The Transition To Capitalism in Brazil: Notes On a Third Road

Abstract

The first three and a half centuries of Brazilian historical development followed what Caio Prado Jutnior (1976) has called a cyclical pattern: the sugar boom in Bahia and Pernambuco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mining in Matto Grosso, Goias, and Minas Geraes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cotton cultivation along the coast in the mid-eighteenth, and coffee production in the center-south from the mid-nineteenth century onward. This process has more recently been analyzed as the particular stages in the development of capitalist relations and production forms within a dominated social formation (Silva, 1976; Pinheiro, 1975b; Carvalho Franco, 1974). More precisely, Brazil's position within the international division of labor was from the outset that of a supplier of agricultural goods and raw materials for the centers of manufacture and industry in another part of the globe. As such, this seemingly accidental pattern of prosperity, followed by decline, is really an illustration of the form that the primitive accumulation process assumed in Brazil.! Bourgeois social scientists have posited the notion that the process of capitalist development goes on in sectors; thus with the proper investments, management and resources, a country can move in a variety of ways, up or down the development ladder (Leff, 1968; Wirth, 1970; Baer, 1965). Marxists, on the other hand, have shown that the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist production is characterized by a series of contradictions which means that the capitalist mode of production may replace the previous mode more completely in one sphere than in another. My purpose here is to demonstrate, contrary to the theories of the bourgeois social scientists, that the number of banks and import/export houses in Brazilian cities or the appearance of a few enterprises and urbanization are not absolute proof of the predominance of the capitalist