Domination and inequality

16/10/2024

Culture • Ecology • Books • Sociology

By FERNANDO RUGITSKY*

Introduction to the reissue of Paul Singer's book

Paul Singer, inequality and the subproletariat

The book Domination and inequality has a place of honor among the classics of Brazilian critical thought. Originally published in 1981, it is one of the great landmarks of the critical review of developmentalism triggered by the historical rupture of 1964. At the same time, the book inaugurated a tradition of interpretation that can still bear much fruit. Combining a meticulous critical analysis of Brazilian socioeconomic statistics with an effort to renew the Marxist interpretation of the transformations of capitalism in Brazil, Paul Singer produced a work that deserves to be widely read and discussed. The present reissue is therefore appropriate.

To situate Domination and inequality It is worth going back in time a little and reconstructing, albeit briefly, what was at stake when Paul Singer was invited, in the mid-1970s, to contribute a chapter to the famous collection The controversy over income distribution and development, organized by Ricardo Tolipan and Arthur Carlos Tinelli. The chapter launched the author on an intellectual journey that would occupy him for more than a decade and result in two books, collected in this edition: Domination and inequality, already mentioned, and Income distribution, first published in 1985.

Thus, we have gathered here some of Paul Singer's responses to the challenges to national critical thinking posed by the 1970s: understanding the defeat of 1964 and the “economic miracle” that followed. Responses that can still, almost half a century later, guide us in facing new problems and old dilemmas.

The controversy over income distribution

In the 1950s, economic development consolidated itself as one of the subdisciplines of the field of economics.² The debates at the time, oscillating between abstract concepts and detailed analyses of concrete experiences, were marked by a diffuse confidence that overcoming underdevelopment was on the horizon. The enthusiasm that permeated the field was based on the “implicit idea that [the subdiscipline] could virtually single-handedly slay the dragon of backwardness.”³

Latin America was undoubtedly one of the regions that took center stage in these discussions. The theories formulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) occupied a prominent place in the debate.⁴ Even development economists from outside the region made a point of visiting to present their ideas and discuss with their Latin American peers.

During this period, the line between academic debate and the formulation of economic policies was not well defined, and governments transformed theories into national projects. In Brazil, an exemplary example of a more general phenomenon, the leading development economist, Celso Furtado, a graduate of ECLAC, was called upon to contribute to the development plan of the Juscelino Kubitschek government and, a few years later, was promoted to the position of Minister of Planning in the João Goulart government. The accelerated economic transformation, encouraged by the government, was accompanied by the vertiginous urbanization of society, cultural upheaval, and growing organization of the working classes, in the countryside and in the cities.

However, in April 1964, the civil-military coup represented a turning point, disconnecting the advance of capitalist accumulation in Brazil from the modern dreams of developmentalists. Accelerated economic growth could no longer be equated with overcoming underdevelopment. In this sense, Maria da Conceição Tavares and José Serra stated in 1970 that “while Brazilian capitalism is developing satisfactorily, the nation, the majority of the population, remains in conditions of great economic deprivation.”⁵ Furtado himself would formulate a similar argument: “higher growth rates, far from reducing underdevelopment, tend to worsen it, since they give rise to growing social inequalities”.⁶

The coup in Brazil was part of a series of military coups that established violent dictatorships in Latin America from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, generally with US support in the context of the Cold War. Hirschman argues that these “political disasters” marked the beginning of the decline of thinking about economic development, which would undergo an intense process of self-reflection from then on.⁷ “What was lost in enthusiasm was gained in maturity.”⁸

One of the main debates that mobilized Brazilian economists during this period dealt with the issue of inequality. With the publication of data from the 1970 Census, Rodolfo Hoffmann and João Carlos Duarte showed that, between 1960 and 1970, inequality had increased in Brazil.⁹ The ongoing strength of the so-called “economic miracle” was being distributed very unevenly. The argument might have gone unnoticed if it had not been for the publication by the American economist Albert Fishlow, in the same year, of a similar estimate that caught the attention of Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank.

In a speech at UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), in 1972, McNamara highlighted the Brazilian case as a cause for concern and cited Fishlow's data: “[i]n terms of GNP [gross national product], the country did well. The very rich did very well. But over the decade, the poorest 40 percent benefited only marginally.”¹⁰

The Brazilian government, especially the palace economists (Antônio Delfim Netto, Roberto Campos and Mário Henrique Simonsen), reacted promptly, denouncing what they were quick to describe as weak data and spurious motivations behind the estimates.¹¹ Their discomfort was evident, and so were the reasons behind it. The Brazilian case was on the pages of international economic journals, in a debate that highlighted the political nature of economic decisions. According to Fishlow, the increase in inequality “indicated precisely the priorities [of the Castello Branco government]: the destruction of the urban proletariat as a political threat and the reestablishment of an economic order oriented towards the private accumulation of capital.”¹²

In response, the then Minister of Finance, Delfim Netto, officially commissioned a study on the subject to be carried out by Carlos Langoni, a graduate of the University of Chicago. Advised by federal government officials, Carlos Langoni published the book in 1973 Income distribution and economic development in Brazil. Behind an elaborate statistical apparatus and a profusion of tables, the book sought to interpret the increase in inequality by resorting to the neoclassical theory of human capital.

The main message served the government's interests: “In an economy like Brazil's, with high growth rates, especially in the industrial sector, it is reasonable to anticipate the existence of imbalances in the labor market, since the expansion of demand tends to benefit precisely the most qualified categories whose supply is relatively more inelastic in the medium term. Thus, it is natural to find several professional categories receiving salaries above the value of their marginal productivity. In this sense, it can be said that the degree of inequality in the current distribution is greater than the degree expected in the long term, when it will be possible to eliminate these extra gains through the appropriate expansion of supply.”¹³

The increase in inequality would thus be “reasonable” and “natural”, an unavoidable effect of accelerated growth, rather than a result of the policies adopted. It would also be transitory, since the market itself would take care of correcting it in the “long term”.¹⁴ Carlos Langoni went a step further and questioned the causal relationship between income distribution and well-being, suggesting that perhaps the main objective should be the elimination of poverty, without it being necessary to try to reduce inequality.¹⁵

The response was not long in coming. Langoni’s work was the subject of detailed analysis and scathing criticism by numerous Brazilian economists. One of the first reactions appeared in a review of the book written by Pedro Malan and John Wells in 1973. In the same year, the first meeting of Anpec (National Association of Graduate Programs in Economics) included a session on income distribution, in which other texts critical of Langoni’s work were presented. The effort to respond to the “official” defense of the regime would unite Edmar Bacha, Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, Maria da Conceição Tavares, as well as Fishlow, Hoffmann, Duarte, Malan, Wells and Paul Singer.

The debate was waged on several fronts. Some, such as Wells, sought to use annual data to argue that the increase in inequality occurred mainly during the years of contractionary adjustment, that is, between 1964 and 1966, and not during the period of growth, so that the mechanism suggested by Langoni would not be plausible. Others prioritized criticizing the theoretical basis adopted by Langoni, the theory of human capital. There were also attempts to reinforce the evidence that connected the increase in inequality to wage repression policies and the reduction of the minimum wage.

The debate fostered a flowering of conceptual frameworks and empirical efforts that resulted in a complex and comprehensive reading of the transformations underway in Brazilian capitalism and their repercussions on income distribution. It was undoubtedly one of the high points in the history of the national economic debate. The book organized by Tolipan and Tinelli, which brought together the economists cited above in 1975, including Paul Singer, is still a landmark.

Enter Paul Singer

Paul Singer's direct criticism of Langoni has two main elements: (i) the argument that the marginalist theory of income distribution, adopted by Carlos Langoni, is based on a false assumption according to which it is possible to identify individual marginal productivities and (ii) the questioning of the meaning of the correlation between income level and level of education (the main evidence used by Carlos Langoni to support his interpretation).¹⁶ Regarding the first point, Paul Singer argued that the income appropriated by different social groups is not a mere result of the technical characteristics of the production process, but is influenced by political and social determinants. In contrast, the marginalist theory (which remains dominant in economic thought today) assumes that remuneration is determined by the marginal productivities of the different factors of production, which “[is] based, in turn, on the assumption of the infinite divisibility of the factors of production, that is, that it is possible to determine the productivity at the margin of each individual working in the company. However, this assumption is false. The division of labor in any modern company entails a close interdependence of all members of large production teams. It makes no sense, therefore, to consider the productivity of an engineer or a worker in isolation. The productivity of the engineer is null if he cannot count on the collaboration of other specialists and numerous workers.”¹⁷

This is, of course, a recurring debate, pitting defenders against critics of the levels of inequality observed in different societies and at different times. More recently, the French economist Thomas Piketty used an argument similar to that of Paul Singer to reject the view that the explosion observed in recent decades in the salaries of executives in large corporations was due to the extraordinary growth in their productivity.¹⁸

Returning to the Brazilian case, Paul Singer complements the criticism of the marginalist theory of distribution with an alternative interpretation to the main evidence used by Carlos Langoni. According to him, “the correlation between education and income does not indicate a simple cause-and-effect relationship,” but, “[i]n fact, the educational pyramid reflects, with few distortions, the pyramid of social and economic stratification.”¹⁹ Contrary to what Carlos Langoni argued, the growing wage gap between workers with different levels of education was not an inevitable result of temporary imbalances between the supply and demand for workers with different levels of qualification.

In reality, this was a politically instituted disparity, since the observed remunerations did not follow “economic” criteria, but resulted from government policies (in particular, the determination of the minimum wage and the rules for salary adjustments) and their repercussions on the Brazilian social structure.

It remained, then, to investigate this structure and its transformation since the 1960s. As Paul Singer reveals in the preface to Domination and inequality, here would be his main contribution to the controversy over inequality: “Since it no longer made sense to merely reaffirm the denunciations of the regime’s policy, I then proposed to develop a historical interpretation of the distribution of income in Brazil, seeking to show how the structural transformations, caused by the development process, produced changes in the distribution of income. This methodological stance obviously obliged me to face the issue of social classes”.²⁰

The controversy over inequality thus converged with another intellectual development underway in Brazil, also crucial for the critical review of developmentalism: the reinterpretation of our historical trajectory based on a critical reading of Marxism. The critical apparatus inherited from Marx offered instruments for examining the illusions of developmentalism and interpreting the defeat that occurred in 1964. By choosing the class structure as the focus of his investigation, Paul Singer mobilized the ongoing revival of Marxist thought to intervene in the debate surrounding Carlos Langoni's book.

Along with José Arthur Giannotti, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ruth Cardoso and Fernando Novais, Paul Singer had been part of the original group of intellectuals who decided to focus critically and interdisciplinarily on The capital, in the famous seminars held at the University of São Paulo (USP), which lasted from the end of the 1950s until the mid-1960s.²¹ Having come into contact with Marx's work in his youth, when he was a worker and union leader, Paul Singer resumed reading the German thinker during his academic career, combining multiple experiences that allowed him to assume a role that was not only central but also unique in the intellectual debates that followed the 1964 coup.

Mini-landownership and the sub-proletariat

At the time, one of the goals of the revival of Marxism in the periphery was to examine the nature of the process of proletarianization and the transformations of social relations of production in the Global South. The aim was to deepen the diagnosis of the transition that developmentalism described as a mere reallocation of the labor force from the subsistence sector to the capitalist sector, bringing to light its implications for capital accumulation and class conflict. In other words, Marxist critics were rethinking the dualism disseminated mainly by the work of the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis.²²

In the Brazilian case, Francisco de Oliveira's formulation, in Criticism of dualistic reason, undoubtedly brought to the forefront the discussion about the specificity of peripheral capitalism and the nature of primitive accumulation in Brazil, offering a series of intriguing hypotheses.²³ But it was Paul Singer, in Domination and inequality, who proposed the most systematic and in-depth analysis of the Brazilian proletarianization process.

The book contains an unprecedented investigation of the Brazilian class structure and its transformation in the mid-twentieth century, based on a rigorous examination of a series of statistical sources, especially the Census, the Agricultural Census and the National Household Sample Surveys (PNAD). Paul Singer provides us with a sophisticated diagnosis of the specificity of the Brazilian historical experience, and situates with great precision the structural contours of class conflicts.

In the classical debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, the key to understanding the process of proletarianization was found in the transformation of agriculture.²⁴ To unravel the Brazilian case, Paul Singer opts for the same strategy.²⁵ After all, more than half of the Brazilian economically active population (EAP) was employed in agricultural activities until at least 1970.²⁶ Since the 1930s, with the crisis in export-oriented agricultural production (especially coffee growing) and the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, the demand for food and other agricultural products in Brazilian urban centers has increased substantially.

This increase, in turn, results in an expansion of commercial agriculture aimed at the domestic market. However, this part of agricultural production is still largely supported by family labor, rather than wage labor.

The situation would only change in the second half of the 1950s, when, according to Paul Singer, “the expansion of capitalism, accelerated by the influx of foreign capital, goes beyond the limits of urban activities and begins to penetrate agriculture”.²⁷ Although most of the expansion of the rural labor force between 1950 and 1960 remained outside capitalist social relations, the number of wage workers in agricultural activities grew from about 5 to 5,8 million people. However, despite this absolute growth, agricultural employees represent a declining share of the total labor force.

Between 1960 and 1970, however, a notable inflection was observed: the number of employees in agricultural activities fell to less than 3,5 million (just over ten percent of the EAP), at the same time as there was an increase in the number of people employed in agriculture.²⁸ The percentage of salaried workers in the Brazilian rural workforce has been reduced by almost half in ten years, from 37% to 20%.²⁹ The penetration of capitalism into agriculture does not generalize wage-earning, but rather the peasantry.

The paradox is only apparent, however. As had occurred in so many other previous experiences of capitalist advances in the countryside, capital repelled labor with a much greater intensity than it attracted it. Throughout the 1960s, capitalist agriculture expanded its dominance over Brazilian agricultural production, resorting to intense mechanization and expelling the labor force. The pages dedicated by Paul Singer to the analysis of the growing role played by tractors are especially interesting.³⁰

The result was an intense process of mini-landownership. Between 1960 and 1970, the population employed in the smallest rural establishments (up to 10 hectares) increased dramatically. Their share in the total agricultural EAP jumped from 31% to 41%.³¹ Furthermore, this enormous population contingent not only found itself trapped in small areas, but had also been displaced to regions further away from urban markets by the concentration of land under the control of capitalist agriculture.³² Their ability to secure their own livelihood was increasingly limited.

Mini-landownership was decisive in creating the basis for large-scale proletarianization, by constituting an enormous “agricultural reserve army”³³ available to capital: “the great majority of agricultural workers live in such poverty that, in relation to capital, they form a single class of expropriated people, whose labor power is available to be acquired at the legally and socially established minimum cost.”³⁴

Mini-landlorization not only reserves a potential labor pool but also, by putting pressure on the subsistence conditions of the small-landlord population, accelerates the rural exodus. In another passage, Paul Singer refers to the “forced 'urbanization' of agricultural workers” to describe this process.³⁵ In the 1960s, there was simultaneously an increase in the population working on smallholdings and a reduction in the rural population, from 55% to 44,1%.³⁶

Emphasizing the specificity of the Brazilian case, Paul Singer noted that this vast industrial reserve army made “a phase of primitive accumulation” dispensable, in the sense that access to land had long been limited in Brazil. In other words, the decisive period for proletarianization was not marked predominantly by land expropriation, as in the classic English case, but by the accentuation of the structural imbalance between the limited means of production available to producers and subsistence requirements.³⁷

The mini-land ownership consisted of the premise of proletarianization because it was inseparable from the formation of an enormous relative surplus population, borrowing Marx's expression. In mapping the Brazilian class structure (both urban and rural), Paul Singer chose to divide the working classes into two groups, the proletariat and the subproletariat.³⁸ The second group, which the author explicitly linked to the concept of reserve army, is made up of those “who actually or potentially offer their labor force on the market without finding anyone willing to acquire it at a price that ensures its reproduction under normal conditions.”³⁹

Based on the historical interpretation of the transformations in social relations of production, Paul Singer offered an original explanation for the phenomenon that had been challenging observers of peripheral development: accelerated urbanization without the counterpart of urban job creation, with the resulting “mass marginalization.”⁴⁰ of the subproletarians: “[t]he origin of this subproletariat is linked to the dissolution, by capitalism, of parts of the subsistence economy, without the accumulation of capital generating a demand for labor power sufficient to absorb – under normal conditions – the labor thus freed up”.⁴¹

Attentive reader of The capital, Paul Singer knew that the classical process of proletarianization in Europe was also unable to absorb the population expelled from the countryside.⁴² Would it then be the case to say that Brazil was repeating, more than a century later, the steps taken by other countries? Wouldn't there then be something specific to peripheral capitalism?

Paul Singer addressed these issues explicitly, highlighting two differences between Brazilian development and the classic European case:

(i) having started much later, our development process is contemporary with mature capitalist economies, which intervene heavily in it, giving it its own characteristics; (ii) given the country's large territorial extension, the surplus population created by capitalist expansion, instead of being exported (as occurred in 19th century Europe), tends to reproduce, within the country, the pre-capitalist forms that are being annihilated in the most dynamic centers of the economy.⁴³

The first point undoubtedly deserves analysis that does not fit into these lines, but here I want to highlight that the second difference pointed out is one of the decisive critical findings of Domination and inequality. By interpreting the origin of the Brazilian subproletariat and quantifying it, Paul Singer offered one of the main clues to understanding the specificities of class conflicts in Brazil.

And here I return to my starting point: what lessons Domination and inequality offered to the controversy over inequality?

By shedding light on the interconnection between the development of smallholdings and the formation of a huge sub-proletariat, especially during the 1960s, Paul Singer explained how the mechanisms that reproduced income concentration and led to an increase in inequality could be identified in the Brazilian class structure and in the dynamics of the transformation of social relations of production. In other words, the exclusionary growth of the economic miracle, marked by extraordinarily high GDP growth rates and wage stagnation, would not have been possible without the prior formation of a huge relative overpopulation. The violent arm of the military government's repressive policies was thus combined with the equally violent process of smallholdings and forced urbanization of rural populations, engendered by expanding capital.

By incorporating later data, Paul Singer also showed that it was possible to identify from that moment onwards cycles of absorption and reconstitution of the industrial reserve army in Brazil, albeit with specific characteristics and their own temporality. He used Marx's chapter on the “general law of capitalist accumulation” to elucidate, to a certain extent, Brazilian distributive cycles.

Specifically, the accelerated expansion that occurred during the economic miracle, despite wage repression policies, led to a notable reduction in the subproletariat with a corresponding growth in the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie.⁴⁴ Certain development theories, entangled in their linear schemes, could identify in such a transition a step towards overcoming underdevelopment.

But Paul Singer did not lose sight of the cyclical nature of capitalist dynamics. As he notes, in The formation of the working class, “[b]etween 1980 and 1983, production fell in the countryside and in the cities, unemployment grew and significant portions of both the petite bourgeoisie and the proletariat were thrown into the subproletariat”.⁴⁵ Thrown back into the ranks of the subproletariat, I dare add.

Resume the thread

There is much more to the following pages than this brief overview might suggest. But an examination of the arguments mentioned above allows us to point to some valuable legacies of Paul Singer’s investigations into the Brazilian class structure. The debate on income distribution in Brazil, which provided the initial impetus for the works of Paul Singer collected in this edition, was revived in Brazil in the mid-2000s. Recent efforts have sought to understand the ongoing decline in wage inequality. However, the theoretical ambition of the 1970s controversy has largely been set aside and replaced by sophisticated statistical methods. What has been gained in precision, however, has been lost in interpretive capacity.

Most recent efforts to study the trajectory of inequality have been content to describe the movement, without daring to interpret it. Ricardo Paes de Barros, who in addition to being a protagonist in the Brazilian economic debate on inequality held high-ranking positions in the federal government during the Lula period, “declared that he had found the method he was looking for to rigorously analyze Brazilian inequality when he came across, in the second half of the 1980s, the book that Carlos Langoni had published in 1973.”⁴⁶

The revival of the perspective adopted by Carlos Langoni is, in reality, a more general phenomenon, that is, not restricted to the Brazilian debate. According to Pedro Ferreira de Souza, in the decades that followed the controversy of the 1970s, “Carlos Langoni’s approach became dominant” in Brazil and other countries.⁴⁷ However, we need to recover the power and perspicacity of its critics to understand why the recent reduction in wage inequality accentuated political conflicts and structural dynamics that ended up leading to its reversal.

Revisiting only one side of the 1970s controversy has left the recent debate deficient and incomplete, as it has failed to explicitly address the limits to the decline in wage inequality. As we have learned from Paul Singer and his contemporaries, such limits are not set by the trajectory of inequality itself, but by its connection with the structural dynamics of the economy and changes in the class structure, issues that urgently need to regain centrality.

The few studies that have focused on the relationship between the structural dynamics of the economy and income distribution have led to an inconvenient observation: the reduction in inequalities has been fueled by the regression of the productive structure, increasing the external vulnerability of the Brazilian economy and creating barriers to its continuation.⁴⁸

The perspective suggested by Paul Singer in Domination and inequality is more fruitful in elucidating the recent trajectory of income distribution in Brazil.⁴⁹ This is because the economic, political and social crises that have combined in such a devastating way in Brazil since 2014 have their origins in the worsening of class conflicts. Let us remember that they were triggered before external vulnerability slowed down the Brazilian economy and, therefore, cannot be attributed to balance of payments constraints. But what is the link between the reduction of inequalities and the worsening of class conflicts? The answer lies in resuming the study of the Brazilian subproletariat, inaugurated by Paul Singer.

Recent efforts to map the Brazilian class structure, when interpreted in light of Paul Singer's concepts, suggest that the period of Lulaism was characterized by a new process of expansion of the proletariat with a corresponding reduction of the subproletariat.⁵⁰ Or, to use Marx's terms, the absorption of the industrial reserve army. Despite the conciliatory inclination of the Lula governments, which precisely implemented a program focused on the sub-proletariat, avoiding confrontation with capital, the antagonistic classes reorganized themselves to dispute the contours of exploitation.⁵¹

The underlying reason is that Lula's policies, combined with external prosperity in the form of tree of commodities, substantially reduced relative overpopulation, putting pressure – without the government’s knowledge – on the structural conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital.

These underlying tensions came to the surface in the 2010s with a wave of strikes not seen since the emergence of new trade unionism in the late 1970s. It is no coincidence that the previous wave also occurred after a cycle of reduction in relative overpopulation. In the recent period, there has also been a significant cyclical flattening of profits, associated with union unrest.⁵² These two elements, combined, contribute to explaining the intensification of the class struggle visible in the period, which led to a violent political and economic regression.

It will not be easy for Brazilian society to recover from the setback that has occurred. But it would be even more difficult if it did not have the tools to understand what happened. An important part of these tools, both theoretical and empirical, were forged by Paul Singer in the debates of the 1970s, in the texts that can be read in the pages of his two books that have just been republished together, Domination and inequality e Income distribution.⁵³ It is up to the current generation to appropriate them and carry forward the legacy of their author.

*Fernando Rugitsky is professor of economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and co-director of Bristol Research in Economics.

Reference

Paul Singer. Domination and inequality. Studies on income inequality. Organization: André Singer, Helena Singer and Suzana Singer. São Paulo, Unesp/Perseu Abramo Foundation, 2024, 304 pages. [https://amzn.to/489M9Pg]

Notes

See, among others, AO Hirschman, “The rise and decline of development economics”, in: AO Hirschman, Essays on Trespassing: economics to politics and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 1–24, H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: the history of an idea, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, esp. chap. 3, pp. 49–87, and P. Krugman, “Toward a counter-counterrevolution in development theory,” in: Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1992, 1993, pp. 15–38.
Hirschman, cit., P. 23.
See O. Rodriguez, Latin American Structuralism, Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2009, and M. Fajardo, The World that Latin America Created, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2022.
MC Tavares and J. Serra, “Beyond Stagnation: a discussion on Brazil’s recent development style”, in: R. Bielschowsky (org.), Fifty Years of Thinking at ECLAC, Trans. Vera Ribeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1970/2000, p. 593.
C. Furtado, “Underdevelopment and dependence: the fundamental connections”, Review of Political Economy, 33 (1), p. 15.
Hirschman, cit., p. 20. Examining specifically the Brazilian case, Marcos Nobre refers to a “'reflective moment' of the 'training' paradigm” and emphasizes the role of the seminar on The capital and the work of Chico de Oliveira, both mentioned below. See M. Nobre, “From 'formation' to 'networks': philosophy and culture after modernization”, German Philosophy Notebooks, 19, 2012, pp. 13–36.
Hirschman, cit., P. 23.
R. Hoffmann and JC Duarte, “Income distribution in Brazil”, Business Administration Magazine, 12 (2), 1972, pp. 46–66.
A. Andrada and M. Boianovsky, “The political economy of the income distribution controversy in 1970s Brazil: debating models and data under military rule”, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 38B, 2020, p. 81.
Andrada and Boianovsky, cit.
A. Fishlow, “Brazilian size distribution of income”, American Economic Review, 62 (1/2), 1972, p. 400.
CG Langoni, Income Distribution and Economic Development in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Expression and Culture, 1973, p. 116.
Langoni used Simon Kuznets' argument that development would initially lead to an increase in inequality and eventually to its reduction. For a recent critique of Kuznets' formulation, see T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014, chap. 1.
Langoni, cit., pp. 206 and 213.
This edition, pp. 190–6.
Idem, P. 192.
According to Piketty, “the notion of ‘individual marginal productivity’ [is] difficult to define. In reality, it becomes almost a purely ideological artifact on the basis of which a justification for high status can be elaborated.” Piketty, cit., p331.
this edition, P. 191.
Idem, P. 21.
See, on this seminar, R. Schwarz, “A Marx Seminar”, in: R. Schwarz, Brazilian Sequences: essays, São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1999, pp. 86–105, and Paul Singer’s own account in P. Montero and F. Moura (orgs.), Group Portrait: 40 years of Cebrap, New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 78–80.
On Lewis’s formulation, its reception by Furtado and his Marxist critics, see F. Rugitsky, “Inhibited class struggle? Furtado and the specificity of the Brazilian social structure”, in: AM Saes and AF Barbosa (orgs.), Celso Furtado and the 60 Years of Economic Formation of Brazil, São Paulo: Sesc, 2021, pp. 327–355. Among Lewis’s Marxist critics, the Argentine José Nun and the Italian Giovanni Arrighi stood out, as well as Chico de Oliveira, mentioned below.
Paul Singer followed Chico's work closely, since they both worked at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) at the time. In an interview given decades later, Paul Singer mentions that Criticism of Dualist Reason was a response to the debate, held at Cebrap, on the seminal article by Tavares and Serra cited above. See Montero and Moura, cit., pp. 84–85.
Ellen Meiksins Wood refers to the “agrarian origins of capitalism” in E.M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view, London: Verso, 2002.
See, in particular, this edition, pp. 39–58 and 168–182.
In 1960, agricultural activities accounted for 54 percent of the EAP and, in 1970, 51 percent. The urbanization of employment accelerated from then on, with this percentage falling to 36 percent in 1976. this edition, Table 30, p. 120.
Idem, P. 163.
Ibidem, Table 14, p. 65.
Ibid.
Ibidem, pp. 44–58 and 174–182.
Ibidem, Table 1, p. 175.
Ibidem, P. 170.
Ibidem, P. 176.
Ibidem, P. 123.
Ibidem, P. 158.
Ibidem, P. 177.
This formulation is due to Arrighi, who sought to specify the Marxist concept of primitive accumulation. See G. Arrighi, “Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia”, Journal of Development Studies, 6 (3), 1970, pp. 197–234. ↺
this edition, pp. 32–35. ↺
Idem, P. 33. ↺
Ibidem, P. 189. ↺
Ibidem, p. 199. See also similar passages on pp. 158 and 189.
In formulating the concept of the industrial reserve army, Marx states the following: “As soon as capitalist production takes over agriculture, or as it has taken over it, the demand for rural workers diminishes, with the accumulation of the capital operating there, absolutely, without its repulsion, as in non-agricultural industry, being supplemented by a greater attraction. Part of the rural population is therefore continually on the verge of transfer to the urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the lookout for circumstances favourable to this transfer. (…) The rural worker is therefore reduced to the minimum wage and is always with one foot in the swamp of pauperism.” See K. Marx, Capital: critique of political economy, Book I, Volume 2, 19th ed., Trans. Reginaldo Sant'Anna, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1867/2003, p. 272.
this edition, P. 162.
Idem, P. 120.
P. Paul Singer, The Formation of the Working Class, 23rd ed., New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 72.
R. Cariello, “The Liberal Against Poverty”, Magazine Piauí, 74, 2012.
Fr. HGF de Souza, A History of Inequality: Income Concentration among the Rich in Brazil (1926–2013), New York: Routledge, 2018, p. 119.
See F. Rugitsky, “Sectoral inequality and heterogeneity: challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean”, in: Cepal, The Future of Equality in Latin America and the Caribbean: brief essays, Santiago: Cepal, 2018, pp. 53–61.
F. Rugitsky, Class Struggle cit.
See JA Figueiredo Santos, “Social class and income shifts in Brazil”, Data, Vol. 58 (1), 2015, pp. 79–110, and P. Mendes Loureiro, “Class inequality and capital accumulation in Brazil, 1992–2013”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 44 (1), 2020, pp. 181–206.
It was political scientist André Paul Singer, son of Paul Paul Singer, who first noted the critical potential of recovering the concept of subproletariat to analyze the Lula period. See A. Paul Singer, The Meanings of Lulism: gradual reform and conservative pact, New York: Routledge, 2012.
GK Martins and F. Rugitsky, “The long expansion and the profit squeeze: output and profit cycles in Brazil (1996–2016)”, Review of Radical Political Economics, 53 (3), 2021, pp. 373–397.
P. Paul Singer, Domination and inequality: studies on income distribution, New York: Routledge, 2024.