The Crisis of the Dictatorships. Nicos Poulantzas

time to recognize these new realities. The underlying reason is the tradition bequeathed by the Third International, which considered fascist regimes and military dictatorships as necessarily bound up with economic retardment or retrogression; there are a host of formulations according to which these regimes are supposed to have caused a long-term ‘blockage’ of these countries’ ‘economic development’, or even put it into reverse. These characterizations go hand in hand with an economist/technicist conception of economic development and industrialization, a conception that pervades the various theories of underdevelopment, itself a highly erroneous term. For there is no such thing as a neutral economic development, economic development as such, with a uniform and unambiguous direction that could only be positive: an economic development which cannot be properly carried out by these regimes, so that condemning them necessarily involves characterizing them as ‘economically retrogressive’. Here a further and related illusion comes to light: these regimes are seen as condemned inevitably to disappear, and their fall directly predicated on their supposed inability to set under way, or follow through, ‘economic development’.

      But this ‘development as such’ lacks any meaning. What matters is its social and political significance, i.e. its relationship to the exploitation of the popular masses in the contemporary imperialist chain. And roughly since the 1960s, if not always to the same extent, the Portuguese and Spanish regimes have followed, and the Greek military regime continued, a policy of industrial development parallel with a concentration and centralization of capital; in other words, a policy of development of capitalist relations in their monopoly form, and one conforming with the new features of exploitation that mark the present phase of imperialism and the relationships between dominant and dominated countries – a policy, therefore, that by this very fact subjugates these countries to the new dependence that characterizes the imperialist chain. One outcome of this is that this ‘economic development’ exhibits a series of aspects specific to the dependent industrialization of the dominated countries, an industrialization that is very far from following the path of the dominant countries; another outcome is that the popular masses have experienced a considerably increased exploitation both by their own dominant classes and by those of the imperialist metropolises, from the very fact of this industrialization.

      This already sheds light on the question of the relation between the dictatorships and the type of dependence and development peculiar to these countries. It is an undeniable fact that these regimes have particularly favoured this path of dependence on foreign imperialist capital. We have had to make this point already at this stage of the argument, as a number of writers, partly in reaction to the erroneous thesis that the dictatorships are associated with an ‘economic retardment’, accept that these regimes have promoted the development of capitalism, but immediately add, as if afraid of having conceded a point, that this makes no difference, as the same development would have taken place anyway, and in the same manner, if these countries had had bourgeois-democratic regimes. Greece is generally given as the example here, as the hypothesis cannot be verified in the cases of Spain and Portugal, where the dictatorships were established so long ago. Greece saw the beginnings of industrialization marked by the new structures of dependence and the massive investment of foreign capital, before the dictatorship, a process that was moreover accelerated from 1964 onwards, under not a right-wing government, but rather one of the centre (George Papandreou). The junta, then, can simply be said to have continued on the course already established. In this conception, the place of a country in the imperialist chain is seen as sufficient to determine the forms of its dependence in all their details: socio-political distinctions and the internal political institutions of the country would be unable to alter this, except in the case of a transition to socialism.

      But we must be clear as to what is involved here. It is obvious that a country’s dependence vis-à-vis imperialism can only be broken by a process of national liberation, which in the new phase of imperialism and the present circumstances as a whole, coincides with a process of transition to socialism. This accepted, however, there are certainly different forms and degrees of dependence, and these essentially depend on the specific internal socio-political coordinates of the countries involved. To take a simple example, the relation of France to American capital was evidently different under the Gaullism of the years 1960–68 than it has been since – today above all – and yet these two moments are both located in the same, present phase of imperialism. In this sense, the dictatorial regimes in Portugal, Spain and Greece certainly played an important role in the specific pattern, shape and rhythm of the dependence process that took place under their direction; not because of their inherent differences from the parliamentary-democratic form of regime, but rather because of the economic and social forces whose interests they predominantly represented. This was particularly the case in Greece, where the military dictatorship’s policy in this respect was very different from that of the previous regime. To formulate the problem more clearly: the specific forms of regime in the dependent countries play a particular role in the precise forms assumed there by the new path of dependence, as a result of the specific ‘internal’ balance of forces to which they correspond.

      One basic strand in the present analysis has now been already indicated.

      In examining forms of regime and the changes in political institutions, a problem which arises for the imperialist metropolises as well as for the dependent countries, it is essential to take the present phase of capitalism into consideration. This phase, however, does not simply determine all these forms and changes by itself; it is only relevant in so far as it determines, the conjunctures of class struggle, the transformations of classes and the internal balances of socio-political forces which alone can explain these regimes and their evolution. To put it another way, we can certainly speak at a general and rather abstract level of a dependent type of state, for the dependent societies of the present time: a state that exhibits certain common features in all the societies in which it occurs, in so far as it corresponds to the general modifications that imperialism inflicts on them, and must fulfil the general functions falling to it in the present phase of imperialism. But it is none the less clear that the concrete forms that this state assumes – fascism, military dictatorship, ‘democratic’ republic, etc. – depend on internal factors within these societies. These factors appear as decisive as soon as one accepts that it makes a considerable difference, at least for these countries themselves and the popular masses there, whether this dependent state is a bourgeois ‘democracy’ or a reactionary military dictatorship; here, as elsewhere, the forms that bourgeois domination assumes are far from a matter of indifference, for all their common appellation as ‘dictatorships of the bourgeoisie’.

      Maintaining the primacy of internal factors in this way already takes us a step further; we have to break once and for all with a mechanistic and almost topological (if not ‘geographical’) conception of the relation between internal and external factors. In the present phase of imperialism there is really no such thing as external factors on the one hand, acting purely from ‘outside’, and opposed to internal factors ‘isolated’ in their own ‘space’ and outclassing the others. If we maintain the primacy of internal factors, we simply mean that those coordinates of the imperialist chain that are ‘external’ to a country – the global balance of forces, the role of a particular great power, etc. – only act on the country in question by way of their internalization, i.e. by their articulation to its own specific contradictions. But these contradictions themselves, in certain aspects, represent the induced reproduction of the contradictions of the imperialist chain within the various individual countries. To talk of internal factors in this sense, then, is to discover the real role that imperialism (uneven development) plays in the evolution of the various social formations.

      This will be the guiding thread in the following analyses, and its implications involve a whole series of problems. To make this more clear, we can turn for a moment to the case of Chile, which is highly relevant as regards the role of the imperialist powers – and their centre in particular, the United States – in the installation, maintenance and evolution of the regimes we are concerned with here. In discussions of the Chilean experience the mechanistic and topological conception of ‘external factors’ is often at work in the thesis of the plot against the Allende government, a thesis which maintains the supposedly direct, immediate and exhaustive role played by the United States and the CIA. This thesis has the particular advantage that it prevents the Allende