Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic dispossessions

ABSTRACT

Based on a study of urban interventions in the city of Rio de Janeiro conducted in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics, this article investigates how contemporary dispossessions relate, contribute, or do not contribute to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. To do so, I first define 3 types of dispossession: (a) redistributive dispossession; (b) expanding dispossession via capitalization and proletarianization; and (c) expanding dispossession via commodification and proletarianization. The first is only a redistribution of already produced surpluses, and the other 2 expand the accumulation of capital by converting means of production or subsistence into capital or commodities and increasing the availability of labor power. The theoretical distinction between different types of dispossession guides the analyses of spatial restructuring in the wake of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Acknowledgments

This article is a revised version of one delivered at the 111th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, August 2016. A draft of that paper had also been discussed with the Conference of Socialist Economists’ Trans-Pennine Working Group, in York, UK, in February 2016. The author thanks Werner Bonefeld, Fábio Bueno, Greig Charnock, Mercè Cortina, and Orlando dos Santos Júnior for their help in different tasks related to this work. The author is also grateful for the valuable suggestions and editorial assistance of Xuefei Ren, Casey Wagner, and the anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimers apply.

Funding

This work was supported by CNPq (Grant Number 441749/2014-3) and FAPDF (Grant Numbers 193.000.728/2015 and 0193.000475/2016).

Notes

1. All figures in U.S. dollars correspond to their equivalents in Brazilian currency, according to the exchange rate at the end of the month in which they were reported.

2. Relying on the potential for construction projects related to both events, an important foreign research company forecasted that the Brazilian cement industry could have annual growth of 9% in 2012–2016 vis-à-vis the 4% then expected for gross domestic product (Research and Markets, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CNPq (Grant Number 441749/2014-3) and FAPDF (Grant Numbers 193.000.728/2015 and 0193.000475/2016).

Notes on contributors

Daniel Bin

Daniel Bin teaches public policy at the University of Brasilia. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His recent works have focused on economic policies and their implications for labor and class relations and, more recently, on dispossessions of means of subsistence and production. Papers on these topics have been published in Capital & Class, Critical Sociology, Economia e Sociedade, and the World Review of Political Economy.