This book analyzes contemporary dispossessions in Brazil, drawing on the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation to show how processes of proletarianization, capitalization, and commodification each relate in distinct ways to capitalist accumulation.

With an emphasis on the processes by which immediate producers are turned into wage-dependent producers, and the means of subsistence are transformed into the means of capitalist production or commodities, the book presents studies of the movements of capital—as well as those aimed at defending the commons—showing how contemporary dispossession is related to capitalist accumulation. Ranging through the 1964–1985 military dictatorship, the transition to neoliberalism in the 1990s, the legislative coup that ousted the Workers Party from federal office in 2016, and the Bolsonaro government and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the book demonstrates the socioeconomic shifts that have occurred in Brazil in recent decades.