Interview with Jaime Osorio fifty years after Ruy Mauro Marini's Dialectics of dependence

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century, Latin American critical social thought was experiencing a boom in the heat of the social struggles that were spreading throughout the region, and which crystallized in processes such as the Cuban Revolution. In this context, theoretical perspectives arose hand in hand with political disputes. The rise of class struggle later confronted the interests of big imperialist capital in its neoliberal restructuring and reconfiguration of U.S. hegemony. Between revolutions and counter-offensives, between exiles and international networks, intellectuals and left-wing militants fought for social transformation and with dedication they stopped to interpret social reality in order to build real paths to socialism. Fifty years after the publication of one of the founding works of the Marxist Theory of Dependency (TMD), Dialectics of dependency by Ruy Mauro Marini (1973), we seek to delve into the framework of its emergence and development, as well as to pay tribute to Marini's legacy as an intellectual, activist and professor. We therefore interviewed Jaime Osorio, Chilean sociologist, professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, who studied and worked with Marini both in Chile in the period prior to the military coup and later in his second exile in Mexico.