Primitive accumulation and the expansion of capital into the Amazon: A marxist perspective on the environmental devastation caused by the gold fever on the boards of the interoceanic highway in Madre de Dios

Abstract

This paper aims for a contribution of a Marxist perspective on the recent process of acceleration of the environmental devastation caused by informal/illegal gold mining in Madre de Dios (MdD) region, on the Amazon of Peru. This acceleration is chronologically related with two factors: I) the construction of the interoceanic highway, the first highway to ever cross this area, establishing the path from where the new mining zones were open, II) the cycle of valorization and record prices of gold, especially on the post 2008 crisis period. Therefore, to approach this process of transformation of the amazon forest into a new space of capital accumulation, after an introduction that serves to better describe the context of the gold fever in MdD, this paper proposes a review of the concept of primitive accumulation, departing from Marx's thinking and others Marxists authors. Among those, is highlighted the geographical perspective of David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession, suggested to update the debate concerning contemporary processes of capital accumulation. The conclusion of the paper is to demonstrate the validity of approaches that identifies the continuous character of the process of primitive accumulation in order to point out the dialect value of this approaches to investigate the international relations of contexts such as the gold fever in MdD.