Daily Times

Prime Minister Imran Khan has time and again vowed to work to make the poor better off as a result of the policies of his government; what we have seen so far is dispossession of the poor in the form of anti-encroachment drives and such other measures. As has been said in these pages that his announcement of making large-scale low-cost housing for the poor is laudable, if implemented. However, what is the point of the promise of providing a roof to the poor over their head, when you are callously depriving them of their source of livelihoods?

Amongst others, scholar and architect Arif Hasan has written in the press so compassionately about more than 1,400 shops being demolished in Empress market (Saddar area) of Karachi. It means more than 4,000 hawkers have been evicted. Many of these hawkers and shopkeepers were in Saddar area for that past five decades or so, often inheriting their micro-enterprises from their fathers. Hasan estimates that more than 10,000 families might have lost their livelihoods as the result of eviction carried out in a couple of days.

The problem is not restricted to urban areas only. We know of sprawling metropolises and posh housing schemes that displace the rural people from their homes and fields, in order to provide luxurious housing to the elite of this country. Most of the development work translates into the large-scale displacement of the poor against their will. Zubair Torwali has written in the press about fears of mountainous people being displaced of their access to forests and customary law rights in Kumrat Valley, Upper Dir, Malakand division where apparently Imran Khan has announced to build a national park and it was apparently not done in consultation with local people. Torwali has casted this as a curse of development, being part of mission to “civilize” the “savage” and used Edward Said’s “orientalism” lens to explain it.

We offer a different theoretical framework to analyze the dispossession of the urban and rural poor in Pakistan and it is Karl Marx’s “primitive accumulation” that sums it up. Marx wrote eight short chapters in the last Part 8 of his Capital Volume 1 (from Chapters 26-33) and they are an essential read for anyone studying development. Marx studies the “enclosure of the commons” in the historical development of capitalism in Britain. Marx has mainly explained the following two aspects of primitive accumulation primitive accumulation as the accumulation of resources through mainly non-economic means, and primitive accumulation as the accumulation of surplus value through dispossession labour of its means of production.

The two aspects are intertwined. Primitive accumulation is, according to Marx, “a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers.”

As the literature on primitive accumulation informs us that the revolution in agriculture that eventually led to capitalism started in the last three decades of the 15th century and lasted till the end of eighteenth century. The “new nobility” was more interested in earning money by selling wool to emerging manufactures than producing crops. Hence, arable land was turned into pastures. Fewer people were needed to shepherd sheep than to grow crops, therefore, surplus people held by/dependent on landed nobility were driven out of agricultural lands. This was the beginning of the creation of a labour market. The predecessors of would-be capitalist agriculturalists appropriated common lands.

We know of sprawling metropolises and posh housing schemes that displace the rural people from their homes and fields, in order to provide luxurious housing to the elite of this country. Most of the development work translates into the large-scale displacement of the poor against their will

In the sixteenth century, Church properties were usurped due to reformation of Catholic Church. In this period, Marx states, “(t)he estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favorites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the Church’s tithes was confiscated”. Soon after “pauperism” was officially accepted and a rate for the poor was fixed. In the seventeenth century, Crown properties were stolen in violation of law. Theft of Church and Crown properties was a drive toward large capitalist farms. According to Marx, the whole edifice of capitalism is built on the separation of producer from his means of production. This separation is achieved through largely coercive means.

In the eighteenth century, there is further transformation in the feudal mode of production towards capitalism. Law changes course and actually sides with the forces of appropriation. The British parliament passes “Acts for enclosures of Commons”. Intermediate land proprietors were replaced by tenants and leased farmers. Common land is fully appropriated by the end of eighteenth century.

As we have seen in the historical case of development of capitalism in Britain that it was done by dispossession and coercion and the law largely sided with the would-be capitalists. We are witnessing something similar in today’s Pakistan and other developing countries. Rural and urban poor are being callously deprived of their land, homes, grazing rights, customary rights, right to livelihoods and it is being done in the name of “writ of law” and in Empress market’s case to also “preserve the heritage”. What heritage are we going to protect, where there are no poor in sight?

It is time to emphasize to PTI government in the centre and PPP government in Sindh that the poor do not need their lip service. Any “development” and “writ of law” enforced by dispossessing the poor is inhumane. If governments cannot work actively to make the poor better off, at least they should not make them worse off. We should all keep on raising our voice on this issue through whatever means at our disposal.

The writer has a social science background and can be reached on twitter @FoqiaKhan

Published in Daily Times, December 16^th2018.