Dispossessions in Bolsonaro's Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The Bolsonaro administration and its class allies used the pandemic as a political opportunity and the state as a tool to advance dispossessions. • Dispossessions such as debt interest payments or privatizations simply redistribute surpluses or means of production, with no impact on capital expansion. • Dispossessions of peasants or indigenous people from lands and forests expand capital by turning their means of subsistence into means of capitalist production. • The transfer to for-profit companies of public services, facilities, or spaces turns means of subsistence into commodities and thus expands capital. • Capitalization, commodification, or the termination of contemporary commons reduce means of subsistence and thus increase the availability of exploitable labor-power. In 2020–2021 Brazil simultaneously experienced the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and the world's largest health crisis in a century. The Covid-19 pandemic struck the country deeply, killing about 690 thousand people by late 2022. They were also years of increased pressure by capital on peasants and indigenous people, targets of the violence with which capital, ever since its dawn, has wielded to advance over spaces that serve the subsistence of immediate producers. In this period, the Brazilian state continued to comply with decades-old demands from neoliberal ideology for privatizations and the dismantling of protections for workers and the poor in general. These phenomena, when articulated by theory inspired by the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, suggest that the Bolsonaro administration and its class allies used the pandemic as a political opportunity for dispossessing policies. The article discusses this based on concepts that distinguish dispossessions that serve capital expansion from those that do not. The first group includes processes that lead to proletarianization of immediate producers in addition to the capitalization or commodification of hitherto means of subsistence. Among dispossessions that do not expand capital are those that involve the simple redistribution of surpluses or means of production. The paper contributes to the literature on dispossession by analyzing concrete manifestations of it, drawing on a conceptual framework that distinguishes dispossession types that have been conflated in much current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]