Although several of the contributors to this useful volume are members of the Latin American diaspora of our times, the intellectual currents that chiefly inform the book are those that animate the contemporary European milieu. Thus, United States Latin Americanists should find Industrialisation and the State in Latin America doubly interesting. Of value for their substantive content, the chapters serve also to document the varied approaches employed by a scholarly community that has made notable additions to our understanding of social organization in Latin America in recent years.
The central theme of the volume, as the title indicates, is the pivotal role of the state. The constraints, internal and foreign, on state action come up for examination, as do various policy outcomes and, more obliquely, the organization of the state itself. If there is any general point to be derived from the ensemble of chapters, it is a cautionary one. The complexity of relationships clustered about the state apparatus in Latin America ensures that a mechanistic reliance on any theoretical approach will miss much that is significant.
Outstanding in the initial group of essays is that by E. V. K. FitzGerald on Mexican industrialization and state capital. After reviewing, with an ample statistical backdrop, the evolving role of the state in Mexican development, FitzGerald assesses the contrasting implications of the National Industrial Development Plan and the policy course preferred by the World Bank. Reading between the lines, one would surmise that FitzGerald thinks the former the more likely path for the years just ahead—an interpretation subsequent events (especially the decision of Mexico to remain outside of the GATT) have tended to support. Adolfo Dorfman reviews the familiar territory of industrialization policies during the mid-twentieth century and suggests that insufficient attention has been accorded the attitudes and impact of the new public-sector technocratic elite that these policies have brought into being. Most discutible, perhaps, is Carlos Fortín’s interpretation of Chilean economic life during and after Allende. Although the disordered condition of the Allende economy seemed to have much to do with the rapidity with which the socially directed sector expanded into and produced a collapsing private sector, Fortín thinks that things would have gone better had the state sector grown still larger and even more rapidly. This diagnosis of the notable institutional indigestion of that unhappy period is, to say the least, imaginative—rather like prescribing another king-size pepperoni pizza for a bad case of heartburn.
Sandro Sideri contributes a provocative dependencia-rooted essay to the second section of the book (on “external constraints”), raising, in respect of both the military and regional integration, analytical issues that surely will merit more extended examination as time goes on. David Slater, for his part, seeks to develop a neo-Marxian framework for the critical discussion of international relations, with results that mark a considerable advance over earlier scholars working in this tradition. This particular chapter, one suspects, will be widely read by graduate students interested in updating the Marxian analytical approach. The two other chapters in this section, by Rhys Jenkins and Fred Jongkind, deal respectively with Mexico and Venezuela. The penetration and domination of the Mexican economy by large multinational corporations is viewed by Jenkins as the source of a number of baleful effects, but Jongkind’s reading of Venezuelan experience with industrialization argues—convincingly in the opinion of this reviewer—that a much more refined dependencia analysis must be developed if theory is to be squared with the available empirical evidence. One wishes that a survey along the lines of Jongkind’s had been implemented in Mexico as well, to supplement and perhaps add a more nuanced tone to the trenchant analysis presented by Jenkins.
The section of the volume on “The State and Labor Control Strategies” looks into the structure of interests that compose the state in several Latin American societies. The Brazilian and Southern Cone cases come in for scrutiny at a national level, while regional industrial relations systems are considered in the cases of Mexico (Monterrey) and Peru (Cerro de Pasco). The difficulty of uncovering any really new findings of relevance to social theory is exemplified in these essays, although, on balance perhaps, the regional or microlevel approach seems to have much to recommend it as a way of laying a basis for new theorizing. It would have been interesting if all of these contributors had related their analyses to the earlier generation of labor-in-development scholars; only Jackie Roddick and Menno Vellinga see fit to do this and the results enhance our understanding of the phenomena being examined.
A closing essay, by Leo Vladár, traces the distinctive implications of state character for regional development policy in Venezuela, replaying in an appropriate coda, as it were, the key theme of the volume: the determining role of the structure of state power.
