Michael Levien

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.

Land Grabs in Neoliberal India

Dispossession without Development

Hairong Yan

Michael Watts

This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx's 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized 'populists' for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Agrarian Marxism

Yan Hairong

This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx’s 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Michael Levien

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