The ‘development state’ in Latin America: Whose development, whose state?

Abstract

Examined here are interrelated issues in Latin America of class, class struggle, agrarian movements and several permutations (developmental, neoliberal) of the capitalist state. The latter encompasses rival paths of development in Latin America: state-led, market-assisted and grassroots land reform. Although a long history of violence by the state against peasants and workers struggling for land culminated in the reform programmes of the 1960s and 1970s, the laissez faire project of the neoliberal state has continued to inflict and generate violence, as well as to transfer its effects to urban areas as outmigration from the countryside gathers momentum. It is argued in this context that there are three fundamental modalities of social change, two of them paved with state power. However, for agrarian movements there is only one viable road: that of class struggle over state power.

Notes

1 See, for example, the 1970s discussion about the extent to which the state embodied the interests of a ‘new’ bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie, a discussion that involved – among others – Poulantzas 1973; 1975, Therborn 1976, Wright 1978 and the contributors to the volume edited by Holloway and Picciotto 1978.

2 The importance of the second of these two questions – the retention of state power once it has been acquired – was underlined in a dramatic manner by the ousting of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile during September 1973.

3 That state regulation of agribusiness enterprises continues to be regarded by some engaged in the study of development as a viable option is evident from the contributions to Jansen and Vellema 2004.

4 For an endorsement by the regulation school of Gramscian ‘hegemony’, see Aglietta 1979: 29].

5 As Aglietta 1979: 29ff.] makes clear, his notion of regulation does not address the presence in the wider capitalist system (and thus the impact on the nation-state) of imperialism.

6 Gramsci, it should be emphasized, did not discount either the role or the significance of the class struggle, a crucial point that distinguishes his ideas from the far less valuable ones of present day populists who write about Latin America. Thus, for example, it is impossible to disagree with the acuity of the following observation made by him [Gramsci, 1977: 140] in 1919, at the height of the class struggle taking place in Italy after the 1914–18 war: ‘In the countryside, we must count above all on the action and the support of the poor peasants, the ‘landless’. They will be driven into activity … by the need to resolve the problem of how to live, by the need to struggle for bread. And this is not all: they will be obliged by the same perpetual need, the ever-present danger of death from hunger or bullets, to put pressure on the other sectors of the agricultural population, to make them set up organs for collective control over production in the countryside as well. These organs of control, the peasants' Councils, despite the fact that they will leave intermediate forms of private land ownership (small holdings) in existence, will have to carry out a psychological and technical transformation of the countryside and become the basis of a new communal life-style: centres through which the revolutionary elements will be able to enforce their will in a continuous and concrete fashion.’

7 All of them are regarded not only as having been but also still being on the political left. Thus, for example, his interviewer describes Unger 2005: 173]– inaccurately – as ‘one of the most innovative and interesting thinkers of the modern left’. For an example of the application of a post-structuralist and/or subaltern studies framework to Latin America, see among many others Santiago 2002 and the collection edited by Rodríguez 2001.

8 That Laclau 2005: 249, 250] has ejected from his analysis the fact of class and class struggle is evident from the following comments: ‘[I]n my view, conceptualizing social antagonisms and collective identities [needs] to go beyond stereotyped and almost meaningless formulas such as “class struggle” … terms such as “class struggle”, “determination in the last instance by the economy” or “centrality of the working class” function – or functioned until recently – as emotionally charged fetishes, the meanings of which were increasingly less clear, although their discursive appeal could not be diminished’.

9 See Veltmeyer 2000 for a critique of Laclau's project 1985, 2005 to move beyond Marx and Marxist class analysis.

10 Populism, according to Laclau 2005: 18], ‘“simplifies” the political space, replacing a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise.’ For Laclau 2005: 18], therefore, populism is ‘a constant dimension of political action which necessarily arises … in all political discourses, subverting and complicating the operations of the so-called “more mature” ideologies’. This is the reason why he [Laclau, 2005: xi] ends up with a discourse that is without content or socio-economic subject: ‘My attempt has not been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the opposite: to show that populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political.’

11 Rejecting the Marxist argument that classifies populism as a form of false consciousness, Laclau 2005: 15] maintains that where Third World populisms are concerned, ‘[t]he class struggle is … an irrelevant conception’, and that no ‘manipulation’ is involved. In his words [Laclau, 2005: 13], ‘[a]n approach to populism in terms of abnormality, deviance or manipulation is strictly incompatible with our theoretical strategy.’

12 This is evident, for example, from the insistence by Laclau 2005: 224, original emphasis] that it is necessary to conceptualize ‘the “people”‘not as a datum of the social structure’ but simply as ‘a political category…[a] socio-political demand’. That is, a discourse without a social referent or a material basis, one in which the socio-economic composition of ‘the people’ is of no significance. Hence the admission by Laclau that ‘questions such as “Of what social group are these demands the expression?” do not make sense in my analysis’.

13 In the words of Laclau 2005: 176], ‘I actually think the notion that populism is the democratic element in contemporary representative systems is one of the most insightful and original ideas.’

14 For his influential work on the nature of the Latin American State, see O'Donnell 1979; 1988; 1992.

15 In the words of O'Donnell 1988: 31], ‘[t]he specificity of [bureaucratic authoritarianism] in relation to other, past and present, authoritarian states in Latin America lies in this defensive action by the dominant classes and their allies to crises involving the popular sector that has been politically activated and is increasingly autonomous with respect to the dominant classes and the state apparatus.’

16 On this, see O'Donnell 1988: 36, note 2].

17 Like so much of the framework on which his views about current ‘redemocratization’ are based, Unger's conceptual apparatus has its roots in the analysis by him of the way in which ‘agrarian bureacratic empires’ do or do not develop. The desirability of ‘redemocratization’, or a politically inclusionary approach within neoliberal capitalism, is echoed in his argument that, historically, landlords and other elements of the ruling class in ‘pre-industrial’ agrarian societies baulked at the destruction of an independent peasantry, favouring instead ‘an inclusive, commercial economy’[Unger, 1987b: 21, emphasis added]. In other words, in the past – as in the present – the panacea to the ills of society took the form of the desirability of political inclusion of peasants and workers within an exploitative/oppressive economic system. Hence the origin of an ‘inclusive’ politics, a spuriously progressive term, means nothing more than the incorporation (or reincorporation) of peasants in a way that continues economically to benefit those who extract surplus labour from them. This in turn underscores the importance to Unger of ‘the political’, and its deterministic role where systemic transformation is concerned. A symptomatic observation in this regard is as follows [Unger, 1987b: 21, emphasis added]: ‘So the whole dynamic of occasional declines into natural economy, limits on this decline, and reversals of it, grew out of a characteristic situation of group struggle. This situation has to be understood in its unity if it is to be understood at all. Even the aspects of the process that seem most narrowly economic had no life apart. They, too, were politics.’

18 Hence the systemic goal is for Unger 1987a: 462ff.]‘political stability in an empowered democracy’, or – less charitably – the property relations of capitalism without, if possible, the class struggle (=‘instability’) which they generate. His programmatic utterances, like those of Laclau, are a mish-mash of contradictory motherhood-and-apple-pie pronouncements (= something for everyone). The latter take the form of ‘rights’ to just about everything – to solidarity, to immunity, to the existence of and participation in the market, and against destabilization [Unger, 1987a: 520, 524, 530, 535]. What happens in a zero-sum context when these ‘rights’ come into conflict with or negate one another is something he fails to elaborate.

19 The two prefiguring models are Chayanovian in terms of theory: peasant family farming and agricultural involution. Both the latter posit a ‘natural’ limit to economic growth, determined by the consumption needs generated from within peasant economy, a traditional equilibrium to which cultivation reverts. Populists interpret this process of reversion as evidence for the stability of pre-modern cultivation practised by smallholders in what the former take to be natural ecosystems.

20 At the centre of Unger's framework is the concept of a ‘reversion cycle’, or the periodic return on the part of what he terms ‘agrarian bureaucratic empires’ to natural economy, with a consequent decline in commercial activity, trade and prosperity. This happens, Unger 1987b: 6ff., 10ff., 15ff.] maintains, either when government fails to ‘protect’ smallholders from expropriation by landlords, or when peasants, petty traders and agricultural workers combine to resist landlord oppression. Only when ‘from below’ organization is effective, when ‘elite unity’ is lacking (and the state disintegrates), or when government succeeds in preventing ‘from above’ appropriation from occurring, is ‘reversion’ avoided. In such circumstances (state protection, peasant fightback, or elite disunity), peasant households survive as economic units fully integrated into the ‘monetary commercial economy’, and systemic development occurs. Of the many substantial theoretical objections that might be levelled at this rather odd theory, two can be mentioned here. First, Unger places a seeming unbridgeable historical divide – between state and landlord – where in reality none exists. In the kind of pre-capitalist (=‘pre-industrial’) agrarian societies he talks about, landlords were the government, or the ruling class. Even where the latter disagreed on specific policies (=‘elite disunity’), therefore, it would unite when faced with a threat from below. To see this in terms of an absolute dichotomy (state v. landlord) is accordingly incorrect (a point Unger 1987b: 17] subsequently concedes). And second, in contrast to Unger – for whom the disintegration of the State prevents a unified elite from mobilizing its power against the peasantry, the latter becoming as a result integrated into the ‘monetary commercial economy’– it is precisely when central state power disintegrates that ‘natural’ (or peasant) economy reasserts itself (as Kautsky and Weber argued with reference to the decline of the Roman empire).

21 For a critical perspective on ‘civil society’, see the contribution by Brass to this collection. In his most recent text, Unger 2007 advocates a reordering of society that is open-ended under the rubric of ‘pragmatism’ (whose, precisely, we are never told). In other words, a form of social change guided – yet again – by postmodern aporia.

22 Asked by his interviewer to respond to the observation that ‘[o]ne of the most distinctive claims you make … is that the future of the left involves abandoning the link with the working class in favour of a link with what we used to call the petit bourgeoisie’, Unger 2005: 177] replies: ‘The mass of ordinary humanity now has an imaginary horizon that is much more petit bourgeois than it is proletarian. They dream of a small business or independent professional existence, but they are still working class. They live off their labour. They do not command but are commanded. They are not propped up [by] hereditary transmission of either property or educational advantage. The left must meet them on their own terms and help broaden the repertoire off [sic] economic instruments and institutions that might respond to their aspirations.’ On this point, his conclusion [Unger, 2005: 184] is that ‘all of our understandings of agency [have] become congealed and frozen. A leftist cannot accept it. The basic impulse must be to unfreeze things. This unfreezing always must happen through two manoeuvres. It has to speak in the cold calculus of interest, the appeal to people's present understandings of their interests such as the appeal to the petit bourgeois aspirations.’ To the observation that his ‘conception of economic reform [is] the same as that offered by the new right’, Unger 2005: 179] answers in the affirmative (‘It is true that what I propose has a superficial resemblance to the neoliberal idea of the privatization of public service’), but then adds – implausibly – that his own view is nevertheless ‘fundamentally different’. Among the reasons for this implausibility is the similarity between Unger's view about the petit-bourgeoisie and that of the political right in Italy nearly a century ago. According to Hamilton 1971: 31–2], therefore, in May 1920 the ‘Fascist programme issue at the end of the Congress contained a new clause “in favour of a working bourgeoisie”, per una borghesia del lavoro. “The Fasci recognize the immense value of that ‘working bourgeoisie which, in every field of human activity (from industry to agriculture, from science to the liberal professions), constitutes the precious and indispensable element for the development of progress and the triumph of national fortunes.”’ The significance of this conjuncture is that it marked an attack on socialism and (therefore) an influx to fascist ranks not just of capitalist peasants but also of monarchists, Catholics, conservatives, and landowners.

23 Hence the view [Unger, 2005: 178] that the ‘quarrel of the left cannot be with the market … The basic impulse of the left should be: market yes, free civil society yes, representative democracy yes.’ For more of the same, see Unger 1996; 1998.

24 On the Tupac Amaru rebellion, see Jacobsen 1993.

25 See Wheelock Román 1975, Amador 1990 and Mahoney 2001.

26 The theoretical issues involved in categorizing peasants in terms of class are outlined by, among others, Brass 2000a; 2000b and Kearney 1996. The Latin American historical trajectory has been characterized by a politically weak and subjugated peasantry and by the predominance of the latifundio. On the issue of the alternative paths of agrarian development in Latin America see de Janvry 1981.

27 See, inter alia, the relevant sections in the important collections edited by Stavenhagen 1970, Landsberger 1969, 1974, and Roseberry, Gudmundson and Samper 1995.

28 An interesting fictional – but accurate – portrayal of the oppressive Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic is that by Mario Vargas Llosa 2001.

29 Early and still useful accounts that chronicle this process include Simpson 1937, Whetten 1948, and Tannenbaum 1968.

30 The literature on the dynamics of these agrarian reforms is voluminous but see, inter alia, Gutelman 1971 and, more generally, Stavenhagen 1970 and Brockett 1998.

31 The rural census of 1986 estimated the rural population as 23.4 million people. By 1995, the rural population had declined to 18 million, pointing towards a massive exodus of over five million people. Because of declining revenues, the compression of prices to below production 1972] costs, and massively increasing indebtedness among producers, an additional 800,000 families, that is, over two million persons, are estimated by IBGE (the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) to have abandoned the countryside in just five years (from 1995 to 1999) because of low prices and the lack of land and credit.

32 Carlos Menem, Argentina's President at the time, declared that at least 200,000 small and medium-sized farms and rural ‘businesses’ were productively marginal and surplus to the country's requirements, and could not be supported by government policy.

33 On ‘social exclusion’, see Behrman, Gaviria and Székely 2003 and Veltmeyer 2003. Some of these social scientists work for organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank while many others are affiliated with diverse ‘independent’ research institutions or universities. But they all seem to share this enthusiasm for ‘social exclusion’ as the problem of poverty and ‘social capital’ as the solution.

34 IBASE, a research centre in Brazil, has studied the fiscal impact of legalizing MST land occupations cum settlements versus the cost of services used by equal numbers of people migrating to urban areas. When landless workers occupy land and force the government to legalize their holdings, it implies costs: compensation to the former owner, credit for the new farmers, etc. But the total cost incurred by the state to maintain the same number of people in an urban shantytown, including the services and infrastructure used, exceeds in one month the yearly cost of legalizing land occupations.

35 Details about changes in Brazilian landownership are contained in INCRA 1999, Petras and Veltmeyer 2001a; 2003, and Dataluta 2002.

36 This view was advanced by Lehmann 1978.

37 For a less metaphorical and more analytic review of this debate vis-à-vis the peasantry see Petras and Veltmeyer 2001b. This rural-to-urban movement was the effect of a primitive accumulation and proletarianization process that proceeded apace with the advance of capitalism into the countryside [Bartra, 1976; Cancian, 1987. The process of proletarianization has proceeded slowly and unevenly, and it has to be said that extra-economic coercion has persisted well into (and in some cases beyond) the 1960s in most Latin American nations. By 1970, a large part of the rural population in many countries was partially or wholly separated from its means of labour, a situation which generated a new wave of political protest and peasant insurgency. As pointed out by Paige 1975, specific categories of peasants (tenants, sharecroppers, rich/middle/poor cultivators) responded differently to this process; thus the key issue in rural struggles might be land, land reform, access to credit or technology, higher wages and better working conditions, or indeed any combination thereof.

38 Broadly speaking, the concept of the ‘development state’ came to prominence in the 1950s in response to two problems endemic to the ‘economically backward’ societies of the developing world. First, the perceived absence or weakness of a capitalist class loath to invest its capital productively. And second, the need for the advanced capitalist states that dominated the world order to ensure that the developing countries, many of which were engaged in a struggle for national liberation, would not succumb to the lure of communism, instead taking a capitalist path on the road to independence and nation-building. In this context, the capitalist state assumed the ‘functions of capital’: namely, property in the means of production (owner); investment of capital (investor), and management or combining the means of production (entrepreneur). In addition, the state in some contexts was charged with the responsibility for strategic planning of the whole development process. In the developing societies in Latin America and elsewhere, the state was also assigned the responsibility for ensuring improved access to the means of production (capital, technology, land) – what in the politically neutered development discourse is termed ‘asset redistribution’. As well as improving access to the means of production, a highly politicized process that intervened in class conflict in the countryside between peasants and landowners, the developmental state was assigned the role of ‘redistributing growth’– channelling market-generated incomes into social programmes (health, education, social security) and rural development (credit, microfinance, technical assistance).

39 The connection between the judiciary and the social movements in Latin America is illustrated in the recent legal detention of the leader of APPO in its struggle in the Mexican state of Oaxaca (La Jornada, 6 December, 2006). The secretary of La Red Todos los Derechos para Todos (Rights for All) network has this comment on the detention of Flavio Sosa: ‘es una actualización de los viejos modelos del sistema político mexicano de usar la justicia como forma de presión en contra de los movimientos sociales: detienen a una parte de la dirigencia y obligan al movimiento a dedicar sus esfuerzos a la defensa de sus líderes, mientras el cumplimiento de sus demandas se pospone’. That is, it constitutes a return to old methods of applying pressure: namely, by arresting leaders and thus forcing the movement to devote time and energy to defending them, putting to one side the struggle for a political programme.

40 As de Janvry et al. 1998: 5ff] outline, this land reform programme was implemented in stages: (1) the placement of the modernized estates in the non-reform sector under threats of expropriation, providing land ceilings for the non-reform sector, organizing the reform sector into a community or state collective form (ejidos, etc.) and distributing holdings as individual tenures; (2) individual titling of collective lands, ejidos, and state farms; and (3) providing rural development for individual beneficiaries and access to idle lands for the landless and the poor peasantry (minifundistas).

41 On the impact of this process on the agrarian sector of Chile, see Murray 2003; 2006.

42 The neoliberal capitalist state was formed in the early 1980s in the context of an attack on the ‘development state’, which was deemed to be ‘inefficient’, having overextended its social welfare and economic planning programme to the point of a fiscal crisis. Although the neoliberal state has been characterized as ‘minimalist’ in terms of its having been stripped of its responsibility for expanding and regulating the economy (reassigned to ‘the private sector’) and for the provision of social welfare and advancing ‘development’ (reassigned to a revitalized and strengthened ‘civil society’), it can nevertheless be said to have a concept of ‘development’, albeit one based on the market and its accompanying project of ‘trickle down’ economic growth, ‘human rights’ based legislation, and political ‘redemocratization’.

43 It is scarcely necessary to point out the parallels between such a programme and the practice of sub-prime housing mortgage lending by the banks, the latter having generated a financial crisis that continues to reverberate in the world capitalist system.

44 On this, see also Finan 2007.

45 Fujimori's poverty relief programme in Peru was similar to that of Salinas in Mexico [PRONASOL, 1992, in that it served primarily as an electoral mechanism for securing the rural vote.

46 For a critical perspective on these ‘new social movements’ see, inter alia, Brass 2000a, 2000b and Veltmeyer 1997.

47 On the Zapatistas in Chiapas, see Harvey 1998 and the contributions to the volume edited by Washbrook 2007.

48 On this point, see also Informativo Campesino, No. 91, April 1996.

49 The MST mobilized its members to take direct action in the form of large-scale land occupations that typically include between 1,000 and 3,000 families. Upon occupation of the land, the leadership on behalf of the encamped settlers (asentados) enters into negotiations with the government to recognize their title to the land, to this end invoking its own laws on the subject.

50 Inefficient or unproductive use of land is rooted in a pattern of land tenure where 9% of the landowners own close to 78% of the land, while at the other extreme, 53% of the rural population has little or no land (less than 3%, according to IBGE 1989). IBGE estimates that less than 20% of Brazil's arable land is cultivated in any form, which leaves 80% without a productive function and, hence, a target for legal expropriation with compensation.

51 In the case of Brazil, this strategy and the associated tactic of land occupations have been so successful as to force the government to step up its own alternative land reform programme. The governments of both Cardoso and Lula turned to the World Bank, to a programme based on the ‘market mechanism’, a programme begun in 1997 as a pilot project (Cédula da Terra) in the northeast of the country and generalized in 1999 with the institution of the Land Bank (Banco da Terra). The aim of this ‘market-supported’ land reform programme is to redistribute land not to the tiller but to ‘the most productive’. Consequently, the actual acreage of land transferred via this mechanism under this programme has been modest at best. After fifteen years of struggle and a revamped state-led as well as a market-assisted land reform programme, 3% of the population still own two-thirds of the country's arable land, much of which continues to lie idle.