Tensions of neo-liberal development

Abstract

In this article, I examine the tensions of neo-liberal development as experienced in contemporary West Bengal, culminating in recent struggles over land acquisition. My analysis is conducted through three modes of reflection—the political actions of a cultural group called Jana Sanskriti, the discourse and policy making of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and David Harvey's conceptual distinction between expanded reproduction and accumulation by dispossession in his book, The New Imperialism (2003). Harvey argues that processes of ‘expanded reproduction’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ are organically and historically linked. Yet, he sustains a dichotomy by arguing that the flight of capital following the robbery of public goods through privatisation is a worse problem than the insertion of capital for privatisation. I argue that the tensions of neo-liberal development at the historical level in West Bengal belie Harvey's dichotomies at the conceptual level. I show that Bengalis struggle over the very purpose, value and future of capital insertion. Rather than Harvey's ‘which is worse’ question, some citizens in Bengal question a grammar of distribution in which welfare and productive opportunities can only be achieved through particular forms of capital insertion for particular visions of industrial development.