Enclosing the Commons in Honduras

• Author: Tyler Shipley
• Date: 01 March 2016
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12146

Enclosing the Commons in Honduras

By TYLER SHIPLEY*

ABSTRACT. We are witnessing in the 21

st

century a dramatic new wave

of enclosures of common resources and traditional or indigenous

landholdings, as small agrarian producers across the global South are

losing their land to largecorporations and landowners, especiallyin the

agribusiness and extractive industries. In the context of competing

theories about land grabbing and the global commons, this article will

offer a detailed empirical account of the strategies by which capital has

seized land from smallholders and communities in Honduras, with

emphasis on the wide variety of tactics that are used to both grab the

land itself and also to maintain an aura of legality around a process that

often includes at least the threat of violence.

Introduction

When Marx described the dynamic of “land grabbing” as a critical piece

of the establishment of agrarian capitalism in England, he could hardly

have known that the process would be replicated repeatedly in the

accumulation cycles of capitalism well into the 21

st

century (Marx [1867]

1976: 556–557). Nevertheless, small producers in the global South

remain consistently under pressure to give up their land to wealthy

agribusinesses, extractive companies, or other major blocks of capital,

and the dynamics of proletarianization continue to proceed apace. The

process by which landis transferred from small producers to big capital

is obviously complicated and multifaceted, and it changes depending

on the time and place under review. A comprehensive account of “land

grabbing” in the current phase of neoliberalism is a project well beyond

the scope of the current investigation.

However, in this article, I will make a modest contribution to the

study of “land grabbing” by documenting in some detail three case

*Tyler Shipley holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at York Uni-

versity in Toronto, Canada and is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Research on

Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 2 (March, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12146

V

C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

studies in the dispossession of land from small communities by large

corporate interests in Honduras, by local and foreign capital, especially

the latter. While the Honduran case is narrow, it offers a perfect illustra-

tion of the capacities of large corporate interests—in concert with gov-

ernments in both imperialist and global South states—to seize land with

relative impunity, carving up the global commons into large parcels of

profit-generating private property. The variety of strategies from which

these corporations can draw, which will make up the large part of this

article, demonstrate that any theorizations we may build about the pros-

pects for protecting the global commons have to take into account the

overwhelming power of capital and the state when mobilized together

against small producers.

This point is particularly relevant to the ongoing debates around the

nature of the global commons that draw from a long critical tradition

that has rejected the Lockean conception of private property as a har-

binger of “progress.” Indeed, two critical figures here, Henry George

and Elinor Ostrom, each offered critiques of the dominant theoretical

foundations for capitalist private property regimes that have left a fruit-

ful—if incomplete—legacy. I will say a few words about each before

setting up the central empirical focus of this article in order to demon-

strate that while both George and Ostrom were correct in rejecting

those dominant narratives of capitalist development, each of their anal-

yses ultimately lacked the capacity to provide a satisfactory explanation

or response to the currentwave of land grabbing.

Progress, Poverty, and the Commons

Questions of land and property remain central to any effective analysis

of how capitalism functions and who it benefits, and this is no less true

in the 21

st

century than it was in the 19

th

. Indeed, one of themost signifi-

cant demographic dynamics of the 21

st

century has been the rapidly

increasingly proletarianization of humanity; never before has so high a

percentage of the world’s population been detached from the land and

dependent on the saleof their labor power to survive. This massiveshift

away from independent agricultural production is most visibly demon-

strated in statistics on urbanization, which showed that in 2008, for the

first time in human history, over 50 percent of humanity lived in cities.

Enclosing the Commons in Honduras 457

That figure is still rising rapidly, now over 53 percent (World Bank

2014), and while it does not capture land ownership itself, it does

suggest that the modest land reforms that redistributed some land

back to social and common production have been reversed, as peo-

ple have felt compelled to move to cities to find work.

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty ([1879] 1981) initially made him

popular on the American left, containing as it did a trenchant critique of

capitalist property relations and a direct link between those relations

and the visceral poverty and inequalitythey engendered. And yet, para-

doxically perhaps, George refused to ally with those who sought to

socialize large industries in order to more equally distribute the wealth

that George himself believed to be a common inheritance of all people.

Instead, he advocated for a land tax that would, he believed, address

the root cause of poverty in capitalism: land rent. Watching the devel-

opment of San Francisco, George insisted that with the rise of capitalist

wealth came increases in the value of land,making it ever more expen-

sive to earn the privilege of accessing it (Hudson 2008).

A land tax would, according to George ([1879] 1981: BK IX), be the

most effective way to redistributewealth. The pursuit of this goal would

be the centerpiece of his political career, though he would never

achieve it. But his emphasis on land—and his profound concern about

the poverty that private ownership of land was producing—both con-

nected him to the emerging Marxist tradition and also separated him

from it, insofar as he was committed to a reformist road to a better capi-

talism (Boyle 2015). Indeed, while the left insisted thatthe modern state

was primarily a political manifestation of the capitalist class (and there-

fore had to be dismantled and rebuilt to create socialist transformation)

George’s solution to capitalism’s violence was rooted in the state itself:

he even ran for office in New York City, with the principle of imposing

a land tax at the center of his platform.

The dynamics in Honduras suggests that George may have been mis-

guided in his hope that the state could be used in such a way. After all,

it is the collusion of multiple states and the owners of capital that has

made for a dramatic increase in inequality and poverty and the transfer

of common resourcesand small-scale agrarian production into capitalist

agribusiness and extraction. Still, the socialmovement that was growing

in Honduras during the 2000s was demanding reforms that would have

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology458