Primitive Accumulation in the Late Twentieth Century: Mexico, the United States, and NAFTA

Between 1971 and 1994, American capital succeeded in redirecting state action toward the interests of the largest transnational firms, facilitating extreme concentrations of wealth and capital alongside a profound defeat of organized labor and the dismantling of social programs. The post-Keynesian political economy produced the North American Free Trade Agreement, an event which demonstrated both the ideological capture of the American state by neoliberalism and the purpose of the ideology as a social force (as opposed to a strictly economic one). This article investigates the neoliberal turn generally and NAFTA specifically as engines of social dislocation in North America and primitive accumulation in Mexico. Trade liberalizations between 1985 and 1994 destabilized Mexican and indigenous peasant communities in the hinterland, resulting in mass rural flight. This produced a situation where the urbanization of rural producers benefited several groups of market actors —namely American agribusiness firms, maquiladora owners and their American beneficiaries.