Accumulation By Dispossession Research Articles

Davida Harveya teoria akumulacji przez wywłaszczenie. Nowe perspektywy badawcze – przypadek Jasona W. Moore’a

This article reconstructs David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession (ABD) theory aimed at explaining the specifics of capital accumulation under neoliberal capitalism. Reaching back to the thought of Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, Harvey proposed an impressive theory of qualitative change within the capitalist mode of production. However, as his critics have convincingly presented, Harvey’s concept struggles with the problems presented in the text. The solution to these problems appears to be the school of “world-ecology”, analyzed here on the example of one of its representatives, Jason W. Moore. By solving the problems that Bin and Ras wrote about, it creates the possibility for APW to become a theory that shows a certain continuum of quantitative change within capitalism. In other words, Moore’s research perspective creates new perspectives for the application of APW.

Contextualizing Accumulation by Dispossession: The State and High-Rise Apartment Clusters in Gangnam, Seoul

In an effort to contribute to the contemporary debates on accumulation by dispossession (ABD), we argue for a closer attention to the link between the state and ABD. We propose contextualizing ABD within the institutionalization of the process of replacing communal property rights with private property rights. In such institutionalization, the state plays a critical role as the final guarantor of property rights. As such, the sociospatial specificities of the state would strongly influence how ABD unfolds and how it is understood. In the empirical part of this article, we use this approach to focus on a specific type of capitalist state—that is, the developmental state—to examine the emergence of apartment-dominated residential landscapes in Gangnam District, Seoul, in the 1970s through the use of ABD. Key Words: accumulation by dispossession and primitive accumulation of capital, developmental state, Gangnam District, high-rise apartments, Seoul, South Korea, vertical accumulation.

Extractive Dispossession: “I am not happy our land will go, we will have no better life”

Inspired by questions from local communities about the potential impacts of large-scale extractive activities, we used others’ experience to identify and illustrate intentional and immanent impacts from extractive led development (ELD). Recognising the capitalist driver of global extraction and needing to capture the harsh, but often obscured reality of local experience, we turned to theories, applications and experience of dispossession. Based on Holden, Nadeau and Jacobson’s (2011) application of Harvey’s (2003) theory of accumulation by dispossession (AbD) in the Philippines, we identified eleven separate but interrelated and overlapping factors of extractive dispossession which provide the specific detail required to identify and understand extractive impacts. These were then discussed and tested with communities potentially impacted by the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine in the Morobe province of Papua New Guinea. Participant responses indicated the value and utility of this recipient-view perspective of extractive impact in an interactive and iterative approach that informed communities about potential impacts and documented their concerns with process and outcome at Wafi-Golpu - which is already a site of multiple dispossessions. The research outcome is a practical heuristic with specific factors that enhances our understanding of potential impacts from ELD and can assist in applying concepts of dispossession and accumulation to development impacts.

David Harvey's Theory of Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist Critique

David Harvey is well known for his extensive writings on accumulation by dispossession (ABD). ABD refers to “the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices” that Marx had designated as “primitive accumulation.” Harvey has sought to update Marx's theory of primitive accumulation to consider the ways in which dispossession occurs in present-day capitalism in its various forms. His theory of ABD is very problematic. Yet a comprehensive, critical assessment of Harvey's work on dispossession that considers its intellectual and political problems is missing. This article considers Harvey's ideas advanced since the 1980s to be problematic on multiple grounds. To begin, the concept of ABD itself is chaotic in the critical-realist philosophical sense: it includes processes which bear no internal relations, and it separates processes which should not be separated. He inflates the causal significance of the concept far too much, and mistakenly considers ABD to be the dominant moment of contemporary capitalism. He generally fails to connect ABD of producers to what I will call “accumulation by exploitation” of proletarians and semi-proletarians. His views on dispossession in the South with which he associates (new) imperialism are inadequate in part because he abstracts from the exploitative character of imperialism as it is rooted in production controlled by imperialist businesses. And the political implications of his theory, which significantly differ from the conclusions that Marx draws from his own analysis of dispossession in Capital vol. 1, and which have a dim view of the role of the working class in the anti-capitalist socialist movement, are reformist.

Accumulation by Dispossession or Accumulation without Dispossession: The Case of Contract Farming in India

According to David Harvey, Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD) has become the dominant form of accumulation under the mantra of neoliberalism backed by the State policies, whether in developed or in developing economies. Using empirical evidence on contract farming in India, I argue that capitalist accumulation can indeed occur without dispossession. I show how a class of petty capitalist farmers (petty, in comparison to corporate capital) is encouraged to maintain its private property (land) and to enter into commercial contracts with big industrial (multinational) companies to deliver certain farm products at a pre-determined price. These companies have no intention to dispossess the farmers, and they do not have to. As a structure of multiple class actors (big business; capitalist farmers; rural labour), contract farming is a process that represents centralisation (and concentration) of capital and points to the ways in which agrarian and industrial capitals are intertwined. Contract farming as a form of accumulation is based on appalling working conditions of labour, including vulnerable women workers and migrants, on contract farms, and it exhibits much geographical variation in its occurrence.

Alienation in Neoliberal India and Bangladesh: Diversity of Mechanisms and Theoretical Implications

In this article, selected evidence from contemporary India and Bangladesh is analyzed to identify the diverse mechanisms of land alienation at work. A typology of such mechanisms is developed for this purpose, based on a critical review of theoretical approaches to primitive accumulation (Marx 1976) and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) (Harvey 2005). In this typology, mechanisms of land alienation and primitive accumulation can be direct or indirect and may or may not involve the use of force. Moreover, multiple mechanisms can operate in combination. The application of this typology to the empirical evidence shows that mechanisms of land alienation exist under all its broad categories. Accordingly, it is concluded that notions of primitive accumulation/ABD which are confined to extra-economic or non-market characterizations are unduly restrictive and correspond to special cases that cannot accommodate the entire range of mechanisms displayed by the evidence from neoliberal India and Bangladesh. Moreover, capitalism itself can operate as a driving force of ongoing primitive accumulation/ABD, corresponding to direct mechanisms of land alienation. Correlatively, primitive accumulation/ABD can be generated by autonomous factors and the lands so released can be potentially deployed in capitalist production, corresponding to indirect mechanisms of land alienation.

Land grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance

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.

East Asian Developmental Path and Land-Use Rights in China

This paper highlights contemporary China’s long-term continuities with the historical EastAsian developmental path in relation to its post-1978 revival of market-economy traditions. Therevival of market economy traditions does not exemplify the unfolding of processes associatedwith the “one-size-fits-all” Washington Consensus. Rural land reforms were driven from belowand strongly influenced policy changes from above. Neither rural nor urban land use relationssuggest a more general unfolding of neoliberal processes of capitalist accumulation bydispossession. Contemporary Chinese land relations reflect the effects of continuities withhistorical East Asian regional traditions more strongly than do some discontinuities andruptures that emerged in the conjuncture of the mid-1980s. These continuities remain moreimportant in understanding the future of the China-led East Asian region. Like the Ming andQing dynasties, China’s Party-State is sharply focused on problems of governance. Retaininglegitimacy and recreating a welfare state to promote harmonious development rather thangrowth fetishism appears to characterize China’s current trajectory.

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

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.

The Contemporary Significance of Primitive Accumulation∗

The emerging body of literature on accumulation by dispossession (ABD) sharpens the political edge of the critique of contemporary capitalism. While this is welcome, there are also reasons for concern about the way ABD has been taken up. This is so, because the processes at the heart of Marx's enunciations of primitive accumulation are widely considered passé or are subsumed within the broadened conception of ABD. It matters because the separation of agricultural households from land is an ongoing and central reality of our times, and the social effects have been disastrous. Achieving greater clarity around primitive accumulation and the constellation of issues associated with the agrarian question, then, is of more than passing importance. This article argues that radical geographers should return to the land to undertake an open and materialist engagement with contemporary processes of primitive accumulation.

Spatial and Other “Fixes” of Historical Capitalism

Capitalism is the first and only historical social system that has become truly global in scale and scope. Mapping this transformation over time is a particularly challenging task. Without some theoretical guidance in the selection of the networks to be mapped, there is a real risk of producing maps that are so confusing as to be worthless. Drawing from David Harvey’s concepts of “spatial-temporal fix,” “switching crisis,” and “accumulation bydispossession,” this article proposes a conceptual map focused specifically on the processes associated with the globalization of historical capitalism. This is not an actual map of the spatial-temporal dynamic of historical capitalism but a first step in the identification of the kind of geographic and historical information that is needed in order to produce such a map.