SWORD Deposit
Permanent URI for this community
ETDs in this community are being checked for completeness and are in the process of being transferred to their respective collections under the FGS ETD collection umbrella.
Browse
Browsing SWORD Deposit by Author "Albo, Greg"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Accumulation by dispossession and the transformation of property relations in Egypt: housing policy under neoliberalismJoya, Angela; Albo, Greg; Panitch, Leo; Alnasseri, SabahThis dissertation examines the ways in which workers and peasants access to housing has been shaped under different political regimes over the past two centuries (1805-2011). Up until 1952, Egypt did not have an official housing. policy leaving housing needs to be met locally. The rapid rise in population by mid twentieth century and the rural-urban migration during World War II and after resulted in a rising demand for affordable housing. Under Nasser's regime, workers and peasants experienced the first national housing policy and progressive pro-tenant laws. Under Anwar Sadat's regime, as the private sector's role in housing production increased, access to affordable housing in urban centres became limited leading to the expansion of informal housing, a phenomenon that continued to become a permanent feature of Egypt's urban spaces. In the post 1990s, after the liberalization of the Egyptian economy, the state began dismantling rent control laws and promoting a private sector-led rental housing market supported by private mortgages. The liberalization of land and housing markets through the adoption of Law 96/1992 and Law 4/1996 dismantled tenancy rights and shifted the balance of power in favour of landlords and property developers. These developments expanded the crisis of housing to rural areas as over a million peasants and farmers were forcefully evicted from their houses. Evidence presented here suggests that neoliberal policies in land and housing facilitated capital accumulation through policies of dispossession. The privatization of state enterprises and the agricultural sector resulted in the transfer of land and resources to the private sector. Over the course of two decades of neoliberal policies, property developers and agribusiness experienced a boom as the Egyptian economy became closely integrated with the global economy. Workers and peasants, however, had a fundamentally different experience as unemployment levels continued to rise and an increasing numbers of Egyptians fell into poverty. The crisis of housing that intensified in the 1990s and after reflected a deeper restructuring of power relations and resource redistribution away from workers and peasants and to landlords and developers. The strategy of accumulation by dispossession, however, undermined the fragile legitimacy that the Mubarak regime had experienced leading to the end of his regime in 2011.Item Open Access The political economy of uneven rural development : the case of the nonfarm sector in Kerala, IndiaBordoloi, Sudarshana; Das, Raju J.; Kelly, Philip; Albo, GregThe rural nonagricultural/nonfarm sector (RNFS) has been gaining prominence in (rural) development theory and practice in many developing countries of the world since the 1970s. It is widely argued that the RNFS is able to generate employment and reduce poverty in rural economies, which are otherwise plagued by a stagnant agricultural sector. The existing literature on the RNFS has situated the development of the RNFS in terms of its economic linkage with rural-agricultural or urban-industrial sectors. While this literature has contributed to our understanding of the RNFS, it has not adequately explained the processes and outcomes of RNFS in relation to its capitalist class character. In other words, there is a dearth of political-economic analysis of an important sphere of economic activity. This inadequacy along with the fact that much of the research on rural capitalist relations (i.e. on rural political economy) has been on rural-agricultural activity, define the points of departure for this research project. This dissertation examines the historical-geographical development of capitalist/class relations of non-agricultural activity within rural spaces. The study is contextualized in the coir industry -- an important rural nonagricultural industry -- in Kerala, India. The empirical findings of this research show that class differentiation and class relations in the RNFS emerge historically and spatially, driven by the principles of commercialization, capitalist accumulation, profit maximization and competition. Colonialism set the stage for the initial economic subordination of labor under capital in the coir industry, establishment of capitalist market and formation of a huge reserve army of surplus labor. Production in the industry is dominated by its capitalist form. Relations to property and labor power are expressed in a variety of place-specific forms. These include not only relations between private capital and labor but also capital-labor relations in the cooperative and state-managed sectors. A large section of the economically active population in the coir sector, which can be called a reserve army of labor, is 'self-employed' and connected to the capitalist system in the realm of exchange relations. Employers employ workers at low wages and control them through various mechanisms including technological control at the point of production, which workers accept owing to their vulnerable conditions in the struggle for a living wage. Class relations also condition and are reinforced by non-class relations of gender and caste in the coir industry.