In this article I want to ask a simple question: if some contemporary capitalist practices lead to dispossession, marginalization and death of certain populations, then what venues of resistance are available to communities engaged in livelihood struggles? The answers (if indeed there are any), as tend to be the case for most simple questions, are complex, challenging, sometimes paradoxical, at other times troublingly violent, perhaps even impossible. But not attempting to imagine other worlds is a greater failure of the imagination than accepting the fact that while the current system is not perfect, it “works” and can be “fixed.” What I want to do in this article is to show for whom the system works, who and what is being fixed, who does the fixing and the consequences of this fixing.

In one of my earlier papers I developed the concept of necrocapitalism drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe and Michel Foucault’s notions of sovereignty and biopower. While acknowledging the existence of different types of capitalisms in today’s political economy, I define necrocapitalism as specific capitalist practices of modes of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods and the general organization and management of violence. Accumulation by dispossession has been described by David Harvey as the “New Imperialism” that characterizes the contemporary neoliberal political economy, which bears a striking resemblance to Marx’s description of primitive accumulation that preceded industrial capitalism.

The state played a crucial role both in the development of primitive accumulation and its transformation to industrial capitalism. From the days of the British Empire, where the East India Company conquered territories, pillaged lands, enslaved populations and set up colonial outposts to serve king and country, to the emergence of the modern sovereign nation-state and its organizational accumulator, the transnational corporation, military strength was always an enabling factor of the accumulation process. In the postcolonial era, the nation-state as the only legitimate purveyor of violence continues to play a key role in the accumulation process. However, the lines between state authority and market authority are not clearly defined: powerful market actors like transnational corporations often have their own “police” or use private militias to “protect” their assets in the Third World. Private military forces were used by the United States government during both invasions of Iraq, and in the current occupation of Iraq private military contractors outnumber military forces of all allied forces with the exception of the United States.

Old patterns of imperialism can be seen in the dominance of neoliberal policies in today’s global political economy. Transnational corporations often wield power over Third World countries through their enticements of foreign investment and their threats to withhold or relocate their investments. In return for foreign investments and jobs, corporations are able to extract from impoverished and often corrupt Third World governments tax concessions, energy and water subsidies, minimal environmental legislation, minerals and natural resources, a compliant labor force and the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) which are essentially states of exception where the law is suspended in order for the business of economic extraction to continue. Thus, rather than marking the death of the nation-state as some theorists of globalization like to argue, the global economy is premised precisely on a system of nation-states. Neoliberal globalization can be seen as a marker for the final hegemonic triumph of the state mode of production. The nation-state then is a fundamental building block of globalization, in the working of transnational corporations, in the setting-up of a global financial system, in the institution of policies that determine the mobility of labor, and in the creation of the multi-state institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA and WTO. The unprecedented scale of government intervention in response to the global financial crisis in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia has been such that neoconservative circles have invoked the specter of socialism and the fears of the emergence of a state-run economy. Whether the financial crisis is indeed a reflection of the crisis in capitalism that could result in long-term re-engagement of the state in economic production or whether it will be business as usual remains to be seen, especially now that Germany, France and the United States appear to be coming out of recession.

In order to better understand the context of necrocapitalist modes of accumulation that result in dispossession, loss of livelihood and death, I want to focus on the intersection of market and state interests that create particular extractive regimes leading to violent conflicts between Indigenous communities, transnational corporations and governments – conflicts that are occurring in the former colonies in Asia, the Americas, Africa and the Pacific. These conflicts involve forceful expulsion of peasant populations, environmental destruction, social dislocation and loss of livelihood and are all occurring in democratic countries, not in a military dictatorship, which begs the question: in what way is democracy serving these communities? And if the state and market produce disempowering outcomes for communities in democratic societies, what can civil society and social movements do to resist such practices? Before we explore these questions, let us take a look at some recent conflicts where transnational capital in the form of multinational corporations deploy the “legitimate” violence of the state to forcibly relocate, maim or kill Indigenous and rural communities in order to extract surplus from their land.

Imperial formations in the contemporary political economy are more “efficient” in the sense that formal colonies no longer need to be governed. Imperialism has learned to manage things better by using the elites of the former colonies to do the governing, and the structural power of supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund and markets to do much of the imperial work. I will describe three modes of management that enable accumulation by dispossession: management by extraction, management by exclusion and management by expulsion.

Management by extraction arises from the endowment curse and is an all too familiar discourse for millions of people in the Third World living under the oil curse and the minerals curse. Extraction of oil and minerals in many parts of the world is almost always accompanied by violence, environmental destruction, dispossession and death. Transnational oil companies, governments, private security forces are all key actors in these zones of violence and the communities most affected by this violence are forced to give up their sovereignty, autonomy and tradition in exchange for modernity and economic development which continues to elude them. Shell in Nigeria, Chevron in Ecuador, Rio Tinto in Papua, Barrick in Peru and Argentina, Newmont Mining in Peru, Vedanta Resources in India and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico are but a few of the more well-publicized cases of the “endowment curse.” The market, state and international economic and financial institutions are inextricably involved in management by extraction. The Chiapas region of Mexico, for example, produces 54% of Mexico’s hydroelectric energy, 21% of its oil and 47% of its natural gas, and also contains the country’s most impoverished people, where 36% of the population do not have running water and 35% do not have electricity. There are seven hotel beds for every 1,000 tourists and 0.3 hospital beds for every 1,000 locals. In one of the country’s richest regions in terms of natural resources and a source of wealth for the rest of the country, 71.6% of the Indigenous population in the region suffers from malnutrition and 14,500 people die every year. Transnational corporations extract wealth from Chiapas by mining their land, felling their forests, and selling a tourist experience at the expense of local communities who have the misfortune of “inhabiting” the region. In 1994, thousands of Chiapians rose up against the Mexican government in an armed insurrection and temporarily took over the regional capital of San Cristobal. The Mexican government responded with military action and after several conflicts offered a “conditional pardon” to the rebels. Zapatista leaders responded to the Mexican government’s offer of conditional pardon with the following letter, entitled “Who must ask for pardon and who can grant it?”

Why do we have to be pardoned? What are we going to be pardoned for? Of not dying of hunger? Of not being silent in our misery? Of not humbly accepting our historic role of being the despised and the outcast? Of having demonstrated to the rest of the country and to the entire world that human dignity still lives, even among some of the world’s poorest peoples?

The letter ended with the Zapatistas stating that perhaps it was the government that should ask the Zapatistas for pardon, which they would be happy to consider. The market was not particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Zapatistas either. In a memo entitled “Mexico – Political Update,” the Chase Manhattan Bank, a major financer of the Mexican government concluded that the “government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy.” Thus, international finance and infrastructure is a key requirement for “development” to occur in “underdeveloped” areas, of which governments must demonstrate “effective control and security,” which means certain communities need to be “eliminated.” This is necrocapitalism.

Management by exclusion arises from the democracy curse and is another practice that is commonly used to govern the political economy. During the negotiations leading up to the Kyoto protocol, one of the tasks allocated to a policy group was to develop a global forest policy that would develop forestry management and reforestation policies to offset greenhouse gas emissions. Conscious of the fall out from the riots that accompanied the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and similar riots at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Genoa and Melbourne, the organizers were careful to be seen to be inclusive and invited green groups, unions, community organizations, apart from corporations, policy makers and scientists. Unfortunately, in their quest to come up with a global forest policy, they omitted to invite representatives of millions of people who actually live in forests, mainly Indigenous tribes. The forest tribes held their own climate change summit and proclaimed their own resolution at the International Indigenous Forum on Climate Change: The measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based on a worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only their carbon absorption capacity. This worldview and its practices adversely affect the lives of Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly, our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which are consecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations.

For Indigenous people who inhabit the region, forests are not just carbon sinks – forests are their food, livelihood, source of medicine, housing, culture, society, polity and economy. Global trade and environmental policies are often made without taking into account the violence and dispossession of Indigenous communities that result from these policies. It becomes meaningless to debate issues of forest rights when there are no forests left. Dispossession of local communities also highlights the failure of both the market and the state where “citizens” of democratic states do not have the right to determine their future. This is necrocapitalism.

Management by expulsion arises from the development curse involving forceful expulsion of Indigenous populations to make way for infrastructure and energy projects. In India, it is estimated that between 30 and 50 million people have lost their traditional lands as a result of dam projects since 1947. A single mega dam project, the Sardar Sarovar dam project will displace 400,000 tribal peoples once it is completed. Economic “reforms” and structural adjustment policies dictated by supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund often result in dispossession of local communities through expulsion. For instance, agricultural “reforms” and trade liberalization (agriculture is “liberalized” in the Third World and protected in the First World) have been directly linked to a 260% increase in the suicide rates of farmers in India. In 2005, there were 520 suicides by farmers in Vidharbha, the largest cotton-growing region in India. There were more suicides in cash crop-growing regions than in food-growing regions. Six journalists covered the “farmer suicides” stories in February 2006. That same week, 512 journalists were jostling for space in Mumbai for the Lakme Fashion Week, where models were exhibiting the new chic cotton dresses made from cotton grown by farmers who were killing themselves less than 500 kilometers away. Alarmed by the increase in suicides among poor farmers, the Indian government sent teams of psychiatrists to the region to advise farmers and their families on “managing stress.” One young farmer whose father committed suicide after facing mounting debts had this to say to the visiting psychiatrists: “You came here and asked us many questions and gave us many answers. Don’t drink you said. Don’t beat your wife. Do yoga to handle stress. You never asked this one question: Why are farmers of this country who place food on the nation’s table starving?”

Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice President of the World Bank, once the blue-eyed boy of the neoliberal establishment and now a traitor to their cause, commented that the bank’s economic development policies “did manage to tighten the belts of the poor as we loosened those on the rich.” This is necrocapitalism.

So how have communities resisted these long and violent histories of oppression? Indigenous communities in Australia, Africa, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific have been fighting transnational corporations and their own governments over access to resources. If we analyze these conflicts, a few common themes emerge. First, communities engaged in livelihood struggles demonstrate a strong will to fight these incursions of the market and state into the Indigenous political economy. Second, for these communities the struggle is almost always a “fight to the death.” And finally, these resistance movements cannot be described as international, transnational or global, but are truly translocal: local communities living in democratic societies that are engaged in conflicts with both the state and the market, and sometimes even with “civil society,” while also making connections with other resistance movements in different parts of the world.

Participatory democracy and accountability are central to developing a politics of the translocal. Ultimately, any reconciliation between economic, environmental and social interests is a political task because it involves structures and processes of power. The main question for a translocal democratic politics is how to create forms of power that are more compatible with the principles of economic democracy. In the contemporary political economy there are millions of people who experience “democracy without choices” where, as citizens of sovereign states, they can vote to change ruling political parties, but have little or no say in influencing economic policies that diminish or destroy their capabilities and rights. Thus, the governance of translocality has less to do with how corporations can penetrate civil society or enter into dialogue with civil society actors, but more to do with how marginalized and impoverished communities who are non-corporate, non-state and often non-market actors can ensure their rights are protected in a democracy. And while civil society has a key role to play in the process, not all regions of the world have an established civil society with accompanying institutions that can negotiate with state and market actors.

Partha Chatterjee argues that the notion of civil society itself is predominantly a Western, middle class sanitized concept. He argues that democracy today is not about government by, of and for the people but rather better understood as a politics of the governed. Civil society excludes in many parts of the world a political society that consists of populations who are not “proper” members of civil society or “true” citizens in a democratic nation-state – illegal migrants, undocumented aliens, illegal squatters, illegal users of water, electricity, transport. To this population, I would add Indigenous communities in different parts of the world whose regions are now essentially conflict zones, imperial and colonial spaces of exception where the accumulation of surplus value can take place through death and dispossession. And in the very near future we will see the political society expand even more as an estimated 20 to 40 million people become climate change refugees, a new category of political society that has to be “governed.” So the translocal emerges at the intersection of political society and civil society where groups of people comprising the political society in different parts of the globe are fighting similar battles over resources against market and state actors.

If state and market actors have to be held accountable over resource conflicts, communities need to establish rights over resources – in the case of Indigenous communities these are not individual property rights but communal rights. The ultimate challenge of a theory of translocal resistance is to conceive the inconceivable: an extension of the democratic that transcends nation-state sovereignty, perhaps even transcends citizenship. Translocal subaltern resistance needs some form of translocal sovereignty, a concept that is yet to be developed fully both theoretically and politically. At least there is now some level of institutional recognition of the plight of Indigenous communities all over the world. Acknowledging the histories of colonialism and dispossession suffered by Indigenous communities all over the world, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007. The Declaration was vigorously opposed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, all of which were responsible for the genocide of Indigenous people (Australia finally signed the Declaration in 2009). Forty-five of the 46 articles in the UN Declaration appear to give Indigenous peoples the right to self-determination in terms of “development or use of their lands or territories and other resources,” while requiring states to obtain “their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources” and providing appropriate measures to “mitigate adverse environmental, economic, social, cultural or spiritual impact.” However, the final article in the declaration makes a mockery of these noble visions for Indigenous rights when asserting “nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying or authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.”

It is difficult to see how Indigenous communities’ rights to self-determination and development can be secured unless we unpack notions of state sovereignty. Translocal political regimes consist of state, market and civil society actors with multilevel power and multilayered citizenship. Political societies can leverage legitimacy and authority of transnational civil society to protect their rights when there is state or market failure. Recent resistance movements have attempted to do just that with differing degrees of success. There is currently a major conflict underway in the state of Orissa in India where the might of the state and the market in the form of a multinational mining corporation Vedanta Resources is pitted against the Dongria Kondh tribal communities that inhabit the Niyamgiri hills in the region. The corporation, which is constructing a bauxite mine, is facing spirited resistance from the Indigenous communities who have complained about pollution from the mine that is preventing farmers from farming their field, destroying their crops, killing their cattle and promoting the spread of new diseases. In an act of perverse irony, earlier this year Vedanta won the “Golden Peacock Environment Management Award – 2009” for their contributions to environmental protection. The conflict, as is the case with nearly all resource conflicts, took a bloody turn as the state deployed its “legitimate” violence in the name of the market using armed police forces. “Informed consent” and “rights to development” vanish under the weight of state sovereignty and corporate power and highlights the fundamental incommensurability between Indigenous and state/market interests.

Anil Agarwal, Chairman of Vedanta Resources had this to say about his corporate strategy: “We believe our strategy and business objectives will harness India’s high-quality wealth of mineral resources at low costs of development, positioning it as a leader on the global metals and mining map.”

Jitu Jakaka, a tribal elder fighting the mining corporation described their struggle: “We are not going to allow Vedanta at any cost. Even if you cut out throats, even if you behead us we are not going to allow this. We will fight with weapons and drive away whoever comes. Without Niyamgiri we cannot think of life. If we lose the mountain we will end up in great trouble. We’ll lose our soul. Niyamgiri is our soul. If Niyamgiri goes our soul will die.”

These two incompatible views of the meaning of land reflect the fundamental contradictions in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People: the only way for tribal communities to protect their rights in Orissa is for the state to cede sovereignty over the region or for the tribal communities to establish secure property rights over land and resources. Framing the Niyamgiri hills as their “soul” is not a particularly efficient use of the “resource” that permits the extraction of surplus for the market. Thus destruction of souls and bodies of communities fighting the endowment curse becomes a necessary condition for generating “wealth.” As a wise old man said more than two hundred years ago “between two rights, force decides.”

An almost identical battle is being waged in another hemisphere and on another continent – this time deep in the Amazonian jungles of Peru and Ecuador. The state’s decision to open up 72% of communal rainforest lands and resources in the Peruvian Amazon to oil drilling, logging and mining without consultation with Indigenous inhabitants have led to violent and bloody protests this year culminating in a massacre of unarmed Indigenous protestors by the Peruvian military. Peru’s economic growth in recent years has had little effect on its Indigenous population (comprising nearly half the country’s population) where 40% of the Indigenous population live in dire poverty. Justifying the attacks on the Indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon, the Peruvian President Alan Garcia had this to say: “40,000 natives do not have the right to tell 28 million Peruvians not to come to their lands. There is a conspiracy aimed at stopping us from using our natural resources for the good, growth and quality of life of our people. You have to ask yourself: Who stands to benefit from Peru not being able to use its gas? Who stands to benefit from Peru not finding any more oil? We know who. The important thing is to establish the ties in these international networks which have emerged to foment unrest.”

These new war zones across the globe illustrate the translocality of struggles over resources where the political society facing the brunt of development find themselves fighting against the forces of the market and the state. It is precisely by investigating the “international networks which have emerged to foment unrest” that a theory and politics of the translocal can emerge. Far from being democratic citizens protected by the state, served by the market and advocated for by civil society, we now have political societies who do not slip through the cracks but rather are forced through them for the extraction of wealth for the “general public,” the “nation” or “society.” These conflicts represent a new economic and cultural “imperialism without colonies” where much of the imperialism is managed by market institutions. Citizens can become citizens deserving state protection only if they produce exchange value, if not they will have to be killed in the name of progress and development. Political sovereignty becomes subservient to corporate sovereignty and it is the economics of extraction, expulsion and exclusion, not politics, that determine future war zones.

To overcome a collective failure of the imagination there is a need to revisit places that have “emerged to foment unrest.” Perhaps inhabiting these spaces may provide alternate visions that enable us to envision a future where sustainable development does not mean sustainable corporations, where the poor are not structurally adjusted by tightening their belts while loosening the belts of the rich, where biotechnology does not reduce the diversity of life into a replication of uniformity, where food exports do not lead to an increase in a nation’s GNP while their children starve, where billions of dollars are not spent developing drugs to cure balding and impotence while millions die elsewhere of malaria and tuberculosis. But that is another story.

Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Research at the College of Business, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

References:
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture 15/1, 2003, pp. 11–40.
Ann L. Stoler, “On degrees of imperial sovereignty,” in Public Culture, 18 /1, 2006, pp. 125–145.
David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1998.
Giorgio Agamben, State of exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005.
Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, Vol. 1, Random House, New York 1978.
Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, Pantheon, New York 1980.
Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and nation revisited: 50 years after Bandung,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6/4, 2005, pp. 487–496.
Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Shadows of tender fury: The letters and communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Monthly Review Press, New York 1995.
Subhabrata B. Banerjee, “Who sustains whose development? Sustainable development and the reinvention of nature,” in Organization Studies, 24/1, 2003, pp. 143–180.