ON THE AUTONOMY OF THE STATE

In the extensive and complex literature on the nature of the capitalist state one finds a prominent and long held debate on the question of the capitalist state’s ability to act and formulate interests of its own independently of and even against dominant groups (classes) and societal interests. This ability is referred to as "state autonomy". In this debate there are two clear oppositional approaches: on one side there are those theorists who, upholding a "society-centered" view, give ontological primacy to civil society and argue that the capitalist state is, and can only be, relatively autonomous. On the other side, there are “state-centered” theorists postulating that the capitalist state is organizationally autonomous and independent of society. The concept of state autonomy also has been used to explain the nature of the state in dependent and peripheral societies.

In this paper, I submit a general critique of the state-centered approach, and in particular I demonstrate that the Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974) was not and could not have been an autonomous state acting against the interests of the dominant ruling class fractions. Lastly, I hope the paper is a contribution to the growing scholarly work that suggests we must bring class and civil society back in, if we want to demonstrate ‘what states really are’. The paper is organized in five sections. In the first and second sections I present an abridged survey of the literature on the autonomy of the capitalist state.[1] Then, I discuss briefly the major theoretical arguments regarding both the nature of the state and the degree of state autonomy in dependent peripheral countries. In the fourth section, I present as empirical substantiation of the society-centered approach and of the notion of ‘relative state autonomy’, the economic-political factors that caused the rise (1933) and the fall (1974) of the former Portuguese Estado Novo. A critique of the state-centered approach and of its applicability to the Estado Novo are the topics of the concluding section.

1. THE SOCIETY-CENTERED APPROACH

Society-centered theorists consider the social formation the primary and starting object of inquiry in understanding the State. The proper explanatory direction, they argue, is from civil society to the nature of the state and vice-versa. Thus, the analysis of the forms of the capitalist state can only be made when the causal necessity of the emergence and existence of the state, and its organizational apparatus, derives from the nexus of individual relationships (liberal state theory, pluralism) or the nexus of class relationships (Marxian state theory).

1.1 Marx and Engels. In the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859/1935), Marx observes that “forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves...but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life...”, and that “the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy”. In the Origin of the Family (1884/1972) Engels observes “the state is therefore by no means a power forced on society from without...rather it is a product of society at a certain stage of development …this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it...it the state”. And in the Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels state that “only political superstition today imagines that social life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality the state is held together by civil life” [cited in McLellan 1977:541, emphasis added].

For Marx and Engels (and for neo-Marxists), the state is an extension of civil society, a mechanism that reproduces the normative social order so that particular, not general, interests are protected and enhanced. Hence to Marx and Engels (and to neo-Marxists) the “state and its bureaucratic organization constitute ‘parasitic’ entities” [Held 1989:39]. In a capitalist society, no matter what level of economic development and what form of state, the particular interests are those of owning capitalist class. The state assures the maintenance of the necessary “general conditions for the reproduction of the wage labor/capital relation which is the heart of bourgeois societies” [Munck 1984:206]. Echoing Marx’s dictum, Zeitlin observes “the political form of the bourgeois state, either democratic or authoritarian, is the relatively contingent historical product of specific social struggles between classes and class segments...in determinate circumstances” [1981:141].

While better known for considering the capitalist state an ‘instrument’ of the owning/ruling class, Marx and Engels also held a secondary view of the state which considered the plausibility of relative state autonomy. In his description of the form of the state of the Second French Empire, Marx observed: “in reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation” [cited in McLellan 1977:541]. Engels also observed that “by way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both...(S)uch was the Bonapartism of the First, and still more of the Second, French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat...” [1972:160-161]. Marx and Engels are cognizant that capitalist states may assume different and sharply contrasted forms, and that some states may be more autonomous than others, but, they argue, they remain class states.

1.2 The Instrumentalists. While agreeing that the capitalist serves the interests of the owning classes, neo-Marxists differ in their explanations of how the capitalist state accomplishes its tasks. Jessop has aptly observed that there is in Marxian theory “a variety of theoretical perspectives which co-exist in an uneasy and unstable relation” [1982:xii]. [2] Instrumentalists [see Mills, 1956; Miliband, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1977; Domhoff, 1983, Useem, 1984] argue that the state is an “instrument for the domination of society” [Miliband 1969:22] that functions on the basis of the conscious intentions and “instrumental exercise of power by people in strategic positions” who either manipulate state politics directly (direct instrumentality) or through the “exercise of pressure on the state” (indirect instrumentality) [Gold et al, 1975].

Instrumentalists assert, however, that the capitalist state, in order to serve the capitalist class, must necessarily be relatively autonomous. “Its relative independence makes it possible for the state to play its class role in an approximately flexible manner. If it really was the simple ‘instrument’ of the ‘ruling class’, it would be fatally inhibited in the performance of its role. Its agents absolutely need a measure of freedom in deciding how best to serve the existing social order.” [Miliband 1977:87].

1.3 The Structuralists. Neo-Marxist structuralists, [see Poulantzas 1969, 1973, 1976, 1978] derive a Marxist theory of the capitalist state from the logic of capitalism, using Althusser’s structuralist epistemology. Structuralists argue that the state can not be understood via the behaviorist/empiricist observations of instrumental exercise of power by the ruling class, because the class composition of those running the state apparatuses is of no importance to the nature of the state in capitalist societies. Instead, it is the structure of these societies that make the state serve the capitalist class that is causal significant. Social classes and the state are, according to Poulantzas, objective structures, and their relations must be taken as an objective system of regular connections. Since class relations create the state, the latter is a condensation of class-based relations. And, inasmuch as the state reflects objective power structures, the state cannot be independent; it can only be relatively autonomous, and as such is given the capacity to act independently of individual capitalists, while remaining unavoidably the state of the owning ruling class.

Miliband has stated quite accurately that “it is to (Nicos) Poulantzas [1936-1979] that belongs the credit for the most thorough exploration of the concept of the autonomy of the state; and it was he who coined the formulation which has remained the basis for the most subsequent discussion of the subject, namely the ‘relative’ autonomy of the state” [1983:58[.

2. THE STATE CENTERED APPROACH

State-Centered theorists consider the state as an institution, and its activities the primary and starting point of inquiry. To them, the proper explanatory direction is from the state and its bureaucratic organization to civil society, and not vice-versa. To state-centered theorists the state is at the same time embedded in the structural relations of capitalistic social formation, and an independent organization which has a monopoly on coercive power, and a life and form of its own.

2.1 Max Weber. States, Weber argued, “are compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people over them” [Skocpol 1985:7]. In conceiving the state as such, Weber (and the neo-Weberians) can postulate that the state may pursue goals and plans that do not reflect the demands of powerful groups or classes. Unlike Marx, Engels and Lenin, Weber did not consider forms of state organization as ’parasitic’ and the “direct product of the activities of classes”. The “modern state is not, Weber contended, an effect of capitalism; it preceded and helped promote capitalist development” [Held 1989:41].

2.2 Fred Block. The neo-Weberians, most of whom are identified incorrectly as neo-Marxists[3],

argue on one hand that states inherently are organizationally autonomous from dominant classes,

and the other that they necessarily function to guarantee capital accumulation and maintain class

domination.

Like Weber, Block [1977a, 1980, 1987] argues that the state is not reducible to class interests and power. “State power is sui generis, not reducible to class power” and “each social formation determines that particular way in which state power will be exercised within that society” [1980:229]. Block introduces the theoretical construct he names ‘state managers’ who, he contends, are individuals not involved in the relations of production and are, therefore, independent from the capitalist class, even if they were proper members of that class before they became state managers. ‘State managers’ are Block’s theoretical solution to the problem of ‘relative state autonomy’, which he finds to be “a slightly more sophisticated version of the instrumental view it attacks” [1977:7], because it still reduces, albeit structurally, state power to class power. Since the state managers are independent of and not controlled by the capitalist class, and are responsible for maintaining ‘business confidence’, the reduction of state power to class power implied in the qualification ‘relative’ is inappropriate and unnecessary. Block’s state is an autonomous state for itself.

2.3 Theda Skocpol. Skocpol’s theoretical work on the state and on state autonomy is a strong defense of the ‘structural’ organization of the state. Like Weber and Block, she also argues that the state can not be reduced to class relations and class struggle; that the state is an independent

organization just like any other private organization with its own internal structure and its own interests. Skocpol criticizes classical Marxist theories (and neo-Marxist structuralists) for assuming that “states are inherently shaped by classes or class struggles and to preserve and expand modes of production” [1985:4], and for making it “virtually impossible even to raise the possibility that fundamental conflicts of interest might arise between the existing dominant class or set of groups on one hand, and the state rulers on the other” [1979:27]. She has observed that “Poulantzas’ approach is ultimately very frustrating because he simply posits the ‘relative autonomy of the capitalist state’ as a necessary feature of the capitalist mode of production as such” [1985:33]. The state, she points out, is not seen “as an organization for itself” [1979:27].

More recently she has argued that “states...may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands of the interests of social groups, classes or societies”. She castigates “virtually all neo-Marxist writers of the state” for having retained “deeply embedded society-centered assumptions” [1985:5-9], and thus ignoring that “important social change is a consequence of autonomous state activity” [Levine 1987:97].

2.4 Sousa Santos. The Portuguese state-centered sociologist has postulated that the Portuguese Estado Nova (1933-1974) was an autonomous state (1984). He claims specifically that: 1) the interests of the hegemonic class co-existed with the interests of the autonomous Estado Novo; 2) the hegemonic agrarian bourgeoisie accepted a tutelage exercised by the bureaucratic machine in the name not of the hegemonic class but of the interests of the autonomous state; 3) from 1926 to 1974 the relations between the agrarian hegemonic class and the state were conditioned by the political predominance of the Estado Novo; 4) the colonial wars in Africa forced the state to change its political economy; 5) the Estado Novo failed because, faced with much concentration of social contradictions, “the organizing matrix of the state reached its limit of flexibility” [1984:8-11]. To Sousa Santos the Estado Novo was an autonomous state for-itself, a power subject, an organization independent of class relations and class struggle. During its forty-one years of existence, the Estado Novo was autonomous and pursued its own goals and interests.

As we can see, to the state-centered theorists surveyed above, as well as to others whose work could not be reviewed in this paper because of the usual limitations of space, the state is the starting point, independent explanatory variable of inquiry.[4]

3. THE DEPENDENT STATE

In dependent or peripheral societies, the proper understanding of the nature of the state warrants the analysis of its relation to internal class configurations, as well as to its external relations. Marx wrote on the external relations of India and Ireland, and developed two views of colonialism. He considered (incorrectly) that penetration by British capital was advantageous to India. In Ireland, however, he and Engels saw the same penetration as destroying the economy of England’s first colony. To Lenin, imperialism was a logically necessary phase of the capitalist mode of production, the stage born out of the crisis of profitability.

3.1 The World Systems Approach. The world systems approach, or dependency theory, of Frank [978, 1980], Amin [1973, 1976, 1980], and Wallerstein [1974] postulates that the underdevelopment of dependent countries is the result of the international division of labor and of the external relations between dependent/peripheral countries and metropolis/core countries. Frank’s dependency theory argues that in peripheral societies the state “is an essential instrument for the administration of the dependent role of these economies in the international division of labor and the capitalist world process of capital accumulation” [Carnoy 1984:188]. The state in these peripheral societies is autonomous and more independent of local owning classes, because of the asymmetry of power between the internal and external bourgeoisie. This instrumentality is not, of course, simply epiphenomenal, for differences do exist in the pattern of resources transferred to the metropolis.

3.2 The Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State. The structuralist and functionalist concept of bureaucratic-authoritarian states developed by O’Donnell in his earlier work[5] causally links the emergence of dependent states to the structural requirements of highly developing or developed dependent capitalist societies. The bureaucratic-authoritarian state is above all, the “guarantor and organizer of the domination exercised through a class structure subordinated to the upper fractions of a highly oligopolized and transnationalized bourgeoisie" [O’Donnell 1979:292]. Hence, the form of the bureaucratic-authoritarian state is epiphenomenally determined by an external cause: the macrocosm of capital accumulation.

3.3 The Historical-Structural Approach. A theory of dependence that relates the dependent state more to internal class struggle is Cardoso and Faletto’s historical-structural theory. Their approach “emphasizes not just the structural conditions of social life, but also the historical transformation of structures by conflict, social movement, and class struggle [1979:x]. They reject explanations that deduce “mechanically significant phases of dependent societies only from the ‘logic’ of capitalist accumulation” [1979:xv]. Their starting point of inquiry is the local inter-class and intra-class struggles that either caused or arrested capitalist development in the periphery. In other words, the focus is past and present social relations and not broad economic epihenomena [Carnoy 1984:194]. They argue that in peripheral societies, local dominant groups impose the interests of external bourgeoisie “not precisely because they are foreign, but because they may coincide with the values and interests that the groups pretend are their own” [1979:xv].

Echoing the historical-structural approach, Hamilton observes that in peripheral formations, “it is their internal situation - the level of productive forces, the relative strength of contending classes, etc. - which generally determines the response of a given formation to external influence and in fact whether these influences will become dominant in shaping that social formation” [1982:19].

4. THE PORTUGUESE ESTADO NOVO

4.1 Antecedent Conditions. For half a millennium (until 1974) Portugal possessed a colonial empire twenty-two times the size of its continental dimensions. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, Portugal was also a dependent and peripheral country. While never a de jure colony of another country, Portugal was indeed a de facto colony of England. The status of de facto colony began in 1703 when Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with England. Under the treaty, English textiles had free entry into Portugal, while Portuguese wines had preferential entry into England. Soon, however, the terms and condition of the Treaty became too advantageous to English manufacturing industries and disastrous for the Portuguese economy. The development of the Portuguese incipient textile industry was arrested, and land exploitation and labor were shifted from basic foodstuff production to viniculture. This shift, while welcomed by wine makers (some of them British, owners of large estates in the Porto region), eventually caused increases in the importation of foodstuffs and deficits in the balance of trade. Portugal, a country with an empire, became a ‘satellite’ of English economic interests [Pereiera 1971; Sideri 1970].

Portugal’s dependence on England also had consequences for the Portuguese class structure and class struggle. The rather small and powerless capitalist class of the eighteenth century represented a threat first to the monarchy and later to the non-modern agricultural based hegemonic class fraction. To maintain its political hegemony - its existence and economic interests - the lords via the monarchy, and the latifundists later via the Estado Novo, were willing to ‘subordinate’ their interests and the future of their country “to the international interests of the British bourgeoisie" in exchange for “British political support” [O’Brien 1974]. British economic interests in Portugal in conjunction with the interests of dominant local class fractions, before and during the life of the Estado Novo, blocked autochthonous possibilities for the development of competitive industrial capitalism, for the transformation of Portugal into a modern nation. Portugal (a European country, an aged sovereign nation with a colonial empire) never experienced a ‘bourgeois revolution’, neither from above nor from below. Instead, she remained underdeveloped, dependent and the poorest country in Western Europe. [6]

4.2 The First Republic. Portugal was an agricultural country before and after the creation of the Estado Novo in 1933. Hence, hegemonic control of the social formation was in the hands of the latifundists which constituted a “traditional land owning and merchant class” [Arrighi 1985:23; Machado 1987:118; 1991]. This group, with the assistance of rural and urban petite bourgeoisie of Lisbon and Porto and of the working class, succeeded in bringing down the monarchy and in establishing republicanism in Portugal on 10 October 1910. The Portuguese First Republic was formally implemented with the Constitution of 1911, which provided for a parliamentary system of government and a president chosen by the parliament. The new constitution guaranteed individual civil rights and “provided the basis for the creation of an egalitarian society” [Keefe et all 1977:49].

Although the social programs and activities of the First Republic were not sufficiently radical to produce structural changes in Portuguese society, [7] they were sufficiently radical regarding the interests of the owning class: “capitalists, landowners, foreign investors, and high ranking bureaucrats felt their interests were threatened....” [Harsgor 1976:2-3].

4.3 Integralismo Lusitano. Soon the dissatisfaction of the dominant class fractions (landowners, financiers and emerging capitalists) with parliamentary rule was confirmed in the movement Antonio Sardinha organized on 8 April 1914. The movement, called Integralismo Lusitano, rejected parliamentary rule and favored the return to an “organic, traditionalist and anti-parliamentary” monarchy in which the assembly would rubber-stamp legislation approved by a technical council and final approval would be exclusively by the monarch. Integralismo (much influenced by Charles Maurras of Action Francaise) was in great part incorporated several years later in the Movimento Catolico Social Portugues, and specifically in the Central Academico de Democracia Crista. On 5 December 1917, General Sidonio Pais, a follower of Integralismo, led an uprising, seized state power, arrested and deported the president of the Republic, and appointed himself president-dictator. But Pais was assassinated in December 1918, and after his death, the Republican Constitution of 1911 was reinstated, and free elections were held in 1913.

4.4 The Republic and Business Groups. Pais’ coup d’etat indicated that the republican-parliamentary form of state was no longer protecting the interests of the owning class fraction, and was considered almost life-threatening to the urban petite bourgeoisie. The latter, originally backers of the establishment of the Republic, became opponents of the economic, political and social policies of the republican regime; in particular, they considered the pro-labor legislation of the First Republic detrimental to their interests. Moreover, business groups such as the Commercial Association of Lisbon, the Industrial Association of Porto and the Central Association of Portuguese Farmers (which represented many latifundists) had been complaining for some time that the instability of the republican political system was causing great harm to the economy. The latter group argued that “elections disrupted the nation and encouraged groups like the Bolsheviks and the Masons” [ACAP 1922: 63; cited in Schwartzman 1989:40].

These business groups, plus others such as the Industrial Association of Portugal, the Retailers Association and the Agricultural Union, contributed financially to the organization of their new political party, to which they appropriately gave the name of Union of Economic Interests (UIE). The new anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary party brought all the bourgeois economic associations “under an umbrella organization for the explicit purpose of political intervention”, and was also the new political vehicle “for organizing capitalist classes that were previously handicapped by association charters that denied them a direct role in politics” [Schwartzman 1989:148]. The UIE acquired O Seculo, the Lisbon daily newspaper which had been the official organ of the Republican party since 1881. Under the leadership of Joao Pereira da Rosa, who was to become one of the most dedicated and loyal propagandizers of the Estado Novo and of the so called Salazarista regime, O Seculo became the UIE’s official mouthpiece [Mediros 1978; Schwartzman 1989]. The UIE “was not a typical democratic party; rather it was a party of unmasked capitalists who had as their goal the betterment of their own economic conditions” [Schwartzman 1989:148-49].

4.5 The 1926 Coup D’Etat. In 1926 the armed forces seized state power, terminated the republican parliamentary form of state and replaced it with a military dictatorship that lasted until 1933 when the Estado Novo was officially implemented.

4.6 The National Union. Prior to the implementation of the Estado Novo, the National Union was established in 1933. The Union was a civil and political association of notables (read: party) established to give direction and support to the seizure of state power commenced in 1926. It remained the regime’s principal association and the only lawful political organization until 1974. During all that time, high level state officials were selected from the list of civilian and military candidates submitted by the Union.

4.7 The National Labor Statute. Implemented also in 1933, the Statute’s Section II, Article 8, was the juridical blueprint intended for controlling, silencing and rendering submissive the Portuguese working class. Workers’ organization were abolished, and labor unions, strikes, sit-ins and lockouts were outlawed.

4.8 The Control of Industry Act. The Act became law on 3 January 1931, two years before the Estado Novo. This important mechanism required prior state authorization for the establishment or the relocation of industrial plants, or for new investment in machinery and equipment designed to increase industrial activity. Affected by internal changes and development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP), the Act was revised in 1945, 1964, and 1965. Shifts in the CMP also changed the beneficiaries of the Act; while in the 1930s it protected both the non-monopolistic petite bourgeoisie and existing monopolistic firms, after World War II it became an effective mechanism for the proliferation of cartels and monopolistic groups. The Control of Industry Act was an effective mechanism to restrain development of liberal-democratic capitalism, prevent or delay modernization, restrict internal competition, and protect the interests of established monopolistic companies. Another device of control was the Protective Tariffs Act which imposed exorbitant import duties on foreign products, and thus protected Portuguese capitalists from external competition.[8]

4.9 The African Wars. The model of political economy of the Estado Novo was based on mercantilist principles and on an introverted economic autarky that isolated Portugal from Western Europe. Earlier efforts to open up the country economically (demanded by the extreme poor performance of the introverted economic system confirmed by most economic indicators) were expedited with the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in Angola in 1961, in Portuguese Guinea in 1963, and in Mozambique in 1964. To finance the cost of preserving the ‘metaphysical’ empire (or the economic interests of national and international capitalism), the Estado Novo was forced to secure foreign loans, and to open up the introverted economic system to foreign investment, which became quite large by the second half of the 1960s. By 1968 the wars in Africa were absorbing 44.3 percent of Portugal’s budget, a heavy cost for the poorest country in Western Europe, and the dependency of Portugal on foreign capital and influence had increased commensurably.

Furthermore, the wars also ushered in structural changes in the Portuguese social formation, both on the Continent and in Africa. Increased public spending brought increased personal income, which in turn caused an internal demand for consumer goods without productive growth. And with increased demand came inflationary pressures. Soon, contradictions permeated the political-economic model, which for more than three decades favored economic stability without inflation. Both the Control of Industry and the Protective Tariffs Acts (see above) were eventually rendered meaningless. And a fundamental new structural problem appeared: intraclass competition for state power between owning class fractions whose economic activities “had traditionally been based on the colonies and those that leaned more towards the European markets” [Kohl 1982:175].

4.10 Society for the Study of Economic and Social Development. Founded in 1970 by a group of young technocrats - some were government officials - SEDES was a group that represented the interests of the ‘modern’ segment of the ruling class (of which the technocrats were members), as well as a movement opposing the Estado Novo. The group “included leading representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie, above all intellectuals who were striving for a reform of the political system from within” [Kohler 1982: 182; Blume 1977]. SEDES sought structural changes that would permit the incorporation of Portugal into the industrial and democratic world of modern Europe. SEDES spoke on behalf of the liberal business community and the technological intelligentsia that was becoming a ‘power bloc’, and whose interests warranted a more modern and more efficient capitalist society. SEDES, an ardent supporter of market economy and political pluralism, had articles published in daily newspapers, and held public meetings on a variety of economic, political and social topics. In 1972, Rogerio Martins, a young technocrat, and the secretary of state for industry during the ‘liberal’ period of Caetano’s regime, replaced the old Control of Industry Act (see above) with a new Industrial Development Law, which was befitting the structural transformations and was in tune with the interests and needs of the modern and soon to become hegemonic sector [Baklanoff 1978].

SEDES was one of “four broad clusters of interests” with specific agendas for Portugal’s future. The other three were the ‘ultraconservatives’, the ‘intergralists’ and the ‘federalists’ [Graham 1975]. The ‘ultras’ were the hard-liners, members of the old guard, “rationalizers of the old order”, defenders of the society built with the implementation of the Estado Novo. They fought for minimal change in the economic-political-social system of continental Portugal and for the retention of the colonial empire. The ‘intergralists’, formed after the outbreak of the colonial wars, argued that the colonial system no longer worked. They favored “economic, social, and institutional changes with far-reaching implications for establishing interests in the Portuguese state” [Graham 1975:40]. The ‘federalists’ also favored maintaining the Portuguese colonial system, but differed on how this could be accomplished. They argued for autonomy and massive economic and infrastructural development of the colonies. With the re-election of President Tomas, a member of the old guard, in July 1972, the ‘ultras’ won the battle, unaware that the war had been lost earlier.

4.11 The Fall of the Estado Novo. To understand the successful seizure of state power by the military in April 1974 we must consider the economic and social changes Portugal began experiencing in the early 1960s. The rapid quantitative and qualitative systemic changes that ensued had deleterious consequences on the long economic, political and social introverted social formation. The mode of production or ‘regime of accumulation’ existing in Portugal since the 1920s was a sort of capitalism characterized by private ownership of the means of production, extensive state control of the economy and the oppression of the working classes. As shown above, the wars in Africa expedited systemic changes in the increasingly anachronistic political organization of the Estado Novo. In 1974, the military, acting on behalf of the modernizing segment of the hegemonic class, seized state power.

5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The conceptualization of the state as an autonomous organization, as an independent area of study neglects (at best) or ignores (at worst) the concrete historical-structural configurations that give rise to specific state forms. In positing an essentialist/reified concept, the state-centered theorists fail to consider the dialectical and structural relationship between class relations and the form of the state. State autonomy can only be relative autonomy because of “the structural constraints which do beset any government working within the context of a particular mode of production” (Miliband 1977:73-74). Moreover, state-centered theorists seldom submit criteria for assessing autonomy empirically, and seldom show “the form of autonomy, the nature of its relativity, and the time sequence within which it occurs” [Petras et al 1984:108-109].

Fred Block has stated that “politics and the state have independent determining effects upon historical outcomes” or, in other words, “that the state or the people who direct the state apparatus [are] historical subjects” [1980:227]. Those acquainted with the school of thought known as ‘regulation school’, and its historically based notions of ‘regime of accumulation’ and ‘mode of regulation’ [Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1986] - and informed by the notions of ‘habitus’, ‘cultural capital’ and ‘symbolic power’ [Bourdieu 1990], and by the concepts of ‘regime’ and ‘biopower/biopolitics’ [Foucault 1978] - can only consider Block’s theoretical constructions nonsensical and sociologically vacuous.

It is more realistic to argue, I think, that members of propertied patrician families that trace their ancestry all the way back to the middle ages or even further, do not cut their genealogical class habitus upon assuming the role of state managers. Their old and long internalized weltanschauung remains substantially unchanged. And state managers qua state managers are not independent historical subjects responsible for imperialistic state policies and for the ignominious fate of dependent peripheral “social democratic regimes such as those of Salvador Allende in Chile [or] Michael Manely in Jamaica” [Evans 1985:62], and of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and the Sandanistas in Nicaragua.

Transnational corporations (TNCs) and their activities of capitalistic global reach [Barnet and Muller 1974] have been the real historical subjects active in specific practices of world making. These practices are the effects of a ‘way of life’. In the 1950s the real estate holdings of the United Fruit Co, in Guatemala were so extensive it reduced that sovereign nation into a ‘banana republic’. Interestingly, United Fruit retained the law firm of which John Foster Dulles, the then secretary of state, was an associate [Berryman 1985]. With the cooperation of high level state functionaries, fruit TNCs in Central America, copper and communications TNCs in Chile, bauxite TNCs in the Caribbean and Ghana, myriad TNCs in Brazil and Mexico, and electronics and footwear TNCs in Asia, are examples of the real historic subjects actively involved in subordinating sovereign economic, political and social systems to their interests and practices for greater capital accumulation.[9]

In her studies of Mexico, Hamilton [1981, 1982] distinguishes two types of state autonomy: ‘instrumental’ and ‘structural’. The former “refers to the ability of the state to exercise autonomy with respect to dominant groups [classes]”. The latter “refers to the ability of the state with respect to existing structures”. Hamilton and other society-centered theorists accept instrumental autonomy (a different term for relative autonomy) as structurally necessary to give flexibility to the capitalist state. Structural autonomy, however, is rigid because of the location of the state in society, and thus instead of flexibility there are structural constraints. Hamilton correctly observes that even when a state exercises considerable instrumental/relative autonomy (due to the absence of a hegemonic class cohesion), if it “attempts to go beyond structural boundaries (e.g., expropriating private property, socializing the means of production, etc.) such action will in itself result in the rapid cohesion of previously antagonistic segments of the dominant class” [1981:307].

This is to say, that if the state decides “to 'transcend' structural boundaries, the dominant class will utilize its control of economic resources to ‘redirect’ the state to options within the existing structure. “ [1981:310]. And in dependent countries such as Mexico (and Portugal), the limitations to state autonomy originate not only in the endogenous but also in the exogenous structural configurations. Because “the basic structure of internal production [becomes] internationalized”, state autonomy in the context of peripheral dependency “must be conceptualized not only in terms of the relation of the state to internal classes but also, and perhaps, primarily, in terms of its relation to foreign capital” [Hamilton 1981:308].

There are at least two fundamental flaws in the state-centered approach. First, in viewing the state as an independent structural organization, and in opposing the reductive instrumentalism still implicit in the notion of relative autonomy, state-centered theorists are forced to reject all notions of class, ideology and hegemony. But I am reminded here of John Stuart Mills observation that “wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests and its feelings of class superiority” [1975:8]. We know that “capitalists can organize themselves’ [Whitt 1979], and that the Business Roundtable, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the corporate PACs and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission are examples, among others, of associations of capitalists (some, state managers concurrently) organized as a class-for-itself, and thus engaged in “class based strategies” [Whitt 1979:56-57]

Moreover, the existence in Portugal in the 1960s of the four broad clusters of interests (see above) clearly demonstrates that instead of conflicts between Block’s “state managers”, or Skocpol’s “state rulers” (see above), and existing dominant classes, there was instead conflict between dominant/governing class fractions struggling for state power in order to secure either the maintenance of the status quo, or limited structural transformations from above. Zeitlin [1984] found similar conflicts in Chile.

Second, with all their rejections of economic reductive instrumentalism, the inescapable logical consequence of state-centered theorizing is the state as an instrument of state managers who are brought back in from a Weberian notion of interpersonal relations. Hence, state-centered theorists are actually Weberian ‘instrumentalists’ and thus must also be accused - as Miliband was by Poulantzas [1969] - of being committed to a “problematic of the subject” or to the reduction of the state to interpersonal relations either between independent state managers, or between them and individual members of civil society. But, I argue, the state can neither be reduced to an instrument of state managers, nor to simple conceptual propositions. It can be understood only through a rigorous examination of the historical inter-class and intra-class conflict and struggles and the ensuing transformation of structures.

To postulate that the Estado Novo was an autonomous and independent state, as Sousa Santos does, is to neglect the overwhelming and incontrovertible historical evidence showing the Portuguese Estado Novo not as an autonomous state, not as a state for itself, but very much indeed as a class (bourgeois) state. In fact, if there was a state that could not be autonomous, in virtue of the peculiarities of the social formation that gave it life, it was unequivocally the Estado Novo. It has been observed that “the most obvious social structural condition favoring [state] autonomy is division within the dominant class” [Evans 1985:63]. Until the 1960s this division was totally absent in Portugal. In fact, the National Union, (see above), was a classic example of what Gramsci [1971:57-78] designated as a ‘social group’, with the function to unite the various owning class fractions into a ‘power bloc’, to dominate antagonistic groups, and to provide “intellectual and moral leadership.”

Thus, from 1933 to 1974, it was quite difficult to distinguish economic managers from political managers. For “the men of the Estado Novo, with rare exceptions, penetrated large economic organizations and installed themselves within them...one can find whole companies transformed into veritable beehives of ex-ministers...[I]t appears that Portuguese public life, for many, is only a passage to the private sector; from official administrative functions they go to lucrative private companies’ [Rego 1969:22]. Examples of this situation are Franco Nogueira, foreign minister and CEO of the Espirito Santo monopolistic group; Antonio Spinola, army general and director of Siderurgia Nacional; Henrique Tenreiro, admiral and czar of the Portuguese fishing industry.

Formalistically and theoretically, the Estado Novo was a corporatist state, but in reality corporations did not exist for a long time, and when they were created they played no role in policy development and implementation. The Estado Novo became “one of the most oppressive and monopolistic of state capitalist systems, and it came to favor employer interests at the expense of labor...moreover the business and fledgling industrial elements were able to make the case to Salazar that if corporatization was to be a force to be enforced upon it as it was upon labor it would lead to a lack of interest and the ruination of the economy” [Wirada 1979:100].

The Estado Novo was the state of a ‘reactionary coalition’, i.e., the hegemonic power bloc constituted by the latifundists in coalition with the financial and industrial bourgeois fractions, and under the leadership of the first. And in creating the Estado Novo, the reactionary coalition “created a police state not in order to regiment and mobilize society in the interests of the more advanced sectors of capital, but to freeze the social structure in a way that maintained the hegemony of a backward and neo-feudal class” [Lomax 1983:110].

From its inception the Estado Novo was an apparatus designed to satisfy, to guarantee and maintain ‘ideal’ conditions for private capital accumulation in a socio-economic context free of competition and labor unrest. Even before its implementation, the Estado Novo “was entrusted with the preservation of the interests of the reactionary coalition...(it) paved the way for further capital accumulation and the development of capitalism in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class...(it) naturalized the working class and other threatening groups (such as dissent intellectuals and students) so that internal peace was assured...(and) the reactionary coalition controlled the state through the army whose highest echelons were amply rewarded” [Ginner 1982:186].

The Estado Novo failed in 1974 not because it had reached its limit of flexibility, but because of historical-structural conditions and events that emerged in Portugal beginning in the 1960s. Ensuing transformations in the forces of production warranted a new system of social relations. Hence, in 1974 the military seized state power on behalf of the modernizing segment of the hegemonic class. This segment had to seize the state in order to transform from above the economic, political and social structures of what had become an anachronistic social formation, into a liberal capitalist democratic member of the European community of nations. Before 25 of April 1974, “an increasing number of businessmen...asked: If the Premier [Caetano] tells us that we cannot restore freedom until the African wars are finished, if we cannot go into partnership with the Common Market unless we democratize, why not find a way to do just this?” [Wheeler 1974:1-2]

The Estado Novo was the political organization of the hegemonic, possessing class fractions. It was never fundamentally opposed to its interests, never autonomous, never a state for itself. Its rise, durability and fall, were not caused by its ‘internal dynamics’, but determined by specific historical-structural conditions of society. To argue that the Estado Novo was an autonomous state with its own interests, is to engage in an objectivism that as Habermas [1971] asserts “naively correlates theoretical propositions with matters of fact.”

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[1] For an extensive and outstanding treatment of state theories I recommend Carnoy’s [1984] book.

[2] Some state-centered theorists have been, in my view, incorrectly identified as Marxian theorists. See note 3.

[3] Block, who in my view was never a neo-Marxian, has revealed that he has abandoned historical-materialism because he found it too economistic, and is now a ‘post-Marxist.’ He now sees politics as ‘irreducible’ and argues that the notions of class conflict and struggle do not help to understand racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other social struggles [1987:17-17; 34-35].

[4] See Trimberger [1978]; Stepan [1978]; Krasner [1978]; Nordinger [1981].

[5] In his later writings O’Donnell is less structural functionalist, and gives more consideration to internal situations within Latin American dependent states.

[7] A fact recognized even by Marcelo Caetano [1967:436; cited in Camping 1975:18].

[9] This is parallel to a critique of the claims submitted by students of international relations working within the ‘realist’ paradigm. The ‘realists’ are also ‘state-centered’ theorists.