Introduction: Violence, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975005
• Author: Matthew Lorenzen,Andrew R. Smolski
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Subject Matter: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975005

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 4–27

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975005

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

4

Introduction

Violence, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in

Contemporary Latin America

by

Andrew R. Smolski and Matthew Lorenzen

This issue’s focus is on the structural roots of violence in Latin America and

on violence’s connections with capitalism and colonialism. After decades of

neoliberalization—the retreat of the state from its social obligations, the priva-

tization of public goods and services, deregulation in favor of business, a

regressive fiscal policy shifting the tax and fee burden onto the general popula-

tion, and stagnation in wages and benefits—it appears that the state’s remain-

ing function in the region is social control in the service of profit justified as a

fight against crime (Lorenzen and Orozco, 2016; Paley, 2015). Critical scholar-

ship counters this crime-fighting narrative by theoretically and empirically

demonstrating that the varied expressions of violence follow from a structural

and institutional arrangement to facilitate capital accumulation by subjugating

workers, peasants, black people, indigenous people, and any social group

deemed materially expendable by a hegemonic ideology that converts victims

into deviants.

As Marx (1909 [1867]: 785) wrote to explain the creation of the first masses of

capital—so-called primitive accumulation—that set capital accumulation in

motion, “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery,

murder, briefly force, play the great part.” Paley (2014: 38, 50) echoes Marx with

a similar formulation of accumulation-driven violence when she writes, “it

becomes easier to understand how the drug war facilitates the continuation of

a capitalist economic model . . . by [fostering] state and non-state militarization

and . . . the ability of transnational corporations to exploit labor and natural

Andrew R. Smolski is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

North Carolina State University, a past LAP research fellow, and a coordinating editor for Latin

American Perspectives. His research centers on analyzing the structures and institutions capable of

building a socially just and ecologically sustainable agri-food system. Currently, he is working on

a comparative-historical analysis of how incorporation into and exile from the capitalist world-

system conditions Cuba’s social metabolic order from 1898 to 2016. Matthew Lorenzen is an asso-

ciate researcher at the Institute of Geography of Mexico’s National Autonomous University. His

research interests include new ruralities and migration; rural gentrification; mixed migration

from, to, and through Mexico; the forest transition; and the governance of common-pool resources.

His current work focuses on the Mixteca Alta region in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. They thank

the editorial collective for supporting this project, which began as a prospectus in 2017. They feel

honored to have worked with the many excellent scholars whose contributions appear in this

issue and appreciate their patience and willingness to go through a long review process. They are

grateful for the extensive and supportive comments provided by Rosalind Bresnahan, Marjorie

Bray, Steve Ellner, Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli, and Bill Bollinger. The collective thanks them for

organizing this issue.

975005LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975005Latin American PerspectivesSmolski and Lorenzen / Introduction

research-article2020

Smolski and Lorenzen / INTRODUCTION 5

resources.” Today, accumulation-driven violence goes beyond the drug war,

being employed by states, corporations, and capitalists more generally both in

the legal and the illegal sphere. Violence, then, is a formative part of capitalist

social relations, premised as they are on the exploitation of labor, the disposses-

sion of populations, and the extraction of nature.

This critical argument concerning the structural roots of violence is absent

from common understandings of violence’s causes and of the possible solu-

tions to it. In the general political discourse and much of the literature, espe-

cially the grey literature (reports by government agencies, nongovernmental

organizations, and international organizations), violence is framed solely in

relation to criminality, generally bypassing the various links with capital accu-

mulation. While the traditional “law and order” approach, focusing on repres-

sive and punitive measures against violent criminal actors, is not as prevalent

as it once was, it remains a widespread perspective in Latin America. “Citizen-

security” approaches to violence and criminality have gained ground during

the past decade, focusing on factors such as corruption, impunity, the absence

of proper police training, deficient enforcement of the rule of law, poverty,

inequality, youth unemployment, school dropout rates, the lack of state ser-

vices, and unregulated urbanization (see, for example, IADB, 2014; Muggah

and Aguirre Tobón, 2018). These approaches frame violence as an impediment

to capital accumulation, with Jaitman etal. (2017) claiming that crime costs the

region 3.5 percent of its gross domestic product.

However, as Smolski argues in his review of books by Kees Koonings and

Dirk Kruijt (2015) and Eduardo Moncada (2016) in this issue, these factors

are not underlying causes. Rather, they are morbid symptoms that lead to

crime only after themselves being caused by the unequal distribution of

resources upon which capitalist profits are founded, a structural form of vio-

lence according to Johan Galtung (1969). Overlooking capitalism, colonial-

ism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and other structures upon which the

modern world-system is based, researchers and policy makers are able to see

the world through Panglossian goggles, missing structural causes and treat-

ing symptoms.

In this introduction, we synthesize a theoretical framework that encom-

passes the findings and arguments made by the contributors to this issue. This

framework provides readers a logic for analyzing violence with a critical lens,

along with a counterhegemonic narrative on violence’s root causes. We start by

recapitulating Marxist perspectives on violence and capital accumulation,

according to which capitalism was not only born out of acts of violence (most

notably the dispossession of the peasantry) but continues to depend on vio-

lence to expand, while also creating social injustices that can be understood in

the framework of structural violence. We then describe the role of colonialism

in legitimizing and normalizing violence against victims marked by subjective,

ascribed status, such as race and indigeneity, through a cultural violence that

hollows out and deprecates alternative modes of being. Finally, we focus on

various forms of resistance to accumulation-driven violence throughout the

continent. Indeed, our thinking is that there is much to learn from these forms

of resistance regarding both the structural roots of violence itself and possible

lessons from successful strategies to build peace and alternatives to capitalism.