ABSTRACT
In the context of the recurrent political oscillations that took place in the last decades in Latin America, a new approach strengthened among social sciences, which suggests the existence of an economic continuity: the intensification of the production of raw materials for the world market. This approach, which led to the characterization of these development models as “extractivist”, presents two main typologies in which the different countries of the region could be included: on the one hand, extractivism itself, linked to neoliberal governments; on the other, “neo-extractivism”, which is linked to centre-left governments. In this work we aim to offer a critical analysis of this approach with the purpose of giving an account of its potential to analyze the reality of Latin America, focusing especially on the case of Argentina. To this end, we will first summarize some of the most salient conceptual features of (neo)extractivism, and then move to its concrete aspects in Argentina. Next, we will present an alternative approach to the specific form that capital accumulation in Latin America takes, based on the Critique of Political Economy developed by Marx in Capital, which seeks to account for the specific form of capital accumulation in Argentina, taking accumulation in its global unity as the starting point. On this basis, we will critically analyze the appropriateness of scrutinizing the Argentine case from the (neo)extractivist approach.
KEYWORDS: extractivism; neo-extractivism; ground rent; Argentina; capital accumulation