Continuing
with these notes or comments on the CEPAL report on FDI-20024, we will leave
for later the subject of the export of imperialist capital as “an apparent
inflow of financing and in reality a great plunder” of our country (VP 1972, VP
1977). Because, it is necessary to clarify some issues that appear in the long
quote on the economic-productive profile
of the country today:
First, that
it expresses the continuation of the old economic path of development of
bureaucratic capitalism, in its third phase or general crisis, in the
semi-colonial and semi-feudal Peruvian society. The dynamics of the economic
process in our country, like that of other Latin American and Caribbean
countries, in the 80s and 90s of the last century until today, has been driven
by large imperialist companies (the so-called transnationals) and imperialist
investment, to a greater extent than in all the previous phases of our economy.
This is summarized in the “Profile...” when referring to the “primary export
character” “oriented to the world market” of the economy and its lack of
linkage with the whole economy: “enclave economy” that does not generate
employment, etc.
The
“primary export character” of the Peruvian economy is not new. This is not a
“new productive structure” as the author of “Perfil” believes, but only a
variation in who plays the main role in economic activity, whether state-owned
enterprise and investment or private enterprise and investment. This process
occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in our countries with the implementation of the
imperialist economic policy of so-called “neoliberalism,” by which the State
abandoned its role as the main lever of economic activity in terms of
investment and business activity, which passed from the State to individuals.
What the States had accumulated over decades was “privatized,” giving way to a
process of greater dispossession of public lands and property and of
communities, giving rise to “a process of migration without
industrialization that harmed the countryside, (…) the predominance of
informal employment over formal employment. In 2007, the informal employment
rate was 79.9%, while formal employment was only 20.1%; A decade later, the
variation is small: the informal employment rate is 72% and the formal
employment rate is 28%.”
What
conclusion can we draw from what we have just said?
That not
every process of dispossession of the great masses of men of their traditional
means of production and subsistence turns them into wage earners
(proletarians), but into a miserable and hungry mass, who have to resort to
self-employment and other forms of survival, with which bureaucratic capitalism
develops based on semi-feudalism and at the service of imperialism as it occurs
in Peru and Latin America and the Caribbean. Similar cases have occurred in
many cases in history. See, in this regard, Marx’s letter to the editor of
OTIÉCHESTVIENNIE ZAPISKI’ [End of 1877] in the appendix, but in this place we
quote the following from it:
“Thus, events that are remarkably analogous
but take place in different historical environments lead to totally different
results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then
comparing them, one can easily find the key to this phenomenon, but one will
never reach it through the universal master key of a general
historical-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being
suprahistorical.”
The
so-called deindustrialization is nothing other than, both in Peru and in other
countries of our continent, the transition from an “industry” increasingly
dependent on imperialism and foreign capital, based on the import of inputs,
patented equipment and other intangible foreign assets to the direct import of
manufactured goods without the almost always minimum percentage of “added
value” of the country. Where the income from the export of primary goods is
destined to the import of these manufactures. This determined the increase in
the external debt and the so-called “debt crisis.” That is, the export of
imperialist capital to our country and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
took one form with the so-called “industrialization” by import substitution and
another with the “neoliberal” economic “reforms” of the last two decades of the
last century until today. On the so-called “industrialization by import
substitution” you can consult E. Anaya Franco in his work “Imperialism,
industrialization and technology transfer in Peru”, cited in VP 1977, p. X and
in the work of J.A. Torres Z. Economic Structure of the Peruvian Industry, both
refer to the fact that this industrialization process was driven by imperialist
investments and the penetration and control of this process by imperialist
companies and the process of direct control of the buyer's own companies by
foreign investment, which as cited in the “Profile” constitutes the
foreignization of companies in Peru in the present century. Let us read the
quote again:
“Another element that characterizes the PESER
is that there is a strong foreign investment by transnational groups, which
are becoming the majority in several companies. The economic elites are the
extractive ones (mining, gas, electric energy and the logistic apparatus linked
to the export and industrial sector) and the banking sector. The most
important bank, the Banco de Crédito del Perú, has as its main shareholder
Crefast, a North American investment fund, with more than 50%; AFPs have
12% of the shares, and 24% is in the hands of a Panamanian offshore company.
For their part, the Romeros have a small percentage of shares. The economy
has become foreignized “through direct investments by Repsol, Yanacocha, etc.
Or through the purchase of shares in Peruvian companies such as Graña y
Montero, Ferreyros, Intercorp. The emerging groups have more control over their
property because they are very reluctant to sell shares on the stock market.
They know what will happen to them” (Durand, 2017). (…) they have been
generating monopolies and oligopolies in various sectors. This has made it
vulnerable to the ups and downs of international trade, giving rise to enclave
economies with little internal connection, and generating little
employment or low-productivity employment.”
Result: our
economy is more dependent on the needs of imperialism (world market),
consequently greater backwardness in the economy as a whole and greater
plundering and exploitation of the four classes that make up the people in the
democratic revolution has not led to capitalist economic development as the
revisionist and capitulationist LOD says, a historical and political
impossibility, because what develops on the semi-colonial and semi-feudal basis
is bureaucratic capitalism as the dominant path that imperialism imposes in our
countries.
And, we
repeat, what the author of the “Profile” says in academic terms: “This has
made it vulnerable to the ups and downs of international trade, giving rise to
enclave economies with little internal connection, and generating little
employment or low-productivity employment.” As has already been said, “it
doesn’t rain either up or down.”
This
determines an economy that they call “rentier,” that is, that the income
generated by the export of natural resources has not been destined to change
the productive orientation; on the contrary, they resort to the import of goods
such as machinery and equipment for these “extractive activities” in these
“enclave economies” and non-productive consumer goods. This “modern sector”
(directly from the imperialist companies or from their agents from the big
native bourgeoisie) therefore does not serve the development of the national
economy, because its exchange with the other sectors of the economy is minimal,
because its machinery and equipment, knowledge, comes from the imperialist
countries and only employs 1.5% of the EAP, which is 16 million. Most of its
super profits are exported and its new investments in machinery and equipment
are to import them. That is to say, it does not have a great “multiplier factor
in the economy” or, as it is also often said, it does not rain either up or
down.
The big
company of imperialism or of the big native bourgeoisie, at its service, which
is the one that dominates primary exports, plus the medium-sized or national
companies, constitute the so-called modern sector of the economy, the rest
belongs in its vast majority to the pre-capitalist economy (semi-feudalism).
The ECLAC reports themselves confirm this, as we read in the prologue of a
study by the director of the institution at that time, which says:
“(In relation
to sustained growth and the UN Agenda 2030) Micro, small and medium-sized
enterprises (MSMEs) cannot be left out of this process. Furthermore, their
weight in the productive fabric (99% of formal Latin American companies are
MSMEs) and in employment (61% of formal employment is generated by
companies of that size) makes them a central actor (...)”.
Hence,
99% of formal companies are micro, small and medium-sized, therefore, without
counting companies in the informal sector. Formal MSMEs provide employment
for 61% of formal employment, so 49% of formal employment is shared
between large companies and the State. In the case of Peru, formal
employment varies between 28 and 22%, if we take into account that
informal employment went from 78% to 72% of the EAP in the last two
decades. Most of the employment in formal micro and small businesses is
self-employment and the absolute majority of informal employment is
self-employment. Important data for the social relations of production in the
country (pre-capitalist = semi-feudal)
And to
characterize their function within the economy, he also says:
“In many aspects, Latin American MSMEs
still present, with limited exceptions, the weaknesses and fragilities that
have characterized them for decades: they continue to be on the margins
of the most dynamic markets and their contribution to exports remains extremely
limited; they participate marginally in more dynamic productive relations
with large companies, and they rarely integrate into associative models
with other companies to generate economies of scale and collective goods.
Likewise, they fail to accelerate their innovation process and production
processes continue to operate with obsolete or scarcely productive technology.
All of this results in poor performance of
MSMEs, whose most significant indicator is the persistence of a large gap in
labor productivity compared to large companies (…)” (MSMEs in Latin America: fragile
performance and new challenges…, ECLAC, Santiago 2020, with a foreword by
Alicia Bárcena).
This part
of the quote is important, because it expresses that most of the country's
companies are still backward and "backwardness is semi-feudalism"
(President Gonzalo. Likewise, it shows what had already been said in a previous
paragraph, that the large companies of imperialism or of the great native
bourgeoisie at its service, which have minimal productive or exchange relations
with the other sectors of the economy or as it is said in the underlined part,
that the (formal) SMEs, not to mention the informal ones, "participate
marginally in more dynamic productive relations with large companies." We
add that this "marginal participation... with large companies" must
be mostly from medium-sized ones.
ANNEX:
167. FROM
MARX TO THE DIRECTOR OF
OTIÉCHESTVIENNIE
ZAPISKI ’
[End of 1877]
(…)
To
conclude, since I do not like to leave anything to divination, I will get to
the point. In order to be authorized to judge the In my study of the present
economic development of Russia, I studied the Russian language and then for
many years studied official and other publications connected with this subject.
I came to this conclusion: if Russia continues along the path it has followed
since 1861, it will lose the greatest opportunity that history has ever offered
to a nation, and will suffer all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist
regime.
The
chapter on primitive accumulation is intended only to trace the path by which,
in Western Europe, the capitalist economic system emerged from the bowels of
the feudal economic regime. It therefore describes the historical movement which, by separating
the producers from their means of production, turns them into wage-earners
(into proletarians, in the modern sense of the word), while turning those who
own the means of production into capitalists. In this history, "all
revolutions which serve as a lever for the advance of the emerging capitalist
class are epoch-making; and above all those which, after depriving large masses
of men of their traditional means of production and subsistence, suddenly throw
them onto the labour market. But the basis of all this development is the
expropriation of the farmers.
“This has
only been radically fulfilled in England... but all the countries of Western
Europe are going along the same road,” etc. (Capital, French edition, 1879, p.
315.) At the end of the chapter the historical tendency of production is
summed up in this way: that it itself engenders its own negation with the
inexorability that presides over the transformations of nature; that it itself
has created the greatest impulse to the productive forces of social labour and
to the all-round development of each individual producer; that capitalist
property, being based, as it already is in fact, on a collective form of
production, cannot but be transformed into social property. I have not given
any proof at this point, for the simple reason that this statement is only a
brief summary of long developments given earlier in the chapters dealing with
capitalist production.
Now, what application can my critic make of
this historical sketch to Russia? Only this: if Russia is to
become a capitalist nation on the lines of the countries of Western Europe—and
indeed she has been trying to do so in recent years—she will not succeed
without first transforming a good part of her peasants into proletarians;
and consequently, once fully under the capitalist regime, she will experience
its merciless laws, as other profane peoples have experienced them. That is
all. But that is not all for my critic. He feels obliged to
transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe
into a historical-philosophical theory of the general course which fate imposes
on every people, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself,
in order that it may finally arrive at that form of economy which will ensure,
together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour,
the most complete development of man. But I beg my critic to excuse me.
(I am both too honoured and too ashamed of him.) Let us take an
example.
In various
passages of Capital I allude to the fate that befell the plebeians of
ancient Rome. They had originally been free peasants, each cultivating his
own plot. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same
movement which separated them from their means of production and subsistence
brought about the formation not only of large landed property, but also of
large financial capital. And so it was that one day they found
themselves with free men on the one hand, deprived of everything but their
labour power, and on the other, to exploit this labour, those who owned all the
wealth they had acquired. What happened? The Roman proletarians were
transformed not into wage labourers but into a rabble of unemployed people more
abject than the "poor whites" of the American South, and with this
there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent on
slavery. Thus, events
which are remarkably analogous but take place in different historical
environments lead to entirely different results. By studying each of these
forms of development separately and then comparing them, one can easily find
the key to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive at it by means of the
universal master key of a general historical-philosophical theory whose supreme
virtue consists in being suprahistorical.
On the
Russian rural community, Marx and Engels wrote in the preface to the Russian
edition of the Communist Manifesto (January 21, 1882):
“The
question now is whether the Russian rural community—which is a form of
primitive collective communal property, which has already been largely
destroyed—can immediately pass over to the higher, communist form of
land ownership; or whether, on the contrary, it must from the outset
undergo the same process of disintegration as that which has determined the
historical development of the West. The only possible answer to the
elements of a new economic order when faced with this question at once is the
following: if the Russian revolution becomes the signal for the unleashing
of the workers’ revolution in the West, in such a way that the two complement
each other, then the form of land ownership which exists today in Russia can
constitute the starting point of a historical development.”
•
Otiéchestviennie Zapiski (“National Annals”). This letter was written in
French. (Ed.)
•• N. K.
Mikhailovsky: prominent theoretician of the petty-bourgeois party of the
Populists.
(Ed.)
From
Correspondence, p. 288 ff.
We will
continue with this topic in the next installment.