From Using to Pricing: Land Becoming an Object of Accumulation – Snehashish Mitra

Tania Li, What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Trans Inst Br Geogr, 39: 589-602, 2014.

Abu Ahasan and Katy Gardner, Dispossession by ‘development’: Corporations, elites and NGOs in Bangladesh. Samaj No 13, 2016.

Michael Levien, The land question: Special Economic Zones and the political economy of dispossession in India. Journal of Peasant Studies 39: 933-69, 2012.

As the title suggests, the land has become one of the most sought-after and lucrative commodity in today’s world. No longer land appropriated by only the land-owning gentry (say erstwhile zamindars in the Indian subcontinent), who would utilize the surplus accumulated through the agricultural produce of the land; land has become a prime commodity for speculation which is being increasingly used for non-agricultural purposes. Nowhere is such trend more prevalent, than in the urban peripheries where townships like Gurugram (near Delhi) and New Town (near Kolkata) has been set up on vast tracts of acquired (often forcefully) villages, farmlands and wetlands. Even where the use of land is limited to agricultural productivity, the relationships revolving around land and the community has undergone a visible reorientation which has an inextricable link with state building, promises of infrastructure and the hope for a better future. Tania Murray Li’s ethnography among the communities inhabiting the Sulaweshi highlanders in Indonesia shows how the introduction of cocoa cultivation necessitated a new term to capture the practice of treating land as a commodity and as  a site of investment, a significant departure from the earlier practice of labour deciding the rightful possessor of the land’s produce.

A land in such terrains, where titles of ownership are not based on legal documentation by the state, has become attractive sites of appropriation by numerous enterprises from the West. This trend has spiked significantly after the 2008 economic recession. The land is considered as a safe site for investment, which holds a fixed material existence, unlike the uncertain immaterial finance subject to the whims of Wall Street. However, land, as shown in statistical models and graphs, is embedded with a diversity of topography and non-capitalistic social relations, which often disrupts the process of churning out monetary dividends for offshore investors. Protest over land acquisition in Singur, Nandigram, Dongria Kondhs are few examples where the accumulation of land has been resisted through popular movements of the mass.

Among the three factors of production – land, labour and capital, while labour and capital are mobile, the land is not. Then how can surplus be generated and transferred without being associated with the land (say like a peasant)? We need to think how the owner of capital/land (or both) can make the best deal by being an absentee landlord or as a distant economic agent with a potential for financial investment. One way, as contemporary experiences suggest, is to infuse capital in the land in order to gather control of the land. If this infusion of capital is for non-agricultural purposes or highly mechanized farming of commercial crops, then the capital is not associated with a significant number of labourers, and almost certainly the number of labours would be much lesser than the number of labours who made a living out of the acquired land. Thus, transfer of resources happens without transfer of labour, as Sanyal had observed, leading to dispossession without proletarianisation. Levien’s study of the Mahindra SEZ in the outskirt of Jaipur shows how land has been acquired for non-agricultural purposes, which has destabilized the pre-existing rural economy, and disproportionally benefitted mostly the upper caste and educated group, and marginalized the position of women within the household. Here dispossession has happened, with only a fraction of the dispossessed getting absorbed in the new economy of SEZ. To be precise, such accumulation by dispossession (ABD) is distinct from Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ in the sense that in the Marxian framework immediate producers were turned into wage labourers; ABD can happen by completely bypassing this feature, even when land is transformed into capital.  Ahasan and Gardner’s article on the developmental projects taking place by acquiring land in different parts of Bangladesh shows similar trends. In both the sites, environmental degradation remains a common outcome as well.  

Levien conducts in-depth ethnography to trace the valuation of the land over the pre-acquisition to post-acquisition time period, which shows how the landowners, mostly farmers were deprived of the eventual valuation of the land, when it was used for renting out office space and building luxurious residential; Levien introduces the concept of ‘rate of accumulation by dispossession’ in such context. When the market forces are unable to penetrate the land market, enters the non-economic forces in the form of state, NGOS or the ‘little independent methods’ of land grabs. This grab is legitimized by the notion of greater public good and state starts behaving like a land broker state, be it Congress/BJP ruled Rajasthan or Commnunist Party of India (Marxist!) in West Bengal. In urban areas, the housing development boards such as HUDCO are examples of institutions pregnant with neoliberal ideology with no democratic accountability. State facilitates releasing of uncommodified/undercommodified land for the corporates at lower the market rates, which gives rise to ‘rate of accumulation by dispossession’. The dispossessed may, however, strike back, as in West Bengal where the 34 years long Communist (?) government was voted out of power in 2011. If employing non-economic forces to acquire land is a prevalent trend, it doesn’t make much of a difference if land titles exist or not, undermining De Soto’s (2000) argument for formal land titles for landowners with the hope that they would benefit from the land market.

Therefore the question arises, how do the class of people depending on the land or any other natural resources directly for subsistence, resist the onslaught of capital on their means of production? Levien’s account shows how the state is co-opted in the process of ABD, rendering redressal from the state as an obsolete hope. Mobilization and obstruction perhaps remain the only tested method of resisting ABD. The slogan ‘langol jaar, jomi taar’  (land belong to those, who owns the plough and uses it to farm) stormed West Bengal during the land redistribution programme in the 1970s; if having a plough isn’t a guarantee to farm anymore, it might as well be used as the last ‘weapon of the weak’.