milton Friedman.
Last years
In the same way that his life practically began with a forced march, his family having fled from the Nazis, when André Gunder Frank and his wife Marta Fuentes had to flee Chile when they were older. The reason for this was the rise of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who in 1973 carried out a coup d’état and overthrew the left-wing parties that governed at that time.
Gunder Frank fled to the United States, although this country would not exactly be a welcoming place. The American government did not treat Gunder Frank with courtesy because he had renounced his American nationality and he had recovered the German he had been born with, in addition to the fact that so many years living in Latin America made him feel more like he was from there than from the United States.
For this reason he decided to travel again to countries that were kinder to him and his ways of thinking, including Canada and Holland, although without ceasing to feel Latin American. That identity still connected him to Latin America, and at the same time filled him with deep sadness when he saw how those countries that had until recently been a true environment in favor of free thought and the defense of Marxist and social theses were becoming a continent full of dictatorships. military.
But in addition to this, he had to experience the death of his wife, a fact that would fill him with affliction that would not leave him until the day he died. After this he decided to live in Canada for a while and, when Bill Clinton won the presidency of the United States, André Gunder Frank was able to return to that country, allowing him to work there. But his last days were not spent in the United States, but in Europe, although instead of living in his native Germany he preferred to go to Luxembourg. It would be there that he would die at the age of 76 on April 23, 2005, after having been fighting cancer for 12 years.
One of André Gunder Frank’s greatest theoretical contributions is his dependency theory. The background of this theory dates back to the 1940s, when the Argentine Raúl Prebisch began to spread the idea about the differences in development between the center and the periphery However, it would be in Santiago de Chile where this debate would gain more strength and the place where Gunder would hear people talk about these ideas.
The basic idea of this dependency theory is that The world economy always ends up harming less developed countries In fact, to make this idea more understandable, its authors used the terms “center” and “periphery”, which are nothing more than euphemisms for Western and white countries and non-Western and/or non-white countries. The periphery, which is not developed, has to fulfill the role of supplier of raw materials, while industrialization and profits go to the center.
These ideas would be taken up by Frank himself and other authors, such as Ruy Mauro Marini, developing them in greater depth. Specifically, Gunder Frank maintained that underdevelopment was not a consequence of the survival of archaic institutions in less developed countries, nor of the lack of capital in regions that have remained distant from economic movements. In reality, underdevelopment has been and is generated by the same historical process that has generated the economic development of capitalism.
From the same perspective as Gunder Frank, world trade has mechanisms that prevent peripheral countries from improving and developing, keeping them in a poverty that already costs the central countries. Among these mechanisms we can highlight that the global market only allows the periphery to act as exporters of raw materials or as consumers of already manufactured products. They are not allowed to make their own manufactures.
Besides, The central countries have monopolized all technical and technological development, increasing the prices of the products since if you want to own them you have to ask them to travel from those countries to the peripheral ones, causing the price to increase since they have to go further away. Even if there is better in the peripheral economy, the market ensures that, due to the difference in prices, imports increase and exports stagnate.
The ideas of Gunder Frank and the rest of the ideological supporters were not simply a theoretical model. Several Latin American nations began to put into practice some maneuvers inspired by Gunder’s Marxist theses to avoid stagnating in underdevelopment that the core nations were trying to condemn them.
They highlight the application of trade protectionism, with the imposition of tariffs and controls on foreign products. In addition, a powerful industrial structure was built that provided manufacturing capacity for different products to the countries that previously imported them. Another strategy applied by Latin nations was to overvalue the currency, which made buying somewhat cheaper.
However, although these strategies worked for a time, especially in the 1970s, in the end the pressure from the central countries using the external debt that the peripheral countries had always had meant that the strategy had to be changed.
World system theory
Another of André Gunder Frank’s contributions was his theory of the world system. This is a work in which It addresses both economic and historical aspects from a naturally Marxist perspective and makes an important analysis of social and political relations throughout history In it he talks about what he calls the “world-system” and, according to Frank, at first this system had China, an economic center for centuries, as its main command, but the discovery of America and its riches made Europe take over.
As a curiosity, Gunder considered that it was a matter of time before the center turned towards Asia, something that in some ways he predicted quite well. Today China, Japan and India have become powerful economies in Asia, along with South Korea. In fact, several economists point out that if Korea is reunified one day, Asia’s economic power will be such that the world economic system will change very drastically.
About the lumpenbourgeoisie
Another of André Gunder Frank’s interesting ideas is about how America was installed in capitalism since the 16th century, practically since it was discovered by Europeans. The continent functioned with a lumpenburg system (from the German “lumpen”, “beggar”), a concept invented by him. This idea refers to the context of Latin American colonial and neocolonial elites, which became very dependent on colonialist power and is related to how the upper class of these countries has little class consciousness and supports their colonial masters.
