Suchergebnisse

This essay engages with the commodification of land in an urban periphery of India. It argues against the tendency to reduce commodification of land to "primitive accumulation" or "accumulation by dispossession." It presents an ethnography of the process of the commodification of land under speculative conditions. The growing demand for land for urbanization and industrialization, along with the availability of speculative finance capital in the real estate market, has made land a scarce commodity. In this land market, local capitals piggyback on finance capital and bid up the prices exponentially in the micromarkets. Speculation makes it impossible for the state to match the market price, and its compensation for the land losers is always quite low, which the latter refuse to accept. The landowning farmers, on the other hand, have developed a capacity to adjust to the speculative conditions and to control the supply of land in the market. Even though they can receive a very good price for their land, they show no urgency to sell it. As a consequence, the state's plan to urbanize a given area, to create a stable arrangement of clear property titles, and to control land prices become uncertain.

Over the last two decades, the notion of primitive accumulation has been reemerging within studies of historical capitalism. Nonetheless, most research on contemporary dispossessions has related them to capitalist accumulation proper without sufficient theoretical care, in a way that virtually collapses the concepts of dispossession and accumulation into one another. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some theoretical distinctions to better understand how contemporary dispossessions and their variations, forms and mechanisms relate, contribute, or even do not contribute, to capitalist accumulation proper. To do so, I discuss the concept of classical primitive accumulation and its alleged continuity until today. I then propose the concept of redistributive dispossession which, unlike primitive accumulation, does not create any condition for the expansion of capital. Such conditions are created through the processes I discuss under the label of expanding dispossession, which I split into expanding capitalizing dispossession and expanding commodifying dispossession.

Mercedes Biocca's The Silences of Dispossession: Agrarian Change and Indigenous Politics in Argentina provides excellent accounts of Indigenous participation in and resistance to the dispossession by the capitalist and neoliberal apparatuses of accumulation and elimination.
The post The Silences of Dispossession appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The crisis unleashed in Barbuda by Hurricane Irma in 2017 followed centuries of neglect by the British colonial state and then by the postcolonial government of its sister island, Antigua. Barbuda developed customary communal-land tenure as a result of its peculiarities in slavery and freedom, and this survival strategy has doubled as political and economic resistance to encroachment by Antigua, where private land ownership and uneven opportunity abound because of the unstable, cyclical nature of its main industry—tourism. Although Barbudans have long delimited tourism development and refused private land ownership, citing communal land as their shield, these issues have resurfaced in the rebuilding process after Hurricane Irma. Barbudans' desires to maintain their previous way of life remain hampered by the Antiguan government's disaster capitalist desires to reconstruct Barbuda as a resort paradise. This essay reveals how climate change, economic fragility, and uncertain sovereignty have collectively undermined Barbuda's customary forms of independence, leaving dispossession in their wake.

Protest has become a hot topic in recent sociolinguistic and semiotic landscapes scholarship. Despite a growing number of studies, little research has been done on dissent as it is jointly orchestrated by individuals and objects. To fill this gap, this paper builds on previous semiotic landscapes studies (Bock & Stroud, 2019) and offers an analysis of political action as it is produced in the 'nooks and crannies' of everyday life (Besnier, 2009; Scott, 1990). Interrogating participants' memories of dispossession, the paper brings to the fore their experiences of the manoeuvring required to enact dissent. The performative acts that they describe involve situated context-sensitive intentional decisions to protest, both in and out of the public eye. The acts of manoeuvring require thought-through calculation, ongoing readjustment, and reinvention on the part of the protesters as they respond to the calls of their immediate material environment. As interviews and photographic data collected in Crimea illuminate, individuals find recourse to things, but things affect individual actors too, hence suggesting that language and other semiotic markers of belonging come to be experienced as a complex multimodal phenomenon in the everyday manoeuvres of protest.

Is Botswana still 'an African miracle'? Thanks to diamonds the country's growth rate was the highest in the world into the 1990s, and regular parliamentary elections judged free on polling day have been held since 1965. However a duopoly of presidentialism and ruling party preponderance has stimulated arrogance, complacency and corruption among the country's rulers. What is 'perpetual democracy'? The ruling BDP is kept in perpetual power by the first-past-the post election system. The President in Botswana is empowered to do whatever he pleases. President Mogae has amended the constitution to ensure the automatic succession of the Vice-President General Ian Khama, the son of Seretse and Ruth Khama. A new Directorate of Intelligence Services provides closer control of power. Why are the Khoisan confined to 'a gulag of special settlements'? The expulsion of the San from Central Kalahari Game Reserve was relentlessly enforced in 1997 and 2002. A multi-cultural coalition asserts that the government is implementing 'a philosophy of cultural genocide on the non-Tswana tribes'. How can the gift of diamonds be turned to reform? Professor Good asserts the need to strengthen and democratise the electoral and voting systems. He sees diversification as essential to reduce the dependency on diamonds. He urges the use of mineral wealth to reduce the gap between rich and poor; half of the population are at present in poverty in a rich country. KENNETH GOOD was Professor of Politics at the University of Botswana when he was expelled from the country. South Africa: Jacana