The State and Capital Accumulation in Mexico
The economic activities of the state have rightly been regarded as a crucial factor in the remarkably rapid process of capitalist expansion experienced by Mexico in the two decades after the Second World War, and must also be seen as such in the imbalance that has emerged over the last ten years -an imbalance that itself led to an accelerated growth of the public sector. State intervention in the process of capital accumulation during the period of dependent import-substituting industrialization is common to the experience of Latin America as a whole,l but in Mexico the scale and scope of this intervention appear to have been greater than elsewhere, generating an important debate over the size of the Mexican public sector in the I960s, and now providing a significant case to be examined in the light of current discussions as to the relative autonomy of the state in capitalist economies. In relation to economic growth, most of the initial capital bases for modern agriculture and industry laid under the Porfiriato were destroyed during the years of revolutionary violence between I9II and I924, and output in all branches fell.2 Much of the next decade was spent in reconstructing the transport and financial systems. On the political plane, although the reformism of Madero had been overtaken by the popular agrarian movements of Villa and Zapata, and the hegemony of the agrarian oligarchy destroyed, these movements had demonstrated their incapacity to form a government before being themselves suppressed by Carranza and Obreg6n. In this political vacuum, it took the bureaucratic-military elite a decade to build a national state, but the resultant 'statist' regime of Cardenas (1934-40) managed during the North American depression to reduce substantially