On the reception of ’Accumulation by dispossession’ in Latin America: ’extractivism’, dependencia and primitive accumulation intertwinned

There is a growing consensus that the recent trend of ’pink-tide’ governments in Latin America have been favoring different sorts of so-called extractivism, despite their progressive politics in other fields. Extractivism is understood as exploitation of oil and minerals, sometimes extended to the intensive use of natural resources (such as in exports of paper pulp or soya beans). Sometimes, this is equated to the idea of an ’extractive mode of accumulation’, that is capital accumulation stemming mainly from the extraction and export of natural resources. This paper tries to trace the intellectual and theoretical grounds of these diverse set of ideas, by recognizing two different streams that fuel its recent development. First, it analyses the explicit references to "accumulation by dispossesion", the idea first drafted by Rosa Luxemburg and recently restated by Harvey, plus the debate on the new enclosures (Midnight Notes Collective, The Commoner n2). Then, dependencia as another source of inspiration more relevant in the Latin American context is analyzed. Both this latter sort of ’green version’ of dependency theory and the uses of the debate on recurrent primitive accumulation are criticized for their relevance and empirical relevance. As a conclusion, a set of false dichotomies arising from this eclectic framework and widely used by political movements is critised, such as "national versus foreign capital", "productive vs extractive capital", "autonomous development vs dependent extractivism"