By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*
Considerations on the book by Caio Prado Júnior
1.
A return to the classics always makes us feel more restless about our present and the uncertainties of the future. Reading Caio Prado Júnior's work entitled History and development reflects very strongly the concern we refer to, and considerable parts of that text make us rethink the limits of the capacity to establish a sovereign history of Brazilian society.
When reviewing the aforementioned work, considering that several analyses have already been made of it and its author, such as other important names in the historiographical construction and Brazilian political economy, which has already been subjected to considerable exegesis, our objective will be to return to the text and make its interaction with the current framework of Brazilian political economy, trying to observe how Brazilian historical atavism is reflected in our current and uncertain pattern of development.
Caio Prado's text refers to his proposal for a thesis on a professorship for USP. Unfortunately, the competition was not held due to the dictatorship that was entering its most authoritarian phase in 1968, with the enactment of AI-5 that year. The construction of the text allows us to foresee four theses that would later be developed by different authors, but which are clearly stated and constitute support points for the interpretation of our present, even though their possible reinterpretations can and should be added to with new tonicities, something that the author's Marxist analysis and the materialist dialectic used in the text make possible.
2.
The first point or thesis that we consider relevant corresponds to the historiographical character of any theory of development expressed in Prado's work. Orthodox economic theory establishes a model standard for capitalist economic development. The key proposition of the text we are analyzing refers to the opposite thesis, that capitalism develops in different types of capitalism, and that historical contradictions and secular formation establish the structural basis of development. Therefore, it is not possible to speak of a logic of convergence, or in Prado's terms, a “Rostowian” logic.
Caio Prado (p. 35) observes that economic theory fails to grasp “history in its real and true specificity (…) [constituting mere] elements to be fitted into the proposed models”. The author’s criticism must be treated under two important conditions: firstly, the perspective of economists, in their different schools (neoclassical, Keynesian and Schumpterian) that capitalist development constitutes a progressive phenomenon and tends towards a movement of economic and social convergence, something that the “staged” logic of the American neoclassical author Rostow was so pertinent to, and another important Brazilian author, from a different but also critical school of thought, Celso Furtado, called the “myth of economic development”, in a work of the same name.
Caio Prado Júnior's analysis remains current and orthodox theories have added little to the previous propositions criticized by the author, due to the liberal ideological perception that considers convergence theses according to which the path to development was universal, following successive phases. As Martins (2011, p. 224) observes, "the claim formulated by the modernization theory of a single development path for the various national societies proves to be absurd". However, Rostow's "stage-based" approach has had a profound influence on Brazilian economic thought and, mainly, on the "developmentalist" actions of the military governments of the 1970s and on the permanence of the neoliberal logic after the 1990s.
Brazil's colonial formation, based on slavery, metropolitan exclusivity and agrarian concentration, established an atavism that continues to influence the current conditions of dependence on Brazilian peripheral capitalism. These aspects are the center of Brazil's historical formation, and it is “in history, in the concrete facts of the formation and evolution of our nationality, that we find the basic and essential material for understanding the current Brazilian reality” (p. 32).
There is no way to build explanatory models for different realities, and therefore it is not plausible to establish standards applicable to different realities regarding capitalist development. As Caio Prado Júnior observes in the first chapter, conventional economists start from a “static vision, an abstract traditional society, similar everywhere” that, at a certain point in economic progress, would converge “to trigger a self-driven process of capitalist accumulation and progressive inversion that condition development” (p. 41).
Caio Prado, in establishing the necessary intentionality of history, does what another modern Marxist will do when comparing the treatment of economic analysis using the metaphor of a “ship” without a compass and out of control, or in Eric Hobsbawm’s own terms (2002, p. 118): “divorced from history, the economy is an out of control ship and economists without history have little idea of where the ship is sailing”.
3.
The second innovative thesis, which is distributed throughout the text but initially stated in the second chapter, with a profound influence on the different theories of dependency that were established in the late 1960s and in subsequent decades, refers to the dialectical character and reflection of the “contradictions generated by the international system of capitalism in which Brazil and other peoples and countries of its category fit as simple peripheral elements” (p. 28) of the capitalist dynamics of the aforementioned international system.
It is worth remembering that the “dependency theory” emerged as a relevant part of the criticism that the new Brazilian left would develop of the “stage-based” theses of the old PCB. Here we are faced with a type of stage-based theory linked to the logic that Brazilian society still had “feudal” elements and that the social changes to be made still constituted a stage of the bourgeois revolution in the country, with the central alliances for the transformation process being formed between rural and urban workers and sectors of the national bourgeoisie that were willing to oppose the sectors of the agrarian aristocracy (landowners) and the imperialist bourgeoisie.
From Caio Prado Júnior's perspective (p. 108-109), what is observed is not the persistence of feudal forms but rather a deep association of capitalism that is established here, and its bourgeoisie centered on the logic of exporting primary products with international capitalism, thus “the connection of international capitalism with our old colonial system based on the export of primary products (…) continues to keep it [the Brazilian economy] framed in a system in which it appears as a peripheral and dependent sector and element”.
Two additional notes on the thesis presented: firstly, the conditions of autonomy of the Brazilian economy and state are no more independent than in the period discussed by the author, even though the degree of complexity has increased and, in some aspects of its political organization, it has taken decisions to distance itself from US imperialism, very specifically in the case of its participation in the BRICs. However, as recent years have shown, including Lula's current government cycle, its relative autonomy is graduated by power relations and accommodation to US interests, which were looser in the years 2000/2010 and more incited in the last two decades.
A second important aspect, dealt with in detail by the author, corresponds to the dialectical interaction between the external (imperialism) and the internal (dependence), and is not a mere interaction between factors of the balance of payments and the accommodation of the internal and external markets.
Over the seven decades of the 1950th century, Brazilian capitalism expanded, becoming at a certain point (1970/108) the most dynamic peripheral economy. It was observed that “Brazilian industrialization would advance clumsily and in discontinuous and disorderly impulses”, and that the growing presence and control of international capital would be predominant, even constituting the “dynamic nucleus of Brazilian industry”. It would be this complete symbiosis and control of international capital over Brazilian industry that determined the dependent logic of the Brazilian economy. Thus, the “participation of international capitalism in the Brazilian economy constitutes (…) a growing obstacle to the transformation of the same economy and its liberation from its colonial past” (p. XNUMX).
4.
These elements lead us to a third fundamental thesis, regarding the way in which Brazilian industry will be established, beyond the presence of international capital, whose central characteristic will be low coordination and cyclical conditions whose consequence will be “a disorderly industry implemented, with no other criteria than the exceptional and so artificial facilities offered and the immediate stimulus of easy and quick profit” (p. 100). Here we have two problems posed that will also be addressed by authors such as Chico de Oliveira, Conceição Tavares and Theotônio dos Santos.
The absence of a planning system that went beyond the use of basic Keynesian tools, such as the use of exchange rates and subsidy incentives, via financing with subsidized interest rates, marked the Brazilian developmentalist logic, even though the dictatorship's PNDs (National Development Plans) had some attempt to organize the economy sectorally, but as recent studies such as that of Rodrigues (2023) demonstrate, which we present in article Site the earth is round, fundamentally the strategic intervention of the State conditioned the accumulation sectors through subsidies and organization of the necessary infrastructure, but favored a liberal logic that did not organize the reproductive matrix of the economy. The restricted sovereignty that marks the Brazilian peripheral condition explains the differentiated modes of the relationship between international capital and the Brazilian development system, vis-à-vis other societies, such as the Chinese or Korean ones, for example.
Caio Prado Júnior (p. 99-100) observes that although we have had rapid industrial growth, its foundations were precarious, and its dynamism was quickly exhausted by the obstacles of “import substitution” and the cyclical conditions of international capitalism. We observe that the generation capacity of Department I of the Brazilian economy has never gone beyond a certain replication of industries from the second industrial revolution, and the complementarity between productive departments and especially the segments of production of “machines that produce machines” have not developed in the national industrial matrix, reinforcing the author's thesis of “a disorderly industry”. One of the consequences of this disorderly pattern will be the premature deindustrialization of the country in recent decades.
5.
A fourth important thesis refers to the composition of the Brazilian working classes and, very specifically, the constitution of what another Marxist author, Ruy Mauro Marini, will call “superexploitation of labor”. Caio Prado Júnior (p. 105) observes that “industrialization has not managed to generate an economic activity capable of absorbing and incorporating at an adequate level the demographic growth observed in the country, in particular the surpluses expelled and displaced from the agrarian sector”.
The formation of a relative overpopulation whose characteristic elements refer to its high components of “stagnant population” and “impoverished”. The first constitutes a portion of the relative population that is not allocated to functions within the capitalist market, but with irregular occupations and some of them are not subject to the process of capital valorization, that is, they are not salaried workers.
This population contingent is central to the process of capital valorization because it provides an inexhaustible deposit of available labor force. The second segment constitutes the lowest sediment of the reactive overpopulation, being expressed in a significant portion of individuals who are not “serviceable” to capitalist exploitation, aspects theoretically noted by Marx (1867).
6.
The establishment of a peripheral capitalist economy with these characteristics of super-exploitation and restricted market conformation and a labor market of low organicity, produces a society not only with sociological limits established by grotesque income inequalities, but also with economic limits that do not overcome “other horizons” and that evolve “through successive cycles strictly subordinated to the external market situation for one or another primary genre”, economic cycles “that repeat themselves in time and space throughout our economic evolution” (p. 69), markedly “evolving intermittently and through a discontinuous succession of sudden starts, stops and even, occasionally, momentary setbacks”, something quite visible in the current Brazilian economic cycle.
the reading of History and development does not revive how much the builders of Brazilian critical thought have already warned us about the need to build social instruments that break with Brazilian “colonial atavism”, or what Florestan Fernandes identified as the author’s contribution in identifying the “colonial nexus” that imprisons the present of our society in the eternal repetition of a “vicious circle” of peripheral dependence on US imperialism or any other that may be asserted.
*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints (Paka-Tatu).
Reference

Gaius Prado Junior. History and Development: the contribution of historiography to the theory and practice of Brazilian development. New York: New York University Press, 2021, 144 pages.https://amzn.to/3CcSMFd]
REFERENCES
Carlos Eduardo Martins. Globalization, dependence and neoliberalism in Latin America. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
Celso Furtado. The myth of economic development. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, 1983.
Florestan Fernandes. The enigmas of the vicious circle. Foreword by History and Development. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2021.
Jose Raimundo Trinidad. Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints. Bethlehem: Paka-Tatu, 2020.
Karl Marx. Capital: critique of political economy. Book I [1867]. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.
RODRIGUES, Carlos Henrique Lopes. Imperialism and State Enterprise in Brazilian Dependent Capitalism (1956-1998). Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2023.
Ruy Mauro Marini. Dialectics of Dependence (1973). SADER, Emir (orgs). Dialectic of Dependency an anthology of the work of Rui Mauro Marini. Rio de Janeiro: Voices, 2000.
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