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Recent Political Development in Peru: Dependency or Postdependency?
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AGRICULTURE, BUREAUCRACY, AND MILITARY GOVERNMENT IN PERU. By CLEAVESPETER S. and SCURRAHMARTIN J. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. Pp. 329. $22.50.)
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND MIGRANT LABOUR IN LATIN AMERICA. By LAITEJULIAN. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Pp. 229. $25.00.)
THE PERUVIAN REVOLUTION AND THE OFFICERS IN POWER, 1967–1976. By NORTHLIISA and KOROVKINTANYA. Occasional Monograph Series No. 15. (Montreal: Centre for Developing-Area Studies, McGill University, 1981. Pp. 136. $5.00.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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1. See David G. Becker, The New Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Dependency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983) for a definition of the term dependencista and a justification for its use (pp. 3–4). This book also provides an exposition of the idea of postdependency. For present purposes, dependencismo can be taken to represent the radical nationalist ideological view, according to which development—especially development that is equitable internally and enhances national autonomy externally—is thought to be retarded coercively by forces of foreign capitalism in collaboration with all or part of the “national” bourgeoisie. The contrasting postdependency view is that capitalism is a dialectically self-contradictory process with progressive aspects and with the possibility of constructive, mutually beneficial relationships between national and international capital.
2. Perhaps the best-known (to North Americans) Peruvianist who elucidates these themes is Julio Cotler. See, for example, “The New Mode of Political Domination in Peru,” in The Peruvian Experiment, edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 44–78; see also his “State and Regime: Comparative Notes on the Southern Cone and the ‘Enclave’ Societies,” The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), edited by David Collier, pp. 255–82.
3. It is interesting to compare the tone and content of the works under review here with those written while Velasquista reformism was still in full swing, for example, Lowenthal's collection entitled The Peruvian Experiment.
4. See, for example, David Scott Palmer, “‘Revolution from Above’: Military Government and Popular Participation in Peru, 1968–1972,” Ph.D. diss. Cornell University, 1973; and Alfred Stepan, The State and Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
5. Cleaves and Scurrah see state power as distinct from, but related to, policy autonomy; however, because they do not examine the sources of state power, they do not clarify the relationship between the two.
6. Neoliberalism is one of the authors' ideal types (they prefer to omit the prefix). It does not connote a weak or inactive state, but one that has to contend with cross-pressures from competing societal interests when it seeks to select and implement policies.
7. See David G. Becker, “Modern Mine Labour and Politics in Peru since 1968,” Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 32 (July 1982):35-60, which describes mineworker radicalism in identical terms.
8. Peter F. Klarén, Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973).
9. Sources include Becker, The New Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Dependency, whose bibliography lists many others; on labor in this region, see Dirk Kruijt and Menno Vellinga, Labor Relations and Multinational Corporations (Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979).
10. The claim about international capital's hostility toward industrialization in countries like Peru is decisively refuted by Bill Warren in “Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization,” New Left Review 81 (Sept.–Oct. 1973):3–44.
11. Laite tends to create the impression that most workers in the Cerro de Pasco installations are employed there for relatively short periods of time. The opposite is the case, although one finds somewhat more turnover than in, say, a U.S. facility. Note that almost all of this turnover is due to employee choice, not to layoffs. Since the early 1950s, the company has sought a stable workforce.
12. I suspect that the problem here is a tendency, also found in many other works on proletarianization, to regard Britain as the archetype of non-“dependent” capitalist development. Actually, the British sequence, beginning with the expulsion of peasants from the land due to enclosure, is fairly atypical. In the case of the United States, one also finds an extreme reluctance on the part of proletarians to remain in that condition, even today; the small-business alternative remains highly attractive, as was the family-farm option until the 1920s.
13. The reason is that those who work in the mines with the intent of investing their earnings in land arrange for their newly purchased holdings to be farmed by others until they are ready to retire. Because the agrarian reform in its radical phase sought to expropriate all land not actually being worked by its owner of record, these miner-peasants would have been directly and adversely affected.
14. One explanation offered by Laite is that when a strike is called, workers usually disperse to their home villages until it ends. Although dispersal does not cause them to forget the economic demands at issue, it hinders mobilization and political “conscientization.”
15. David G. Becker, “ ‘Bonanza Development’ and the ‘New Bourgeoisie’: Peru under Military Rule,” Comparative Political Studies 15 (Oct. 1982):243–88.
16. Luigi R. Einaudi and Alfred C. Stepan, Latin American Institutional Development: Changing Military Perspectives in Peru and Brazil (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1971); George Philip, “The Soldier as Radical: The Peruvian Military Government, 1968–1975,” Journal of Latin American Studies 8, no. 1 (1976):29–51.
17. From an interview on 15 July 1978 with Jorge Fernández Maldonado, one of the most powerful members of this group, it became clear that the general had been so strongly influenced by Social Christian doctrines that he distributed Social Christian literature to the troops. This aspect of ideology deserves additional research.
18. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977).
19. The usual argument about capitalism and fascism is the one derived from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963). It posits that fascism is a form of antisocialist populism that arises when neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat is strong enought to establish its political domination and social control. The bourgeoisie supports it out of a desire for order and fear of the proletariat, but pays the price of losing direct control over state power, and as a result, has less confidence that the state will always act in the interest of capital. In other words, fascism is never the preference of the capitalist class and is supported only in the face of a graver threat from below. The argument is solid and is confirmed by much historical experience. That the Peruvian bourgeoisie was uninterested in the “fascistoid” option held out by General Javier Tantaleán and the other officers of the right-wing “La Misión” group implies that the bourgeoisie did not feel threatened by “communism,” despite the popular mobilization under leftist banners that had already occurred—a sign, one must conclude, of the class's self-confidence.
20. Henry Pease García, El ocaso del poder oligárquico (Lima: DESCO, 1977).
21. Villanueva, a former major who has written several well received works on the Peruvian military, attempts in this tendentiously argued piece to attribute the military's political action before and after 1980 to the issue of arms supplies. Suffice it to say that the military need not fear an attempt by Belaúnde to dictate its external sources of supply, whatever the political arrangements; it is hard to believe that any Peruvian civilian government would be so foolish as to defy the military on a matter of such obvious institutional interest. Nor does Villaneuva realize that there are perfectly good reasons for purchasing Soviet arms in preference to Western equivalents: they are generally cheaper (not more expensive, as he maintains), are often backed by more favorable financing, and being less technologically complex, are less expensive to operate and service. Gorman's chapter compares the ideas of Julio Cotler with those of other Peruvian thinkers in an attempt to demonstrate that Cotler's are more accurate and therefore are likely to animate the country's intellectual life for some time to come. Cotler's accuracy can be debated, but his future influence does not follow automatically, whatever the outcome, and is not otherwise supported. The chapter ends with a lengthy concluding section on elite-mass relations that has little to do with the preceding material.
22. See Alan Angelí and Rosemary Thorp, “Inflation, Stabilization and Attempted Redemocratization in Peru, 1975–1979,” World Development 8 (Nov. 1980):865-86; also Evelyne Huber Stephens, “The Peruvian Military Government, Labor Mobilization, and the Political Strength of the Left,” LARR 18, no. 2:57–93.
23. Discussed at length in Cynthia McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change in Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
24. Belaúnde, Pease observes, has sought to utilize his status as a national symbol by adopting a Gaullist stance above the fray of daily politics. Thus, like De Gaulle, he has allowed his prime ministers to “take the heat” for unpopular economic policies, which leaves him free to step in as an apparent moderating force when popular pressures become too great. (Woy-Hazleton also notes this seemingly successful technique.) Pease suggests that the recent division within AP between the economically orthodox, led by Manuel Ulloa (prime minister until early 1983), and the “populists,” led by Javier Alva Orlandini (leader of the party's congressional delegation), has further enhanced Belaúnde's ability to play this role. Note that Pease accurately predicted that Ulloa eventually would be forced out of the prime ministry.
25. All countries borrow to finance deficits in their foreign trade balances rather than meeting them solely by drawing down foreign exchange reserves. Chronic budget deficits, the other major instigator of borrowing by capitalist states, are (as North Americans now know) endemic to all countries, developed as well as developing. Deficits may be expected to increase during periods of rapid growth, when demand for government services (infrastructure, say) may increase faster than tax revenues. Ever since the eighteenth-century foundation of the Bank of England, private interests have been glad to finance these “permanent” deficits, regarding loan principal as sunk investment that will pay interest forever. (Individual loans are amortizable, but amortization payments are offset by new borrowings.) In all of this practice, the only thing peculiar to developing countries is that their financiers generally charge them higher rates of interest—although not as high as the rates that private businesses are charged. Chase Manhattan Bank, with a limited stake in Peru when compared to its total portfolio, may be less concerned with its borrower's health than is the Bank of England, but it is hard to see how Chase's interest in the profitability and continuity of its Peruvian loan market can be served by damaging the country's economy.
26. Raymond Vernon, Storm over the Multinationals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).
27. According to Devlin, there was one instance when Chase Manhattan tried to force a change in a contractual agreement between the state and a large U.S.-based mining firm, but backed down when the government proved unyielding. Since the crisis set in, the banks have shown interest in Peru's liberalizing its treatment of foreign investment in order to qualify for refinancing. They do so because they sincerely believe that the Peruvian economy would be better off and that their Peruvian loan market would be more secure and profitable over the long haul as a result. Within limits, they may be right.
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