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Land Acquisition and Notes on Combined Accumulation of Capital in Contemporary India
MAIDUL ISLAM
Assistant Professor of Political Science Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
We believe that, by clearly locating ourselves in a post-Marxist terrain, we not only help to clarify the meaning of contemporary social struggles but also give to Marxism its theoretical dignity, which can only proceed from recognition of its limitations and of its historicality. Only through such recognition will Marx’s work remain present in our tradition and our political culture.
—Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe1
Land acquisition is a crucial feature of both state and capital led economic development in the post-colonial world. Land acquisition in many cases is also characterized by dislocation of agrarian population, artisans and petty producers from land. For Marx, such separation of producers from the means of production accompanied by “a whole series of forcible methods”
is the logic of the primitive accumulation of capital (1976: 928). Recently, critical academic scholarship has argued that primitive accumulation of capital in the post-colonial world creates redundant surplus population than forming the reserve army of labour waiting to be absorbed by the capitalist enterprises. Moreover, post-colonial development has not been a classical transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism like the western capitalist countries. In such a context, the critical academic scholarship argues that the contemporary mainstream development economics tried to depoliticize development and concentrated on inventing the tools of anti-poverty programmes within the broader logic of governmentality to politically manage the victims of capitalist growth. Contemporary India is not an exception to such processes of capital accumulation, governmentality, and depoliticized development discourse (Sanyal: 2014). In this respect, this essay attempts to rethink the conceptualization of capital accumulation associated with such land acquisitions in contemporary India.
In the current phase of neoliberal capitalism in India, capital often speaks the language of compensation and resettlement. The Land Acquisition Act 2013 also speaks the language of maximum possible consent of the affected people before coercive evacuation. The Land Acquisition Act 2013 mentions about prior consent of eighty percent affected families in the
Acknowledgment: I thank Anjan Chakrabarti, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Swagato Sarkar for being kind enough to listen to some of the ideas expressed in this paper. I am grateful to Ranabir Samaddar for giving me this opportunity to present this preliminary notes on the ‘combined accumulation of Capital’ in the Capital in the East Conference, Kolkata (30-31 January 2018). Any errors in this paper are mine.
1 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’, in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), p. 130.
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case of private companies and seventy percent consent of affected families in the case of public- private partnership projects.2 It also has detailed instructions for the compensation for landowners and also has provisions for rehabilitation and resettlement of affected families comprising of those whose livelihoods are dependent on land acquired for government or private sector projects.3 From the above law, it is clear that both the state and capital speaks the language of transaction and business rather than explicitly forced displacement. This paper attempts to argue that such a logic is technically different from the classic Marxian primitive accumulation of capital as initially conceptualized in the Capital Vol. 1 in the context of 19th century England. It is also different from the “non-classical form of primitive accumulation”
due to setting up of modern capitalist enterprises, involving indirect dislocation as argued by recent scholarship in the East (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009).
The law of the land gives the ground to argue that in the case of the compensatory transaction, although primitive accumulation could be possible, “merciless barbarism”
involved in such a process of primitive accumulation in the development of capitalism in the West as described by Marx cannot be applicable. It is because of the possibilities of subtle coercion and transaction involved between the land possessor (inhabitants) and the land buyer (capital, state or their rented agents). In this regard, this paper would try to conceptualize this process of coercion and transaction as the “combined accumulation of capital” in the 21st century India by differentiating from both the classical and non-classical forms of primitive accumulation.
Marx had never talked about ‘capitalism’ in the Part-VIII of Capital Vol. I that deals with the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Rather, it is capital, which displaces the peasantry.
For Marx, violent forms of “primitive accumulation”4 as the primary or original accumulation was “the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital” (1976:
875). Marx articulated this in Chapter 25 of Capital Vol. I before he talks at length about the process of primitive accumulation in Part VIII:
2 The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, Gazette of India (New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice, 27 September 2013), p. 3.
3 Ibid., pp. 17-21; pp. 28-29; pp. 37-42.
4 In the original German edition of Capital Vol. 1, Marx had used the term “Ursprüngliche Akkumulation”, which could be translated as “original accumulation” or “primaeval accumulation”. It can be located at the moment of origin of capitalism in general and the capitalist class formation in particular. Therefore, in such a sense, this form of accumulation cannot be regarded as capitalism’s past but is contemporaneous with the origin of the capitalist class process. However, “Ursprüngliche Akkumulation” was translated as “so-called primitive accumulation” and
“the secret of primitive accumulation” in the English editions of Capital Vol. I, produced by Progress Publishers, a lost in translation that described this form of accumulation to the past or “pre-history” of capitalism. See Chakrabarti and Dhar (2009: 228).
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A certain accumulation of capital, in the hands of individual producers therefore forms the necessary pre-condition for a specifically capitalist mode of production. We had therefore to presuppose this when dealing with the transition from handicrafts to capitalistic industry. It may be called primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation], because it is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates, we need not investigate as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting point (Marx 1976: 775).
Before starting the discussion on the primitive accumulation, Marx gave a neat logical structure for the readers:
We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value;
surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre- existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point(Marx 1976: 873).
Firstly, Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation has been associated with the concept of force than commodity exchange that he talks in Chapter 3 on the circulation of commodities:
In actual history it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labour’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment, ‘this year’ of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic (Marx 1976: 874).
Secondly, primitive accumulation played a vital role in the transition from the capitalist society to the feudal society.
So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’, because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital. The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former(Marx 1976: 874-875).
Thirdly, Marx’s case study about the forcible separation of the agricultural producer from the soil was West Europe in general and England in particular.
“In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form” (Marx 1976: 876).
“The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These
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methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (Marx 1976: 915-916).
In Western Europe, the homeland of political economy, the process of primitive accumulation has more or less been accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to the antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre- capitalist world, with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime constantly comes up against the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist. The contradiction between these two diametrically opposed economic systems, has its practical manifestation here in the struggle between them(Marx 1976: 931).
Fourthly, during the process of primitive accumulation, Marx pointed about the transformation of feudal and clan property into modern capitalist private property.
“The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supply of a free and rightless proletarians”(Marx 1976: 895).
Fifthly, he associates primitive accumulation with colonial plunder.
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield”(Marx 1976: 915).
The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder(Marx 1976: 917).
Sixthly, he argues primitive accumulation leads to the confiscation of immediate and direct producers and includes forcible methods.
What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e. its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not the direct transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner(Marx 1976: 927).
At a certain stage of development, it brings into the world the material means of its own destruction.
From that moment, new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society. It has to be annihilated; it is annihilated.
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Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production, the transformation, therefore, of the dwarf-like property of the many into the giant property of the few, and the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the instruments of labour, this terrible and arduously accomplished expropriation of the mass of the people forms the pre-history of capital. It comprises a whole series of forcible methods, and we have only passed in review those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the direct producers was accomplished by means of the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions
(Marx 1976: 927-928).
Recent literature on the issue has correctly argued that orthodox Marxists with a teleological and an economic deterministic approach see this process as a necessary condition for the transition from the pre-capitalist feudalism to the capitalist stage of development that happened in the late middle ages in Western Europe much like the classical political economy (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009).
While reading Marx, Kojin Karatani argues that Capital’s “development is always preceded by real historical events. Before dealing with industrial capitalism, Marx gives a long positivist reflection on ‘primitive accumulation.’ The transformation from merchant capital to industrial capital is formally that from M-C-M’ to M-{mp + L}-M’. But for this to happen, the separation between the means of production (mp) and the laborer (L), namely, the commodification of labor power, must have taken place. This transformation, once seen as an economic category, appears to be quite smooth and clear, nevertheless for this ‘formal development’ to occur (or to be grasped as occurring), the real historical process has to be taken into consideration as a sine qua non.” (Karatani 2003: 160).
This ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ that separates labour power from the means of production and which also transformed land into a commodity was originally decided by the absolutist monarchical state (Karatani 2003: 253). Thus, in the case of Europe, this absolutist monarchy's role in transforming the feudal ‘extra-economic compulsion' into private property was very crucial. Karatani has aptly demonstrated this in his two path-breaking works, Transcritique and The Structure of World History:
“The absolutist monarchy lifted the feudal ‘extra-economic compulsion’, and transformed feudal dominion into private property, by suppressing the innumerable feudal lords standing in a row waiting their turns. Furthermore, it imposed the commodity economy onto the agrarian community by way of monetary taxing. By these measures, the absolutist monarchy accelerated the bourgeois reform of the feudal economy” (Karatani 2003: 270).
“In Europe the absolute monarchies created the identity of the nation by suppressing the feudal aristocracies and uniting the people as subjects of the monarch. Moreover, through the destruction and exploitation of the older agrarian community, the absolute monarchies put in place the base for a capitalist economy. Marx called this process ‘primitive accumulation.’ The bourgeoisie who overthrew the absolute monarchy in violent revolutions subsequently built the capitalist economy on this base that was constructed by their predecessors” (Karatani 2014: 257).
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In the context of the land acquisition bill in India, today both state and capital speak the language of compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement, and they talk about the maximum possible consent of the affected people before coercive evacuation. Here, they articulate the language of transaction and business rather than explicitly forced displacement. Therefore, both state and capital could argue that it is just and fair to the dislocated population as it is offering monetary compensation and not forcefully evicting them, which can be regarded as a process of entitlement to private property rights in the libertarian lexicon of acquisition of holdings by the principle of transfer (Nozick 1980: 150-151).5
In this regard, I would argue that such a logic is technically different from the classic Marxian primitive accumulation of capital. It is also different from the “non-classical form of primitive accumulation” that involves “changing one or more of the conditions of existence”
due to setting up of modern capitalist enterprises, dismantling the economic livelihood of a rural neighbourhood such as altering the ground levels of water that negatively affects the agrarian population and creates conditions for its slow dislocation, “block by block”
(Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009: 173-198). This process of non-classical primitive accumulation is a reversal of the Maoist strategy of enveloping the urban with the rural, by epitomising “the encasing and the enfolding of the rural by the urban” (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009: 198). By re- reading Marx’s late encounter with the Russian Mir and the correspondences with Vera Zasulich, Chakrabarti and Dhar’s insightful “ab-original” reading of the original Marxian rendition of primitive accumulation (2009: 16-156) makes a case for "a micro and perhaps mundane mode; surreptitious, silent and secret form" of primitive accumulation that is "non- classical" in character, and which involves indirect dislocation (2009: 178).
However,in the case of compensatory transaction, although primitive accumulation as a “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1976:
875) accompanied by “terrible and arduously accomplished expropriation” and “a whole series of forcible methods” (Marx 1976: 928) are present but “merciless barbarism” (Marx 1976: 928) might be absent due to transaction involved between the land possessor (indigenous
5 While engaging with Marx’s Capital Vol. I, the libertarian political philosopher, Robert Nozick did not engage with the concept of primitive accumulation of capital. Instead, he tried to refute Marx's theory of exploitation (Nozick 1980: 253-262). At the same time, the liberal political philosopher, John Rawls also did not mention about the primitive accumulation of capital while teaching Marx in his Harvard lectures (Rawls 2007: 319-353).
Rawls also suggested that Marxian communism is attributed to ‘radical egalitarianism' by the likes of G.A. Cohen and Norman Geras who think that for Marx, ‘capitalism is unjust’; a communist society would resolve the justice question by eliminating injustices like alienation and exploitation along with the overcoming of the division of labour. The Marxian ‘ideal’ of ‘a society of freely associated producers’ or the ‘higher phase of communism’, according to Rawls, could be a ‘society beyond justice.’
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inhabitants) and the land buyer (capital). I would term it as a “combined accumulation of capital” by replacing the Marxian idea of “primitive accumulation”.
I would argue that primitive accumulation takes place outside the production relations where transaction is absent and direct extra-economic coercion is present. Whereas, in combined accumulation of capital, subtle coercion can be located within or inside the production relations in the name of compensation. In other words, it is business transaction at gunpoint, a feature of extractive capitalist accumulation with the veiled threat from the state, capital and the rented agents (extra-legal extortionists, strong men etc.) of both state and capital.
In the classic primitive accumulation, Marx argued about transforming the land held by the expropriated to private property as a commodity. But in the combined accumulation, land is already seen as a commodity by the capital. In this way, it is also different from the process of non-classical forms of primitive accumulation that indirectly dislocates peasant population due to the negative impact on the surrounding neighbourhood as part of the modern capitalist ventures. In short, combined accumulation of capital is a form of coercive accumulation that takes place inside production relations with the lack of bargaining power of the individual seller of private property or the inhabitant in a property either owned collectively or individually.
This form of coercion is witnessed during land acquisition for mining, big industry, infrastructural development, real estate projects etc. with active collaboration of the state and the rented agents of both state and capital. In the combined accumulation of capital, the state projects itself as the collective bargainer on behalf of both the capital and the inhabitants, who have to choose between resistance and compensation. In the phase of neoliberal global capitalism, land is scarce and therefore becomes one of the principal sites of emerging contradictions and vast inequalities among various classes. This is unlike the Lockean period of mercantile capitalism and colonialism where land is being seen as infinite and thus plenty left for others to acquire (Locke 1988: 291). Such a condition leads to emerging contradistinctions where on the one hand, the peasant/inhabitant either want to save her/his land or demands land as part of the rehabilitation package from the state while on the other hand, the capitalist also demands land from the state to mine or set up industry. In these circumstances, the choice is thus given, and formal consensus is built around that given and overdetermined choice in front of the peasant population—to resist capitalist accumulation or perish.
I would argue that this phenomenon of combined accumulation of capital has become an essential feature of contemporary neoliberal capitalism in India as well. This is because the redundant surplus population as capital’s constitutive outside being separated from the means
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of production as a process of primitive accumulation instead of being the reserve army of labour, waiting to be employed by the capitalists (Sanyal 2014) is not just a feature of primary accumulation in the post-colonial world but also that of combined accumulation of capital under the conditions of neoliberal form of capitalism. The mechanism of such combined accumulation involves the coupled processes of extra-economic coercion and monetary exchange. In other words, combined accumulation of capital is a combination of both coercion and transaction. The process of combined accumulation involves taking land from indigenous peasant population by capital and the state. Such combined accumulation, characterised by business transactions with a veiled threat, also create redundant surplus population as capital’s constitutive outside. At the same time, it could reduce the price of the land and other means of production for the capital.
The Land bill in India also creates conditions of possibilities that when consensual methods like compensation and negotiation do not work, capitalist hegemony could be established via coercion. This aspect is already present for those twenty percent or thirty percent people who might not wish to sell their land or those inhabitants who do not want to relocate. The Land acquisition bill also creates conditions on the peculiar complexities of corporate control over land and natural resources that are justified around concepts of compensation and resettlement or necessary collateral damage like dislocation for the sake of capitalist development. The land acquisition exercise in India is often jointly carried out by both the state and capital. This connivance between state and capital is currently witnessed in the case of contemporary phase of extractive capitalism, where vast tracts of land are being concentrated in few hands of big corporates, and the state facilitates mining operations for the interests of capital.
This form of state-sponsored terrorism or what Marx would have called “ruthless terrorism” (1976: 895) is often used as a coercive strategy during the moments of both primitive and combined accumulation of capital. The quantum and magnitude of such forms of state terror and intimidation by agents of both state and capital, of course, vary and contingent upon the stakes involved and the nature of resistance towards such coercion.
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Karatani, Kojin. (2014). The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs. Durham: Duke University Press.
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