1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 3 Capitalism on the frontier of agroextractivism Raúl Delgado Wise Today we are witnessing a new phase in the national and global development of the productive forces where intellectual property and ownership of patents has become a key component of the imperial(ist) system of domination 1 under the aegis of neoliberal capitalism (Rodriguez, 2008). This phenomenon is taking place within the institutional and policy framework of a system set up in the 1980s to liberate the ‘forces of economic freedom’ (capital, the market, private enterprise, globalisation) from the regulatory constraints of the welfare-developmental state and a system of ‘global governance’ where the concentration and centralisation of capital has reached unprecedented levels. The diverse and multifaceted dynamics of this process have been extensively studied and analysed in diferent regional and national contexts. However, a relatively understudied aspect of this process is the profound restructuring undergone by the system of technological innovation at the heart of the capitalist development process over the last two and a half decades, where the concentration and the private appropriation of the means of knowledge creation and technological innovation—what Marx defned as the general intellect—has reached major proportions. Far from favouring a progressive or revolutionary development of society’s productive forces (in the direction of both development and socialism) this trend has placed a number of countries on the periphery of the world system on a regressive path in the advancement of knowledge, exacerbating the propensity of the world system towards crisis. The aim of this chapter is to unravel some fundamental features of this restructuring and capitalist development process in what David Harvey (2005) has described as the neoliberal era and Samir Amin (2013), from a world systems and monopoly capital perspective, has termed the era of generalised monopolies. With reference to the systemic dynamics and forces at work in these conditions this chapter is concerned with, and has a dual focus on, the expansion of corporate capital in the agricultural sector and the advance of resource-seeking, or extractive, capital in this sector. Unlike the system whose dynamics were theorised and analysed by Marx, extractive capitalism 2 is based not so much on the exploitation of labour as the looting and pillage of natural resource wealth. Needless to add, these two forms of capitalism are not exclu- sive one of the other, and at every stage in the evolution of capitalism they are