Reproducing dependency: auto industry policy and petrodollar circulation in Venezuela

Abstract

Development policy is analyzed by liberal models in terms of bargaining transactions between interest-maximizing actors and by the dependency perspective in terms of the internalized requirements of worldwide capital accumulation. Both approaches assume the working of capitalist rationality in dependent nations. In contrast, a focus on productive relations, class alliances, and political coalitions reveals the constraints on developmental policies in nations built around the partial development of capitalist productive forces and occupying a subordinate role in the international division of labor. Analysis of the Venezuelan auto policy during the Pérez administration (1974–79) shows the relations constituting socially defined actors and the structures underlying the policy bargaining process. It posits that in Venezuela there is a growing disjuncture between the internationally conditioned requirements of capital accumulation and the locally based demands of social reproduction; that the common interest of state and bourgeoisie in maintaining the rentier basis of the economy shapes the direction and extent of industrial development; and that circulation of petrodollars has absorbed production as a phase of circulation. The struggle between state and transnational corporations over local engine manufacture, and the tension between import substitution and export promotion, concealed an underlying conflict between rent appropriation and capital accumulation.