Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment

The Commodification of Land in City and Country

D. Asher Ghertner, Robert W. Lake, D. Asher Ghertner, Robert W. Lake

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501753756
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs.

This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development.

Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular.

Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

1

Fictitious but Not Utopian

Land Commodification and Dispossession in Rural India

Michael Levien

Contemporary protests over “land grabs” have renewed interest in the relationship between land dispossession and capitalism. Searching for theoretical foundations, scholars of almost every persuasion have found inspiration—and a reservoir of good quotes—in Karl Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) classic account of land commodification in The Great Transformation. Polanyi argued that land—like labor and money—is a “fictitious commodity”; that its transformation into a commodity generates profound social dislocations; and that these dislocations generate countermovements for social protection. Polanyi thus saw the long stretch of history between the English enclosures and World War II as defined by a “double movement” in which, “the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones” (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 79). While Polanyi took midcentury state capitalisms as evidence for such restriction, his concept of the double movement resonates again amid the intensifying land commodification of the neoliberal era and the land struggles this has produced.

Despite such resonance, Polanyi’s treatment of land is arguably the most cursory of his “fictitious commodities”; there is significant disagreement among scholars about what “fictitiousness” actually means; and some have recently argued that the concept hinders rather than helps our ability to grasp the very “real” political economy of land (Christophers 2016). The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the meaning and defend the utility of Polanyi’s conception of land as a fictitious commodity. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research into processes of land commodification and dispossession in rural northwest India, I argue that Polanyi’s conception of land as a fictitious commodity helps to explain why state action—including but not limited to dispossession—is an important mechanism for transforming land into a commodity. Land is a fictitious commodity, I will suggest, not because commodifying it is utopian (Block 2001; Block and Somers 2014) or unethical (Li 1991, 220); nor is it because commodifying land necessarily destroys its use value (Burawoy 2015, 19) or undermines capitalism’s ecological conditions of possibility (O’Connor 1988, 12; Fraser 2014, 547). Rather, land is a fictitious commodity because it is enmeshed in nonmarket institutions and value practices that must be overcome if it is to be governed by markets.

This interpretation of fictitiousness depends neither on a romanticized defense of precapitalist institutions nor a claim that land is unique in creating obstacles to commodification—the basis of two important critiques of the concept (Fraser 2014; Christophers 2016). Rather, it rests on the simple observation that land was not—like most other commodities—created to be sold on the market and that, therefore, attempts to turn it into a commodity must overcome the diverse and historically sedimented institutions and social values in which it is embedded. The sociological significance of Polanyi’s conception of land as a fictitious commodity, thus interpreted, is that it helps us to understand why land’s social integument poses obstacles to capitalist accumulation; and why dispossession— and state action more generally—are necessary for its transformation into a commodity. The concept thus fills a troubling gap in Marxian theories of dispossession, such as Harvey’s (2003, 2005) accumulation by dispossession, which do not explain why dispossession becomes an important mechanism of commodification in particular times and places. Polanyi himself did not grasp, however, that it is dispossession not commodification that generates countermovements over land; that such countermovements can fail to emerge or succeed; and that the relentless march of commodification is therefore far from utopian, social and ecological havoc notwithstanding.

In what follows, I will first review and critique recent prominent interpretations of the meaning of fictitiousness and then advance my own reading of Polanyi’s concept. I will then try to show how this reading of land as a fictitious commodity helps to explain the role of states in transforming rural land into a commodity. I do so by drawing on the case of Rajpura, a rain-fed farming village in the Indian state of Rajasthan that I studied intensively between 2009 and 2011, with four further revisits between 2012 and 2017. As late as 1950, Rajpura was a feudal demesne with no private property or land market; in 2005, it housed one of India’s largest private special economic zones (SEZ)—essentially a privately run city for multinational corporations and high-end real estate. With deep class, caste, and gender inequalities, at no point was Rajpura idyllic. But using the insight that land is a fictitious commodity does not require an ahistorical or romantic depiction of Rajpura’s precapitalist institutions. Rather, the concept methodologically directs our attention to different phases in the transformation of Rajpura’s land from noncommodity to commodity. These phases include post-Independence land reforms that abolished feudal tenures and created small-holding private property; post-1990s deregulation that lifted many constraints on land markets while intensifying demand; and the coercive use of eminent domain by the Rajasthan government to dispossess the village for a private SEZ. State-orchestrated dispossession, in this and similar cases across India, was the coup de grâce that overcame the remaining obstacles that even deregulated rural land markets pose to large-scale land commodification.

Yet, while widespread land dispossession of this kind has provoked militant farmer protests elsewhere in India, I show how the Rajasthan state government was able to absorb Rajpura’s dispossessed farmers into the process of commodification itself, thus undermining the second leg of Polanyi’s double movement. While the dispossession and commodification of Rajpura’s land has produced dramatic ecological and social consequences, as Polanyi would predict, it has not produced a countermovement, much less decommodification. Rajpura’s land is now a commodity integrated into a global real estate market.

Land as Fictitious Commodity

The Fuzziness of Fictitiousness

Among the fictitious commodities, Polanyi’s discussion of land is arguably the least coherent. To begin with, it is scattered across the book and unevenly integrated into his larger argument. While Polanyi’s account of the English enclosures begins in chapter 3, chapter 4’s important discussion of precapitalist economic systems—in which Polanyi argues that economic systems were subordinated to society for most of human history—contains no discussion of land. It is only in chapter 6 that Polanyi fully introduces his “fictitious commodities,” while chapter 15 focuses on land specifically. Polanyi’s discussion of land commodification in these sections is empirically thin and ad hoc. While, like Marx, he focuses on the English enclosures, he also mentions the need for land for mills and worker housing (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 188), the role of the Code Napoleon in instituting private property in France (ibid., 189), and rather vaguely, colonial expropriations (ibid., 187). Most confusingly, however, Polanyi constantly conflates the commodification of land with the extension of trade in agricultural products (these markets have an empirical connection, but are not the same). His account of the nineteenth-century “double movement” thus actually focuses on protectionist movements against free trade and not movements against land commodification. Even when discussing agrarian protectionism, Polanyi cannot decide if the peasantry is “least contaminated by the liberal virus” or the “champions of market economy” (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 196, 197). Like the entire text, moreover, Polanyi’s discussion of land suffers from his organic and functionalist conception of society, which protects itself against the market through the medium of classes (Burawoy 2003). Not only does Polanyi assume that reembedding is in the interests of everyone, but he simply assumes that the countermovements succeed—though there is great disagreement among scholars about what, exactly, reembedding entails (cf. Block and Somers 2014; Burawoy 2003; Lachman 2007). All of this makes for a frustrating read, which undoubtedly explains why Polanyi is so often mobilized through à la carte quotations. While Polanyi’s theory of a double movement resonates at a relatively high level of abstraction—intensified marketization produces social resistance across multiple domains of life—almost everything else remains to be filled in.

Despite these deep ambiguities in his classic work, Polanyi bequeathed an important concept in fictitious commodities. But much like Polanyi’s far more debated and parallel term embeddedness (Krippner et al. 2004), fictitiousness has been interpreted in remarkably divergent ways. For Block and Somers (2014), land—like labor and money—is a fictitious commodity because it cannot be fully commodified; any attempt to do so is “utopian” since the resulting social havoc calls forth countermovements and government intervention. Commodifying fictitious commodities thus “describes something that cannot actually exist” (Block and Somers 2014, 32). On this basis, they argue that Polanyi’s most important insight is that markets are always embedded in society (see also Block 2001).

In Burawoy’s reading, by contrast, the double movement rests on the idea that there are historical waves of commodification (2015). Land, in this reading, not only can be commodified; but its commodification defines the most recent “wave of marketization.” What makes land a fictitious commodity, for Burawoy, is that this commodification leads to ecological destruction. Commodities are fictitious “if their unregulated commodification destroys their ‘true’ or ‘essential’ character” (ibid., 19). Thus, “when land, or more broadly nature, is subject to commodification then it can no longer support the basic necessities for human life” (ibid., 19). In this interpretation, fictitiousness is thus defined not by the impossibility of commodification but by its (negative) results. In a parallel reading, Nancy Fraser argues that fictitious commodities are those things that, if commodified, undermine the market’s conditions of possibility (2014, 548). Dispatching with what she calls an “ontological” interpretation of fictitiousness, which she argues is based on an essentialist and ahistorical conception of land that overlooks “relations of domination” and thus lends itself to a reactionary project (Fraser 2014, 547), Fraser advances what she calls a structural interpretation: land is a fictitious commodity because commodifying it destroys capitalism’s ecological foundations (see also O’Connor 1998, 12).

Noting the concept’s ambiguities, and taking exception to the idea that land commodification is utopian, Christophers (2016) has recently argued that we should dispatch with the concept of fictitiousness altogether if we are to understand very real processes of land commodification under capitalism. Building on Fraser’s (2014) argument above, Christophers issues a two-fold critique. First, while Polanyi “links the difficulty of marketization to the original, non-sale-oriented condition of land, labour and money,” Christophers asks, “How often does society actually confront these three entities in their original forms, and thus also confront properties nominally militating against marketization?” (Christophers 2016, 140). Polanyi’s conception of fictitiousness, Christophers concurs with Fraser, assumes an ahistorical conception of land. Second, Christophers (2016, 140) questions the uniqueness of land, labor, and money, asking whether they are really the only things not created as commodities but treated like commodities and, relatedly, whether there are any other commodities “that resist commodification and/or pose problems for market formation,” generate countermovements, and/or obligate efforts at social and political reembedding? Christophers provides the examples of human organs and knowledge.¹ But, unlike Fraser, Christophers believes that we should get rid of the concept of fictitiousness altogether since “treating land as fictitious has demonstrably been hobbling, making political economists circumspect about land and its conceptual significance” whereas “a shedding of ideas of fictitiousness…. can empower them to place land at the very heart of theory, which, in an era of land grabbing, ‘planetary urbanisation’ and proliferating international housing crises, is clearly where it needs to be” (Christophers 2016, 143).

Christophers’s call to treat the political economy of land more seriously is welcome, as is his challenge to clarify what, if anything, is useful in designating land a fictitious commodity. But I do not believe his—or Fraser’s—critiques are fatal to the idea of land as a fictitious commodity, which in my reading depends neither on an ahistorical concept of precommoditized land nor on the claim that land is ontologically unique (rather than simply specific).² Indeed, I argue that Polanyi’s conception of land as a fictitious commodity fills a real gap in our understanding of the “real” political economy of land under capitalism. Below, I take up Christophers’s challenge to clarify its meaning.

The Sociological Meaning of Fictitiousness

Polanyi argues that commodities “are objects produced for sale on the market” (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 75). What makes land, labor, and money peculiar is that while they “are essential elements of industry” and “must be organized in markets” they “are obviously not commodities” as “none of them are produced for sale” (ibid., 75, 76). The implication is that land preexists commodification and is, therefore, deeply embedded in nonmarket institutions: “What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions…. with tribe and temple, village, guild and church” (ibid., 187). Not only is land historically embedded in social institutions, but it is correspondingly valued in multiple ways that are not reducible to its economic value. Thus, Polanyi elaborates, “The economic function of land is but one of many vital functions of land. It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land” (ibid.). While Polanyi phrases this in typically functionalist and lyrical fashion, the point stands. Land has historically been embedded in nonmarket institutions and socially valued in ways that are irreducible to its economic value. Under European feudalism, to take Polanyi’s main example, land was “extra commercium” (ibid., 73) and embedded in political, military, and judicial structures: “Its status and function were determined by legal and customary rules” (ibid., 72–73). A market society, however, must treat land as if it were a commodity like any other; as an essential factor of production, it must be responsive to price signals. For this to happen, however, land must be extracted from its social entanglements: “To separate land from man and to organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy” (ibid., 187). We shall return to whether this is, indeed, utopian.

Polanyi is vague about how this separation happens (Burawoy 2015, 20), though like Marx’s (1990 [1867]) analysis of primitive accumulation, he emphasizes the role of the state and, less forthrightly, violence.³ In his account of the enclosures, Polanyi focuses more on the ineffectual efforts to check its progress than the political forces and administrative mechanisms that made it possible.⁴ Of Europe’s agrarian transition more generally, however, Polanyi observes that “some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time” (Polanyi 2001, 189). Also like Marx, Polanyi believes that more contemporary processes of colonization illustrate the same mechanisms that were involved in the enclosures. In an even sparser account, Polanyi notes—like his precursors Marx (1990 [1867]) and Luxemburg (2003 [1913])—that colonialism involves “smashing up social structures” in order to extract both labor and resources (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 71, see also 188). The main difference between the enclosures and colonization is that the process of commodification that took centuries in the West “may be compressed into a few years” in the colonies, which also lack the political sovereignty necessary to place checks on this process (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 192).⁵ While in both cases Polanyi notes the role of private persons (whether landlords or colonizers), his emphasis is on the role of the state—consistent with the Great Transformation’s larger argument that “the laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action” (ibid., 147).⁶

It is certainly true that Polanyi operates with a vague conception of the “organic” precapitalist societies thus shattered. It does not follow, however, that his concept of land as a fictitious commodity implies an ahistorical conception of land unshaped by “human activity or relations of power” (Fraser 2014, 547)....

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country
• 1. Fictitious but Not Utopian: Land Commodification and Dispossession in Rural India
• 2. Fictions of Surplus: Commodifying Public Land in Canada and the United Kingdom
• 3. Fictions of Safety: Defensive Storylines in Global Property Investment
• 4. Ground Fictions: Soil, Property, and Markets in the Colombian Conflict
• 5. Narratives of Waste: The Fictions and Frictions of Land Commodification in Liberalizing India
• 6. Rental Fictions: Speculating in Rent-Regulated Housing in New York City
• 7. The Fiction of Formalization: Titles, Concessions, and the Politics of Landownership in Cambodia
• 8. Regularization and the Fictions of Planning “Unauthorized Delhi”
• 9. The Sanctuary of the Collective: Contesting the Fictions of State-Led Land Commodification in Peri-Urban Guangzhou
• 10. Rights Gone Wrong on the City’s Edge: The Fictions and Fetishes of Land Documents in Ho Chi Minh City
• 11. Where Materiality Meets Subjectivity: Locating the Political in the Contested Fiction of Urban Land in Camden, New Jersey
• 12. The State of Land Grabs: Regulatory Fictions in Ghana’s “Small-Scale” Gold Mining Sector
• Afterword: Land Fictions in the Longue Durée
• Notes
• References
• Contributors
• Index