Scholars argued that capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough
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It is ... not simply that the core is more industrialized, has larger individual enterprises, and is more powerful than the periphery which determines their definition in the core-periphery context. It is the existence in the core economies of the essential dynamic tendency which creates the distinction and reproduces it. It is in this most fundamental sense that as long as peripheral countries participate in 'development' in the context of the developed world system they are more or less permanently subordinated. Their historical derivation, relations of production, and intermediary class domination singly and together are manifestations of their position, but do not cause it. Third World dependency has thus become a "distinct" phenomenon [Roxborough ; 1976 and 1979], widely removed from the European experience of transition to capitalism [Furtado : 1973]. This is but a reflection of the "extroverted" development of peripheral societies under the impact of Western capitalist expansion, which "disarticulated" the economies of the periphery into "atom" and "microspaces", and then "asymmetrically" integrated the periphery into the world market, by promoting export production and import consumption and in the end "blocking" its capitalist growth [Amin : 1974a, 1974b and 1976]. Hence the incomplete capitalist transition for the Third World countries, especially under the "long duration" of the merchant-capitalist domination, which has failed to revolutionize the PCMPS of the periphery. Thus the now-famous dictum of Geoffrey Kay [1975 : x; also 95-107] :
. . . capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough.
Despite popular notions to the contrary, some dependency writers are quite aware that the impact of Western capital upon the dependent areas has never been "automatic", but has always been mediated in concrete reality by local classes, the State, ecological conditions, etc. The more critical among them�FeTnando Cardoso for example [1982:118]�even brand the notion of "the development of underdevelopment" as a vacuous jargon, decked in the distemper of a mere "play upon words". For, there has been some "associated-dependent development" in Latin America under new forms of monopolistic expansion [Cardoso : 1973 and 1982; Cardoso and Falletto : 1979; cf. Kahl: 1976 : 136]. Indeed, the simple hyperbole of dependency theory cannot possibly account for the emergence from the 1970s of a "vigorous" capitalist industrialization in certain Third World wuntries.