Carlos Henrique Lopes Rodrigues’ Imperialismo e Empresa Estatal no Capitalismo Dependente Brasileiro (1956-1998) is the result of research carried out for the author’s doctoral thesis. It analyses the actions of US imperialism and its relationship with the transformations in the processes of capitalist development in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century and analyses the economic consequences of the emergence of neoliberalism in the country.
Contrary to well-known interpretations, Rodrigues demonstrates that the implementation of neoliberalism in Brazil was not tardy. He argues that neoliberal practices began at the beginning of the 1980s, with the actions of the Secretariat for the Control of State-Owned Enterprises (Secretaria de Controle das Empresas Estatais – SEST), created in October 1979. The SEST was empowered to establish certain restrictive measures to clean up the balance sheets of the state companies that were to be privatised even before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to impose conditionalities. As a result, the Brazilian economy was adapting to the new imperialist conjuncture, characterised by the transition to finance-led internationalisation.
In his work, Rodrigues describes the different types of imperialism throughout history, namely the colonial system (1808-1860), neo-colonialism (1860-1955) and the ‘total imperialism’ of the post-World War II period, led by the United States, before arriving at contemporary imperialism. At first, until the early 1970s, foreign direct investment (FDI) rearticulated the Brazilian bourgeoisie and inaugurated the internationalisation of industry. Following this, in the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, financial internationalisation led to the relocation of the production process, creating a new form of dependency, whose main characteristics are: foreign debt, cultural mimicry and the abandonment of planning processes.
Rodrigues references the interpretations of Brazil’s economic history by Caio Prado Jr, Celso Furtado, Florestan Fernandes and Plínio de Arruda Sampaio Jr to understand the interactions between imperialism and a society with an underdeveloped and dependent economy that was unable to achieve capitalist development with sufficient national autonomy. According to the author, in Brazil, the development projects that took place between the second half of the 1950s and at the end of the 1990s were subordinated to the interests of multinational companies. As a result, the intense capitalist development during this period contributed to making Brazilian society one of the most unequal in the world.
The book is divided into three chapters, which capture the transformation of the linkages between imperialism and the Brazilian state. As part of this process, state elites adapted national economic policy through state-owned companies, with the aim of increasing the possibilities for high profit margins for multinational companies located in Brazil.
In the first chapter, the author demonstrates that the state created public enterprises in order to lay the groundwork for the internationalisation of production in Brazil. This was the moment when the automobile industry arrived in the country, and created the euphoria expressed by the slogan, ‘fifty years of progress in five years of government.’ In addition to examining Juscelino Kubitschek’s Development Plan (Plano de Metas), the chapter presents the limits of this economic policy and the relationship between the civil-military coup in 1964 and the economic reforms carried out under the Government’s Economic Action Programme (PAEG). The reforms by the PAEG greatly favoured the interests of international capital.
In the second chapter, the author points to the consequences of the process of the internationalisation of financial flows in Brazil. In addition, he analyses the economic policy that guided the implementation of the Second National Development Plan and the consequences of foreign indebtedness for the Brazilian economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, state-owned companies were forced to manage a fiscal adjustment, which was implemented with the aim of generating a balance of trade and guaranteeing interest payments on the foreign debt. As a result, public enterprises became indebted and in a more precarious state, due to the delay in adjusting the appropriate tariffs and the prices of the goods they produced. On the one hand, these measures tried to contain the rise in inflation, and on the other, they helped private companies to supply their products at artificially low prices.
In the third chapter, the author gives an exhaustive account of the changes in legal frameworks and privatisation processes that took place during the governments of João Figueredo, José Sarney, Fernando Collor de Mello, Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This new historical conjuncture sheds light on the relationship between US imperialism and the internationalisation of financial flows. The author shows how the large international financial groups acted speculatively, selling their shares in the privatised companies after making significant profits. The author highlights the importance of the Real Plan (Plano Real) guidelines, which allowed the Brazilian economy to adapt to the new rules of the international financial system. Towards the end of the chapter, the author discusses the massive wave of privatisation carried out by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose government registered the highest annual average in the ratio between financial gains from the privatisation of state-owned companies and the gross domestic product.
The process of capitalist development is not idyllic. However, in Brazil, for a few decades, the possibility of realising it under a democratic regime seemed possible. The civil-military coup of 1964 extinguished this possibility, because the intense capitalist development of the period was based on three institutional transformations that intensified the exploitation of labour. Firstly, monetary correction protected financial investments in strategic economic sectors from inflationary corrosion. Secondly, union repression prevented the organised working class from demanding better working conditions and wages. Thirdly, the Institutional Act 5 of December 1968 gave the President the power to intervene in sub-national governments, suspend the political rights of any citizen and revoke federal, state and municipal elective mandates.
When the military regime ended, the global economy had also changed. Thus, in line with these changes, capitalist accumulation processes in Brazil began to be focused on the privatisation of the state-owned companies created in the previous period, limiting national sovereignty in the intensification of the neoliberal process in Brazil.
Rodrigues analyses the extensive bibliography of his area of research, reconstructing and marking his position in relation to the debates in this particular field, by pointing to the limits of capitalist development in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. His observations on the Brazilian business community engage with the Anglophone bibliography on the weakness of national elites in the face of the soft power of the United States. The author thus highlights the impossibility of building a society along European or North American lines in peripheral, dependent and underdeveloped regions.
Rodrigues also explains well how Brazilian society is moving towards incivility or barbarism, the logical consequence of a process that has led to the breakdown of the national industrial structure. Faced with these incisive statements, the book provides the necessary critique of a historical process of national subordination, and at the same time, offers hope for building a world beyond capitalism.
Francisco de Oliveira (2013) observed the same historical period and made his well-known claim that Brazilian society had become a platypus. The Brazilian sociologist observed a society in which the bourgeoisie had no emancipatory project. There were high rates of urbanisation, and the agribusiness sector was economically strong. The technological advances of the second industrial revolution were consolidated, unlike the limited advances of the third industrial revolution. However, for the advances of the third industrial revolution to take place, the national industrial sector needed to further increase its subordination to international financial capital. Two decades later, Rodrigues’ critique contributes to a greater understanding of this society, whose political leadership oriented the actions of its public enterprises in accordance with the interests of the multinational companies that established themselves in Brazil during the process of productive internationalisation. Following this period, the strategies of state-owned enterprises were then subordinated to the interests of international capital in the process of implementation of finance-led globalization.
To conclude, it should be emphasised that Imperialismo e empresa estatal no capitalismo dependente brasileiro (1956-1998) convincingly argues that autonomous national development is impossible for countries located in the periphery of global capitalism. Rodrigues does not see any loopholes for late-developing countries, nor does he clearly envisage a transition to a form of post-capitalist production. This is not a personal limitation of the researcher, but of the current historical period in which the debate around the construction of new social forms no longer seems to have a place in academic discourse. We are currently experiencing a radical reduction in expectations for the future, which leads to the eternalisation of current society and the creation of little space for the construction of new emancipatory projects. However, the act of radically criticising existing historical processes can be considered an important first step in the quest for economic emancipation.
- This review is a translated and slightly modified version of the one published in Portuguese in the journal Mundorama.
Reviewed by Leonardo Dias Nunes