When Capitalists Collide is a study of the politics of investment conflict. But Nicaraguan investors viewed matters differently from the revolution’s theorists, and the outcome, familiar enough to those who know Nicaraguan history or for that matter the Egyptian case and the early history of the July 1952 Revolution, was a costly conflict between investors and the state and a takeover in stages of the economy’s commanding heights (Vilas 1986 Colburn 1986). Vilas and many others believed that once the estates were confiscated, a patriotic national-capital fraction would be inspired to undertake new long term-investments in production. Over dinner, Vilas described the thinking that led to the Sandinistas’ land-reform project and, in particular, the idea that the expropriations served the objective interests of the country’s industrial bourgeoisie. In 1983, I had the opportunity to meet the Argentinean economist Carlos Vilas, who was then an adviser to Nicaragua’s revolutionary government. The problem of national capitalists and capitalisms has never been simply a question for intellectuals to argue about, and adopting the conventional assumptions has at times spelled real disaster. Yet, while the insurgent moment continues to fade into the past and a generation of radical intellectuals matures, ideas about capitalists seem particularly resistant to change. The premise behind this book is that our answers need rethinking, as others in the field seem to recognize ( Canack 1984 Block 1987 Evans and Stephens 1988 Haggard 1989 Hawes and Liu 1993).
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The answers to these questions are a window to the core assumptions and values that underpinned the insurgent movement in North American social sciences and to the currents-from dependencia to dependent development, from structural theories of the state to institutionalist analysis of bargaining, from class conflict to elite pacts-that are the legacy of the anti-imperialist intellectual project of the 1960s.
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What do capitalists do and what should they do? These questions are critical to comparative political economy of development and, even more so, to the lives of millions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995.