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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of agrarian change 2011-10, Vol.11 (4), p.454-483
Main Author: LEVIEN, MICHAEL
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accumulation
accumulation by dispossession
agrarian transformation
Agricultural economics
Capitalism
Economic Change
Economic Development
Economic theory
Elites
Ethnography
India
Inequality
IT industry
Land
land broker state
Markets
Peasants
Profits
Rural Areas
Special Economic Zones
Studies
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1471-0358
1471-0366
DOI:10.1111/j.1471-0366.2011.00329.x