Barbacena, 1932 – Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), 1997

By Carlos Eduardo Martins

One of the main references in Latin American critical thought, Ruy Mauro Marini graduated in 1957 in public administration from EBAP, where he was both student and assistant professor to Guerreiro Ramos. He then obtained a scholarship from the French government to study at the National Foundation of Political Sciences (Sciences Po). Between 1958 and 1960, he conducted his first systematic studies of Karl Marx’s work. Upon returning to Brazil, he was one of the founders, in 1961, of Política Operária (POLOP) – an organization that challenged the theses of the communist parties in Latin America advocating for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, proposing instead a socialist program for popular struggles – and took part in the founding of the University of Brasília (UnB). He became an assistant professor in 1962–1963 and a teaching assistant in 1964, alongside faculty that included Andre Gunder Frank, Victor Nunes Leal, Theotonio dos Santos, and Vania Bambirra. He began his doctoral studies on Bonapartism, which were interrupted by the 1964 military coup.

Dismissed from UnB, Marini was arrested by the Navy in July 1964 and later released by order of the Supreme Federal Court; shortly after, he was kidnapped by the Navy and handed over to the Army. After another habeas corpus, he sought asylum in the Mexican Embassy and later moved to Mexico, joining the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México. During this time, he published notable articles such as “Contradicciones y conflictos en el Brasil contemporáneo” (1965), “Brazilian Interdependence and Imperialist Integration” (1966), and “Dialéctica del desarrollo capitalista en Brasil” (1966), which were included in his book Subdesarrollo y revolución (1969).

Marxist Analyses of Dependency

In these works, Marini laid the foundations for dependency theory: the technological dynamism of dependent capitalism, its social base, and the tendency toward subimperialism, a concept he developed for the first time. He emphasized the monopolistic integration that redefined itself after World War II and led to the industrialization of dependent countries under the leadership of foreign capital. This industrialization was enabled by a convergence of interests with the dependent bourgeoisie, expressed in the generation of extraordinary surplus value that allowed the formation of a monopolistic sector within that bourgeoisie.

Analyzing the Brazilian case, Marini demonstrated the tendency for tensions between this capital sector and the small and medium bourgeoisies, tied to the domestic market, to dissipate when economic crises and worker organization threatened profit rates. This led bourgeois sectors to unite in favor of measures that restricted popular consumption and reestablished profit rates, culminating in the 1964 coup.

According to Marini, the contradictions between foreign capital and the domestic market manifest in the central role of extraordinary surplus value and the decapitalization that follows cyclical capital inflows, driving luxury consumption, state consumption, and external market conquest as paths to profit realization. It is this drive toward external markets – including capital export as its most developed form – that defines the economic foundations of subimperialism.

In 1969, after publishing an article about the Brazilian student movement in the wake of Mexican student protests, the government pressured him to leave the country. Marini then moved to Chile, settling in Concepción and joining the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), of which he became a leader. At the invitation of the Center for Socioeconomic Studies (CESO), he moved to Santiago, where he taught a course on theories of social change – focusing on the transition to socialism – and seminars on Marxist theory and Latin American reality.

From this period came Dialética da dependência (1973), which confirmed the academic and political importance of his work. Using Marx’s method of moving from the abstract to the concrete, Marini reinterpreted the general categories of Capital and developed the concept of labor superexploitation as the foundation of the expanded reproduction of dependent capitalism. Superexploitation, as he described, occurs when labor power is paid below its value through three mechanisms: increased working hours or intensity without wage compensation, and wage reductions. Its driver is monopolistic competition, which depresses production prices and negatively affects the surplus value and profit rates of capital in peripheral countries, which then compensate by appropriating more labor.

Simultaneously, Marini co-founded the magazine Chile Hoy. The articles he published there formed the basis of El reformismo y la contrarevolución: estudios sobre el Chile (1976), a book in which he analyzed the Chilean experience. The military coup forced him into exile again. After a brief stay in Panama, he split his time between Germany – at the Max Planck Institute – and Mexico, eventually settling at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

There, he reunited with much of the CESO group, including Theotonio dos Santos, Vania Bambirra, Orlando Caputo, and Jaime Osorio. He founded the magazine Cuadernos Políticos in 1974 and the Center for Information, Documentation, and Analysis of the Labor Movement in Latin America (Cidamo) in 1977, directing it until 1982. He further developed the theoretical problems raised in Dialética da dependência in key texts, including: Las razones del neodesarrollismo (1978), in response to criticism from Fernando Henrique Cardoso and José Serra; Plusvalía extraordinaria y acumulación de capital (1979), where he integrated technological progress into Marx’s reproduction schemes, situating extraordinary surplus value, its intersectoral dynamics, and its specific form in dependent countries; and El ciclo del capital en la economía dependiente (1979), in which he analyzed the three phases of capital movement in dependent economies (circulation, production/accumulation, and circulation/realization).

He also established research lines on: global conjuncture analysis; the crisis of authoritarianism and the transition to democracy – describing the shift from counterinsurgency states to tutelary forms of democracy or “fourth power states,” which allow space for popular organization toward expanded democracy; the advance of neoliberalism in Latin America, exemplified by his article Sobre el patrón de reproducción del capital en Chile (1980); productive restructuring and its impacts on employment, addressed in Crisis, cambio técnico y perspectivas del empleo (1982); the crisis of socialism as a social movement or state experiment; and Latin American thought.

End of Exile and Difficult Return

With political amnesty in 1979, Marini divided his time between Mexico and Brazil, but in 1984 returned permanently. His return brought many frustrations. The rise of an intellectual elite committed to the liberal management of the economic base created by the dictatorship, the isolation of the 1960s and 70s Latin American debates, the monopolization of media, and the slow dismantling of authoritarian remnants restricted his influence. Among the projects he worked on was organizing graduate courses at the Foundation School and Public Service in Rio de Janeiro (FESP-RJ), under the direction of Theotonio dos Santos, between 1982 and 1986.

The extension of professional amnesty allowed him to rejoin UnB in 1987, where he resumed teaching in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. He coordinated the political science graduate program and led research on income concentration, the automotive industry, and Brazil’s public deficit from 1986 to 1989. In May 1990, he returned to Rio de Janeiro on sabbatical and resumed his research on Latin American thought, industrial restructuring, and socialism in the context of globalization and regionalization. This period produced his book América Latina: dependência e integração (1992). At the end of 1993, he accepted the invitation to direct the Center for Latin American Studies (CELA) at UNAM. He reorganized graduate studies and focused research on twentieth-century Latin American social thought, culminating in the collective work La teoría social latinoamericana, edited with Márgara Millán, in four volumes of analytical essays and three volumes of classic text anthologies.

In his final works, Procesos y tendencias de la globalización capitalista (1996) and El concepto de trabajo productivo – nota metodológica (1997), he pursued the construction of a political economy of globalization, identifying the globalization of the law of value and the extension of superexploitation to core countries as defining features of globalized capitalism. He left behind a body of work comprising six books, over two hundred articles, the coordination of seven volumes, and unpublished material.