From Populism to Neoliberalism: The Political Economy of Latin American Import-Substitution Industrialization: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia in Comparative Perspective

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211063503
• Author: Nicolás Grinberg
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211063503

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 243, Vol. 49 No. 2, March 2022, 183–206

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211063503

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

183

From Populism to Neoliberalism

The Political Economy of Latin American Import-

Substitution Industrialization: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico

and Colombia in Comparative Perspective

by

Nicolás Grinberg

Traditional views on Latin American political development agree that its distinctive

characteristics are in some way related to the region’s pattern of import-substitution

industrialization. All of them share a key theoretical perspective that limits their under-

standing of this development: they consider capital accumulation to be structured at the

national level. Instead, import-substitution industrialization should be seen as the state-

mediated form of recovery by global industrial capital invested in manufacturing of a

portion of the ground rent flowing into the region because of its role in the production of

surplus value on a global scale. The differences in the political economy of import-substi-

tution industrialization between Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia may be

explained in terms of the historical and natural conditions of the specific form taken by

capitalism in Latin America.

Las opiniones tradicionales sobre el desarrollo político latinoamericano coinciden en

que sus peculiaridades están de alguna manera relacionadas con el patrón de industrial-

ización por sustitución de importaciones de la región. Se comparte una perspectiva teórica

clave que limita la comprensión de dicho desarrollo: la acumulación de capital se presenta

como estructurada a nivel nacional. Sin embargo, la industrialización por sustitución de

importaciones debe verse como la forma mediada por el estado que toma la recuperación,

por parte del capital industrial global invertido en el sector manufacturero, de una porcion

de la renta del suelo que fluye hacia la región debido a su papel en la producción de plus-

valía a escala mundial, y va mediada por el Estado. Las diferencias en la economía política

de la industrialización por sustitución de importaciones entre Argentina, Brasil, México

y Colombia pueden explicarse en términos de las condiciones históricas y naturales en que

se realiza la forma específica que toma el capitalismo en América Latina.

Keywords: Latin America, Import-substitution industrialization, Populism,

Neoliberalism, Ground rent

Nicolás Grinberg is a research fellow of the Argentina’s Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones

Científicas y Técnicas (National Scientific and Technical Research Council—CONICET) and an

associate professor in development economics and comparative economic development at the

Centro de Estudios Económicos del Desarrollo (Center for Economic Studies of Development) of

the Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research deals with the

political economy of capitalist development from a comparative-historical perspective. Apart

from studying and comparing various Latin American national experiences, he has studied the

politico-economic development of Korea and Australia and compared them with that of Brazil

and Argentina, respectively.

1063503LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211063503Latin American PerspectivesGrinberg / Latin American Import-Substitution Industrialization

research-article2021

184 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

It is generally agreed that during the period when the industrial sector

became the center of Latin America’s accumulation dynamics (1940s–1970s)

there was a strong cross-country correlation between patterns of political

and economic development. Latin American industrialization is held to dif-

fer from the experience of advanced countries in revolving around produc-

tion for small, protected domestic markets (traditionally characterized as

import-substitution industrialization), and political institutions are consid-

ered likely to be corporatist, with alternating democratic/populist and dic-

tatorial/repressive periods (Schmitter, 1972). Despite variations in the extent

of autonomy assigned to them, scholars generally concur that distinctive

political dynamics underlie the development of Latin American economies.

Even the Marxist branch of dependency theory resorts to explaining inter-

country divergences by reference to cumulative differences in the power of

nation-states (e.g., Wallerstein, 1974) if it wants to avoid the circularity of

explaining dependency in terms of the lack of capital-goods production and

this in terms of dependence on primary-commodity exports produced by

superexploited labor (Marini, 1972). Despite theoretical-level agreement,

there are broadly three contending perspectives. For new institutionalists

and old structuralists, it is the quality/form of state institutions and state-

elite goals that explains Latin American patterns of politico-economic devel-

opment (Centeno and Ferraro, 2019; Orihuela, 2019); for new institutional

economists, underlying political institutions explain the social dynamics

shaping state policies (Haber, 2000); for dependency theorists, the structure

of class power is their main determinant (Furtado, 2020 [1973]; Marini, 1972;

Cardoso, 1973).

My goal here is to offer an account of the relationship between Latin American

political economy and import-substitution industrialization that, in contrast to

those traditions, draws on a key insight from Marx’s critique of political econ-

omy: that the contemporary process of social reproduction is organized through

the valorization of capital and, as such, is globally structured, with national

institutional settings, class struggles, and political agencies as its mediating

instances (Marx, 1976: 222, 702, 929). Following Iñigo-Carrera (2016), I argue

that the specificity of Latin American capitalism and its politico-economic

forms develops from the region’s participation in the production of surplus

value on a global scale as a producer of rent-bearing primary commodities and

the resolution of the contradiction between capital and landed property that

arises from it. I compare the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and

Colombia—Latin America’s largest economies and representative of the four

corporatist types identified by Collier and Collier (2002 [1991])—and offer a

Marxian alternative to that politics-centered account. I trace the origins, trans-

formations, and demise of import-substitution industrialization and its politi-

cal forms. The analysis of the four cases is preceded by a brief discussion of the

national specificity of Latin American capitalist development that serves to

identify the historical and natural conditions of capital accumulation driving

intercountry differentiation. In this process, I also briefly point to the way in

which different theories of Latin American economic development have

expressed ideologically the underlying societal forces they attempted to

account for.