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The Distorted Transformation of Mexico: Arbitralism and Developmentalism, and Political Capitalism and Subcapitalism. A Pathway towards Balancing Capitalism and Balanced Development, or Demdevelopment

Abstract

Starting from the Mexican state´s and capitalism´s overall performance in democracy and development, this study addresses two types of social relationships that have shaped the country´s evolution over the twentieth century: those unleashed from the Constitution of 1917 to now, which are called the historical or postrevolutionary relationships, and those just rising at the turn to the twentieth- first century, named as the emerging or post-postrevolutionary relationships. Both relationships take place through a series of state and capitalist processes overlapping in the spheres of politics, production and policymaking.

The historical relationships are identified as two national productive restructurings, eight processes and two phenomena. The two productive restructurings are those undertaken by Presidents Cárdenas and De La Madrid in 1935 and 1983 respectfully. The eight processes are those of (i) presidentialism, (ii) corporatism, (iii) statism, (iv) democratism as well as (v) free-marketism, (vi) urban-regional-rural unbalances, (vii) technological lag, and (viii) human development. As for the two phenomena, they are arbitralism and developmentalism and work superimposed on the two restructurings and the eight processes, thereby controlling the configuration and action of the postrevolutionary stage. The emerging relationships are taking shape in the last years as a path-dependent succession of historical and current trends, oligarchic disputes, state/market incapacities and "failures", socioproductive struggles and sociopolitical movements, all of them profiling the evolution of domestic capitalism and regularizing the making of democracy and development in Mexico.

Based on both historical and emerging relationships, an exercise of interpretation, conceptualization and prospection of the national unfolding is made, in order to comprehend the dynamics of continuity and change underlying Mexico´s course. Then it is stated that the phenomena of arbitralism and developmentalism engendered a (postrevolutionary) Regime of Political Capitalism and Subcapitalism, which exhaustion is generating a (post-postrevolutionary) new Regime of Balancing Capitalism and Balanced Development. The transition between both regimes is profiling a pathway for a (national) political order of Demdevelopment as a superior dimension of achieving growth, wellbeing, governance and progress in Mexico. Tellingly, this pathway is endowed with a policymaking choice to undertake a demdevelopmental Third Restructuring of national capitalism and state, as a first re-organizational step towards demdevelopment.

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