Latin America: development, dependence and the role of chinese capital

Abstract

In recent decades, capitalism has undergone several transformations in the productive and technological sphere, whether related to new technologies in the areas of communication and information, or to the infrastructure of information systems, innovations in artificial intelligence, digital and platform companies. All these changes have been shaping the way in which capital accumulation operates and also the relationship between countries within the interstate hierarchy. Starting from classic and current theoretical elaborations on Latin American dependence - and focusing on productive and technological transformations - this work aims to investigate how the continent's dependence currently presents itself in this new situation and what its different forms of manifestation are. The results of the work point to the situation in which, while central countries, and some emerging countries such as China, advance at the frontier of these new technologies, others, such as Latin Americans, remain in the same historical position as suppliers of raw materials and also in the most recent position of consumers of these new technologies. Based on theoretical elaborations on dependence and the investigation of ongoing transformations, we seek to demonstrate how such transformations are related to the historical development of capitalism in which new actors (such as China), as they increasingly enter the frontier of development technology and getting closer to Latin American countries, assume a relevant position in defining the continent's dependency framework.