Capitalism is a unique economic system, and its emergence is arguably the most important turning point in the history of humanity, transforming how societies function and the physical environment in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, it is critical to acknowledge that far from emerging onto a blank slate, capitalism has been built upon the foundations of much older economic systems which date back thousands of years. The purpose of this chapter is to review the well-established literature on the transition to capitalism within the context of an agrarian society while emphasising the need to acknowledge the ‘pre-capitalist’, as both an impediment to the expansion of capitalism and a mediating factor, which shapes how transition is taking place. In doing so, the conceptual framework for the book is introduced – in particular, the key concept of the mode of production.

The origins of capitalism date back to the early modern period – developing in the context of a crisis within feudalism in early modern Europe (Dobb, 1948). However, if one is to understand what lies inside of capitalism and what lies outside, it is useful to clearly define what this system actually entails. How we define capitalism has always been open to debate (see, for instance, recent contributions by Hodgson, 2016; Harris and Delanty, 2023), although Marx (1974), in the volumes of Capital, still gives by far the most comprehensive characterisation of the system, key features of which are still fundamental today.

There is a widespread academic acknowledgement, much of which was covered in Chapter 2, that the classical ‘semi-feudalism’ which was the focus of Indian debates in the 1970s and 1980s is of limited relevance in the twenty-first century due to market expansion, labour migration and the subdivision of landlord estates (see Lerche, 2013). Even Nepali leftist commentators have suggested that the declining power of landlords and monetisation of wages mean that agrarian relations are now ‘capitalist’ rather than ‘feudal’ with the exception of a few pockets (see, for example, Sharma, 2019). However, a critical finding of this book is that landlordism has remained remarkably resilient through decades of change, which have included land reforms, the expansion of industry and a state-led modernisation agenda. While the old Tharu landlords’ economic power may have declined in the ways documented in some other parts of South Asia, the absentee landed elite retain considerable control over its holdings, and rent and usury continue to act as the so-called depressor (Harriss, 2013) – constraining the development of the productive forces and pushing households into extreme food insecurity.

Nevertheless, intensifying articulations with the capitalist sector in the wake of economic liberalisation, and rising dependence upon wage labour, on a theoretical level could undermine dependency on tenancy or merchant capital amongst the landless and small landholders. Expanding capitalist markets could also simultaneously open up new avenues for capital investment amongst the urban and rural elite, reducing the incentive for landlords to hold on to their estates.

Paddy, or dhan, is the most important subsistence crop produced by farming households across Nepal's lowlands, regardless as to whether they are farming as tenants or as independent peasants (see Figure 5.1). Not only is it viewed as an essential food staple, but its production is central to the culture and way of life of the Tarai-Madhesh and the larger Eastern Gangetic Plains. This, it should be noted, is a food culture in which Morang's Adivasi peasantry has been integrated into since the clearing of the forest frontier and their transition from forest-based shifting cultivation to sedentary agriculture. It is planted in the monsoon month of Ashadh (June–July), and ropai, or transplantation, is a time of peak labour demand – a process which entails extensive exchange of labour between households, albeit usually in a monetised form. During the mid-monsoon months, labour is limited to periodic weeding and irrigating in the run-up to harvest as the rains subside in the autumn.

After the paddy harvest with the onset of the cooler, drier months of winter known as the rabi season, the farmers plant a crop of dhal, mustard or more often wheat (see Figure 5.2), the flour of which is used to make chapatti (unleavened bread), a secondary staple. Wheat is harvested prior to the pre-monsoon storms in April. The severe heat and thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months, known as the pre-kharif, mark a quiet period in the agricultural calendar nowadays.

The sub-Himalayan lowlands which make up the historic region of Morang have been shown to have a complex history, yet have emerged today with a clear geography of inequality. With waves of migration from the hills, the development of successful owner-cultivator communities to the north has been paralleled by the perpetuation of feudalism in the original Tarai- Madhesh settlements of the south – albeit with the rise of an absentee rather than local landlord class. However, even within the southern belt, which is the focus of this book, the peasantry is shown to be far from a unitary entity and is divided by land ownership status as well as a complex matrix of caste and ethnicity. These divisions are crucial to explore if one is to understand the contemporary interaction between the capitalist and pre-capitalist – and that is the focus of this chapter.

Before that, it is worth offering a bit more social and cultural context of the core field site and its diversity. The seven villages are located in the former Jhorahat, Bhaudaha and Thalaha VDCs, which in 2017 were merged into Gramthan and Katahari rural municipalities (see Figure 4.1). Travelling northeast from Biratnagar towards this cluster of villages on the recently widened road, the Singya Nadi river marks the northern boundaries of the built-up area. One passes some ribbon development, including new housing plots catering to urban dwellers, and a number of large agro-processing mills, and after 4 kilometres one reaches Jhorahat Bazaar (see Figure 4.2), the first settlement which is included in the study.

It is clear thus far that rural poverty in southern Morang has complex roots. Unlike in many villages of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, there is not a local landlord class or a traditional caste-based land ownership hierarchy, where villages are divided into neighbourhoods by caste, with clear disparities of wealth in terms of housing and asset ownership. The region also does not experience the open political and ideological subjugation by a local dominant caste or landlord class at a local level, such as those which garnered support for the Naxalite struggle in Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s (Kunnath, 2017) or in the central Tarai-Madhesh during Nepal's People's War. However, the largely Adivasi peasantry experiences a silent drain of resources through a more complex and ‘distant’ network of feudal exploitation, with rents being appropriated in parallel by urban-based landlords and merchant capital.

It is important to now understand what this means for household livelihoods and the reproduction of rural poverty in southern Morang, as well as the long-term opportunities for ‘accumulation’ within the peasantry. The first section of this chapter explores the ability of households to meet their minimum subsistence needs or produce a surplus in the context of ground rent, distress commerce and usury. The second goes on to look at the implications of this drain of resource for investment on the land – in other words, it explores the constraining role played by the relations of production in developing the forces of production at a time of economic liberalisation and state-promoted commercialisation.

Background

For far too long urban communities and neighbourhoods have been reimagined by corporate power, whether it is global developers, the super-rich, oligarchs, powerful institutions or other power brokers that influence key decisions taken at the highest level. The overriding vision and drive of this commanding and forceful group is to determine the urban future, which with its top-down development of our cities, has created and sustained poverty, dispossession and urban blight among the poorest of our populations. The strategy practised by this corporate power and the super-rich has brought into sharp relief the city as a commodity, where class, power and politics are interwoven to dominate the urban landscape. The outcome is a continuing housing shortage deepened by the increasing pursuit of huge profits rather than human need, which has created significant socio-spatial segregation and inequality between the super-rich, the rich and ‘the rest’ of us.

These outsiders, with their power, influence and money, are demolishing long-established communities and repopulated brownfield sites to make way for massive office blocks and sprawling retail parks while creating new urban neighbourhoods with high-density housing that is unaffordable for most to purchase. This powerful and massive juggernaut of change has side-tracked the token consultation processes involving existing communities.

Introduction

We begin, first, by introducing the reader to Deptford, in Southeast London, a relatively small geographically urban community and part of the London Borough of Lewisham. Bordered on the north by the River Thames and squeezed between the London boroughs of Southwark and Greenwich. Less than five miles from the financial capital of the world, the City of London.

We discuss its diverse demographic make-up and, importantly, its significant maritime history, with reference to Convoys Wharf, a large, empty, post-industrial brownfield site facing the River Thames. A site that lies at the heart of the contested battle between a global developer and the local Deptford community. It is this site and its heritage, largely forgotten and ignored by this developer, that epitomizes the rapidly changing face of the Deptford community.

The voices of Deptford residents graphically highlight this transformation, the sense of felt loss as the developers move in and reshape their community. However, within this acknowledgement of their powerlessness to stop it happening lies the seed of ‘this is wrong and unjust’, a remembrance of the Deptford community's history of their reluctance to merely accept and to challenge injustice.

Deptford

Deptford is in Evelyn Ward, with a population of just over 31,000 and one of 19 wards within the London Borough of Lewisham. An inner South London borough with a population of over 300,000, making it the fourth largest of London's 32 boroughs (Lean, 2019).

Introduction

The challenge to top-down ‘land grab’ urban redevelopment or regeneration across London was extensively explored in the previous chapter with the detailed case study of the unique Voice4Deptford campaign in Southeast London. Community campaigns such as this have a continuing historical lineage in resisting, organizing and ‘fighting back’ against developers, from the regeneration of the London Docks in the early 1980s up to the numerous active campaigns of the present day by communities under threat of losing their homes, jobs, their sense of community and their ‘way of life’, which are now part of the changing London urban fabric.

This chapter will discuss this historical lineage, followed by highlighting a number of current community campaigns and action across London's diverse communities. How developers’ proposals to displace existing communities by ‘social cleansing’ are challenged; how ‘community plans’ by communities themselves provide a community-led alternative to developers’ visions; and how the use of differing approaches to tackle ‘top-down’ regeneration by campaigns offers a range of methodologies in fighting back. How their creativity, the demands for genuine involvement and a say in the future of their communities challenges developers’ commercial interests, as Elms remarked: ‘You don't want luxury apartments, gymnasiums, concierges and endless poxy coffee shops’ (2019: 229).

It concludes with an example of community resistance in the form of highlighting the ‘buying-up’ of expensive properties and land by the ‘super-rich’ in London's wealthiest borough.

A story worth telling

In this chapter we focus on a unique campaign to resist a proposed massive private housing development facing the River Thames in Deptford, Southeast London. Members of the Voice4Deptford campaign tell the story of resisting the demands of a global developer and working for imaginative community alternatives.

From its beginnings in 2013, the chapter tells of how a group of residents, activists and their supporters succeeded in diverting agency, power and knowledge away from outside holders of power and experts into the orbit of the community. How the campaign has actively encouraged and supported local people, residents, to step forward and incorporate Gramsci's idea of community ‘organic intellectuals’ based on who they are, their expertise, local knowledge and class heritage (Forgacs, 1988). By doing so, now in its eleventh year, the campaign continues to challenge the developer, local power holders and their entitlement to retain a hegemonic hold over the Deptford community by denying them their voices, their real participation and their plans for the future.

Essentially, how the campaign is at the community level is a key example of developing a counter-hegemonic action that feeds into the wider left and progressive movement against resisting the ruling and accepted political, economic, beliefs and power.

The chapter opens with how the campaign began, the formation of the initial ‘Convoys Wharf Community Group’, and the trials and tribulations of daily campaign life.

The links between the local and the global have greater relevance than ever right now and not just in relation to the climate crisis. Far from it in fact. Urban regeneration processes need to be understood in precisely such terms too. And this is most especially so in a global city such as London. Social geographers such as Doreen Massey (Massey, 2007) and Saskia Sassen (2014) have pointed to precisely these interconnections already, identifying the brutality and complexity inherent in the global economy. This very complexity has been making it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacement, evictions and eradications that contemporary capitalism produces, with its logics of expulsion, logics that hit working-class communities with particular intensity in global cities such as London.

Which makes this book all the timelier. Communities need to be equipped to analyse these interconnections between the local and the global if they are to respond strategically, understanding the different levels and spaces of power, rooted in the power of global capital, along with the power of the property development industry, too often supported, rather than effectively challenged, by the state at both local and national levels.

The authors’ case study of community action in Deptford, Southeast London, offers the basis for unpacking precisely these interconnections. This is the story of the power of global capital, on the one hand, and working-class communities’ strategies to resist displacement, on the other – social cleansing in the context of ‘feral capitalism’, as David Harvey has so aptly described these processes (Harvey, 2013).