GEOPOLITICS AND PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

STATES, NATIONAL-COLONIAL ECONOMIES AND THE WORLD MARKET

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the Marxian critique of primitive accumulation and its geopolitical dimension, emphasizing the historical processes of systematic violence, expropriation, and the dissolution of pre-capitalist modes of production orchestrated by states and commercial actors. Its central objective is to analyze how primitive accumulation— rather than constituting a localized or exceptional process —was structurally embedded in the emergence of the world market and in the consolidation of geopolitical hierarchies between core states and colonial peripheries. This study adopts a theoretical and bibliographic approach grounded in the critical analysis of the works of Karl Marx and contemporary scholarship, drawing on a historical-dialectical framework of analysis. The findings indicate that the English experience, which Marx treats as a key empirical reference, provides important insights into the simultaneous dissolution of feudal social relations, the genesis of capitalist labor relations, the formation of national economies, and the spatial expansion of primitive accumulation—processes intrinsically linked to the rise, consolidation, and subsequent displacement of major geopolitical centers of commercial, manufacturing, financial, and slave-based accumulation, including Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England, within the broader dynamics of an expanding world market.