Towards a 21st Century Reading of Dependency and Class Relations: Is There a Transnational Internal Bourgeoisie in Chile?
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
8th Annual Conference in Political Economy ? ?The Political Economy of Inequalities and Instabilities in the 21st Century
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The Poulantzian concept of the internal or interior bourgeoisie is still a point of reference in current debates on dependency and class relations in the (semi-) periphery. With this term Poulantzas pointed to the relations and interdependence between the European bourgeoisies vis-à-vis U.S. capital in the 1970s (Poulantzas 1975). The ?internal bourgeoisie? has, in opposite to the ?comprador? or ?Lumpen? bourgeoisie in Latin America, its own productive basis. It collaborates with foreign investors but does not depend on them.
In analyzing the recent social democratic era in Brazil, for example, some argue that the PT administrations represented an internal bourgeoisie power bloc in alliance with middle classes and with the popular masses (see Boito Jr. and Berringer 2014). In the case of South Africa, authors stress the role of internal class forces and the expansive needs of ?South African capital? (see, for example, Samson 2009). Others introduced the term into the debate on transnational class formation. As an effect of globalization, Hirsch and Wissel (2011) argue that the internal bourgeoisie ?interiorizes? transnational capital and, with it, transnational power relations. The rise of this class fraction leads to a change in the composition of the national power blocs, too.
The paper examines how different strands within the dependency school characterized the Latin American bourgeoisie (Celso Furtado, Osvaldo Sunkel, A.G. Frank, Ruy Mauro Marini, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto) and shows that some of them already anticipated Poulantzas` concept of an ?internationalized internal Bourgeoisie?. A case study on Chile analyses class formation processes and the internal composition of the Chilean bourgeoisie since the 1980s. On this basis, the paper asks if the term ?internal bourgeoisie? adequately captures the class configuration of contemporary Chile and critically discusses the analytical value of the concept in class analysis.