Beyond deindustrialization: changes in the pattern of industry organization and accumulation in a scenario of the ‘Brazilian Disease’

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the changes in the pattern of organization and accumulation of the Brazilian industry in the 2000s. In accordance with the thesis presented here, since the defensive reaction to the crisis of developmentalism and the transformations derived from the exhaustion of the Fordist techno-economic paradigm in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of a new pattern of organization and accumulation of the local industry, termed the Brazilian Disease, was consolidated in the first decade of the 21st century. This pattern is characterized by structural reconfigurations toward regressive specialization and deindustrialization alongside the emergence of strategies that ensured the accumulation of capital invested in the industrial sphere. This accumulation, in turn, was associated with the emergence of strategies increasingly disconnected from a strictly productive performance.