Primary Accumulation qua Development Terrorism
October 21, 2009
By Panayiotis T. Manolakos, Sanhati
The origins of capitalism, Marx maintained, are often legitimized as a mythology about the past. Such legitimation takes the form of a creation myth for the capitalist mode of production. If the primary accumulation is a matter for the present, however, constituting the principal contradiction of capitalist development, at least in certain zones, then the ruling classes require a mythology and a policy to legitimize their expropriations of the people’s property. Such a mythology denies the people their property rights in the forms of access to agricultural land, forests, and the commons. The ideology and practice of these dispossessions and its correlates take the form of developmental terrorism, as Amit Bhaduri has observed [1].
The processes of the primary accumulation are an entirely organic development. In its present configuration, the Indian State mainly behaves as a monopolist controlling this form of violence. Developmental terrorism is consequently the principal aspect of the primary accumulation. Thus, Marx noted that:
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market … [T]he fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.
Moreover, this “freed” and outlawed mass enters a terrain riddled with manifold technologies and institutions of violence arrayed against it by the Indian State. Today, a substantial stratum of the masses are situated within this politico-economic universe.
Accepting the interpretation of the primary accumulation as the constitutive primitive of the capitalist system in Chandra and Basu (2007) [2], I maintain that there are two important characteristics of such developmental terrorism. These characteristics are captured in the Gramscian equation power = coercion + hegemony. Both terms in this fundamental equation must be studied to develop a dialectical understanding of the principal contradiction. With respect to the hegemonic term, the emergence of the primary accumulation as the principal contradiction corresponds with a qualitative and quantitative transformation of the politico-military efforts of the ruling classes to expand their privileges. Their extortions take the form of ideological, philosophical, political, and legal war in the attempt to shift the balance of power against the oppressed. With respect to the coercion term, a neo-Leninist conception of the Indian State provides a fruitful theoretical point of entry. In this essay, I discuss certain concrete solutions of this equation that have emerged during the original accumulation.
The Indian State has amply demonstrated a disposition towards the application of force against the mass mobilizations of the oppressed. In the present situation, the motions of the primary accumulation are governed by the mobilization of “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.” in the command of the ruling classes. These armed bodies, of course, consist of the various police forces, paramilitaries, and the army. The utilization of such armed bodies aims to expropriate the people and scuttle social movements mobilizing against this repression. Douglass North, an ex-Trotskyist turned Nobel laureate in bourgeois economics, expressed the matter succinctly by postulating that the State is an actor that aims to attain and preserve its monopoly over violence within a society [3].
Therein is the import of various attempts to manufacture “law and order.” Engels was quite right to quip that in a so-called democratic republic wealth exercises power via the direct corruption of the officials and the alliance of the government with the Stock Exchange. Indian capitalism, in the course of primary accumulation, has proceeded far along this path.
The quantitative data pertaining to this issue are well-known from various academic articles. To give numbers – approvals for mining concessions increased by 179% during the period 1999-2003 (i.e., an annual average of 35.8%). The impact on forest rights has been especially significant. In Orissa, roughly 79,339 hectares has been allocated to mining leases but of these 43,975 hectares were located in forests. Between 1993 and 1997, the loss of dense forest cover in Madhya Pradesh has been about 12,408 square kilometers and 29,780 hectares in Orissa. In the aggregate, 95,003 hectares of forest have been “diverted” for mining leases during the period 1980-2005. These data provide an indication of the intensity of the primary accumulation, which means the plunder of the people’s natural resources [4].
These “diversions” of land are accomplished by various idyllic methods. Sudha Bharadwaj writes concerning the situation in Chhattisgarh, which has produced “200,000 by-default Naxalites“:
The Government of Chhattisgarh admits that since the start of Salwa Judum (SJ henceforth) in the year 2005, 644 villages of district Dantewada, whose overwhelmingly adivasi population is about 350000, have been emptied out.
Our common sense understanding that en masse displacement on this scale could only have been made possible by extreme violence is vindicated by the horrifying incidents of arson, loot, murder, rape, and widespread arrests by the SJ and security forces that have continuously been coming to light, and which can no longer be ignored.
In honest moments, security experts of the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) in Kanker district admit that this is the well known American counter-insurgency strategy of “draining the water to kill the fish”. In addition, many of us who are witness to widespread displacement all over Chhattisgarh for rich mineral resources believe that there is also considerable evidence that the motive for ground clearing is acquisition for mining companies.
Let us not neglect the development terrorism manifest in Manipur. The situation in Manipur was aptly described by Asia-Pacific Indigenous Youth Network (APIYN), an organization promoting and protecting the rights of indigenous peoples, as a “little-known killing field” with widespread “[e]xtra judicial executions, fake encounter killings, rape of women, torture, arbitrary detentions of innocent civilians by the armed forces.”
Basically re-affirming the assessment of Human Rights Watch, CNN-IBN reported that:
A former judge who presided over several enquiries into killings in Manipur says that extra judicial killings are a reality in the state. India was shocked when a dozen women went naked on the streets of Imphal in July 2004 to protest against the alleged rape and murder of Manorama Devi by soldiers of Assam Rifles. Justice (retd.) C Upendra Singh headed the enquiry that followed and his report found the security personnel guilty for Manorama’s custodial death but no punitive action followed. He felt frustrated but was not shocked.
Justice Singh, who served as a district and sessions court judge, has headed 12 investigations into fake encounters between 1996 and 2007. He reportedly found the security forces culpable in every incident but no action has ever been taken against those involved. “I gave in all my findings that the security people were responsible for the killings. They do whatever they like. They don’t care for the law; they do whatever they like,” says Justice Singh ….
Manipur was enraged again when on July 23 Manipur Police commandos allegedly dragged Sanjit, a 22-year-old former militant, into a pharmacy in an Imphal market and shot him dead. Sanjit was accused of killing Rabina Devi, a pregnant woman, a few minutes earlier. The police claimed they recovered a 9-MM gun from Sanjit. Human rights groups reject the allegations and claim it was the police commandos who killed both Sanjit and the woman. “How will he carry a weapon? Not possible at all. I wanted it proved,” says Lt Col Rajendra Singh Rajkumar, an official of the Manipur Human Rights Commission ….
Such encounter killings are also an artifact of the primary accumulation, i.e., there is a strong relationship between the primary accumulation and the colonizing tendencies of the Indian State. This internal colonization in the current phase is intimately linked with the processes of primary accumulation. Thus, the treasures extracted from the colonized areas by “undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.” This holds in Chhattisgarh and Manipur.
Let us briefly turn our attention to the ideological motivation for State violence offered among elements of the police forces. In many instances of State violence (e.g., ‘fake’ encounters), these are rationalized as desh bhakti. All manner of undesirables are disposed of under this rubric, e.g., dadas, terrorists, and naxals. For example, it was recently noted that desh bhakti was cited by Vanzara as the main motivation for eliminating people like Sohrabuddin [5]. Davinder Singh, Deputy Superintendent of the Special Task Force of the Jammu and Kashmir police, admitted that he had tortured Mohammed Afzal (one of those accused in the Parliament attack of 2001). Singh tortured Afzal for the sake of the “nation.” Indeed, “[g]overnment approval for such killings often comes in the shape of the awards of medals to ‘meritorious’ policemen who eliminate the Naxalite threat to the Indian nation.”
Such attitudes are not uncommon. K.S. Subrmanian, a former IPS officer recalled that [5]:
During a training session on ‘social tensions’ at a rural development training institute, some ‘surrendered Naxalites’ had been invited to participate. One of them began by narrating experiences of police torture in graphic detail. The atmosphere in the training hall became tense. Suddenly, a woman IPS officer in uniform, a participant from an adjoining police training organization, burst out and shouted at the Naxalites: “when I hear you people talk like this, I wish I had brought my revolver”! Later, when questioned by me, the officer said that she was serving the ‘nation’ and it annoyed her to hear Naxalite ‘anti-nationals’ attacking the ‘nation’ in the name of police torture.
But what is this nation? Is it an adivasi nation? Is it a dalit nation? Is it a nation of slums? Is it a nation that seeks to attain the illusions of capitalism so aptly depicted in the recent movie Kaminey? There is an ideological war over the idea of the nation. The various attempts of the Sangh Parivar to gain influence in adivasi areas further substantiates this point. According to Thomas Hansen, this ideological war involves the construction of primary and secondary boarding schools, hostels in the urban areas, projects in the villages; the students are encouraged to return to their villages and make them “Hindu again.” Such projects are implemented with the aim of stopping the spread of the “sickness” infecting the tribals. This ideological struggle is an additional element in the processes of the original accumulation.
In addition to the direct ideological war over the idea of the nation, another aspect concerns the politico-legal domain. Marx wrote of the bloody legislations against the expropriated. In India, there has been an expanstion of such legislations (e.g., AFSPA, UAPA, the SEZ act). There has been a corresponding proliferation and intensification of State violence under these Acts. We observe an expansion of powers of the CRPF; slum clearances disguised as beautification; CISF now has been charged with protecting IT parks. Thus, while NREGS payments are delayed, assassinations and the creation of capitalist private property becomes commonplace. Thus, it comes to pass that the Mittals and Tatas accumulate wealth, the Sanjits come to be assasinated, the Ishrat Jahans murdered in fake encounters by the Vanzaras.
Let us conclude with a meditation on the words of Fanon. Friends, let us not pay tribute to the European model by creating a society which draws inspiration from the “advanced capitalist” nations. Humanity awaits a new society greater than such an imitation, which would be an abomination. It is time to transcend capitalist society. The people, the historic bloc of the oppressed, have rejected “development.”
References
1. Development or Developmental Terrorism? – Amit Bhaduri, EPW, 2007
2. Neoliberalism and Primitive Accumulation in India – Chandra and Basu (2007)
3. Structure and Change in Economic History – Douglas North
4. What are We Sustaining ? Evaluating Sustainable Development Policies in India – Sirisha Naidu, 2009
5. Liberation, June 2007
October 25th, 2009 at 14:35
Thanks to Dipankar Basu and Sirisha Naidu for their comments on an earlier draft. The usual disclaimer applies.
October 26th, 2009 at 20:26
Thank you for writing a courageous article about bone-chilling violence in the service of a heedless rush acquire more, and more ad infinitum. It’s also appalling that what is happening in India is large unnoticed and uncommented on in the North.