In his second book, Andre Gunder Frank expands on the theme presented in
his influential study Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.
It is the colonial structure of world capitalism, in his view, which
produced and maintains the underdevelopment characteristic of Latin
America and the rest of the Third World. This colonial structure
penetrates everywhere in Latin America, forming and transforming all its
features in obedience to its own imperatives and thereby imposing upon
the region those characteristic features of poverty and backwardness
which are not primarily the remnants of an ancient feudal past but the
direct products of capitalism. This development of underdevelopment will
persist, Frank argues, until the people of Latin America free themselves
from world capitalism by means of revolution.