Transnational Corporations and the Restructuring of the Argentine Automotive Industry: Change or Continuity?

FITZSIMONS ALEJANDRO; GUEVARA SEBASTIAN

The New International Division of Labour: Global Transformations and Uneven National Development

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016; p. 183 - 213

This chapter studies the historical development of the Argentine automotive industry since the mid-50s to the present. It argues that, first, the peculiar characteristics of low scales of production, obsolete technology and the resulting low global competitiveness of the local auto industry in its initial stages were determined by the specific form of capital accumulation prevailing in Argentina as a result of its participation in the ?classic? international division of labour. As explained in Chapters One to Three, this specificity had at its core the process of appropriation by industrial capital of a portion of the relatively abundant ground rent ? in this case, by transnational automotive-manufacturers. Challenging the dominant point of view that the development of the NIDL led to the qualitative restructuration of the Argentinean automotive industry, this chapter examines the concrete changes within the labour process and the technological and organizational forms taken by car producers. In so doing, the chapter argues that the automotive industry in fact continued its development on the same basis as before. That is, on the basis of the appropriation by TNCs of a portion of agrarian ground-rent ? the magnitude of which circulating in the national economy rose again in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s after a sharp contraction in the late 1970s and 80s. It is concluded, therefore, that the NIDL did not replace the old form of industrialisation, related to the CIDL and based on the appropriation of ground rent.