Abstract
Introduction
As capital has become more mobile, production processes have become fragmented, the dominance of global capital has consolidated, and the spatiality of capitalist transformation has assumed greater salience. The reconfiguration of the local economies and societies through the workings of global capitalism has led to considerable variations within the pathways of capitalist transition. With concerns over rising and fluctuating food prices against the backdrop of persistent malnutrition and hunger in different parts of the world, amidst the global land rush and protests against dispossession, the land question has unquestionably risen to the fore. The two books under review chart the course of these developments from two different vantage points: the first, by looking at the land question in contemporary India; and the second, by presenting the rich diversity in the nature of resistance to dispossession.
Taking Bernstein’s argument that the agrarian question has been bypassed or resolved as its point of departure (Bernstein, 2006), D’Costa and Chakraborty’s edited volume, The Land Question in India, brings in the plurality of the land question under neoliberalism in India. By locating the land question within the agrarian transition debate, the approach charts the multiple meanings of land and offers a rich analysis of the underlying processes that shape the land question, although they do not explore the agrarian transition question in its totality. Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession, edited by Dip Kapoor, provides a wide-ranging, comprehensive and insightful account of dispossession and resistance from the global south. Key contributions of the two volumes are in their critical engagement with the question of dispossession, and in a much-nuanced and sophisticated analysis in comparison to those who treat the land question merely as another instance of market imperfection and institutional failure of a particular kind.
On primitive accumulation
In the global expansion of capitalism, land has emerged as the focus of conflict. ‘Land grabs’ have become common as large-scale transfer of land is made to multinational firms and foreign governments, often with the connivance of host country governments. Resistance to such ‘land grabbing’ has generated a range of concerns, such as impact on farmers through such transactions, the sovereignty of the countries, and implications for local-level food security, as Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession testifies; notwithstanding are the questions on the weak empirical foundations, and conceptual inadequacies of the literature on ‘land grabbing’ (Oya, 2013; Edelman, 2013; also see Kapoor, pp. 23, Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession).
The scale of dispossession of farmers and other kinds of independent producers, and the use of the coercive power of the state and large corporations in these land deals, however, has revived interests in the Marxian idea of primitive accumulation as an on-going feature of capitalism (Adnan, 2015) in order to understand dispossession of different types of natural resources, including land. Partha Chatterjee, in his prelude to The Land Question in India, provides the reasons behind the contemporary relevance of the concept of primitive accumulation. While David Harvey frees the idea of primitive accumulation from its historicism and brings in a number of disparate processes under the rubric of accumulation by dispossession (ABD), his focus on the over-accumulation crisis of capitalism underplays the importance of local class processes in ABD (Das, 2017). Levien (Chapter 2, pp. 53) rejects the relevance of primitive accumulation as ‘the old functional sense of creating the preconditions of capitalism’ and argues that ‘[d]ispossessions today often have little to do with agriculture and are not about resolving the “agrarian question”.’ He finds Harvey’s emphasis on dispossession as ‘primarily economic rather than extra-economic’, blurring the dividing line between ABD and normal expanded reproduction of capital. Levien suggests that rather than focusing on the ‘transition between mode[s] of production’, the focus should shift to ‘variations in regimes of dispossession within the capitalist mode of production’ (Chapter 2, pp. 54, emphasis in original).
Adnan (Chapter 4), on the other hand, argues that ‘primitive accumulation can be regarded as a generic capitalism-facilitating process, which can assume particular forms such as ABD at specific sociohistorical conjunctures’ (pp. 92, emphasis in original). For Banerjee (Chapter 4, pp. 118), it is ‘a continuous process of primitive accumulation that accompanies the contemporary, corporate-led growth process, although not necessarily leading to a structural transformation of the workforce’. For Sanyal (2014) and (Chatterjee, 2008, pp. 6–7, also The Land Question in India, it does not constitute the pre-history of capitalism, but is one of the conditions of its existence, as ‘capital must continuously engage with its (non-capitalist) “outside” for access to resources for its expanded reproduction’ (Bhattacharya et al., pp. 179).
One possible way to link the on-going primitive accumulation with the primitive accumulation at the birth of capitalism is the use of power – coercive power of the state, or brute force by non-state actors. The use of force has led to diverse forms of dispossession in various parts of the world, a theme that has been comprehensively addressed in Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession. However, evictions, as non-violent forms of dispossession are also seen, through the everyday politics of deception, co-option, corruption, and delays in land acquisition (see Chapter 12, The Land Question in India; Ibreck, Chapter 12, Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession). Through selective reversals and reaching ‘compromising equilibriums’ (Chapter 5, pp. 133, The Land Question in India), granting limited rights to the marginalised (Chapter 7, The Land Question in India), narrow framing of the questions (Chapter 6, pp. 170, The Land Question in India), utilising multiple levels of government, and enlisting the support of local elites (Chapter 13, The Land Question in India), the state has facilitated and managed conflicts arising out of the ABD.
The agrarian question and beyond
The editors of The Land Question in India argue that the land question under neoliberalism goes beyond the agrarian question. For example, the acquisition of agricultural or forested land (water and other natural resources) strikes at the root of survival of many independent producers. The objectives of such dispossessions may not be the same everywhere. In fact, in many developing economies it is not for the creation of a class of labourers, rather the prime motive is the exploitation of a scarce resource. Yet, the outcome of dispossession contributes to growth in the wage labour markets or to be self-employed in the urban informal economy as a coping mechanism. For Banerjee (pp. 118), the agrarian crisis ‘creates the appropriate context for grabbing of farmland at low prices’. The link between catastrophic forms of dispossession by mega-projects and dispossession-in-slow-motion may not result from any single project but from a series of interventions that result in the destruction of or exclusion from crucial livelihood resources (Mishra, 2011).
The rise of a non-cultivating landlord class (Chapter 8, The Land Question in India), the persistence of petty commodity production (Chapter 9), and out-migration are all important aspects of the on-going crisis in rural India. Whether the state mitigates or perpetuates the onslaught on small and marginal farmers depends on the specific types of state intervention. For example, the West Bengal state played a major role in perpetuating some of the precarious forms of petty commodity production, since its agrarian reforms did not lead to dynamic rural accumulation for industrialisation (Chapter 10).
Resistance to dispossession
The second book (Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession) contextualises the commonalities and specificities of the movements against dispossession, whose outcomes are also determined by the response from the affected populations. Kapoor (Chapter 1) argues that contemporary ‘land grabbing and accumulation by dispossession is neither novel nor a break from the historical colonial project in these regions’ and instead is a continuity of colonial dispossession and attacks on the livelihoods of the poor and the working class in different countries.
The resistance movements have been diverse, as chronicled by Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession. They reflect diverse internal conditions, the extent and forms of dispossession, methods and expressions of resistance while also revealing their similarities and interconnections. It includes resistance by indigenous peoples, tribal groups and ethnicities, pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, marginal and small farmers, women and agricultural labour within and outside petty commodity production in South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Several contributors to the volume – for example, Waponahki resistance in North America (Chapter 2), resistance to commodification of land and dispossession in Samoa (Chapter 3), anti-mining resistance in Niyamgiri in India (Chapter 4), peasant resistance in Bohotokong (Chapter 4), and the food sovereignty movement in Kenya (Chapter 10), to name a few – have stressed the historicity of both dispossession and resistance. As global capitalists ‘reproduce the propagandist conception of placelessness or absorb place into the more ambiguous idea of space as a product of coloniality in the interests of a politics of capitalist accumulation’, the resistance movements in many cases attempt to resist by invoking ‘a sense of place as specificity and the immediate local affiliation and meaning of land’ (Kapoor, Chapter 1, pp. 7). However, to appreciate the significance of such articulations of resistance, a creative connection needs to be established between struggles within expanded reproduction and against accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003: pp. 179, cited in Kapoor).
A central challenge of the resistance movements is to overcome divergent and at times conflicting interests, such as the contradictions between wage labour in mechanised fishing and artisanal fishers owning small boats (Chapter 6), between landless labourers and small holders (Chapter 8), between small-scale farmers, micro-food producers and the large-scale agro-industrial complex of farming and food production (Chapter 9), and between chiefs and commoners in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia (Chapter 12), and the Niger Delta (Chapter 15). The balance of different class interests (of, say, landowners) might result in different forms of resistance. Regarding the struggle against agro-extractive dispossession in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, Masalam notes that ‘[t]he unequal agrarian structure, together with market pressure toward coconut commodification, exacerbated the general patterns of rural identity, shifting them from a land-based peasant mode of communal production to a labour mode being exploited by capital’, which in turn has led to the demand for cancelling ‘the commercial plantation permit and getting legal recognition from the state for individual property’ (Chapter 5, pp. 118). However, building solidarity networks and alliances, as in the case of the gendered intergenerational class alliances of the food sovereignty movement in Kenya, can resist and transcend such capitalist contradictions. Alternative modes of resistance (insurgencies, non-violent protests, legal struggles, popular mass mobilisation, cultural protest, to name a few), have been documented. These narratives suggest both the significance as well as the limitations of localised struggles against the onslaught of global capital on the livelihoods of the poor. These two volumes together offer a rich theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamics of dispossession and resistance in the contemporary land question.