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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince
Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses haveadopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating theforcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present.I argue that the analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation can be better performedby a pair of new concepts: “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” Irefine the conceptual core primitive accumulation (coercive capitalization of social relations ofproduction) by focusing on the role of colonial violence in the history of capitalism, which Ithen elucidate with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion …
Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince
Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Adam Smith has recently been celebrated as a precocious theorist of commercialcosmopolitanism who decried the injustice of imperial conquest and extraction. This paperfocuses on Smith’s endorsement of settler colonialism in North America and argues thatSmith’s newfound cosmopolitanism is overstretched. Smith welcomed settler colonies as theembodiment of the “natural progress of opulence” and spared them from his invective againstother imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies. Smith’s embrace of settlercolonies, however, involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity ofoverseas settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans.I contend that Smith muffled this disturbing …
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Commodification of land is at the forefront of the re-casting of rural China by the spread of capitalism. This study examines a market-based program of land development rights trading in Chengdu, China. The program was made possible by a change in the central government’s land-use regulation that shifted the policy goal from ‘no net loss’ of farmland to ‘no net gain’ of construction land. We detail how local governments at multiple levels work together to construct land development rights as a commodity and build market institutions to foster its trading, illustrating land commodification as an inherently political process. A unique …