H-Net Discussion Logs - Nineteenth-century Chilean industrializationView the Prior Message in h-radhist's November 1999 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-radhist's November 1999 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-radhist home page. From: andy daitsman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> List Editor: Van Gosse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Editor's Subject: Nineteenth-century Chilean industrialization Author's Subject: Nineteenth-century Chilean industrialization Date Written: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 12:28:56 -0300 Date Posted: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 11:16:54 +0000 [Another message unfortunately not sent until no--Ed.] Chris Brady is an expert at caricaturing complex arguments into farcical simplifications. So instead of repeating ad infinitum my points about the socialist and capitalist revolutions in Chile and their effects on popular consciousness, which Brady in any event seems incapable of understanding, Let me go back to the question of early industrialization here. Now, at this stage in the "debate" (it's actually starting to look more like a catfight), Brady will not accept anything I write, so bear with me for a long quote. The source is Maurice Zeitlin, _The Civil Wars in Chile (or the bourgeois revolutions that never were)_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). "THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT "In our own day, Chile is an 'underdeveloped' country, but from the middle through the end of the last century it was a nation on the move economically and developing rapidly. Chile strode the Pacific Coast of South America as a hegemonic power. Its fertile valleys and grain mills fed foreign flour and cereal markets, and its economy thrived on international demand for silver and copper; its largest mines and smelters, using the most advanced technology of the time and owned and developed by Chilean capitalists, veritably dominated the world copper market for much of this period. Chileans spanned their country's huge rivers with metal bridges and crossed its length and breadth with well-paved roads and some of the world's earliest railways. They lit its major cities with gas lighting, brought them potable water, and linked them by telegraph with the world. They established not only light manufacturing but also a sizable heavy industry, which produced machinery and equipment to exploit its nitrate fields and to mine and smelt its metallic ores, and they built locomotives for the nation's railways. Chile's capitalists exploited Chilean as well as foreign labor and invested directly and indirectly in raw materials production, finance, and trade in neighboring countries--two of whose nitrate territories it then successfully annexed in its own late nineteenth-century 'imperialist war.' Its leading banks established branches in world capitals from London to Delhi, and its commanding capitalists manipulated world market prices for copper and other raw materials from their own seats on the London exchange and Paris Bourse. They formed partnerships with, and often supplied the capital for, English bankers, traders, and manufacturers, as well as sharing with them and other foreign capitalists in the production and sale of the world's nitrates. Chile seemed indeed, as its statesmen proclaimed, to possess its own 'manifest destiny' as an independent capitalist power in the Americas. "Yet its leading thinkers were soon lamenting Chile's 'economic inferiority' (Encina's famous--and alarming--work of that title appeared originally in 1911). By the early decades of the present century it had already come to bear much of the characteristic physiognomy of 'underdevelopment,' becoming in subsequent years a country remarkable only for the sharp contrast between the vibrance of its political democracy (until the autumn [sic] of 1973) and the stagnation of its economy" (pp. 13-14). Now my argument, of course, has always been that prior to 1970 Chile was a dependent (read "underdeveloped") capitalist state, and that the post-1973 revolution transformed it into an advanced capitalist society. That argument, I submit, is perfectly consistent with nineteenth-century industrialization. Brady also claims that my argument is vitiated because I separate the capitalist state from the bourgeoisie. Let me quote again from Zeitlin, at length: "THE ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY "The historical situation in which Chile's parliamentary republic was originally forged and the vitality of its existence for over a century until its recent violent destruction reveal once again that bourgeois democracy is the fragile flower of a specific historical constellation of class relations and political struggles. The peculiarity of Chile's own 'bourgeois democracy' was that it governed a society in which quasi-manorial landed estates, extracting the surplus product of the agrarian tenantry, continued to be dominant in the countryside and preponderant in agriculture, despite the overriding sway of capital and the dominance of the capital-wage labor relationship in the economy as a whole.* From the revolutionary wars of the 1850s until the Left's penetration and organization of some elements of agrarian labor a century later, the supremacy of the large-estate owners in the countryside went unchallenged, especially in the Central Valley, where most of the rural population and the bulk of agricultural production were centered. "Chile experienced neither prolonged agrarian struggles in which the rural population gradually freed itself of the dominion of the large estate nor a sudden revolutionary convulsion that broke the base and destroyed the political power of the great landlords, thereby sealing politically the emergent capitalist relations and laying the basis for the democratic republic. Unlike the capitalist development of Western Europe and England, the political hegemony of the lords of the soil was not broken or transformed in Chile nor was much of the rural population ever turned into independent farmers. If these social transformations constituted the revolutionary preconditions for the emergence and durability of capitalist democracy in the West, it was nonetheless consolidated in Chile without such transformations. "A century after the radical bourgeoisie's call in the 1850s for a 'revolution in landed property,' Chile still had one of the highest concentrations of landownership in the world. Within the large estates reigned a paternalistic system of social control, enhanced by the ever-present threat of expulsion into a landless rural population and enforced in the countryside as a whole by an apparatus of coercion, legal and extralegal, at the behest of the large-estate owners. In practice, until the middle of the twentieth century, alternative sources of information were prohibited and independent associations forbidden in rural areas. Thus the landowners controlled both the vote and the labor power of the agrarian tenants (inquilinos) and dependent peasants (minfundistas), and this was the sine qua non of their continuing political hegemony. Such class relations surely provided an unfavorable soil for political democracy. Yet despite the unshaken dominion of the large estate, Chile was governed for over a century by one of the world's few stable parliamentary representative governments. How was this possible? An adequate answer requires a concrete historical analysis of the origins, course, and consequences of Chile's nineteenth-century civil wars--as does an understanding of the real historical reasons for the so-called 'development of underdevelopment,' in Andre Gunder Frank's apt phrase, in Chile" (pp. 12-13). *Labor-capital relations in industry in the nineteenth century were fully proletarian. In previous posts I've argued that the intervention of a powerful working class movement in the twentieth century led to the adoption of a series of pro-worker measures, especially during the Popular Front governments of the 1940s, which significantly mediated the proletarian character of the wage labor relationship in the twentieth century. Cheers, Andy Daitsman Profesor de Historia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Instituto de Estudios Humanísticos fono: (56)(71) 20 1518 Juan Ignacio Molina Universidad de Talca Talca Chile -- Contact Us Copyright © 1995-2001, H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine Click Here for an Internet Citation Guide.
