CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Introduction

The Concept of Dispossession or Accumulation by Dispossession

The Anglo-Saxon geographer David Harvey (2001), supported by Marxist theory, argues that capitalism
needs to intensify and expand in order to continue accumulating capital. To contribute to the thesis of
Harvey and to be more precise in the particular analysis, I propose to return to the categories of formal
and real subsumption proposed by Marx (2009), as well as the standard category of reproduction of
capital proposed by Osorio (2004) to affirm that: capitalism needs to subsume territories and social
formations in order to reproduce itself as a system, as a mode of production and as a mode of social
reproduction oriented solely and exclusively to accumulate capital. The categories of formal
subsumption and real subsumption are proposed as tools to analyze and explain the reproduction of
capitalism and the reproduction of capital in general terms, as well as the specific forms that it adopts in
each territory and social formation in particular according to the specific needs of each capital
reproduction pattern.

Capitalism as a first condition needs to impose in each territory and social formation the formal
subsumption, that is, to impose via the violence the objective material conditions of the specifically
capitalist mode of production. That is to say, the "split between workers and property over the
conditions of realization of work" (Marx, 2000, p.892). And its consequent conversion into wage earners.
That is why it is formal, because it is only a change of form in exploitation. This approach enriches what
Marx and Engels had already pointed out in the Manifesto "Spurred by the need to give ever greater
output to its products, the bourgeoisie travels the whole world. It needs to nest everywhere, to
establish itself everywhere, to create links everywhere "(1970, pp. 26 and 27). Arguments that serve as
premises for what I call expansion of the socioterritorial logic of capital.

They are the objective material conditions of the specifically capitalist mode of production, which drive
(and presuppose) the dispossession or the so-called original accumulation on the one hand, and on the
other, the monetary, wage relationship, between a class with means and tools of production and
another class without these, what in this work is called the socioterritorial logic of capital. Logic that
generates specific capitalist territorialities according to the needs of each reproduction pattern.

Once the objective material conditions of capital have been established, that is, the formal subsumption
or the socioterritorial logic of capital according to socio-territorial analysis, capital begins the process of
real subsumption of labor and land. Process consisting, according to the argument presented here, in
modifying the spatial structures and social institutions of each social formation according to the needs of
each capital reproduction pattern. Modifying the organization of production, transforming all the
relations of production and, therefore, the territoriality of each social formation, which includes all
social relations within each social formation. This is achieved through the introduction of technological
innovations in the development of productive forces that allow it to increase productivity and intensify
production, while at the same time enabling the exploitation of natural resources that were previously
not technologically exploitable or that were used in a limited or only different way. Process that have
determining effects on the territorial and international division of labor. To these multiple processes
responds what Harvey calls, in a very general way, to intensify and that for this author, is the specific
territoriality of each capital reproduction pattern

Now, the capital reproduction pattern category is developed by Jaime Osorio and "aims to account for
the ways in which capital reproduces itself in specific historical periods and in specific economic-
geographic and social spaces, whether they are regions or social economic formations. "(Osorio, 2004,
p.36). In that sense, this category "allows to establish mediations between the most general levels of
analysis and less abstract or concrete historical levels" 6. At the same time that "it allows historicizing
the movement of the economy in light of the modalities that reproduction assumes at different
historical moments, be it in the imperial world or in the dependent world, within the framework of their
interrelations" 7.

In this paper we address the territoriality of the neoliberal capital reproduction pattern, or in other
words, the neoliberal territoriality. That we will characterize later. In short, the socioterritorial logic of
capital responds in general terms to the concretion of formal subsumption. And the territoriality of each
capital reproduction pattern responds to the particular forms that each reproduction pattern adopts
according to the historical-geographical and cultural characteristics of each social formation and the
development of the productive forces. In other words, the territoriality of each reproduction pattern
represents the effort of capital to concretize real subsumption by modifying the entire social order and
the production relations of each social formation. What it includes: the determining social relationship
(whether land, labor or capital), nature and all the material base that produces spatial structures and
social institutions. Elements that together constitute the relations of material production and social
reproduction of each social formation.

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For Holloway the Theory of exploitation is not a theory of domination, but of the fragility of domination,
because it is being said that capital depends on us (the subjects), that is, on the dependency relationship
that is sustained at work as the basis of the crisis of capitalism. In other words, as he himself maintains:

If accumulation by dispossession is limited only to the fact that capital depends on the wealth of the
land, this does not help us, because it is neither coal nor gold that will make the revolution. So, to
understand capitalism, that is, capital as a fragile relation, we have to say that capitalism depends on
subjects, on living people. It does not help us to say that it depends on minerals, for example; there we
are losing the thread a bit (Composto and Lorena, 2012: s / p).

In short, for Holloway it is more useful to think of dispossession in terms of a strategy to overcome the
crisis of exploitation, and not as another form of accumulation. If we say that capital depends not only
on the exploitation of labor, but on the increasingly accelerated, increasingly intensive exploitation of
labor. John Holloway's position coincides with that of Massimo De Angelis (2012), who argues that
capital unfolds processes of original accumulation ex novo that deepen the privatization and
commodification of the common, since work becomes an obstacle to its reproduction and generates
rigidities in the dynamics of accumulation. De Angelis (2012) argues that primitive accumulation can not
be reduced to a past historical event, but is necessarily present in "mature" capitalist systems as an
inherent process that, given the conflicting nature of capitalist relations, assumes a character
continuous.

In the same vein, Bonefeld (2012) further details the concept, it has been argued that primitive
accumulation is reproduced constantly, either in terms of renewed separation of new populations from
their means of production and subsistence, or in terms of reproduction of the wage relationship in the
"established" nexuses of capital. The first seeks to bring new workers under the control of capital, and
the second, to contain them there as social categories "liberated" from their conditions.

As it is well exposed by Composto and Ouviña:

Returning to a plethora of authors from critical Marxism who have raised the need to rethink the
classical notion of "original accumulation" developed by Marx, not as a moment historically situated at
the dawn of European capitalism (that is, as a founding milestone in the separation of the workers
regarding their means of subsistence), and therefore something already overcome, but as an ongoing
process and permanent. Beyond the nuances, in all cases it is postulated as a theoretical precept to stop
conceiving the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession under the key of a merely transitory event
(locatable, for example, in rural England in the eighteenth century, and relevant only in terms to allow
understanding the genesis of industrial capitalism in that remote country), to the extent that it would
become a constant social practice that must be reproduced again and again under penalty of seeing the
very conditions of capitalist production (s / a: 7, 8).

It is precisely from the reconstruction and / or renewal of the original accumulation, the importance of
the Italian author De Angelis, to rethink the accumulation of capital as a policy of "new enclosures" and
privatization of common goods occurred in the last two decades, both in vast regions of Western Europe
and in almost the whole of Latin America, as Composto and Ouviña point out:

These new enclosures are gaining momentum and amount to accumulation by dispossession with the
progressive privatization of public assets deployed since the 90s in our region, hand in hand with the
neoliberal recipe driven by the heat of the Washington Consensus, far from being something alien to
The policy of "enclosures" described by Marx, constitutes the historically specific form that this assumes
in the framework of the process of capitalist restructuring initiated during the seventies (s / a: 8).

This feature of privatization, which is gaining strength with neoliberalism and explained very well by
Harvey in his book New Imperialism, expresses continuous privatizations of communal spaces, public
assets, forests, lakes and mountains throughout our continent, should be read as part of a broad
strategy of capitalist accumulation, based on predatory mechanisms that seek to convert these vital
instances and common goods into products with a high level of profitability. And precisely from here,
nodal point of this work, it is analyzed how this high profitability is in charge of the transnationals, as
long as they are secured with the unrestricted support of what has been called "National State of
competition" that, in both entity responsible for creating the space for accumulation, becomes a partner
in the expropriation, but in an asymmetric session position in the face of transnational interests.

In the tenor of the expression used by Composto (2012) and which fits well in the aforementioned
argument, the capitalist dispossession of nature has become one of the distinctive-and tragic-signs of
our time. Latin America is one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet and, not coincidentally, it is
one of the main destinations for the privatization and commodification of natural goods by
transnationals and states. It is worth quoting Composto (2012) who has used the words of David Harvey
and accurately reflected the process of dispossession or what is known as accumulation by
dispossession:

In short, the processes of dispossession are constitutive and intrinsic to the logic of the accumulation of
capital or, in other words, represent the necessary counterpart of expanded reproduction. If the latter is
presented as a mainly economic process -the production of surplus value-, which takes precedence
during periods of stability and sustained growth, dispossession is generally expressed in pre-economic
extra-economic processes and takes the reins in times of crisis, way of "space-time solution" or "flight
forward". This means that the production of surpluses pushes on the internal and external borders of
the system, for the permanent incorporation of new territories, areas, social relations and / or future
markets that allow their profitable realization. In this sense, both logics are "organically intertwined",
that is, they feed each other, as part of a dual and cyclical process that is inseparable (Harvey, 2004: 45).

Social territoriality

Now, from the point of view of the socioterritorial analysis proposed here, territoriality is something
that allows us to interweave the relations between land, power, economy, political, cultural and legal
with sovereignty, justice, conflict, violence, the social production of space and the socio-territorial
organization of each social formation; and that therefore determines and determines social
reproduction. The above, constitute the elements that feed the definition here exposed of territoriality.
Which is understood as "the set of practices and social actions of a specific social formation that
materially and symbolically produce the space. Giving particular meanings to the earth, building a
determined and determining social relationship that establishes a social order that produces spatial
structures and social institutions that regulate social life in space under the control of the social
formation that carries out these practices and actions. Protecting and defending the material conditions
that allow the reproduction of said practices and actions that define and characterize specifically that
social formation ". Space under the control of a social formation defined as territory and that is
understood as "the base and material and symbolic condition that determines social reproduction".

This long definition can be synthesized as the set of practices and actions of a social formation that
produces spatial structures and social institutions and which I call social territoriality. And it is a social
territoriality because it is specific to each social formation and not intrinsic to the human species as
proposed by Sack (1986). And if the social territoriality is produced by each social formation, this
production is determined not only by its history and the development of its productive forces, but by the
ontological conceptions that the social formations have of the world.

The productive forces condition the material production and its reproduction. They condition the
material, the objective: the political economy; the right, the norm and its application. The ontological
conception of reality conditions the symbolic production and its social reproduction. It conditions the
worldview, the aesthetic, the subjective that socially becomes objective and that manifests itself as
culture. This ontological conception that manifests itself in the culture of the peoples, determines its
teleological conception of the world and objects. Determine the reason and the reason for his social
work, his practice. As a whole, the productive forces as the ontological conception of the world,
condition the ideology and social practices of these social formations. Therefore, social territoriality is
part of the social production of space8 that geography studies through socioterritorial analysis. The
socioterritorial category is a tool of analysis, which allows us to account for these two dimensions: social
and spatial. The social dimension is reflected in the social institutions and historical social relationships
that are behind these institutions. And the spatial dimension is reflected in the territorial, which implies
the historical social production of spatial structures according to the culture and political economy of
each social formation.

The struggle between territorialities

The socioterritorial logic of capital, by expanding and by subsuming territories and social formations in a
formal and real way, is destroying social institutions and forms of work organization of the social
formations in which it is imposed; at the same time that it modifies the spatial structures of each
territory by imposing the capitalist territoriality of the reproduction pattern of that specific historical-
geographic context. The expansion and intensification of the formal and real subsumption of capital
modifies the socioterritorial production of each social formation that is destroying in its path. What is
most evident when studying the agrarian or property structure of each country, which refers to agrarian
conflicts; as well as the social relations, social institutions and spatial structures of each social formation,
which refers to socioterritorial conflicts and which presupposes and includes agrarian conflicts.

However, the expansion of the socioterritorial logic of capital and the territorialities that each capital
reproduction pattern produces and reproduces are not imposed peacefully in the territories of the
different social formations. It is imposed through violence, through "iron and blood," Marx would say.
So it is very important to analyze the resistance to dispossession, exploitation, subordination,
domination and control that capital imposes. It is important to analyze the resistance struggles, the
subjects that carry them out, the forms and ways as the social formations (social movements, peasants,
Indian peoples, etc.) oppose and refuse to be subordinated, dominated and controlled by capital.

Therefore, socio-territorial analysis studies the struggle between territorialities, between the
territorialities of each capital reproduction pattern and the multiple territorialities of the different social
formations that capital seeks to subordinate9. Let's analyze it from the Mexican countryside and the
Nahua coast of Michoacán.