English
Autor: Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos, Denis Maracci
The book is a compilation of classical and recent works from the Institute of Economics at the University of Campinas. It highlights the enduring significance of its foundational texts and their role in shaping future economic inquiries. However, it also shows how the Campinas School developed new specialized branches of investigation that advanced in innovative directions while keeping its basic methodological tenets.
Central to the collection is the exploration of the origins and development of capitalism in Brazil, a focus of the initial theses at Unicamp's Institute of Economics. This exploration delves into the unique characteristics of Brazilian and Latin American capitalism, emphasizing the need for historical contextualization and the adaptation of theoretical concepts to explain specific socio-economic processes.
This concern with contextualization and historical difference implied the effort to historicize theoretical concepts to reconstitute and explain specific contexts and processes rather than "applying" theories in particular case studies to "test" general hypotheses. This methodological characteristic is, in fact, one of the reasons why the school is currently a living tradition that still investigates structural changes and capitalist dynamics in Brazil and the world.
Hence, the Campinas School is distinguished by its methodological focus on critical theory over problem-solving theory. This approach involves a deeper inquiry into the origins, purposes, and potential transformations of socio-economic and political relations and institutions. The school's commitment to critical theory reflects its intellectual roots in the fight for Brazilian redemocratization and a critique of capitalist structure and dynamics.
The collection opens with the first chapter of Cardoso de Mello's thesis "O Capitalism Tardio" (The Late Capitalism), which critiques the UN's ECLAC perspective on industrialization in peripheral economies. Mello's work challenges the assumptions underlying traditional views on industrialization in Latin America, advocating for a more complex understanding of the process. It argues that Brazilian industrialization must be understood within the broader framework of the development of capitalism, questioning the simplistic views on state roles and bourgeoisie behavior.
The book delves into late capitalism, discussing how industrialization in Brazil and Latin America diverged from traditional models. It highlights the state's and foreign capital's significant role in this process, challenging linear and gradualist approaches to industrialization in late capitalist contexts. It explores capitalism's uneven and combined development on a global scale.
The book also examines the structure and dynamics of capitalism after heavy industrialization, together with a critical diagnosis of the financial system's development and the economic policy of the military dictatorship. The extreme concentration of wealth and income inherent in the structure of capitalism in Brazil is also the object of its chapters, which address the agrarian, social, and labor questions throughout Brazilian industrialization.
The devastating effects of the foreign debt crisis on the Brazilian economy in the 1980s are discussed, as well as the impact of Brazilian neoliberal reforms on the structure, dynamics, and insertion into global capitalism in the 1990s. The last chapters tackle some issues of Brazilian capitalism in the governments of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2015), covering the macroeconomic dynamics of the 2000s, the expansion of the participation of wages in the functional distribution of income, the causes of the Brazilian deindustrialization and the unraveling of the economic and political projects of these administrations in 2016. The book concludes with a discussion of the concepts of capitalism, freedom, democracy, citizenship, liberalism, social democracy, financialization, and neoliberalism to characterize, from a historical perspective, the Neoliberal Era and, within it, Bolsonarism.
The collection emphasizes the need for ongoing research and understanding of Brazil's position in the global economy. It advocates for new national strategies to address contemporary challenges like inequality and ecological crises.
It invites readers to further engage with the extensive academic production of the Campinas School. Notably, the selected texts are a small sample of the vast scholarly output of the Campinas School. In this sense, the book is just an appetizer for readers to seek to know more about the classic texts and the current production of Unicamp's Institute of Economics.