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Has Brazil Moved Toward State Capitalism?

At present there has yet to be a satisfactory explanation of the precise association between the rise of Latin America's "new" authoritarianism (Collier, 1979) and the changing economic role of the state. The starting point for this paper is the contention that this question of the interplay between political and economic change cannot be fully answered until a more fundamental issue has been resolved. What has been the role of the state in the process of capital accumulation? In Brazil, the so-called "paradigm case" for many analysts of "state capitalism" and authoritarianism, the impact of the state apparatus on social classes in periods of both populism and authoritarianism has received more attention than the role of the state in the industrialization process. Yet, as one analyst puts it: "To the extent that accumulation in the capitalist mode of production is the underlying determinant of the form of relations of production and exchange, this is logically the right place to start" (Fitzgerald, in Fitzgerald, Floto and Lehman, 1977: 65). In light of the Brazilian economy's rapid structural change and aggregate growth since 1968, what have been the changes in the relations between and within state, local, and transnational capital? What are the leading sectors of the economy? Which groups control, in which period, the pace and direction of capital accumulation? On the one hand, the state sector of the economy has grown vastly since the 1950s. On the other, the state has greatly aided the accumulation of private capital. Has this quantitative growth led, in fact, to such qualitative changes as to make the state the most important economic decisionmaker? It is the contention of this paper that the questions of which class, or class fraction, is "on top" politically, with whose support and for how long, cannot be fully answered until the most important economic deci-