Finance, infrastructure and national space: from productive integration to the neoextractivist disintegration of the nation

Abstract

Over the past five decades, the promotion of competitive spatial fragments linked to the primary-export sectors, herein called neoextractivist segments, has brought about a restructuring of the national space, generating a tendency toward a fragmentation of the national space. In this article, we contribute with a critical, updated reading of this fragmentation process of the national space, from an understanding of how the State, infrastructure, finance, and Neoextractivism have been articulated in the capitalist development both in general and in Brazil, thus revealing new dynamics and structures of territorial control and wealth extraction. The agents linked to these dynamics and structures have formed a neoextractivist coalition of disintegration that acts to operate in maintaining and broadening primary-export activities, thereby reinforcing the nation's tendency toward fragmentation.