Extended Agrarian Question in Concessionary Capitalism: The Jakarta’s Kaum Miskin Kota

Bosman Batubara and Noer Fauzi Rachman (2022) "Extended Agrarian Question in Concessionary Capitalism: The Jakarta’s Kaum Miskin Kota", Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 11(2):232–255. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/22779760221095121  

This article reassesses agrarian questions by using the ongoing explo- sion in urban and urbanization theories to explain Jakarta’s urban poor (the Kaum Miskin Kota) as an extended agrarian question. It shows how the two capitalist development trajectories identified by Lenin as the Russian and American paths, or the transformation of feudal large-scale and small landholders into capitalists, respectively, do not apply in Indonesia. In the latter, a “concessionary capitalism” of large-scale land claims and allocations by the state is observed. This specific pro- cess produces specific agrarian questions of soil/land and labor through which the urban poor germinated. It closes with a political project, that is, to open more alliance-building possibilities between urban and rural social movements.

Keywords

Extended agrarian question, urbanization, near-South, Indonesia, urban poor, concessionary capitalism

 

Introduction: Urbanization Theory and the Agrarian Question 

The re-emergence of socio-spatial theories regarding what is known as “planetary urbanization” (PU) to explain how urbanization processes move the way around the world (see Brenner, 2014) has led to an explosion of conversation among urbanization scholars (Angelo & Goh, 2021; Arboleda, 2016; Brenner, 2018; Buckley & Strauss, 2016; Castriota & Tonucci, 2018; Connolly, 2018; Derickson, 2018; Goonewardena, 2018; Jazeel, 2018; Keil, 2018; Khatam & Haas, 2018; Kipfer, 2018; McLean, 2018; O’Callaghan, 2018; Oswin, 2018; Oswin & Pratt, 2021; Peake et al., 2018; Pratt, 2018; Reddy, 2018; Schmid, 2018; Vegliò, 2021). It is a re-emergence because the main backbone of PU theory is Henri Lefebvre’s (2014[1970], p. 36) old hypothesis that “society has been completely urbanized.” The notion of extended urbanization, one of the triad socio-spatial infrastructures of PU that unidirectionally assumes the countryside as an “operational landscape” for the city, has been used to identify openings to recalibrate agrarian questions (Ghosh & Meer, 2020). 

Ghosh and Meer (2020, p. 2) argue that the urban or urbanization question is an “inextricable” part of the agrarian question: “[a]ny thoroughgoing epistemological reformulation of the former,” according to them, “requires sustained dialectical engagement with the latter.” They identify the “then and now” variegated trajectories of the agrarian question into “agrarian question of capital” and “agrarian question of labor.” According to Ghosh and Meer (2020), the agrarian question of capital has its roots in Marx’s own explanation of the emergence of classes in society. The subsumption of the countryside under the rule of town is the point of departure for capital expansion. Marx identifies this process as primitive accumulation with its double edges: the separation of the countryside’s people from land and the transformation of the dispossessed into wage labor. The city’s industrial capital, in this model, extends to the countryside. This model was taken up by Kautsky (1988[1899]) on the agrarian question and Lenin’s work (1972[1908]) on Russian agrarian reform. According to Ghosh and Meer (2020, p. 7), Lenin (1972[1908]) identified two processes from which capital in the countryside unfolds. The first is the Russian path, in which the feudal rural large landholders transformed themselves into agricultural capitalists—constituting a capitalism “form above.” According to Lenin (1972[1908], p. 239), this is a feudal “landlord economy.” The second is American path, in which, with the absence of large feudal landholders, the small landholders competed and became differentiated between themselves for the formation of agricultural capitalists—a capitalism “from below” (Ghosh & Meer, 2020, p. 7). In this second path, according to Lenin (1972[1908], p. 239), “the patriarchal peasant” was transformed into a “bourgeois farmer.” 

Ghosh and Meer (2020) engage with the agrarian question of labor through Henry Bernstein’s (2006) claim that the agrarian question of capital is no longer relevant, particularly from the 1970s onwards. According to Bernstein (2006), this happened because the end of predatory landed property due to the rise in land reform programs in the 1970s, state-led developmentalism, and agricultural production. Taking the agrarian question of labor as a gauging device, Ghosh and Meer (2020) identify three openings to recalibrate the agrarian question: the global de-peasantization and de-ruralization since the 1970s, formulated by Araghi (1995) as a labor dimension of extended urbanization; land dispossession through the colossal processes not only led by state and powerful actors but also through the “intimate exclusion” (Li, 2014) between neighbors; and the periodization of the agrarian transformation. 

We appreciate Ghosh and Meer’s (2020) call for recalibrating the agrarian question. Yet, we are also aware that every knowledge production has to be “situated” (Haraway, 1988) in a specific political coordinate. Therefore, we aim to situate those openings in the Indonesian context without neglecting that Indonesia is a world’s core site of extraction (Gellert, 2003) and part of the geography of the global capitalist division of labor. From specific Indonesian experiences, we identify two problems in capitalist development trajectories, as explained by Ghosh and Meer (2002). First, capitalist development in Indonesia—the so-called agrarian question of capital—takes neither Russian nor American paths: neither the feudal large-scale landlord path nor that of small-scale landholding entrepreneurs who managed to advance as dominant capitalists (see Habibi, 2021b; White, 2018). Second, nor does it fit Bernstein’s claim on the agrarian question of labor. This is because land reform in Indonesia was abolished (Bachriadi & Wiradi, 2013) in the ideological battle and the move of the newly independent nation-state from a nationalist-left position to one of pro-global capitalism in 1965 (Farid, 2005; Larasati, 2013; Melvin, 2018; Redfren, 2010; Robinson, 2018; Rossa, 2006; Simpson, 2008) and because rice sufficiency as a result of the Green Revolution only worked for around a decade, from 1984 to 1995 (McCarthy, 2013, p. 192). 

It is precisely here that we engage with Ghosh and Meer’s argument (2020). First, we re-engage with the “agrarian question of capital” by paying specific attention to how the agrarian question unfolded in Indonesia in the colonial era and continued in the postcolonial era, particularly through large-scale land claims and allocations by the state. We explain this type of capitalist development as “concessionary capitalism.” Second, we engage with the agrarian question of labor by showing that in Indonesia, proletarianization, that is, the transformation of human labor in general into human labor in capital relations, was hindered because of the insufficiency of spaces in the industrial sector to absorb the dispossessed; population became surplus to industrial needs, as per Marx’s “relative surplus population” (RSP). We use RSP to explain the boom of urban poor in “near-South” Indonesia—“near-South” in the sense that its underdevelopment is neither unique to the Global South nor necessarily catching up with the Global North (Simone, 2014). We identify Jakarta’s urban poor as part of “stagnant RSP,” as identified by Marx’s, that is, people who have been expelled from the countryside and become surplus to industrial needs; they acquire irregular jobs and live in precarious urban spaces and are constantly under the threat of urban eviction. The term Kaum Miskin Kota (KMK, urban poor), following Lane (2010), is a specific term in Bahasa Indonesia that describes this group of people. We identify the KMK as an “extended agrarian question,” a rural problem that extends into the city. In other words, we see that Kautsky’s (1988[1899]) agrarian and Engels’ (1887) housing questions are inseparable. We do not neglect capitalist development by means of agrarian differentiation in rural Indonesia through uneven land access and ownership within villages/communities, as has been eloquently and convincingly elaborated by others (Bachriadi & Wiradi, 2013; Breman & Wiradi, 2004; Hart, 1978; Li, 2014; Pincus, 1996; Rachman, 1999; White, 1977; 2018). However, there is a different way to explain Indonesia’s capitalist development, that is, as concessionary capitalism. The uneven/differentiated land access and ownership works together with the large-scale land concession. Both models exist in Indonesia. We narrate our story of extended agrarian question and concessionary capitalism through theoretical conversations among concession, extractive regime, primitive accumulation, and RSP.

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