Henry Finch has adapted the Marxist Nicos Poulantzas’s theory of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state to the particular nature of Uruguayan capitalist modernization. For Finch, the Uruguayan dominant class was weakened in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by divisions between progressive ranchers of the south and littoral who were modernizing their operations, and traditional ranchers in the center and north who were interested in land ownership principally as a means of maintaining their positions as political caudillos. Urban, meaning Montevidean, economic power was largely in British and other foreign hands, and these stayed out of Uruguayan politics. The rural splits and urban political abstinence of the Uruguayan dominant class enabled José Batlle y Ordóñez, who “championed the small capitalist class and associated urban groups” (p. 208), to use the traditional political party structures to advance the interests of these small-scale capitalists and urban workers who otherwise would not have been strong enough to predominate. Batlle y Ordóñez developed redistributive policies based on the growing power of the state. The state, mediator of disputes between social groups, in turn, was based on consensus politics.
The Achilles heel of the Uruguayan political economy was that its health depended on the export of ranch-produced commodities. Ranchers were not part of the governing coalition. They were left alone, and once they had maximized the returns from extensive land use, they enjoyed these returns and did not invest them in the risky business of converting their ranches to intensive ranch or agricultural use. The result, already apparent in the 1920s, was stagnation of rural production and Uruguayan exports. Loss of markets made this stagnation less of a problem during the Great Depression, and the sharp rise of world wool prices during the Korean War permitted the neo-Batllista import substitution industrialization boom of the early post-World War II years.
By the mid-1950s, though, wool prices had dropped, import substitution industrialization was exhausted, and Uruguay’s economic crisis was evident. With no economic surplus to redistribute, consensus politics was transformed into a struggle by different social groups to hold on to what they could. Politicians retained power by patronage appointments, while the left and the urban guerrillas grew threatening. In these circumstances, political autonomy ended. The dominant class carne together, as it had during the less threatening Great Depression, to control the state. After the military coup of 1973, a new phase of capitalist accumulation, based on industrial exports and a restructured dominant class, emerged. Batllista Uruguay was dead.
In demonstrating his argument, Finch has brought together and interpreted statistics and information on Uruguayan population, social structure, foreign trade, ranching, agriculture, industry, social legislation, and state enterprises. In the process, he has inverted Julio Martínez Lamas’s well-known thesis that Montevideo was a suction cup, drawing resources away from the interior; Finch responds that Uruguay’s great structural economic problem is the unwillingness of ranchers to intensify production. The theory of political autonomy, first applied by Finch, has been used by other scholars to explain Batlle y Ordóñez as a radical reformer, an explanation closer to historical reality, in my opinion, than the consensus politician described by Finch. Also, political autonomy theory gives this book a peculiar preoccupation—a search for conflicts among the economically powerful as key to explaining the rise of popular politics.
Finch’s analysis ends in 1979, when the Uruguayan military’s plans to institutionalize its control seemed feasible and the government’s policies of integrating Uruguay’s economy into the world economy seemed to be succeeding. Finch, then, before the Latin American debt crisis was even visible, warned that adverse world conditions “could have disastrous effects on the fragile export-led growth model” (p. 273). He was right on this, but wrong in pronouncing Batllista Uruguay dead. Batllista Uruguay has returned. Poulantzas cannot account for the resiliency of the Uruguay Finch admires and feared dead, that “highly politicized, literate and vocal society,” with its “widely held values” of “equality and humanity” (p. 274).
