74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST This thesis unfolds in the discussion on "the development of under-development in Chile" (the author has an inexhaustible flair for such fine phrases and catchwords) where economic development and underdevelop-ment are traced to three 'fundamental contradictions' of capitalism: 1 The expropriation/appropriation of the economic surplus. 2 The polarisation into metropolitan centre and peripheral satellites. 3 The contradiction of continuity in change. Implicit in the first contradiction is a so-called 'drain9 theory attributed to Paul Baran. Gunder Frank asserts that the non-realisation and unavailability for investment of the 'potential5 (as opposed to the 'actual') economic surplus is attributable essentially to the 'monopoly structure of capitalism'; he takes it upon himself to show how this structure resulted in the underdevelopment of Chile throughout modern history. No serious Marxist-Leninist can doubt that capitalism in its historical development must bear the responsibility for keeping Latin America, and a very large part of the world, in wretched backwardness,5 No one can seriously dispute the formulation that the retention of a vast reserve of precapitalist relations, the distortion of the process of primitive accumulation, the expropriation of a large part of the population in these countries, the one-sided utilisation of raw material and, later on, the large-scale export of capital to these countries kept them in this state. It turns out that this is not at all what Gunder Frank has in mind. According to him, world capitalism—past, present and future, advanced or backward—is characterised by "a highly monopolistic structure" (p 31). Here we get to the real point of the analysis: This monopoly structure, working primarily through the expropriation/appropriation contradiction, spread its tentacles from top to near-bottom, to everything that has moved in the historical development of (say, Chile's) economy. In fact, literally everything from the big top of world capitalism to the near-bottom of the underdeveloped society is one chain of exploitation relations. Next follows an elaboration of the 'chain-like relation9 : world capitalism exploits the'national metropolises'; the national metropolises exploit the regional centres; the regional centres exploit the local centres ; the large landowners or merchants exploit the small peasants or tenants ; the small peasants and tenants exploit the landless labourers. In fact, according to Gunder Frank, everybody in this system, with the sole exception of the absolutely pauperised worker, exploits somebody or the other. At every step on the ladder (note the elegant variation of metaphor), he discovers that the relatively few 'capitalists above5 exercise 'monopoly power5 over the many below. And thus, the economic surplus gets expropriated and appropriated. The end result is—the development of underdevelopment . Lenin pointed out that Trotskyite theory has the same relation to Marxism as a caricature to the original. Like all Trotskyite romanticists and pseudo-scientific writers, Gunder Frank has a talent for ignoring real relations and confusing the reader in a flurry of elegant rhetoric,