A Questão Nordestina na formação econômico-social brasileira: reflexões sobre o Estado, as lutas de classes e o desenvolvimento desigual

Abstract

The thesis we seek to defend is that the uneven and combined development of capitalism, in the context of the Brazilian socioeconomic formations, produced a regional issue, conditioning the Brazilian Northeast to a subaltern position. We aim to understand the relationship of the Brazilian State with the Northeastern question, across governments from the 1930s to 2018, with the objective of interrelating the State's intervention with the northeastern issue and class struggles, relating the policies to the moment when they were proposed and to the factions of the bourgeoisie that held the hegemony within the scope of the historical bloc. All of this, aiming to understand the reason for the failure of a deep and progressive transformation of the Northeastern reality during this period. To do this, we propose an investigation based on the movement inherent to the object researched – the Northeastern issue –, submitting to criticism the discourse that were produced about this subject, understanding that they are part of a concrete and dynamic totality. We use, as the main research technique, a bibliographic review on the diverse elements that are related to the theme of the State, the uneven development and the regional issue in the different periods, using the theoretical framework to understand the historical movement. In addition to the bibliographic analysis, we propose a documentary investigation of the various policies produced by the Brazilian State, which aimed to direct intervention in the Northeast. It became clear, through investigation, that the Northeastern issue remains irresolute, even though it has changed – because of the changes that the national and Northeastern economies are undergoing, starting with the processes of commercial integration (after 1930s) and later productive (after 1950s), followed by a productive disintegration (after 1990s) – in which the Northeast never left its subaltern position. The dependence of this region is manifested, precisely, in the moments of greater economic, social, political and climatic turbulence, constraining the Brazilian State to intervene in several ways, through the creation of institutions in the decades – DNOCS, BNB, SUDENE, ADENE, etc. – without ever being able to create the conditions to overcome the economic distance between this region and the Center-South. In view of this more general movement – between developmentalism vs. (neo)liberalism – we understand that the search for overcoming the Northeastern backwardness has as a barrier the limits of dependent capitalism of the Brazilian socioeconomic formations, expressed in the mentality of the bourgeoisie. In view of this, we reaffirm that the various experiences of intervention and systematic abandonment clearly demonstrated the impossibility of the bourgeois State's action to give an effective answer to this issue.