State, Economy and Democracy in Brazil and Latin America

Abstract

Historians from throughout the world affirm that significant changes have occurred in the directions of humanity since the time when men questioned the theocentric explanations that illuminated human knowledge for a long time, thus marking the passage from Medieval times to Modernity. This passage influenced various fields of knowledge such as the French encyclopedists; astronomy and physics, with Pascal and Newton; chemistry with Lavoisier; mathematics with Descartes; medicine and biology from Hippocrates to Darwin. Transformations also occurred in the arts, culture, literature, and in engineering and all fields of knowledge that could be submitted to human rationality with humans at the center of concern. It is evident that this changed traditional forms of exercising power and the forms of organization of different societies. The state, economy and democracy came to have their forms and contents resignified at the heart of the process of constitution of social classes, liberal economies and bourgeois democracies. If in the old continent this process is situated in time at the transition from the feudal regimes to the bourgeois societies, in Latin America a similar process not only took place at a much different historic time, but was also marked by the violent colonialist and imperialist expropriation of our original peoples, by the dependent and subordinated constitution of our economies-characterized by degrading and exponential super-exploitation of the labor force-and by the feeble formation of democratic regimes that interchanged, over history, with authoritarian civil-business and or military regimes. These particularities, as well as the general directions and universal characteristics of state, democracy and different economic forms-although they are central elements of the class struggle around the world-for much time were not issues that had prestige in academic and intellectual spaces. The deficit among us in relation to studies and research in these areas has only been recently faced with the advent of theories that revive our particularity of being a subcontinent that has been expropriated and with dependent economies, as shown by the Marxist theory of dependency, associated to recent experiences of democratic alternatives that offer new forms of conducting politics, different from the traditional, imperialist, neoliberal orientations, such as the experiences in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and even Brazil. These two sets of factors have allowed us to give greater attention not only to the broad issues cited, but to others that stem from them, such as the configuration of public policies, the forms of administration and scope of state apparatus, the transformations of institutions and the regulationism that stems from them, among other issues. It is in the wake of this revival that Revista Katálysis presents us with an edition dedicated entirely to issues of the state, economy and democracy in Latin America. The reflections contained here provide us the opportunity to problematize from both a theor...