Reflections on the Patterns of Change in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State

Abstract

Note: I presented the original version of this work at the “Seminar on History and Human Sciences,” held at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, May 1975. In August 1975 it appeared as Document No. 1 of the series CEDES publishes for the “Working Group on the State” of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). The version presented herein was prepared in December 1976. Despite all that has happened since, I have restricted myself to corrections of style and to doing away with some unnecessary paragraphs, following the useful suggestions of LARR'S reviewers. In other words, I have overcome the temptation to rewrite this work, which I might have done, above all, to emphasize even more the attempts to stabilize economic variables (including but not limited to inflation) of the period I call the “orthodoxy” and expressly to admit the possibility that cases such as Chile and Uruguay may turn, in a socially even more oppressive sense than the “deepening” that I deal with here, towards a “re-agrarianization” or a “re-primarization” of their productive structure. I would also like to think that today I could present a more sophisticated approach to the theoretical problems surrounding the concept of state. But it is not a question of extemporaneously introducing these considerations here-considerations that owe much to criticisms received on the original version of this article–but, instead, of making timely presentation of them in future works. One explanation is necessary on a point that has led to some misunderstanding: when I speak of “mutual indispensability” I am referring to the relationship that exists between the bureaucratic-authoritarian state (once implanted) and international capital. In contrast, when in other works (above all, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism) I have dealt with the factors that tend to provoke the emergence of this type of state, I have speculated on its “elective affinity” with a certain type of capitalism and its crises. The difference is subtle but important, because it not only refers to two temporally different moments but also because it indicates the distance separating what is mutually indispensable (once the state has been implanted) from a strong but undetermined likelihood (before implanting it) that still leaves room for purposeful political action.