Critical development studies attempts to understand why the many projects of development that have been implemented have not led to the stated emancipatory goal after five decades of multiple initiatives and resources, and propose alternatives to the conventional model. In the current, dominant conceptualisation of International Development Studies, «development» is based on the emancipation from poverty for the more than one-billion people who are unable to satisfy their basic human needs, in a world that has never been richer in material terms. These signs are revealed by both the limits of spaces and possibilities for expansion-as the system reaches full capitalization and full proletarianization-and by the resistance of the dispossessed. This article discusses the hypothesis that the processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production that we see in late capitalism are signs of exhaustion of the system. These may be effective for individual capitalists, but the system requires expansion. This is because capitalism cannot be sustained by redistribution processes alone. Thus, it is plausible to imagine that the potential shift of emphasis from the generation to the redistribution of surpluses is a sign of the very limits of the system. If on one hand, we have recently seen an expansion of the processes of dispossession, on the other, there is growing evidence that the capitalist system is immersed in a structural crisis. Capitalism cannot be sustained if additional means of production and growing availability of labor-power are not integrated into its accumulation processes. Nevertheless, similar processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production continue until today. The dawn of capitalism was marked by what Marx referred to as primitive accumulation.
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