The last decades saw a resurgent interest in Marx's concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ and particularly in the extent to which it not only gave birth to capitalism but also forms a systemic response to capitalist crises, as Rosa Luxemburg already argued in her famous analysis of colonialism. Especially influential in this debate has been David Harvey's re-conceptualisation of the process as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which broadens Luxemburg's notion of the external sphere required for capitalist expansion to include not only colonies, but any sphere that promises new opportunities for the deployment of capital. Crucial to Harvey's argument is that such external spheres are actively re-created, however temporarily, for example by factory relocations that push former industrial centres out of circuits of accumulation only to re-insert them later. Harvey's concept was criticised, in particular for the indiscriminate inclusion also of standard ‘economic’ processes of capital accumulation, such as bankruptcy, and for thereby weakening its analytical strength. Nevertheless, it has stimulated debates in a range of fields from geography to sociology and anthropology. In the monograph under review, Sérgio Costa and Guilherme Leite Gonçalves contribute to the debate by developing the concept of ‘entangled accumulation’ to overcome some of the problems that pervade Harvey's concept as well as the alternatives suggested by many of his critiques. Most importantly, these are the alleged externality of violent means of accumulation to capitalism and the Orientalist assumption underlying these approaches, namely that capitalist development allegedly follows a Western precedent subsequently spreading across the world. They offer a detailed analysis of the port district of Rio de Janeiro with its long history of integration, dis- and then re-integration into circuits of accumulation as a paradigmatic example of entangled accumulation.
The authors begin with vignettes of the latest round of re- and dis-integration of Rio's port district, that is, the events unfolding since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared Rio the winner of the race to host the 2016 Olympics in 2009. In the first chapter, Costa and Gonçalves lay the theoretical ground of their argument by connecting and contrasting the positions of the main protagonists in the debate on ‘primitive accumulation’, from Adam Smith, Marx and Luxemburg to more recent followers of the latter, such as Harvey. Despite seeing many merits in Luxemburg's approach, they follow Lena Lavinas and Virgínia Fontes, who criticise it for misconceiving dispossession as a process operating outside of capitalism proper, thereby creating a dichotomy between ‘normalised’ capitalist accumulation operating through – in Marx's famous words – the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ and another one operating through violence in external spheres. By contrast, they argue that expropriation forms the violent core of any form of capitalist accumulation, primary expropriations (as Fontes calls it) separating producers from the means of production as well as all subsequent secondary expropriations effecting the concentration of capital, be it through fraud and blatant theft or through law. Entangled accumulation, as Costa and Gonçalves define it, draws on these insights by foregrounding that capitalist accumulation fundamentally rests on the interconnection and interpenetration of different mechanisms of accumulation, of different spaces as well as of different time periods. In the following chapter, the authors turn to their case study and focus on the relations that developed between the port and the town in Rio since the late sixteenth century, particularly on the ways these relations transformed during different historical periods, reflecting as well as effecting changes in Brazil's integration into global circuits of accumulation. In Chapters 3 and 4, the authors elaborate on these different phases of capitalist accumulation: from mercantile capitalism between the seventeenth and nineteenth century − during which Rio's port gained questionable fame as the world's largest slave market, generating enormous profits for some and unspeakable suffering for millions of others − to industrial capitalism after the slave economy gave way to a wage-labour economy. In its wake, the port proved insufficient for handling the growing volumes of commodities, lost its position as Brazil's nodal point for circuits of capital accumulation, and was eventually disconnected from them in the 1960s when the capital moved to Brasília. Most recently, during the financial capitalism of the 2000s, Rio's rich youth and then real-estate developers rediscovered the port district and aimed to turn it into the Porto Maravilha. In Chapter 5, the last chapter, the authors zoom in on the crisis at the port that became glaring once the 2016 Olympics were over, and left behind half-finished buildings and deserted open spaces. The crisis heralds yet another phase of decommodification, only to open up space for recommodification – that was already on the horizon when the book was written, in the form of a new large casino. They show that the crisis also left behind staggering unemployment rates and looted workers’ subsistence funds that had backed the project, and hence that accumulation around the Porto Maravilha project dwelled on blatant secondary expropriations. Although the crisis is obviously related to crises at regional, national and global levels, not isolated, Costa and Gonçalves argue that seeing these relations simply as driven by over-accumulated capital does not help to grasp their complex entanglements across space and time through which these crises unfold, and through which capitalist accumulation in general expands.
The dense empirical account the authors offer undergirds this argument, indeed very convincingly. Beyond its explanatory power for their case study, the argument is also welcome because it does not celebrate local histories and geographies for their own sake, but for the dialectical relations they reveal between different regions and eras. Equally convincing is the focus they put on expropriation as the fundamentally violent core of all forms of accumulation and on the role the state and state laws play in this regard. In my view, the argument would have benefitted empirically from comparisons with other existing case studies that critically engage with neo-Luxemburgian readings of ‘primitive accumulation’, and theoretically from an engagement with Trotsky's concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ that also centres on the entanglement of different social formations and historical trajectories, and that some anthropologists and historians have revived recently. Furthermore, a more thorough focus on resistance against expropriations would have been welcome, too. The authors allude to such resistance at several junctures when, for example, they argue that negotiations with the local population forced developers to somewhat adjust their plans, or that subaltern ‘culture’ plays an ambivalent role, because it opens up (restricted) potential for resistance but also ends up being commodified. However, we learn relatively little about the social background of protestors or about their social and political allies. A closer engagement with resistance would have been desirable also because one of the main theses of Harvey's accumulation by dispossession – one that was rightly criticised, too – is that the anti-imperialist struggles against it are different from, and usually forsaken by, the anti-capitalist struggles within allegedly ‘normal’ capitalist accumulation by economic means. But these are suggestions to expand the authors’ argument rather than points of critique. In any case, as I hope to have shown, with this highly readable book Costa and Gonçalves make an important contribution to the debates on the contemporaneity of ‘primitive accumulation’ that should be strongly recommended to sociologists, historians and anthropologists working on capitalism in Brazil and beyond.
