The Changes
The changes that the state apparatus suffers in the Military state are too radical to be interpreted simply as transitory forms aimed at restoring the former civil state with its bourgeois-democratic liberties after a reasonable delay. These radical changes include the occupation of the state by a military-technocratic elite; the inexistence or absolute subordination of the legislative and of the judiciary under the executive branch, which is in the hands of the military; control of the apparatus of repression by the Armed Forces; militarization of the whole society -universities, education, ideology, etc. — these changes are structural changes, which permit big monopoly national and international capital the development of a new superstructure that can bring life to its model of accumulation, integrate the dependent economy into the new forms of the international division of labor, and — possibly — permit the political and/or economic domination of more backward countries of the regions (Brazilian sub-imperialism).
Does this mean that the same kind and degree of political repression will (have to) be maintained into the foreseeable future? On the contrary; insofar as the present holders of power are able to consolidate their rule and to institutionalize their political measures, they will no longer require so much brute force to maintain themselves in power and to pursue their economic model. The deeper the economic crisis and the more radical the economic change, the more violent the political midwife force necessary to impose an alternative economic model to "solve" the economic crisis. But once the new course of economic development or underdevelopment has been well launched, less political force is necessary to keep it on course. Thus the answer to the first question posed above would seem to be that the most violent political forms may not be so necessary in the future. It will depend on the "prosperity" of the new economic course, a prosperity gained at great cost to the people ("the economy is doing fine, the people are not," as President Geisel of Brazil accurately summarized). Violent political forms will also diminish when the functions of the most aberrant political forms have been otherwise institutionalized. This stage seems to have arrived, at least temporarily, in India and Sri Lanka, and in the Latin American countries that announced or began some democratization or liberalization. Such "democratization" includes forms of elections, as well as the possible partial return of the military to their barracks. In none of these countries, however, does this change signify the departure from economic and political power of those who only recently assumed or consolidated their hold on it. The displacement of Somoza by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the challenge to entrenched rule in El Salvador and perhaps Guatemala in opposition to regimes of long standing, are facilitated by these regimes’ loss of some of their bourgeois support, perhaps because they have been unable to adapt to changing economic and political requirements.
