Além da estabilização: mundialização, concentração e centralização de capital na economia brasileira

Abstract

The critical analysis of the processes of accumulation, concentration and centralization of capital in the Brazilian economy define the core of this Dissertation. It starts from Marx's critical perspective in the context of a supposed expansion of competition in market economies. From this theoretical basis it is possible to return to the understanding of the influence of leading companies in price formation, following the path stressed by Kalecki, as well as to make clear the association between neoliberalism and concentration of capital in the Brazilian economy, with emphasis on some strategic sectors. Within this horizon, the forms of control exercised by corporations over their competitors, supported by their most advanced level of technological dominance, their scale of production and the advantages derived therefrom, limit both the entry of new capital and competition, resulting in centralization of capital in the form of mergers and acquisitions, leading to the narrowing of the capital base involved in the dispute. For Chesnais (1996, 2016), the world oligopoly must be regarded as the general form of contemporary market structures. Since the 1970s the concentration and centralization of the world economy has increased, either in specific forms of reducing competition or through the power of collective monopoly by large economic groups. The internationalization of capital is the process which transforms the production and appropriation of surplus value into a movement realized beyond the original, domestic spaces of capitalist accumulation. The insertion of the Brazilian economy in this world process was accentuated in the 1990s and consolidated in the 2000s: it was a question of accelerating the opening of the economy leading to an increase in the centralization of capital and consequent internationalization of the Brazilian economy, especially through mergers and acquisitions, a historical process of extensive productive reengineering, weakening the participation of the Brazilian State in the mediation and regulation of capitalist accumulation. The central result of the dissertation is to make explicit, with reference to Marx's legacy, the relation between the evolution of the processes of concentration and centralization of capitals in Brazil and a new stage of globalization, allowing to illuminate the rising power of corporations, their power over the determination of prices and on the dynamics of economic policies, inserting the Brazilian case in the changes implied by the recent crisis. If our work of synthesis and conceptual revision serves the eminently pedagogic purpose of alerting clearly and objectively to the risks of the neoliberal orthodoxy, it will have paid, albeit in a preliminary way, to the anguish of a generation that has not given up hope, while facing an unprecedented onslaught of economic and political forces that rule through fear, ignorance and consenting subordination