Agricultural dispossessions during the 1964–1985 Brazilian dictatorship

The objective of this study is to analyze dispossession processes in rural Brazil that took place during the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, when Brazilian capitalist agriculture had its most significant impulse. From a theoretical perspective, dispossessions that served capital expansion can be distinguished from those that did not. The first group includes processes that led to proletarianization of immediate producers who had been peasants, or to the capitalization of lands that they had been using for subsistence. Among processes that did not expand capital are those that involved the simple redistribution of the means of production—including land—or surpluses. State violence was one of the mechanisms used to execute many of these processes, which supported the expansion project of the dictatorial regime, particularly in northern Brazil. By converting means of subsistence—land—into capital, or immediate producers—peasants—into proletarians, these processes reproduced in contemporary formats what Marx had called primitive accumulation and that in late capitalism I call expanding dispossession.