The collapse in the early 1980s of the export-oriented growth models adopted in the preceding decade has focused new attention on the significance of the state in the Latin American political economy. The essays in The State and Capital Accumulation in Latin America attempt to place this collapse and the current crisis in an appropriate theoretical and historical context. The introductory chapter, authored by Christian Anglade and Carlos Fortín, offers a competent survey of conventional and neo-Marxist debates on capital accumulation. The authors focus on the “relative autonomy” of the state institutions and macroeconomic policies, and the complex role of the state in processes of capital accumulation and the mediation of class conflict in peripheral societies. There follows a brief, fairly conventional treatment of the role of the state in Latin American development since the late nineteenth century.
The country case studies are more innovative. Anglade’s chapter on the political economy of state-led accumulation in Brazil argues that the post-1964 model of export-oriented growth had reached a point of crisis by the early 1980s. Massive state intervention has not produced higher rates of domestic savings or sustained aggregate growth but has, on the contrary, led to the acceleration of huge capital transfers abroad, while provoking a state fiscal crisis and foreign indebtedness of virtually unmanageable proportions.
Fortín’s analysis of “repressive monetarism” in post-1973 Chile demonstrates that, notwithstanding the discourse of the Pinochet regime’s “free market” ideologues, the reduction of state intervention in the economy in fact has been very partial and selective. New forms of authoritarian state intervention have profoundly altered existing patterns of capital accumulation and have effected a radical redistribution of social and political power in Chilean society. According to fortín, these transformations reflect the hegemony of domestic and transnational financial sectors and a significant withdrawal of the state from its traditional function of mediation between the local economy and the world capitalist system.
E. V. K. Fitzgerald’s brief chapter analyzes financial constraints on the autonomy of the Mexican state, to develop a provocative analysis of unstable growth during the Echeverría and López Portillo administrations. The weakening of state managers and the concomitant strengthening of domestic and foreign entrepreneurs during recent sexenios have led to a permanent state fiscal crisis and a severe foreign debt crisis. In Fitzgerald’s view, the underlying impasse of the Mexican political economy lies in the failure to articulate a new political project to replace the one in force since Calles and Cárdenas in the 1930s. His analysis helps us understand the incapacity of state elites to promote the basic restructuring of capital required for a new phase of prolonged expansion.
These polemical essays (a forthcoming companion volume will include case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) make a welcome contribution to a more historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated approach to Latin American political economy.
