ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the most recent developments in the political economics of capitalist expansion, in particular, those that indicate that mechanisms like the ones Marx described as primitive or original accumulation continue to be central for the reproduction of capitalism. Using the concept of entangled accumulation, we seek to articulate and expand these theoretical developments and to go beyond current orientalisms and occidentalisms found even among critical authors, who reclaim the concept of primitive accumulation to study the ills of neoliberal capitalism. By not reflecting upon their limited empirical evidence, these authors make the mistake of believing in the existence of a European predecessor and a peripheral successor in the history of capitalism. The links between Rio de Janeiro and its port with the European metropolis show with disconcerting clarity that since the 16th century, this piece of the earth was irreversibly integrated into the (pre)history of modernity and capitalism.
Various critical studies on capitalism, including the theory of regulation (Boyer and Saillard, 2005) and of crisis (Harvey, 2005), all have a common thread: each and every one of them recognises a continuous driving process behind capitalist accumulation: during a given period, capitalism produces the material conditions that guarantee its expansion and, consequently, ensure its preservation as a mode of production in the subsequent phase of expansion. That is, capitalism is a dynamic formation that depends on constant pressure for growth and thus must perpetually overcome self-imposed limitations generated during the reproduction of capital. In a nutshell, capitalism is a machinery that is highly sensitive to any limits to expansion – limits which, when reached, activate processes that change its skin in order to generate a new cycle of dynamic stability, expansion and growth (Dörre, 2015: 28).
