Agro-Industry Expansion Through “Strategic Alliances”: The Shifting Dynamics of Palm Oil-Related Dispossession

Abstract

In order to open up new terrains to capital accumulation, agro-industries expand into, transform, and, in the process, frequently destroy socio-natural spaces where a noncapitalist logic of production and subsistence hitherto predominated. The expropriations upon which such capital accumulation rests have more often than not been of a forcible and violent character. Marx, writing about the “primitive accumulation” that separates producers from the means of production (1990, p. 875), noted that what he viewed as the prehistory of capital is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Harvey (2003), among others, has pointed to the continuity of the features of expropriation described by Marx as primitive accumulation, coining the term “accumulation by dispossession” to refer to this (see also Gutiérrez-Gomez, this volume).