Accumulation through Dispossession and Accumulation through Growth

The changes occurring in the wake of India's neoliberal reforms, starting in the mid-1980s, illustrate the continuing relevance of Antonio Gramsci's view that the national state occupies a nodal level in international political economy, while necessitating fresh approaches and new assessments of India's current "passive revolution". This chapter argues that patterns of accumulative dispossession have intensified in India in recent years and that these are driven by financialization, while producing new class configurations. The growing poles of accumulation by dispossession and accumulation by growth are one of the most important contradictions of capitalist reproduction in contemporary India. The first social movements countering accumulation by dispossession in India were launched by localized social movements that often referred to themselves as "ecosocialists". The second major political formation that has actively set itself against contemporary dispossession and indeed against capitalist development in general is a resurgent Maoist movement, known in India as Naxalism.