Brazil The Evidence: The Development of Utopia
Bureau: Theory Dependence: Brazil in the Era of Globalization
Day November 27, 2008
Lecture Prof. Theotonio dos Santos
a curious thing was seeing all the honorees at this symposium are my friends. Not acquainted with the Josué de Castro, but worked with Ana Maria and knew his work very young, the Paulo Freire was very much my friend, I was at his house in Harvard and also in Switzerland, Darcy Ribeiro was a friend of many years, Octavio Ianni, companion, one of the few friends of St. Paul who welcomed us into their home when we were illegal, the staff was a little afraid of receiving an illegal home, Celso Furtado, I also coordinated the campaign for Nobel Prize, the Milton Santos, buddy, great, great friend attended the Reggen, the Florestan Fernandes who was I appointed him to head the Center for Socioeconomic Studies (CESO) of Chile he was there when I arrived and told me to Eduardo Arroyo, director of the Center to work with him, Nelson Werneck Sodré was the jury of my work Master's and Ramos was my best man!
In sociology the group is too small, it is a feature much of Latin America. We are an elite, an oligarchy very small, almost all of the same social group, the middle class in our case. Everyone had such an origin and circling in a very restricted. It was the USP in Sao Paulo and in our case the Faculty Economy of Minas Gerais.
This introduction serves to place some of that history, because this group of honorees is two or three generations of intellectuals who have a continuity of thought. This is a rare thing in Latin America, because here every generation has a reference French or American, the center of thought is out. Each produces in terms of what is being done in Europe or the United States and the continuity of our thinking is difficult to ensure.
After 1989, there are also a lack of interest in Marxism, because it seemed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, Marxism had failed. The intellectual output of an entire school of thought in Latin America seemed a little out of context. It is true that already in the 1990s is beginning to recover. Today we take up the interest in Latin America because of its integration increasingly latent. Publishers are beginning to have some interest in Latin America, but still very fragile. First because they do not know and second because he is afraid there is no audience.
The discontinuity of thought in our region is very serious, is part of our situation dependency. Not accumulated knowledge, not accumulated the analysis of reality, because you have to accumulate to produce a sequence of path of knowledge. This also requires an ability to manage and administer a driving skills to guarantee the reproduction of knowledge to keep it and advance it.
This seminar is very important because it really is making an effort to ensure that knowledge. Marini has done work similar to this in Center for Latin American Studies (CELA) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
When universities were founded in Latin America, especially in Hispanic America the relationship between power and the university was strong, to have an idea, the Viceroy watched the presentations that were read the theses of students and teachers university. In Brazil, we had no university until the 30s of last century, but in the English case, they were faced with very important civilizations, Darcy Ribeiro, for example, shows that in his book "The University Required".
Hispanic power to direct the mass of Indians, had to form an indigenous elite. So, if invested heavily in universities to train the indigenous elite with which one could establish dominance. The Church's role was decisive. The English and the Portuguese Catholic. And the world was divided between the two countries, the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal. The first major theological debate in the region wanted to know whether or not the Indians had souls. It was a fundamental debate, because if the Indians had no soul you could enslave them in the way they did with the Africans. But if they could become Christians and thus into subjects of the King The King managed to impose the church on the conquered. Succeeded in imposing upon them the idea that they were citizens. The Crown, in order to maintain their control had to value the indigenous.
The issue of English domination required knowledge, training of leaders, whether indigenous or of the Creoles. Spain had an extremely rich and with a significant contingent of people on their domination. Thus, the university here in Latin America and has had a decisive role in the structure and reproduction of power. Within the Hispanic Society of the university historically has an important role.
In Brazil when I told these friends that honored here were part of the academic restructuring and national politics, the military regime that came clashed with all these leaders. None of them worked with the military regime. During the military regime the system lost its ideologues, we could not create its own ideologues. Then came another phenomenon, the intellectual and ideological spin that turned the critical process originating in the theory of dependence on an instrument of justification of the system, a paper run by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and specifically the USP group and CEBRAP. Cardoso made an ideological shift began in 1974 when it began to enter political life Brazil and the MDB in 1978/79, when we were to return because of the Amnesty Law. This is the year that he write the article against the formulations Marini changing its tone in the criticism.
We had shown that the dependence was a situation faced by region as a whole. The our underdevelopment was part of the expansion of global capitalism. It was a form of development, was the other side of the same phenomenon. Refuting the theory that the development was saying about people being late, and now in contact with civilization and the modern role models, would evolve.
We were more modern than the USA and many European countries. We were already major economic centers, major technology centers and major centers of thought. The Americans were creating their first university in the eighteenth century and we had ours, not the Brazilian, but at least our fellow Mexicans, Colombians, Bolivians and Peruvians had already articulated their universities with the power system. We had advanced technology, we we exported agricultural products to the world. The export of sugar, for example, was one of the most important exports of the season and was produced with the most advanced technology. We were not a feudal society that was beginning to modernize.
As a product of capitalism in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth and consequently the global expansion of capitalism, we are created by organizing our economy to meet the market demand worldwide in the economies of developed countries this process occurred in the period after the consolidation of its domestic markets.
So inclusive is a misconception to argue that Latin American economies were closed and are now opening. The economics of cane sugar was a closed economy? The cane sugar was produced mainly for Europe. The gold that would be great if we had stayed here. We would be a power, we were the highest income per capita in the world in Minas Gerais. But all would gold to Portugal and from there to England.
The Portuguese did not want to work anymore, for they received the gold. Both Portugal and Spain entered a decline in its agriculture, and handicrafts. Because the result of colonial rule was not enough for them need more work. Incidentally, this is a characteristic of the imperialist system, the center of hegemonic imperialism tends to become a zone parasitic parasitism is one of the characteristics described by Lenin in "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism" as a fundamental element of imperialism, to grow based on the expropriation of other economies. With the military strong enough to ensure intellectual domination and eventually to justify the whole system.
ideology is what is needed to justify this situation to clear field, but production itself is bought from abroad. Large farms of England turned into golf courses, because the land no longer needed to produce. From 1970 until Today, the United States produced an enormous trade deficit this year of 2008, the trade deficit should be $ 600 billion, nearly the economy of Brazil.
Today the United States is basically a debtor country, and this debt has increased from wars, evidently because wars are expensive to fund them and they had to evict the regions where they occurred. The colonized are paying wars.
Cardoso part of the same basic place, criticizing the chains that were defending the idea of \u200b\u200bmodernization as the key to understanding our reality.
Our undeveloped condition comes with colonization, with our expertise to export agricultural products and raw materials especially minerals, precious gold and silver. The zones were called underdeveloped areas of great development in the past. The Northeast was one of the biggest export centers in the world and it is no coincidence that Freyre develops his study of the Big House, which is a modern enterprise of production for export, with one side facing the home care. This whole economy is developing according to the export sector. The case of Minas Gerais, for example, develops around it an urban area, livestock and grains that are consumed by the rich center which organizes the exploration of gold.
This economy was by then called the feudal system, ie, a closed economy. This shows exactly this problem mentally analyze our reality through the eyes of another reality, that is, to European eyes. If in Europe there was a feudal system, then there should be something similar here. Even within the left, it was believed that the transition from feudalism to capitalism happen the same way in our region.
Cardoso starts from 1974 to change its position. Their formulations that we propose a structure created as dependent and therefore would not be able to overcome the addiction. But we could link it with development and democracy. Can a democracy within the dependency, a dependent capitalism that continues to grow and create new units and economic sectors. Until we speak, so in a dependent capitalist development and development that exist within a democracy.
Marini responds very harshly to this article. In that reply he tries to show exactly how Cardoso is developing the conditions ideological adherence to the requirement for a dependent, subordinate to world capitalism. This membership becomes 14 years later in a political practice. This debate was not visible because the unilateral Fernando managed to stay in the debate, it was just his position, the other side was unknown. Fernando was adjusting his thinking, Single Thought. If the condition of dependency is therefore permanent and it will foster democracy, we should not change the conditions of the dependency ratio. If capitalism has evolved into neo-liberal thinking, we must formulate a corresponding thought. The idea that Fernando said no read his books is totally false. His books prepared for membership of the dominant sector in the Brazilian system and the dependence of our country.
Fernando has built much of the material for the ideological hegemony, but failed to establish it completely. However, she still designs, for example, about Lula and the PT. The general secretary of PT, which he founded and organized the party for a long period and was one of its great thinkers, Francisco Weffort, was Minister of Culture Fernando Henrique for eight years.
There was a total breakdown, there is a continuity. Lula increasingly have difficulties to adjust to it fully and the government has chosen to follow a different path.
There is still an alternative to well-formed thought. This is one reason why dependency theory is so little known in Brazil, a barrier that was created systematically. The claims that Fernando did that dependency theory defended the thesis that it was not possible economic growth within an economy dependent estancacionistas called us.
never defend this thesis. Ruy Mauro was the first to speak in 1965 at the Brazilian sub-imperialism. We were discussing explaining the process of integration into the analysis on the conversion of Brazilian capitalism to financial capitalism. This was the basis of the imperialist system as studied Lenin, he showed exactly that financial capitalism was the basis of imperialism. Tried to show that the sub-imperialism had problems to accomplish, exactly because the internal contradictions were not overcome by the system, unless there was a drop in foreign imperialist domination of imperialism dominant. But anyway the trend in sub-imperialism exists, linked to expansion of financial capital at that time is at a fairly high level of growth in Brazil. Especially within areas under U.S. hegemonic domination are a country that is generating a significant financial capital, and the latest merger between Unibanco and Itau demonstrates how we are ensuring the financial capital of a Brazilian management position outward looking.
Brazil presents a theoretically integrated with the actual processes in its varied forms. This is one characteristic that demonstrates the force of theoretical thought. As this thought could be linked with the international financing, particularly the Ford Foundation and became the main reference for the Brazilian Social Sciences. The CEBRAP of Cardoso and the Department of Political Science of Minas Gerais have become the centers of study in the service of designing the Ford Foundation, to develop democracy in the dependency and thereby foster economic development can not questioning the world system.
Our group is approaching another chain in the United States, the group's world system that has worked with us. Immanuel Wallerstein is a great leader and has done a really great quality of the analysis would be a world system as a tool for analysis of the contemporary world, the formation of capitalism as system and even other derivations such as the orientation towards the East. The location of China as a great alternative to the hegemonic United States. We defend the thesis of the decline of U.S. hegemony. It's all part of a series of studies done over many years. We started working together in 1972 when Samir Amin has organized a meeting in Dakar, after that were being made several other meetings of this group in the world system in various parts of the world, including Brasilia
Dependency theory has a central position in contemporary debates not only Brazil but internationally. Our Current work is maintained with a strong intellectual influence on other political forces to join the critical attitude of confrontation with the system. Clearly, Hugo Chavez, at least one wing of the Chinese Communist Party, and some other social forces are influenced by dependency theory. Because this is the way of criticism, liberation and emancipation of our region. These are experiences that are articulated in a thought that is part of a large political process, yet to unfold.
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