Transformations in Industrial Productive Structure in Brazil: Globalization and New Imperialism, 1980 to 2018
This paper deals with the Brazilian deindustrialization from 1980 to 2018. It proposes to offer an interpretation of this phenomenon through a systemic approach that characterizes critical political economy as a field of social sciences. For this it resorts to the historical, economic, political and social dimensions related to the transformations that suffered the Brazilian industrial productive structure in the last two decades of the twentieth century and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The initial timeframe of this study was its double significance. The early 1980s is the period when neoliberalism takes center stage in the center of the world capitalist system through the Thatcher and Reagan governments. In this same period Brazil was succumbed to an economic crisis, with the collapse of its external debt, which determined the end of its industrialization process. From then on, Brazilian industry began to show indicators of the loss of its relative importance in the aggregate product of the economy and in Brazil's trade agenda with the rest of the world. At the same time in this period, world capitalism, under neoliberal ideas, promoted the liberalization and deregulation of international capital flows, contributing to a global spatial reorganization of production. This had an impact on the position of Brazilian industry internationally. According to François Chesnais, the dominance of capital in its highly concentrated interest-bearing monetary form operating in the world financial markets reproduces the fetish of money, but is wholly dependent on surplus value and output. Contemporary imperialism expresses itself through the globalization of capital, and its operations establish a hierarchical system of states, which determines the insertion in the world capitalist productive system. This hierarchy would be founded on the dominance of the oligopolistic market structure and the concentration of monetary capital. The proposal here is to verify if it is possible to identify elements of Brazil's subordination in the interstate system, investigating the prevalence of oligopolistic market forms, their degree of denationalization, and the degree of macroeconomic dependence of Brazil in relation to the flow of external capital. We will review the discussion on deindustrialization and detail the theoretical framework on the new forms of imperialism and globalization. With the data analysis through the interaction with the theoretical framework, we will present new questions, pointing its deepening in future investigations.