State-Corporate Crime and the Process of Capital Accumulation: Mapping a Global Regime of Permission from Galicia to Morecambe Bay

This paper seeks to develop the principal concerns of the state-corporate crime literature by drawing connections between two incidents that occurred 15 months apart: the sinking of the oil tanker the Prestige in Galicia in November 2002 and the killing of 24 Chinese migrant workers at Morecambe Bay in the North West of England in February 2004. It begins by introducing the key features of the two cases, before exploring how they might be described and understood as state-corporate crimes. It then identifies a tendency within the literature to analyse state-corporate crimes as ‘moments of rupture’ in the regulatory relationship. Seeking to move beyond such ‘moments of rupture’, the paper argues for an understanding of regulatory relationships as part of a broader regime of permission that seeks the smooth and uninterrupted accumulation of capital. It thus identifies the ‘process’ that must be analysed as a process of capital accumulation. This process is illustrated by focussing on the spheres of production and distribution in this story of capital accumulation. In the course of describing the complex ‘regime of permission’, the paper uncovers a structure of impunity that generally enables the most powerful architects and beneficiaries of state-corporate crime to sustain a process of capital accumulation