Offering what he calls “an historical analysis but not a history book,” Luiz Bresser Pereira, the prominent neo-Marxist economist and banker writes engagingly on Brazil’s half-century rise from primary product exporter on the periphery to industrial society. The book is an extended essay written in 1967 and given with few changes, but with additional chapters from the 1970s and a 1983 conclusion that should be read first. More than anything this is an economist’s testament, not a detailed or fully consistent analysis, valuable nonetheless as a kind of intellectual history. It is the product of a lively mind grappling over time with the causes and consequences of Brazil’s great transformation under industrial capitalism.
Brazil today has reached what he calls “mature industrialized underdevelopment”—highly dynamic but unable to create enough jobs and politically challenged from below to open up. This is the current crisis, which Brazil has the capacity to grow out of through a vigorous export drive coupled with social democracy, to become in effect a democratic Newly Industrializing Country (NIC), although the author will not use this term. To Bresser Pereira, there is no inherent contradiction between growth of the large internal market—historically, the engine of Brazilian industrialization—and an aggressive export drive. This is surprising only in light of the 1967 section, which assumes that “autonomous independent development” could work. Attempts in the late 1950s and later to break into the international market with manufactures are mentioned, but this history remains to be written.
Also worth highlighting is the author’s discussion of what he calls the “techno-bureaucratic middle class. Created by industrialism since 1930, this very large group of technocrats, managers, and bureaucrats is nicely profiled, as are their politics. The postwar rise of economists, for example, helped Brazil to become an agent of change, not merely acted upon. It has today an ideology of development that is conditioned, but no longer dominated, by an industrial bourgeoisie in dynamic tension with this new middle class and a rapidly growing urban working class.
To Bresser Pereira, 1964 was no mere coup; rather, it reflected the first major crisis, when import substitution and its politics no longer sufficed. This thesis is now ripe for historical analysis. But was 1930, the crisis of commercial-agrarian capitalism, a major “turning point” that cleared the way for industrial society? After all, the Bank of Brazil made large loans to agriculture well into the 1930s.
If they are short on details, nuance, and bibliography, these chapters are richly suggestive, especially for Brazil since the 1950s. The author’s linking of socioeconomic change with politics may be overly schematic and at times abstract, but it makes for a highly stimulating book. Written especially for this English edition, the conclusion is especially good.
