Rivers of ink have flowed in order to explain why the Argentinean company YPF -the first vertically integrated state oil company of the capitalist world- entered the long phase of decline that led to ist privatization during the neoliberal decade of 1990s. Nevertheless, scarce research has focused on the primary origin of such process: the oil policy carried out during the developmentalist government of Arturo Frondizi (1958-1962). According to that argument, this paper analyzes the hydrocarbon policy of such president in light of the categories proposed by the accumulation by dispossession’s theory. The findings show the ocurrence of various phenomena, such as the purchase of political influence by the corporations, the aprobations of laws to protect and favour their interests, the signing of public works contracts with inflated costs, the semi-privatization of petroleum areas, the ne...

Instead staying limited to an ‘originary’ or ‘primitive’ stage, accumulation by dispossession and its diverse ways of labour super exploitation constitute a permanent and important force of the historic geography of capital. Considering such premise, this paper analyses the course of the practices of semi-slavery, violence, fraud, labour superexploitation and cutting and seizure of rights suffered by the yerba mate harvesters of the provinces of Misiones and Corrientes (Argentina) from the middle of the XIX Century to nowadays. In order to do this, five categories of analysis were considered: the regimes of recruitment, precarization and discipline of the workforce, which are linked with the loss and violation of workers’ rights; the intensity and duration of the labour workday; wages and frauds; child labour and the dispossession of the right to health; and the state complicit...