Landnahme, analog und digital. Ursprüngliche Akkumulation in den Kontrollgesellschaften

This essay provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelationships between land grabs, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the context of capitalist development. Evidence from a multi-class peasant formation in deltaic Bangladesh indicates that land grabs have been propelled by interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance. Key roles have been played by illegal violence and de-linking of poor peasants from production organization and clientelist relations providing access to land. Establishment of a shrimp zone for export production has led to systematic eviction of the poor, backed by state power. Poor peasant resistance has shifted towards overt forms involving coalition-building and collective action. It is argued that the concept of primitive accumulation can subsume both market and non-market mechanisms as well as voluntary and involuntary transactions involving different degrees of intentionality, inclusive of deliberate dispossession, unintended consequences and negative externalities. Primitive accumulation and ABD correspond to distinct historical phases of capitalism and are subsumable under a generic concept of ongoing capitalism-facilitating accumulation. The dynamics of ‘actually existing capitalism’ display a two-way and recursive causal relationship in which continuing primitive accumulation is as much a consequence of expanding capitalist production as its precondition.

1. Global Land Grabs: historical processes, theoretical and methodological implications and current trajectories 2. The Land Rush and Classic Agrarian Questions of Capital and Labour: a systematic scoping review of the socioeconomic impact of land grabs in Africa 3. Land Grabbing, Large- and Small-scale Farming: what can evidence and policy from 20th century Africa contribute to the debate? 4. Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab 5. The New Enclosures? Polanyi, international investment law and the global land rush 6. Human Rights Responses to Land Grabbing: a right to food perspective 7. The Global Politics of Water Grabbing 8. Green Dreams: Myth and Reality in China's Agricultural Investment in Africa 9. Cycles of Land Grabbing in Central America: an argument for history and a case study in the Bajo Aguan, Honduras 10. Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions 'From Below'

Recent critical analyses of global land grabs have variously invoked global capitalism and neocolonialism to account for this trend. One line of inquiry approaches land grabs as instances of “primitive accumulation of capital” whereby lands in the Global South are “enclosed” and brought within the ambit of global capitalism. Another perspective invokes the history of Anglo‐American colonialism for critiquing the developmentalist discourse that depicts Africa as the “last frontier” to be tamed by the techno‐industrial civilization of the North. This essay integrates these two perspectives by elaborating capitalism as an irreducibly colonial formation with global inceptions. I begin with a discussion of “primitive accumulation” and, counter to many, question the suitability of “enclosure” for interpreting land grabs. The second section delves into the theoretical origins of primitive accumulation, proposing to situate it in a global and colonial genealogy of capitalism. A final section charts the theoretical and historical contours of this global genealogy and arrives at a more capacious reconceptualization of primitive accumulation. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of contemporary land grabs for in situ displacement, the fungibility of land, and new enclosures in the contemporary reconfiguration of global value chains.

The forceful expropriation of land, labour, water, and other productive resources is fundamental for processes of agricultural expansion and intensification. What is known today as ‘land grab’ was theorized by Marx as ‘primitive accumulation’ and by David Harvey as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Today it is most prominent and controversial in Africa, where the governments of India and China are major perpetrators; and it also drives most contemporary urban expansion in India and China. This article deploys David Washbrook's idea of ‘country politics’ to explore the process of land grabbing in the early-modern expansion of agrarian Bengal, where local peasant society and worldwide imperial political economy came together to expand frontiers of farming in what is now the Sylhet District of Bangladesh.

Critical scholars have made extensive use of the concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession to analyse the global land grab. These concepts have been crucial to efforts to understand the land grab in terms of the creation, expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relations, of accumulation by extra-economic means, and of dispossessory responses to capitalist crises. This paper provides an overview of these approaches. It also argues that there are substantial challenges involved in the use of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession, including tensions and ambiguities over what the concepts mean, the assumptions embedded within them and problems of fit with other conceptualisations of the land grab. The paper also highlights resources for engaging with these challenges in the land grab literature.

Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the non-governmental organization GRAIN in 2008 (www.farmlandgrab.org). Since that time land grabbing has generated a voluminous literature of a highly variable quality—some scholarship is outstanding and some is shoddy (Oya, 2013). This contribution seeks to clarify what constitutes land grabbing and why it takes place, as well as the key challenge that scholars and civil society activists face in confronting land grabbing in the context of the question of feeding the world. The central argument is that when a structuralist political economy is used to interpret the land grab phenomenon, it becomes analytically clear that contemporary land deals demonstrate that dispossession by displacement, or what has historically been known as the “so-called primitive accumulation”, has been resurrected as an accumulation strategy of global capitalism witnessing, for the first time in decades, the limits to the market. It is an accumulation strategy that cannot, however, deliver food justice or deal with the climate emergency.

1. Introduction: New Frontiers of Land Control 2. Conservation Practice as Primitive Accumulation 3. Territorialization, Enclosure and Neoliberalism: Non-State Influence in Struggles over Madagascar's Forests 4. Making Spaces, Making Subjects: Land, Enclosure and Islam in Colonial Malaya 5. Ceasefire Capitalism: Military-Private Partnerships, Resource Concessions, and Military-State Building in the Burma-China Borderlands 6. The Rifle and the Title: Paramilitary Violence, Land Grab and Land Control in Colombia 7. Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private Property and Spiritual Reproduction in Post-War Guatemala 8. Emergent Forest and Private Land Regimes in Java 9. Land Grabs, Land Control, and Southeast Asian Crop Booms 10. Carbon Forestry and Agrarian Change: Access and Land Control in a Mexican Rainforest 11. Fragmented Sovereignty: Land Reform and Dispossession in Laos

1. The new scramble over Africa's farmland: an introduction 2. Geopolitical drivers of foreign investment in African land and water resources 3. The perils of development from above: land deals in Ethiopia 4. Forest investments and channels of contestation in highland Ethiopia 5. Scrambling for the promised land: land acquisitions and the politics of representation in post-war Acholi, northern Uganda 6. Asian capitalism, primitive accumulation, and the new enclosures in Uganda 7. Land grab in new garb: Chinese special economic zones in Africa The case of Mauritius 8. Fixity, the discourse of efficiency, and enclosure in the Sahelian land 'reserve' 9. Water resources and biofuel production after the fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe

The literature of ‘land grabbing’ expanded at the end of the last decade. One of the most promising fields in the latest discussions is the renewal of very old research themes, such as agrarian transition and the role of enclosure in primitive accumulation (Hall, Hirsch and Li, 2011), the relationships between land use and property rights (Borras and Franco, 2012), between the role of the State, market and institutions in the access to common goods and their management, between modes of production and social relations (Bernstein 2010), and between dispossession, impoverishment and proletarianisation of small farmers (Li, 2011).

Armed conflict is widely believed to disrupt agricultural production and ‘reverse’ development, but it may also involve the violent transformation of rural economies from subsistence to commercial agriculture. The case of Las Pavas, an estate in northern Colombia, provides further evidence that armed conflict created opportunities for violent land grabs and the expansion of commercial agriculture in Colombia. However, aggregate data suggest that primitive accumulation may be only part of the story behind the massive scale of forced displacement and dispossession. A research strategy that accounts for the diversity of subnational contexts, processes and outcomes is needed.

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.

This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of ‘land grabbing’ in relation to the history of plantation and large- and small-scale farming (pf, lsf and ssf) in sub-Saharan Africa. It looks at the extent of pf and lsf over the 20th century, as well as the policy narratives that have justified, supported or circumscribed their development. Many characteristics of the current land rush and its interpretation reveal elements of continuity with some of the general trends marking the history of pf and lsf up to recent years. In particular, the heterogeneity of pf and lsf, subsuming quite different relations to ssf, and the pivotal role played by the combination of private capital (whether foreign, domestic or combined) with the state represent organisational continuities. Meanwhile continuities in supporting narratives centre on the prevalence of generic prescriptions for either lsf/pf or ssf. Refuting these generic prescriptions is a precondition for more nuanced analysis and policy proposals.

Today the social functions of the state and commons, which have been able to escape capital’s transformative effect so far, are under attack around the world. Discussions around the concept of primitive accumulation are attempts to understand the reasons, mechanisms and results of such attacks. Primitive accumulation in historical sense refers to a precapital separation of peasants from the means of production, which created the necessary conditions for capitalist development. On the other hand, many scholars since Luxemburg argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous process throughout capitalism’s history and it is intertwined with capitalist accumulation. Bringing primitive accumulation from precapital to contemporary era created theoretical problems. Since the state is traditionally the perpetrator of primitive accumulation, the proposed way to solve them is to revisit the capitalist state debate and scrutinize its role in contemporary developments, such as land, water and resource grabbing, simultaneously happening around the world.

Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007–2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing “primitive accumulation” without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. The corollary of this is the creation of additional “relative surplus population”, worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this “relative surplus population” is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.

This chapter critically interrogates the historical trajectories of capitalism and the resolution of the agrarian question therein. The paths of early capitalist development are not possible to replicate in developing countries, more so under contemporary globalization. However, far from the agrarian question being “dead” for these countries, it is all the more relevant within a complex of neo-liberal exploitation of developing world peasantry. The chapter studies the patterns of accumulation under neo-liberalism in Indian agriculture based on primary and secondary data. The accumulation process under agrarian crisis in India illustrates the new delineations within the peasantry and possible alliances against neo-liberalism. This chapter links the agrarian question with that of land and draws insights on the different streams of growing resistance to land acquisition in recent times.