ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the increasingly important role of violence in securing and promoting conditions for capital accumulation in the era of globalization. By drawing on core patterns in the relationship between political violence and neoliberal restructuring revealed across Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras, the chapter offers a foundation for an emergent theory of pro-capitalist violence. The central proposition is that the implementation of neoliberal policies, which have greatly enhanced capital’s ability to secure access to resources and exploitable labor, has been reliant on violence employed by state and non-state armed actors against social movements from below. The chapter demonstrates that the different modalities of pro-capitalist violence work in tandem with the economic objectives set up by national governments and international institutions and while being facilitated by local security legislation. This work aims to make a critical intervention by overcoming the constrains of mainstream approaches to explaining violence in the period of globalization that are centered around issues of crime, corruption, and institutions-building, all of which have been treated as autonomous from class structures and modes of accumulation. In the way of contributing to progressive social transformation, the chapter directs our attention to the structural nature of pro-capitalist violence and the entities that reproduce it.
