ABSTRACT
Introduction Having traced the history of the informatics policy over more than two decades from its inception to its ultimate collapse, it is now possible to describe the level of autonomy achieved by the Brazilian state in this policy area and the “shape” or “topography” of that autonomy over that long period. The high levels of state autonomy achieved over this period were crucial in making possible a shift from one “variety of capitalism” to another, at least in the informatics sector (and with some partially successful efforts to extend the new model to other sectors of the economy, notably telecommunications). In the context of this study, the essential features of a particular variety of capitalism are: (1) the relationships among private national, multinational, and state capitals; and (2) the relationship of the state to the economy and especially to these three different sectors of capital. A major shift in these relationships, especially over a relatively brief historical period, almost by definition requires the state to advantage some sectors of capital in an existing capitalist formation and disadvantage others. In the case of the Brazilian informatics policy, the project entailed the creation of whole new sets of capitalist enterprises, whose ownership and technology were to be 100 percent Brazilian and that had not previously existed. This in turn required the ability to formulate and implement policy virtually guaranteed to generate strong resistance from existing capitalist sectors damaged by that process. One major criticism of the “varieties of capitalism” literature has been precisely that it has paid little attention to the political processes involved in constructing a particular variety of capitalism or in shifting from one variety to another.1 This study has provided a detailed narrative of just such a political process. Moreover, unlike the previous literature addressing the political dynamics of change from one variety of capitalism to another, this study has shown that at the heart of any such political process is necessarily the construction, through political action, of high levels of state autonomy. As laid out in Chapter 1, the autonomy of the state is a complex variable. It involves a capacity for insulation from external pressure that allows policymakers to control policymaking and a capacity to penetrate other actors to force them to conform to the policy. The most important other actors with respect to which particular state actors need to exercise autonomy are powerful actors in civil society (especially
the major capitalist sectors), the international system, the political class, and the rest of the state apparatus. Such capacities for insulation and penetration may result in levels of autonomy ranging from the minimal to the revolutionary. For the purposes of this study, a typology of five analytically distinct levels of autonomy has been elaborated: instrumental, relative, strategic, structural, and revolutionary (see Chapter 1, this volume, for an extended discussion of both the typology of levels of autonomy and the overall analytical framework). As the detailed historical narrative of Chapters 3 through 6 shows, the state autonomy created first by CAPRE and later SEI, was not constant across the lifespan of the informatics policy. It built gradually to a peak in the years just before and after the passage of the Informatics Law in 1984 and then declined until its final collapse in the early 1990s. There are three major periods and numerous smaller episodes of advances and declines along the way. In all of this, the trajectory of the capacity for “insulation” is not always necessarily identical to the trajectory of the capacity for “penetration.”
