To understand the BAM we need to analyse the ways in which capital manifests in the countryside. Capital is always looking for the material conditions for its creation. Its existence depends on its capacity to expand and the possibility to build the conditions to absorb a surplus. To do this, it needs to control – temporarily and spatially – production and labour. But the same conditions that facilitate capital’s expansion and accumulation – labour and nature – can also lead to its destruction and crisis. That is why when we see capital’s manifestations in the territory we always see its intrinsic crisis. Crisis is the unavoidable and necessary way for continued capital accumulation. Capitalism, as the predominant mode of production shaping social relations, tries to overcome its accumulation crises by postponing in time and expanding in space its forms of realization. The so-called “spatio-temporal fix” becomes a metaphor for capital’s solutions to crises. As Harvey (2004) proposes, capital requires temporary displacements (capital investment in long-term projects or social expenses, such as education and research) and spatial displacements, through the opening of new markets, commodification, productive capacities, and new possibilities of resources and labour in new places. These displacements reveal that capital’s reproduction is possible due to processes of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004) which requires the continuous expropriation and appropriation of territories, resources, and labour. As Luxemburg (1951, 368) puts it:
Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor power for its wage system (…) Since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organizations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development.
In Latin America, where the relative costs of expropriating territories and natural resources is low, extractivism is functional to capital since it reproduces the dynamics of dispossession required for capital accumulation (Seoane 2012). Extractivism expands with mechanism of accumulation by dispossession that “gain(s) immediate possession of important sources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc.”; it “liberate(s) labour power and coerce(s) it into service”; and it “introduce(s) a commodity economy” and “separate(s) trade and agriculture” (Luxemburg 1951, 369). Extractive capital attempts to enter non-commercial relations with the environment and human beings and eliminates forms of resistance by turning them into capitalist mercantile society. Accumulation by dispossession imposes a new way to link social relations where exchange value, represented by money, is the dominant social nexus.
For this reason, it is argued here that violence is at the heart of extractivism. The consolidation of extractivism involves the destruction of the material, cultural and environmental structure of socio-territorial networks, appropriating the environment, labour, skills, and knowledge, with similar mechanisms of theft and predation described by Karl Marx in Volume 1 of Capital. But, is contemporary extractive capital the same as the forms of predation described by Marx in the origins of capitalism? Is it even the same as the mechanisms of Latin America’s colonization? We could say that extractivism is a condition for the daily reproduction of capital due to the way in which accumulation by dispossession manifests in territories rich in natural resources. But we also have to say that, nowadays, the past mechanisms of theft and predation have evolved and expanded in modern societies in two new ways that are fundamental to understand. First, present forms of extractivism often entail accumulation by dispossession on a scale infinitely higher than the original accumulation process due in part to scientific and technological innovations. Scale, in this context, does not refer to a quantitative number, but to the complete resignification of a “commodity” and the antagonistic relations that consolidate this commodification and reproduction of capital. Second, although capital has consolidated the production of knowledge and technologies as a constitutive element of the dynamics of exploitation, the subsumption of nature, labour, and knowledge under capital has surpassed the limits of the imagination (Gilly and Roux 2009; Roux 2008). For this reason, it is fundamental to understand present ways of knowledge production through a permanent process of production–expropriation–appropriation of knowledge.
This process helps us understand how the production of knowledge becomes contentious, subject to the antagonistic class forces in capitalist society. Knowledge, as an objective condition of labour, has to be separated from the same labour that generates or produces it and becomes a territory in dispute (see Giraldo and Rosset 2018). As knowledge is produced and expropriated by dominant class forces it becomes commodified and converted from “the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few” (Marx 1887, 541). This process involves a constant resignification and co-optation of knowledge: its reduction to a “simple way of calculation and technical control” where “modernization has repressed the variety, variability, and the indeterminacy of the world to adjust it to the demands of production” (Rullani 2004, 100).
To understand the extractive features of capital it is important to analyse not only the specific function of this knowledge and the technologies it produces, but to recognize the concrete paths that shape the production of knowledge, the dynamics used in knowledge expropriation and dispossession, and the characteristics of a reappropriation of this knowledge (Poth 2019). Within extractivism, science crystallizes the production–expropriation–appropriation of knowledge as exchange value with different mechanisms to subsume labour to capital, and to subsume itself into the creation of value, deepening dispossession and consolidating the idea of knowledge as a commodity, ultimately expanding the reproduction of capital.
This production of knowledge coalesces in universities and laboratories dependent on private sector funding. In effect, information produced is private and researchers are limited by these corporations that impose confidentiality agreements (Lander 2006). As Levins and Lewontin (1985) express, this process promotes individualized, meritocratic, pragmatic, and reductionist practices within labs, and consolidates the strategy of academic secrecy to retain the information. It supports scientific competition, aligning research with the interests of companies that invest in labs. In this way, capital controls what, for whom, and how researchers investigate.
Capital needs to hoard knowledge, dispossess other culture’s knowledge and biopirate genetic resources (Augsten 2005; Roux 2008). Another way to analyse dispossession within research spaces is the institutionalization and movement of public knowledge into private spheres. In this way, if years ago the production of public knowledge allowed disputes about dynamics, objectives, and receivers of research, nowadays disputes are eliminated with the consolidation of public science that has to produce knowledge in association with private corporations for markets, often through public–private partnerships. As never before, the Schumpeterian paradigm2 of innovation crystallizes within the scientific system, connecting economic growth with access to innovations. This paradigm can be seen in the creation of associations between companies and research centres financed by states, technological transference, and the creation of goods with high added value (Langer 2011).
Finally, legal mechanisms to appropriate knowledge, such as intellectual property rights, have consolidated forms of accumulation at the global level. To create value, a commodity must be ab...
