Читать книгу The Crisis of the Dictatorships - Nicos Poulantzas - Страница 8

The events that have taken place in Portugal and Greece, and the process now beginning in Spain, can only be properly grasped in terms of the new world context in which they are located: in other words, the new phase of imperialism, and its effects on the European countries. Within the European arena, Portugal, Greece and Spain in fact exhibit, if in different degrees, a characteristic type of dependence in relation to the imperialist metropolises, and to the United States as their dominant centre.

It would be wrong to foist on these countries the traditional notion of ‘under-development’. By their economic and social structure, they are now part of Europe; their proximity is not only geographic, nor even predominantly so. Anticipating somewhat, we can even say that certain features of the new dependence that they present in relation to the United States and to the other European countries (the EEC) also characterize, in this new phase of imperialism, those European countries that themselves form part of the imperialist metropolises, in their own relationship to the United States. That does not mean that Portugal, Spain and Greece do not have a particular form of dependence; this is indeed a specific feature of the events that have taken place there.

This specific form of dependence, which is a function of the particular history of these countries, has two aspects to it:

– on the one hand, the aspect of an old-established primitive accumulation of capital, deriving in the Portuguese and Spanish cases from the exploitation of their colonies, and in the Greek case from exploitation of the Eastern Mediterranean, which distinguishes these countries from the particular type of dependence of other dominated countries;

– on the other hand, the blockage, due to several reasons, of an endogenous accumulation of capital at the right time, which puts them right alongside other countries dependent on the imperialist metropolises in the present phase of imperialism; the new structure of dependence specific to this phase is thus of the highest importance.

The principal characteristic in this respect is therefore the present phase of imperialism. Since the beginnings of imperialism, the relationships between national social formations (metropolitan countries/dominated and dependent countries) have been marked by the primacy of the export of capital over the export of commodities. Yet this definition is still too general; in actual fact, the export of capital plays a variable role, according to the phases of imperialist development, and this can only be understood in relation to the transformations of production relations and labour processes on the world scale.

During earlier phases, in fact, export of capital from the imperialist countries to the dependent countries was chiefly bound up with the control of raw materials (extractive industries) and the extension of markets. In conjunction with this, the principal dividing line between the metropolitan countries and the dominated and dependent ones was still essentially that between industry and agriculture, or between town and country. Thus the capitalist mode of production that was dominant in its monopoly form in the imperialist metropolises and the imperialist chain as a whole, had not yet succeeded in incorporating and dominating the relations of production within the dependent countries themselves. Inside these countries, other modes and forms of production (the feudal mode of production, and the form of petty commodity production) displayed a remarkable persistence, even though suitably transformed by the penetration of capitalist relationships.

This situation had substantial effects on the socio-economic structure of the countries involved, and even on their political structure: the preponderant and highly characteristic role of agriculture and the extraction of raw materials, combined with a marked delay in the process of industrialization, which has often been seen in terms of the incorrect notion of ‘under-development’. The consequence of this, on the side of the dominated classes, was: a) the numerical weakness and relatively slight social and political weight of the working class, in relation to the substantial weight of a peasantry still subordinated to precapitalist relations of production; b) the quite particular disposition of the petty bourgeoisie, within which could be distinguished an important traditional petty bourgeoisie in manufacture, handicrafts (small-scale production) and commerce, and the substantial weight of a state petty bourgeoisie (agents of the state apparatus) due to the parasitic growth of the state bureaucracy characteristic of this dependent situation. On the side of the dominant classes, this situation was manifested in a particular configuration of the power bloc, often denoted by the term ‘oligarchy’: big landed proprietors, whose weight was very substantial, allied to a characteristically comprador big bourgeoisie, whose own economic base in the country was weak, and who functioned chiefly as a commercial and financial intermediary for the penetration of foreign imperialist capital, being closely controlled by this foreign capital.

The present phase of imperialism has seen major changes; the beginnings of these may be located in the immediate post-war years, though their consolidation and expanded reproduction began only in the 1960s. Capital export still serves for the control of raw materials and the extension of markets, but this is no longer its principal function. The principal function of the export of capital today essentially derives from the need for imperialist monopoly capital to valorize itself on the world scale by turning to profit every relative advantage in the direct exploitation of labour. What is involved here is a characteristic feature of the falling rate of profit tendency, and the new conditions in which an average rate of profit is established in the present world context. The drive to counter-act this tendency runs principally by way of the intensive exploitation of labour on a world scale (increase in the rate of exploitation in the form of relative surplus-value, by raising labour productivity, technological innovations, etc.). This involves the reproduction of capitalist relations of production actually within the dependent countries themselves, where these relations subordinate labour-power on an increasing scale, and it corresponds to both a prodigious socialization of labour processes and to a marked internationalization of capital on the world scale.

These changes have important implications for the dependent countries, or at least for certain of their number; the foreign capital invested in them increasingly takes the form of direct investment in the sector of productive industrial capital. The share of this foreign capital that is invested in manufacturing industry is growing rapidly. The case that has attracted most attention here is that of the great multinational corporations, though this is only a limited index of the phenomenon. These multinationals are for the most part American, and in certain of the dependent countries they produce substantial portions of the finished products that they sell on the world market, because of the favourable costs of production there; alternatively they establish an entire stage of their overall production in dependent countries, or else assemble there finished products for local sale. This phenomenon, however, goes far beyond the particular case of the multinational corporations; the point is that the direction of foreign capital investments in these countries involves their labour processes in the capitalist socialization of these processes on the world scale.

This new organization of the imperialist chain and its associated dependence, of which Greece and Spain are typical examples and Portugal only somewhat less so, substantially alters the internal socio-economic structure of the countries subjected to it. Their position as dominated and dependent countries no longer means simply a traditional division between them and the imperialist metropolises along the lines industry/agriculture; this dependence now precisely involves their industrialization under the aegis of foreign capital and at its instigation. Capitalist relations of production are reproduced on a massive scale within these countries themselves, subordinating labour-power while distorting, reorganizing and even hastening the dissolution of precapitalist relationships.

It follows, therefore, that Spain and Greece have not ceased to be dominated and dependent countries, with Portugal following in their wake, because they have emerged from some so-called state of ‘under-development’ – contrary to what is maintained by the entire ‘development’ ideology. In their case, the domination and dependence that foreign imperialist capital inflicts on them are simply taking, on the whole, a new turn. It now involves the actual process of productive industrial capital and the labour processes that pertain to it at the international level. This is in fact the phenomenon of dependent industrialization, which is also displayed by certain other dependent countries, particularly in Latin America, and exhibits the following features:

(i) These countries are confined to forms of industry based on low-level technology.

(ii) Labour productivity is kept at a low level, controlled by the integration of the labour processes in these countries into a socialization of the productive forces (integrated production) which, in the bipolar tendency of qualification/disqualification of labour-power that is characteristic of monopoly capital, exports the disqualification aspect to the dominated countries, while reserving the reproduction of highly skilled labour for the dominant countries.

(iii) The profits directly realized from the production of surplus-value by labour-power in the dominated countries are to a high degree expatriated.

To the exploitation of the popular masses by the productive investment of foreign capital is added a supplementary element, in this case involving the actual labour-power of these countries in the new internationalization of capitalist relations as a whole: the export of labour-power to the imperialist metropolises – the migrant workers – which Portugal, Greece and Spain provide for Europe on a grand scale. This haemorrhage of these countries’ labour-power constitutes a real superexploitation of the popular masses by the dominant imperialist capital, not just in the superexploitation that these workers suffer in the ‘host’ countries, but also, and even more, in the training costs that the dominated countries lose for labour-power that bears fruit in the dominant countries. Furthermore, and we shall come back to this later, this massive emigration is precisely rendered possible by the process of distorted industrialization that foreign capital promotes in these countries, and by the internal dislocations and de-centerings provoked by this induced reproduction of the dominant capitalist relationships.

This new organization of exploitation and dependence in the imperialist chain thus gives rise to new cleavages between the dominated and dependent countries themselves. While certain of them continue to experience, as the dominant form of their exploitation by foreign capital, an export of capital bound up with the control of raw material and the export of commodities, and with a division between industry and agriculture, the form of exploitation that is dominant in our case, though in parallel with old forms only gradually on the retreat, follows a new course.¹

While I do not want to tire the reader with detailed figures, I shall just give a few examples here, in order to illustrate and situate the socio-economic structure of the countries we are concerned with, and their evolution in the course of recent years.

In Portugal, though the policy of economic development based on development plans dates from 1953, it was only from 1960 that the penetration of foreign capital in substantial amounts began to quicken, in conjunction with a parallel process of industrial expansion. The volume of direct foreign investment doubled between 1963 and 1965, and it has continued to grow ever since. Foreign investment has been more and more concentrated in the different sectors of productive industrial capital, through subsidiary branches of the multinationals (chemical, engineering and electronics industries, as well as various other manufacturing industries such as clothing). Parallel with this, the Portuguese GNP has increased by around 6 per cent per year since 1960; what is more, this breaks down, between 1960 and 1970, into a growth rate of 9.1 per cent in industry, 1.5 per cent in agriculture, and 5.9 per cent in the service sector. In 1971, the primary sector only employed 31.8 per cent of the active population (as against 48.4 per cent in 1950), industry 37.2 per cent (24.9 per cent in 1950) and services 32 per cent (26.7 per cent in 1950). The special characteristic of Portuguese capitalism, moreover, compared with that of Greece and Spain, is the extreme concentration and centralization of capital, particularly given the level of industrialization: 168 companies out of a total of 40,000 (i.e. 0.4 per cent) hold at least 53 per cent of the total capital.

In Spain, although the first burst of industrialization also dates from 1953, following the economic and political agreements concluded with the United States, which opened Spain up to the penetration of American capital, the process only began to accelerate towards the end of the so-called ‘stabilization’ period, i.e. round about 1960. Since then, foreign investment has increased quite spectacularly (from 36.1 million dollars in 1960 to around 180 million in 1968); here, too, it is concentrated, through branches of the multinationals, in the chemical industry, electrical equipment and heavy engineering (shipbuilding, automobiles), and various other manufacturing industries. The rate of increase in the Spanish GNP reached an annual average of around 7 per cent in the 1960s, due chiefly to the expansion of industrial production, which increased four times between 1956 and 1969. By 1969, the agricultural sector only employed 31 per cent of the active population (against 42 per cent in 1960), industry 36 per cent (32 per cent in 1960), and services 33 per cent (27 per cent in 1960).

In Greece, the process is all the more interesting in so far as it is possible to compare development from 1960 under a democratic regime, with that from 1967 onwards under the military dictatorship. Here, too, the process of industrialization got under way at the beginning of the 1960s, together with the penetration of foreign capital. The volume of foreign investment increased five times between 1960 and 1964; 1965 and 1966, moreover, were marked by an exceptional and spectacular advance in foreign capital due to the massive investments of Esso- Pappas and Pechiney in these two years. Between 1960 and 1967, the Greek GNP grew at an annual average of 6.7 per cent.

Under the military regime – according to the official figures – the influx of foreign capital into Greece increased by 62 per cent, comparing the years 1967–71 with 1962–66. Moreover, certain other investments that the regime anticipated and bent itself to secure did not ultimately come to fruition, some foreign investors showing hesitation in view of the regime’s ‘instability’.) The rate of increase in the GNP under the military dictatorship was as follows:

	per cent
1967:	4.5
1968:	5.8
1969:	8.8
1970:	7.5
1971:	7.3
1972:	10.5
1973:	10.1

Here again, foreign investment was concentrated from 1960 onwards in the sector of productive industrial capital (chemicals, electrical engineering, shipbuilding, other manufacturing industry). Between 1960 and 1970, Greek subsidiaries of the multinationals accounted for 45 per cent of the increase in industrial production. The most striking rate of increase, throughout this whole period, is that shown by manufacturing industry: some 10.3 per cent per year between 1963 and 1970. The percentage of the active population employed in agriculture fell from 56 per cent in 1961 to 45 per cent in 1967, and to 37.3 per cent in 1971; that in industry rose from 14 per cent in 1961 to 21.2 per cent in 1967, and reached 25 per cent in 1971 (in which year services employed 38 per cent). We may note that this distribution of the active population in Greece does not fully register the industrialization of the country, which is shown more clearly by the fact that agriculture only accounted for 18 per cent of the GNP in 1970, while industry made up 33.2 per cent; this is because industrialization here has been intensive, through the increase in labour productivity in certain sectors (chemicals, petroleum products, shipbuilding).

The new form of dependence, which goes together with a particular type of industrialization, is also shown by a whole series of other particular features: the growing volume of manufactured products in these countries’ exports, for example, relative to agricultural exports. But the decisive significance of this new path of dependence lies above all in the modifications that it brings about in socio-economic structures.

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.

This already sheds light on the question of the relation between the dictatorships and the type of dependence and development peculiar to these countries. It is an undeniable fact that these regimes have particularly favoured this path of dependence on foreign imperialist capital. We have had to make this point already at this stage of the argument, as a number of writers, partly in reaction to the erroneous thesis that the dictatorships are associated with an ‘economic retardment’, accept that these regimes have promoted the development of capitalism, but immediately add, as if afraid of having conceded a point, that this makes no difference, as the same development would have taken place anyway, and in the same manner, if these countries had had bourgeois-democratic regimes. Greece is generally given as the example here, as the hypothesis cannot be verified in the cases of Spain and Portugal, where the dictatorships were established so long ago. Greece saw the beginnings of industrialization marked by the new structures of dependence and the massive investment of foreign capital, before the dictatorship, a process that was moreover accelerated from 1964 onwards, under not a right-wing government, but rather one of the centre (George Papandreou). The junta, then, can simply be said to have continued on the course already established. In this conception, the place of a country in the imperialist chain is seen as sufficient to determine the forms of its dependence in all their details: socio-political distinctions and the internal political institutions of the country would be unable to alter this, except in the case of a transition to socialism.

But we must be clear as to what is involved here. It is obvious that a country’s dependence vis-à-vis imperialism can only be broken by a process of national liberation, which in the new phase of imperialism and the present circumstances as a whole, coincides with a process of transition to socialism. This accepted, however, there are certainly different forms and degrees of dependence, and these essentially depend on the specific internal socio-political coordinates of the countries involved. To take a simple example, the relation of France to American capital was evidently different under the Gaullism of the years 1960–68 than it has been since – today above all – and yet these two moments are both located in the same, present phase of imperialism. In this sense, the dictatorial regimes in Portugal, Spain and Greece certainly played an important role in the specific pattern, shape and rhythm of the dependence process that took place under their direction; not because of their inherent differences from the parliamentary-democratic form of regime, but rather because of the economic and social forces whose interests they predominantly represented. This was particularly the case in Greece, where the military dictatorship’s policy in this respect was very different from that of the previous regime. To formulate the problem more clearly: the specific forms of regime in the dependent countries play a particular role in the precise forms assumed there by the new path of dependence, as a result of the specific ‘internal’ balance of forces to which they correspond.

One basic strand in the present analysis has now been already indicated.

In examining forms of regime and the changes in political institutions, a problem which arises for the imperialist metropolises as well as for the dependent countries, it is essential to take the present phase of capitalism into consideration. This phase, however, does not simply determine all these forms and changes by itself; it is only relevant in so far as it determines, the conjunctures of class struggle, the transformations of classes and the internal balances of socio-political forces which alone can explain these regimes and their evolution. To put it another way, we can certainly speak at a general and rather abstract level of a dependent type of state, for the dependent societies of the present time: a state that exhibits certain common features in all the societies in which it occurs, in so far as it corresponds to the general modifications that imperialism inflicts on them, and must fulfil the general functions falling to it in the present phase of imperialism. But it is none the less clear that the concrete forms that this state assumes – fascism, military dictatorship, ‘democratic’ republic, etc. – depend on internal factors within these societies. These factors appear as decisive as soon as one accepts that it makes a considerable difference, at least for these countries themselves and the popular masses there, whether this dependent state is a bourgeois ‘democracy’ or a reactionary military dictatorship; here, as elsewhere, the forms that bourgeois domination assumes are far from a matter of indifference, for all their common appellation as ‘dictatorships of the bourgeoisie’.

Maintaining the primacy of internal factors in this way already takes us a step further; we have to break once and for all with a mechanistic and almost topological (if not ‘geographical’) conception of the relation between internal and external factors. In the present phase of imperialism there is really no such thing as external factors on the one hand, acting purely from ‘outside’, and opposed to internal factors ‘isolated’ in their own ‘space’ and outclassing the others. If we maintain the primacy of internal factors, we simply mean that those coordinates of the imperialist chain that are ‘external’ to a country – the global balance of forces, the role of a particular great power, etc. – only act on the country in question by way of their internalization, i.e. by their articulation to its own specific contradictions. But these contradictions themselves, in certain aspects, represent the induced reproduction of the contradictions of the imperialist chain within the various individual countries. To talk of internal factors in this sense, then, is to discover the real role that imperialism (uneven development) plays in the evolution of the various social formations.

This will be the guiding thread in the following analyses, and its implications involve a whole series of problems. To make this more clear, we can turn for a moment to the case of Chile, which is highly relevant as regards the role of the imperialist powers – and their centre in particular, the United States – in the installation, maintenance and evolution of the regimes we are concerned with here. In discussions of the Chilean experience the mechanistic and topological conception of ‘external factors’ is often at work in the thesis of the plot against the Allende government, a thesis which maintains the supposedly direct, immediate and exhaustive role played by the United States and the CIA. This thesis has the particular advantage that it prevents the Allende government’s own errors from being examined, and above all, closes people’s eyes to those internal conjunctures which are precisely what enabled ‘outside intervention’ and the ‘hand of the foreigner’ to be effective. No one can doubt today that there have been and continue to be such interventions. But except in the extreme case of open and direct intervention on a massive scale (Santo Domingo, Vietnam, etc.), this cannot generally play a decisive role in the dependent countries concerned – particularly in such European countries as Portugal, Greece and Spain – without being articulated, within these countries, to the internal balance of forces.

¹ I have dealt with this question, as with several others that will appear later on, such as the present relations between the United States and Europe, the domestic bourgeoisie, etc., in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975.