Capitalist Property Research Articles

Rethinking the agrarian question: Agriculture and underdevelopment in the Global South

AbstractIn recent years, agriculture has come to be seen as increasingly irrelevant to processes of industrialization and economic development in the Global South. The integration of developing economies into global capitalism and the continued advance of structural transformation would seem to indicate that there is no longer a classic “agrarian question” in the developing world. In other words, agriculture is no longer a major barrier to capitalist development in these countries. However, there is reason to doubt this growing consensus. This article argues for a rethinking of the agrarian question in the Global South and presents evidence that capitalist property relations have not penetrated agriculture throughout much of the developing world. Contrary to recent trends in the literature, I argue that not only is there still an agrarian question in the Global South but also that it remains central to explaining lower levels of industrialization in these countries and, thereby, their relative underdevelopment.

An Alternative to the Creation of Shareholder Value. The Production of Uses and Common Pool Resources Management to Escape Capitalist Exchanges Domination

Abstract Purpose This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment. Methodology/approach By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value). Findings This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world. Practical implications It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers. Originality/value Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

Beyond Coloniality of Markets: Exploring the Neglected Dimensions of the Land Question from Endogenous African Decolonial Epistemological Perspectives

Oftentimes the land question is discussed in economic terms. Agricultural relations of production, productivity, and food sustenance and food security are given higher priority. For this reason, some believe that by correcting the land imbalances through equitable land redistribution, mass starvation will ensue and food shortages will lead to economic devastation. This is despite the fact that millions still face hunger, even if they do not have land. In this paper, we contend that, firstly, land cannot be analysed as a market and economic logic. Secondly, Africans perceive land in holistic terms: its value encompasses the economic factor that is not sequestrated from other social phenomena, such as religion, spirituality, social interactions, the family and the polity. Thirdly, Africans have never regarded land asa commoditised private, individual and economic asset transferable in monetary and market relations of exchange. Indeed, privileging land as a market commodity is a result of colonial capitalist property relations and colonial jurisprudence, which is counter to African land law. Thus, any land redistribution programme must factor in African endogenous epistemologies, the question of being and ontology, worldview and other cultural indications

Renovating Vancouver: Transnational Constructions and Mortgages in Sachiko Murakami's Rebuild

This article examines how Asian diasporic Vancouverite poetry explores the implications of living in an Asian North American city that has yet to come to terms with the genealogies of its lands and communities, and its contemporary role as a prototype of capitalist urbanism. Through a brief examination of the socioeconomic history of the city alongside a close reading of the poetics of Japanese-Canadian poet Sachiko Murakami's collection Rebuild (2011), I argue that literary innovation is a crucial lens through which to view capitalist spaces of intentional abstraction and repetition, and the ever-growing glass and steel constructions of Vancouver's globalized cityscape. Rebuild interrogates what it means to inhabit a city that has been thoroughly and repeatedly transformed by transnational capital. In much of the collection, Murakami's own half-Japanese heritage and her awareness of the "colonized" nature of Vancouver are placed in dialogue with the hypermodern architectural construction of condominiums, and the unabashedly capitalist property market.

Art squats, artistic critique and resistance: Between recuperation and obliteration

Art squats have been a characteristic form of the development and diffusion of counter­culture since the 1960s. Their function is twofold, engaging in both art and social critique, and as a form of direct action in each field, resisting both capitalist property relations and the institutions of the art market. However, those functions may be displaced by others as a result of the effects of art squats themselves, such as neighbourhood gentrification. The changing cultural politics of the embodied critical practice of art squats are traced through three European examples. This paper follows Critical Cultural Studies in reading cultural practice as text to engage critically with Boltanski and Chiapello’s dismissal of artistic critique, and also problematising the alternative autonomist assumption that art squats unify the projects of art and social revolution by showing how their strategies can be subject to recuperation, while linking the strategies developed in art squats to contemporary practices of resistance.

Foucault et la généalogie de la sociologie

Quarante ans après Surveiller et punir, La Société punitive montre qu’avec le concept de discipline, Foucault entendait proposer une généalogie de la sociologie, et en particulier du programme durkheimien. Refusant de faire du droit la mise en forme d’exigences immanentes à la conscience collective, il traite la moralisation de la pénalité comme une stratégie mise en place au XIX e par une bourgeoisie soucieuse de se prémunir contre les nouveaux illégalismes suscités par les transformations de la propriété capitaliste. En prenant pour fil conducteur la confrontation avec l’évolutionnisme sociologique qui sous-tend l’histoire de la pénalité retracée par Foucault, cet article se propose de mettre en évidence les gains obtenus au moyen de la méthode archéologique de dissolution des continuités historiques, mais aussi les apories que rencontre la généalogie pour rendre compte de la formation des sujets politiques modernes non plus à partir des formes de solidarité, mais à partir du principe d’une guerre civile sous-jacente à la société.

Marx on Financial Intermediation: Lessons from the FrenchCrédit Mobilierin theNew York Daily Tribune

The role of financial intermediaries in economic development can be clarified by examining Marx's contributions to an old debate among economic historians regarding the role of joint stock investment banking and, in particular, the rise of the French Credit Mobilier , in French economic development. Marx's account of the Credit Mobilier , in a series of articles written for the New York Daily Tribune during the 1850s, contains the outlines of a theory of the potentially destabilizing role of financial intermediaries in economic development. Five propositions regarding financial intermediaries (FIs) in development emerge: First, FIs promote the multiplication of financial claims to social wealth beyond any conceivable basis for their realization in production. Second, FIs immobilize and misallocate capital. Third, the lender of last resort function of the Central Bank is necessarily ineffective in confronting crises of FIs. Fourth, FIs accelerate the restructuring and concentration of capitalist property. Finally, FIs play an explicit political role in buying time in the context of class struggle, deferring conflict to a later date

A Rule of Proprietary Right for British India: From revenue settlement to tenant right in the age of classical legal thought

AbstractScholars have long debated the impact of the British ‘rule of property’ on India. In our own day it has become common for historians to hold that the Raj's would-be regime of free capitalist property was frustrated by a pervasive divide between rhetoric and reality which derived from a fundamental lack of fit between English ideas and Indian land control practices. While seemingly novel, the contemporary emphasis on the theory-practice divide is rooted in an earlier ‘revisionist’ perspective among late-nineteenth-century colonial thinkers who argued that land control in the subcontinent derived from a uniquely Indian species of ‘proprietary’ (rather than genuinely propertied) right-holding. In this article, I critically examine the revisionist discourse of ‘proprietary right’ by situating it in a broader comparative perspective, both relative to earlier ideas about rendering property ‘absolute’ during the East India Company's rule and relative to the changing conception of the property right among legal thinkers in the central domains of the Anglo-common law world. In so doing, the article significantly revises our understanding of the relationship between property, law, and political economy in the subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

Private property and collective action: co-operation instead of competition

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to reconsider commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly as it relates to the impact of the firm shareholder governance model on the shape of society.Design/methodology/approach– The author contrasts an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective to explicate current conditions under which neither the state nor the market prevail in organizing economic activity (i.e. the co-operative form of governance and community-created brand value).Findings– This paper offers mechanisms and recommendations regarding the formalized conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles to facilitate new expressions of the principles of co-ordination. Such behaviour will allow for the development of common resources the purpose being a re-appropriation of the world.Originality/value– This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis which combines financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment. Dismissing the alternative of individuals simply forsaking engagement with society as it stands, it becomes necessary to revisit at this historical moment, the ideals on which modern societies are built, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology limited by capitalist notions of private property, motivating this inquiry.

American Poetry and Private Real Property

This article examines the ways in which American poetic practice and thematics map a conception of private real property as it has developed uniquely on the North American continent. I explore how the Land Ordinance of 1790, the Preemption Act, the Homestead Act, and other land-use policies shaped a conception of the developing landscape as divisible into a vast agglomeration of private enterprises mediated primarily by the transfer of title deeds. The impact of private real property beliefs and practices, I argue, has shaped both the practice and the reception of American poetry (and other cultural products) for at least the last 150 years. I incorporate the insights of cultural geography – particularly the work of John B. Jackson, Carl Sauer, and Scott Freundschuh – to understand how the last century's building practices and the reorganization of the landscape, particularly in western metropolitan areas, find imaginative expression in poetry. Although mine is not a law-in-literature approach, I contend that modern/postmodern poetry operates in a way that depends on the very exchange values of the late capitalist property system it often critiques.

Capitalist Modernity a la Turca: Turkey’s ‘Great Transformation’ Reconsidered

Many scholars associated the recent transformation of Turkish democracy with the rise of a new bourgeois class and the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Using a social property relations approach, I provide a critique of the readings of Turkish modernity based on the fall and the rise of bourgeois agency. Revealing the non-capitalist origins and the protracted capitalist transformation of Ottoman and Turkish modernization, I conclude that the reformulation of the main pillars of Turkish modernity today is an expression of the recent consolidation of capitalist property relations.

Private Property and Collective Action: Cooperation as a Means of Reappropriating the World

This paper reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly as it relates to the impact of the firm shareholder governance model on the shape of society. I contrast an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective to explicate current conditions under which neither the state nor the market prevail in organizing economic activity (i.e., the cooperative form of governance and community created brand value). This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis which combines financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment (Fischbach, 2009a; Rosa, 2012). Dismissing the alternative of individuals simply forsaking engagement with society as it stands, it becomes necessary to revisit at this historical moment, the ideals on which modern societies are built, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology limited by capitalist notions of private property, motivating this inquiry. This paper offers mechanisms and recommendations regarding the formalized conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles to facilitate new expressions of the principles of co-ordination. Such behaviour will allow for the development of common resources the purpose being a re-appropriation of the world.

The New “Voodoo Economics”

Marx’s notion of the “fetishism of commodities” and money is used to analyze the modern phenomenon of the public/private divide, the apparent division of society into state and market. The public/private divide, in turn, provides greater insights into the sources and limits of public finance. The importance of the role of the state as the issuer of the currency is highlighted in the development of Marx’s analysis, as well as in recent debates regarding economic policy and the causes of global financial crises. Using Marx’s analysis of the rules of capitalist property, along with the distribution of the surplus and the formation of the equal average rate of profit, the illusion that money is productive is found to be the source of distortions in understanding, and erroneous policies for the management of, the capitalist economy. According to Marx, the existence of money as a commodity is a sign that the economy is already beyond social control. JEL code: B51, P16, P43

Le communisme entre philosophie, prophétie et théorie

Communism opposes both Liberalism, which articulates the standpoint of capitalist property, and Socialism, taken as the model of those who incarnate « managerial competence”. So far as Marxism is concerned, it conveys the ambiguous design of a Communism understood in terms of Socialism. In this sense, Marxian discourse does entail a certain relation with « real socialism », and also with Western socialisms. The discredit which has fallen upon the latter would appear to be an invitation to take up the banner of Communism or of the “Common” as an alternative to the (socialist) alternative. The approaches of Badiou, Rancière and Negri are here reconsidered in the light of a « metastructural » problematic.

Alternative Property Systems for China

Alternative Property Systems for China Jonathan E. Leightner (bio) When Deng Xiaoping took over the leadership of the People's Republic of China in 1980, he changed the course of the nation. He replaced Mao Zedong's emphasis on equality with an emphasis on profits. Deng's favourite slogans included: "to get rich is glorious", "some will get rich before others" and "whatever makes profits is good for China". Deng, and the leaders who have followed Deng, have progressively moved China from a socialist system towards a capitalist system. During the post-Mao years, progressively longer leases have been offered to those who use land. However, as of June 2010, China had not completely embraced a capitalist property system. The current property system in China is complicated by the two categories used under Mao: a) the government "owned" the property of all state-owned enterprises (SOEs, most of urban China fits under this type of ownership); and b) the people in the Maoist communes (not the government) owned the property used by the communes. This is further complicated by the pockets of communal land in the midst of cities. When Deng changed the course of China, the government could legitimately sell the property of the SOEs. However, it could not legitimately sell the property of the communes. However, as the communes disintegrated, most local governments have redistributed the property of the communes in order to free up plots to sell or to handle demographic changes. By 1998, approximately 66 per cent of villages had experienced at least one redistribution of their farmland, and 25 per cent had experienced three or more redistributions.1 Under current law, farmers cannot directly sell their land for non-farming purposes. However, local governments can forcefully take the land of farmers, paying the farmers a price based on the value of the crops they raised on that [End Page 346] land in recent years (with an adjustment for the buildings on the land), and then the local government can sell that land to developers for a huge profit or to industries that will pay future taxes. This practice has lead to major unrest. Furthermore, between 1999 and 2002, more than half a million corruption cases were filed based on land takings and 3,800 government officials were placed under formal investigation. The national government of China passed the 2003 Rural Land Contracting Law (RLCL) in an attempt to restrict the taking of lands.2 One recent study found that the selling of land taken from farmers was the single biggest source of revenue for village governments, comprising approximately 37 per cent of their total revenue.3 Thus complicating China's land problem is the fact that many village governments are financially dependent on buying relatively cheap farmland and subsequently selling it for much higher prices (or for relatively low prices to industries that will pay future taxes). In the long run, however, this system cannot be maintained because there will come a time when the village governments cannot take any more land without making the remaining farms too small to be economically viable. The national leadership of China realises that to produce a harmonious society, this conflict between local governments and the users of local lands must be solved. Many western economists are encouraging China to give complete western-style property rights to agricultural lands. Theodore Panayotou summarises the major reason as follows: Property rights are a precondition for efficient use, trade, investment, conservation, and management of resources [such as land]. No one would economise on, pay for, invest in, or conserve a resource without an assurance that he has secure and exclusive rights over it, that he can recover his costs through use, lease, or sale, and that such rights will be enforced.4 [End Page 347] Klaus Deininger and Songqing Jin add: A legal system that protects contracts and property rights encourages investment and ensures effective use of scarce economic resources … If the rule of law is weak or nonexistent, private actors will need to spend resources to secure their property rights and enforce contracts with strangers, leading to socially inefficient outcomes. The poor may not be able to afford the associated costs...

Alternative Property Systems for China

When Deng Xiaoping took over the leadership of the People's Republic of China in 1980, he changed the course of the nation. He replaced Mao Zedong's emphasis on equality with an emphasis on profits. Deng's favourite slogans included: get rich is glorious, some will get rich before others and whatever makes profits is good for China. Deng, and the leaders who have followed Deng, have progressively moved China from a socialist system towards a capitalist system. During the post-Mao years, progressively longer leases have been offered to those who use land. However, as of June 2010, China had not completely embraced a capitalist property system. The current property system in China is complicated by the two categories used under Mao: a) the government the property of all state-owned enterprises (SOEs, most of urban China fits under this type of ownership); and b) the people in the Maoist communes (not the government) owned the property used by the communes. This is further complicated by the pockets of communal land in the midst of cities. When Deng changed the course of China, the government could legitimately sell the property of the SOEs. However, it could not legitimately sell the property of the communes. However, as the communes disintegrated, most local governments have redistributed the property of the communes in order to free up plots to sell or to handle demographic changes. By 1998, approximately 66 per cent of villages had experienced at least one redistribution of their farmland, and 25 per cent had experienced three or more redistributions. (1) Under current law, farmers cannot directly sell their land for non-farming purposes. However, local governments can forcefully take the land of farmers, paying the farmers a price based on the value of the crops they raised on that land in recent years (with an adjustment for the buildings on the land), and then the local government can sell that land to developers for a huge profit or to industries that will pay future taxes. This practice has lead to major unrest. Furthermore, between 1999 and 2002, more than half a million corruption cases were filed based on land takings and 3,800 government officials were placed under formal investigation. The national government of China passed the 2003 Rural Land Contracting Law (RLCL) in an attempt to restrict the taking of lands. (2) One recent study found that the selling of land taken from farmers was the single biggest source of revenue for village governments, comprising approximately 37 per cent of their total revenue. (3) Thus complicating China's land problem is the fact that many village governments are financially dependent on buying relatively cheap farmland and subsequently selling it for much higher prices (or for relatively low prices to industries that will pay future taxes). In the long run, however, this system cannot be maintained because there will come a time when the village governments cannot take any more land without making the remaining farms too small to be economically viable. The national leadership of China realises that to produce a harmonious society, this conflict between local governments and the users of local lands must be solved. Many western economists are encouraging China to give complete western-style property rights to agricultural lands. Theodore Panayotou summarises the major reason as follows: Property rights are a precondition for efficient use, trade, investment, conservation, and management of resources [such as land]. No one would economise on, pay for, invest in, or conserve a resource without an assurance that he has secure and exclusive rights over it, that he can recover his costs through use, lease, or sale, and that such rights will be enforced. (4) Klaus Deininger and Songqing Jin add: A legal system that protects contracts and property rights encourages investment and ensures effective use of scarce economic resources . …

“Whose Injury Is Like Mine?” Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men

This article examines representations of gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. It argues that these novels, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. By depicting male psychic pain in this way, Brontë and Eliot attempt to locate the source for the violence men inflict on women in an unreconstructed liberalism—rather than an entrenched cultural hostility—that can be transformed through female sympathy as the basis for reciprocal familial relations. However, Brontë's and Eliot's depictions actually give rise to a paradox in which male authority relies on female sympathy to keep it intact.

‘Revolutionary liberalism’? The philosophy and politics of ownership in the post-war Liberal party

Liberal party thinking on ownership questions in the post-war period (defined here as 1945–1989) attempted to find an alternative to both socialism and existing capitalism. Arguing that Labour and the Conservatives were both committed, in different ways, to the concentration of wealth and power, Liberals defined themselves in terms of a radically dispersive philosophy of ownership. This led the party to explore substantial reforms to the content of capitalist property rights and ways of changing their distribution. Although party policy was typically more conservative than some of the party's internal thinking on these issues, an examination of Liberal party thinking in this area adds to our understanding of the specific philosophical character of post-war Liberalism in Britain; of the diverse ways in which capitalism was the focus of critique in post-war British politics; and of the potential alternatives to ‘neo-liberalism’ in our own day.

Home, Capital of the Region

Home, Capital of the Region

The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom

This article deals with current attempts by copyright industries (music, motion pictures and computer software) to challenge and criminalize practices of piracy and copyright theft, especially in relation to internet usage. A number of anti-piracy campaigns, all aimed at schoolchildren, are critically examined. It is argued that their advocacy of copyright and their corresponding objections to piracy rest on a number of rhetorical strategies which encode capitalist and individualist conceptions of property, creativity and rights. These strategies are elucidated and examined so as to draw attention to their contingent, partial and mythical character. Alternative understandings of intellectual expression are mobilized so as to delineate a case for legitimizing, rather than demonizing, cultural copying practices.