Accumulation by dispossession
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Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the
Practices
Privatization
The 2022
Mass incarceration
Several scholars have linked
Financialization
The wave of financialization that set in the 1980s is facilitated by governmental deregulation which has made the financial system one of the main centers of redistributive activity. Stock promotions, Ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, dispossession of assets (raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses) by credit and stock manipulations, are, according to Harvey, central features of the post-1970s capitalist financial system.[15] That aspect relies entirely on the fact that the quantity of money in circulation and therefore demand levels and price levels are controlled by the boards of directors of privately owned banks.
Those boards of directors are also on boards of corporations and any number of other legal vehicles who are also profiting from asset price swings. At the heart of accumulation by dispossession is the private control of the quantity of money supply that can be manipulated for private gain, which includes creating unemployment or restive conditions in the population. This process is well documented in English history as far back as prior to the founding of the Bank of England and before that in the Netherlands. The process works well with or without a central bank and with or without gold backing. The details are also manipulated from time to time as needed to satisfy popular rage or apathy.[16]
Management and manipulation of crises
By creating and manipulating
State redistributions
The
Examples
Privatization is the process of transferring public assets from the state to the private companies. Productive assets include natural resources, such as earth, forest, water, and air. Such are assets that states have used to hold in trust for the people it represents. To privatize them away and sell them as stock to private companies is what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession.
State redistributions can be in the form of contracts given to power groups: for large infrastructures, services paid by the state and carried out by private enterprise, defense developments, research projects. One would have to find out if those contracts serve public good in a fair way or if they sustain a power structure. Also, the granting of licenses for all sorts of state sanctioned activities can turn out as unfair wealth distribution. Another important redistribution channel is by State supported financing of private enterprise activities.
Relation to Marxism
Harvey links these practices to what
Contemporary movements against accumulation by dispossession
- Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa
- The Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee in India
- The EZLN in Mexico
- Fanmi Lavalas in Haiti
- The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil
- The Landless Peoples Movementin South Africa
- The Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil
- the United States
- Narmada Bachao Andolan in India
- The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa
- Hamas In the Gaza Strip
- Occupy Homes in the United States
- Take Back the Land in the United States
See also
- Asset poverty – Economic and social condition
- Bagholder – Slang for shareholder left holding worthless stocks
- Capital accumulation – Dynamic that motivates pursuit of profit, central tenet of capitalism
- Causes of poverty
- Common land – Land owned collectively
- Dispossession, oppression, and depression
- Economic abuse – Form of abuse
- Economic inequality – Distribution of income or wealth between different groups
- Essential facilities doctrine – Type of claim of monopolization made under competition laws
- Institutional abuse
- Kitchen sink realism – British social realist artistic movement
- Mutualism (economic theory) – Anarchist school of thought and socialist economic theory
- Mutualism (movement) – Social movement
- Precarious work – non-standard employment poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and cannot support a household
- Property is theft! – Political slogan coined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Socialist accumulation– Counterpart to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital
- Tacit collusion – Collusion between competitors
- The internal contradictions of capital accumulation
- Redistribution of income and wealth – Political philosophy
- Wage slavery – Dependence on wages or salary
References
- ^ Harvey, D. (2004). "The 'new' imperialism: accumulation by dispossession". Socialist Register. 40: 63–87.
- ^ Kaplan, Juliana; Kiersz, Andy (December 7, 2021). "A huge study of 20 years of global wealth demolishes the myth of 'trickle-down' and shows the rich are taking most of the gains for themselves". Business Insider. Retrieved December 8, 2021.
- ^ Elliott, Larry (December 7, 2021). "Global inequality 'as marked as it was at peak of western imperialism'". The Guardian. Retrieved December 8, 2021.
- ^ "World Inequality Report 2022". Retrieved December 8, 2021.
- ^ Haymes, Vidal de Haymes & Miller (2015), pp. 3, 346.
- SSRN 2492782. Retrieved December 27, 2014.
- ^ Gerstle (2022), pp. 130–132.
- ISBN 978-0691164052.
- ^ a b c Wacquant (2009), pp. 125–126, 312.
- ^ Harvey (2005).
- ^ Wacquant (2009), pp. 53–54.
- ^ Shaw, Devin Z. (September 29, 2010). "Loïc Wacquant: "Prisons of Poverty"". The Notes Taken.
- ^ Wacquant, Loïc (August 1, 2011). "The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age". openDemocracy. Archived from the original on September 25, 2018. Retrieved July 17, 2018.
- ^ Mora, Richard; Christianakis, Mary. "Feeding the School-to-Prison Pipeline: The Convergence of Neoliberalism, Conservativism, and Penal Populism". Journal of Educational Controversy. Woodring College of Education, Western Washington University. Retrieved February 23, 2014.
- ISBN 0-19-926431-7.
- ^ Hollis, Christopher (1935). Two Nations: A Financial Analysis of English History. London: George Routledge and Sons.
- ISBN 978-0-19-926431-5.
- Jones, Owen (2011). Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London New York: Verso. p. 34.
Works cited
- ISBN 978-0197519646.
- ISBN 978-0-19-928326-2.
- Haymes, Stephen; Vidal de Haymes, Maria; Miller, Reuben, eds. (2015). The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415673440.
- OCLC 404091956.
Further reading
- Harvey, David (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926431-5.
- Harvey, D. 2004. The 'new' imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. Socialist Register 40: 63-87.
- David Harvey, Reading Marx's Capital
- Reading Marx’s Capital – Class 12, Chapters 26-33, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (video lecture)
- The Nation-State, Core and Periphery: A Brief sketch of Imperialism in the 20th century.