Expropriation
- Michael Scipioni
- há 5 dias
- 3 min de leitura
In Critical Development Studies, expropriation is most succinctly understood as the process of separating the class of peasants or commoners from the land. Expropriation exists as a central mechanism for the expansion of capitalism, particularly in the Global South, where primitive accumulation, dispossession, and land seizures take up primary positions in the enforcement of economic structure. This dispossession occurs through both legal means and violent evictions. Expropriation as a critical term of political economy finds its roots in the use of the term by Karl Marx. Expropriation plays a crucial role in the metabolic rift between human societies and the natural ecosystem, where the cycle of material exchange between society and nature is disrupted by expanding production and exploitation of the land.
Primitive accumulation, or what Marx suggested could also be called “original expropriation” is the process of dispossessing and displacing the common ownership of the land. This process concentrates the land and wealth into the hands of an emerging bourgeoisie, who are able to take advantage of the labor of the proletariat, who emerge from the displaced peasantry. Marx also argues that the proletarian revolution will be characterized by the “expropriation of the expropriators”, meaning that the working class will “take back” the means of production from the ruling class and turn them into instruments of free and associated labour.
Expropriation, and primitive accumulation, are not just historical stages of capitalist development. Expropriation is an ongoing feature of the global capitalist system, expressed in neoliberal policies and free-trade agreements, imperialist coercion, and IMF-backed debt repayment measures. In the global capitalist system, expropriation appears most in the poorest areas in the imperial core, as well as in the “periphery” of the system. In the imperial core “speculative expropriation” is used to attach the white and settler proletariat to the land through debt, which creates further incentives for settler classes to displace Indigenous people and enforce colonial and racial hierarchies. More generally, expropriation can be seen in the seizure of private property through eminent domain, where the state expropriates land for resources, or economic and corporate development. Particularly in the Global South, expropriation is expressed in the seizure of land for mining or agricultural companies, dispossessing and displacing Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities. Additionally, it has been theorized that traditions of knowledge may also be subject to such dispossession through the concept of epistemic expropriation, highlighting how knowledge produced in the Global South is decontextualized and depoliticized by scholars from the Global North.
References:
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