The Brazilian Model of Accumulation: Its Origins, Structure, and Crisis

Abstract

When in 1964 the political crisis of Brazilian democracy was solved in capitalist fashion by a brutal military coup, this military dictatorship seemed to the international left a last, desperate resort of the international bourgeoisie in its struggle against the general upsurge of the anticapitalist popular movement. The military dictatorship seemed to have little chance of political and success in view of the deep and universal crisis of Latin American society. Peasant movements, guerrillas, workers' strikes all aroused hopes on the left the world over and fears on the part of the bourgeoisie that the Latin American continent would become a powder keg igniting a chain of social revolutions. The only alternative to these revolutions seemed to be fascist military dictatorships lacking any capacity for development. The Cuban Revolution seemed to be an expression of the general direction of development of the continent, and the Brazilian military dictatorship only a desperate reaction of the rulers of a stagnating, dependent capitalism, a bourgeoisie placed on the defensive. Political developments since that time are well known: after hopeful beginnings of socialist or reform-capitalist developments in Peru, Chile, and Argentina, repressive military regimes have become the rule in the most of Latin America. The Brazilian military dictatorship became the model case of dynamic capitalist accumulation accomplished concurrently with increasing integration into the world market. While the representatives of international capital have celebrated the Brazilian economic miracle as a model for the successful capitalist conquest of underdevelopment, the left has responded to events in Brazil with moral outrage over terror, torture, and mass impoverishment. It has been incapable, however, of comprehending the dynamics of dependent capitalist accumulation except in terms of imperialist conspiracy and social collapse. Brazilian development has been viewed as a special case in which a subimperialist bridgehead of U.S. multinational corporations succeeded in temporarily * Thomas Hurtienne is a sociologist at the Freie Universitat Berlin. This article is an abridged translation of his Zur Entstehungsgeschichte, Struktur und Krise des Brasilianischen Akkumulationsmodells, which appeared in Lateinamerika: Analysen und Berichte, (Berlin) 11 (1978), 70-96. Jon Sperber is a historian at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. 108