No abstract

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over-accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra-economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation -in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession -which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry -occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non-productive economic activity and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation.

This article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state-developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state-run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which 'land broker states' have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful 'land wars'. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the 'public good'. While absolving them from responsibility, I would like to thank Michael Burawoy, Jamie Cross, Asher Ghertner, Daniel Immerwahr, Colin Pace, Suchi Pande, Jonathan Parry, Raka Ray, Ian Scoones, Wendy Wolford and the anonymous reviewers of Development and Change. Development and Change 44(2): 381-407.

In order to analyze land alienation in contemporary India, Shapan Adnan follows a theoretical approach in which mechanisms of primitive accumulation are not restricted to use of force, but include land transfer by agreement, as well as indirect mechanisms that are concerned with very different objectives. Reviewing evidence on land grabs, resistance, and workforce trends, he argues that primitive accumulation under neoliberal globalization has not been substantially followed by the absorption of the dispossessed in regular capitalist employment. Adnan puts forward a set of hypotheses to explain why the self-employed constituted at least half or more of the Indian workforce over 1999–2012. While such trends indicate a partial and short-run divergence from the classic Marxian schema of the transition to capitalism, Adnan argues that, given ongoing trends in the national and global economy, the long run outcome in India remains an open question.

No abstract