Book Description

In this first English-language edition of a book that has seen thirteen printings in Brazil, Dr. Bresser Pereira analyzes Brazil's economy and politics from 1930, when the Brazilian industrial revolution began, up to July 1983. First addressing the period of strong development in Brazil between 1930 and 1961, he discusses at length the import-substitution model of industrialization; the emergence of new classes—industrialists, industrial workers, and especially the new technobureaucratic middle classes; the conflict between the traditional agrarian ideologies of coffee planters and the nationalistic and industrializing ideologies of the new classes; and the new realities of the 1950s that led to the crisis of the populist alliance between the industrial bourgeoisie and the workers. Next he explores the economic and political crisis of the sixties, centering on the Revolution of 1964, when an industrialized and fully capitalist— but still underdeveloped—Brazil experienced the cyclical movements of capitalism. The final chapters of the book examine the Brazilian "miracle" of 1967-1973, the economic slowdown of the 1970s that culminated in the severe recession of 1981, the dialectics between the process of abertura led by the military regime established in 1964 and the redemocratization process demanded by civil society, and the "total crisis of 1983."