Deindustrialization in Brazil, 1980-2018: a complementary interpretation
This dissertation interprets the transformations occurred in Brazilian industry between 1980 and 2018 from a systemic approach that resorts to the historical, economic, political and social dimensions which characterize critical Political Economy as a field of Social Sciences. The study of this process, known as deindustrialization, was carried out by consulting data from secondary sources and by reviewing the bibliography of authors who dedicated themselves to the analysis of the Brazilian economy of that period. The early 1980s marked a break in the country's economic development pattern. The deepening of industrialization that had been, in the previous period, the engine of national economic growth, was interrupted. This phenomenon broke with a movement in the Brazilian economy that had experienced, between 1947 and 1980, the highest annual average increase in domestic product in the world. Our interpretation holds that the Brazilian experience of industrialization was the result of local historical conditions, but also of the global systemic movement of capitalism, commanded and configured, in the form of the Fordist regime of accumulation, from the central countries of the system. As a consequence, we understand that the deindustrialization observed in the last 40 years has to be seen also as a result of that same systemic movement, but now configured as an accumulation regime with financial dominance, together with the peripheral condition of the country. The transformations of capitalism were analyzed here through the bibliographic review of parts of the work of the French economist François Chesnais, in his re-reading of Marx's theories on money, credit and interest, and also by reviewing the contribution of other authors in the same field. In our interpretation, we articulate three theoretical conceptions of the current critical Political Economy: i) the financialization of contemporary capitalism; ii) the underlying capital over-accumulation crisis; and iii) the current low growth regime that stems from i) and ii) and is led by global oligopolies. We thus seek to offer a complementary interpretation that contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon and to its characterization as an early and negative deindustrialization process, tending towards a productive reprimarization. New research questions and proposals for this topic are also proposed.