The Crisis of the Dictatorships. Nicos Poulantzas
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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