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Nicos Poulantzas. The Crisis of the Dictatorships
Nicos Poulantzas
The Crisis. of the Dictatorships. Portugal. Greece. Spain
Contents
Preface
I. The Imperialist World Context
II. The Dictatorships, the United States and Europe
III. The Dominant Classes
IV. The Popular Classes
V. The State Apparatuses
VI. Conclusion
From March 1975 to June 1976
Index
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London: NLB
Atlantic Highlands: HUMANITIES PRESS
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We are already faced with a problem here: this state of affairs has often been under-estimated by the resistance organizations. This was particularly the case in Portugal, traditionally seen as a ‘backward’ country, but also in Spain, where the resistance organizations took a long time to recognize these new realities. The underlying reason is the tradition bequeathed by the Third International, which considered fascist regimes and military dictatorships as necessarily bound up with economic retardment or retrogression; there are a host of formulations according to which these regimes are supposed to have caused a long-term ‘blockage’ of these countries’ ‘economic development’, or even put it into reverse. These characterizations go hand in hand with an economist/technicist conception of economic development and industrialization, a conception that pervades the various theories of underdevelopment, itself a highly erroneous term. For there is no such thing as a neutral economic development, economic development as such, with a uniform and unambiguous direction that could only be positive: an economic development which cannot be properly carried out by these regimes, so that condemning them necessarily involves characterizing them as ‘economically retrogressive’. Here a further and related illusion comes to light: these regimes are seen as condemned inevitably to disappear, and their fall directly predicated on their supposed inability to set under way, or follow through, ‘economic development’.
But this ‘development as such’ lacks any meaning. What matters is its social and political significance, i.e. its relationship to the exploitation of the popular masses in the contemporary imperialist chain. And roughly since the 1960s, if not always to the same extent, the Portuguese and Spanish regimes have followed, and the Greek military regime continued, a policy of industrial development parallel with a concentration and centralization of capital; in other words, a policy of development of capitalist relations in their monopoly form, and one conforming with the new features of exploitation that mark the present phase of imperialism and the relationships between dominant and dominated countries – a policy, therefore, that by this very fact subjugates these countries to the new dependence that characterizes the imperialist chain. One outcome of this is that this ‘economic development’ exhibits a series of aspects specific to the dependent industrialization of the dominated countries, an industrialization that is very far from following the path of the dominant countries; another outcome is that the popular masses have experienced a considerably increased exploitation both by their own dominant classes and by those of the imperialist metropolises, from the very fact of this industrialization.
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