OBSERVARE
Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
ECOLOGY VERSUS PROPERTY RIGHTS:
LAND IN THE CAPITALIST WORLD-ECONOMY1
Immanuel Wallerstein
Director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and
Civilizations and Senior Research Scholar at the University of Yale.
He is the former President of the International Sociological Association and
Directeur d'études associé at École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
He is a member of the World Association for International Relations.
Amongst other awards, he was granted an honorary degree by the Universid of Coimbra
Abstract
Access, ownership, and land use for agricultural and living purposes have undergone major
changes over time, particularly with the emergence of the capitalist World-Economy.
The present text offers a reflection on the propositions of property rights, as well as on the
forms of gaining that right, ranging from land seizure, conquest, or “land development”. In
the context of the capitalist World-Economy, the process of legitimization by means of right
to legal ownership is a fundamental process. However, the emergence of social, libertarian,
and resistance movements opposing restrictive property rights has had significant cultural,
political, and economic impacts, in addition to major ecological consequences.
This article offers several examples of the above, with special mention to the important
social movements that have arisen in countries of the global south, and to the natural
resources where impact is mostly felt.
Keyword
Land; Capitalist World-Economy; Property Rights; Ecology
How to cite this article
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2010) " Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-
economy". JANUS.NET e-journal of International Relations, Nº 1, Autumn 2010. Consulted
[online] on date of last visit,
observare.ual.pt/janus.net/en_vol1_n1_art1
Article received in April 2010 and accepted for publication in September 2010
1 Keynote address at 34th Political Economy of the World-System conference "Land Rights in the World-
System", Florida Atlantic University, April 22, 2010.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
2
ECOLOGY VERSUS PROPERTY RIGHTS:
LAND IN THE CAPITALIST WORLD-ECONOMY
Immanuel Wallerstein
The land was there before the existence of a capitalist world-economy. And people lived
on the land and off the land. The relationship different peoples had to the land they
used in one way or another varied considerably. There were different customary rules
about rights to utilize the land. The crucial point was that these rules very seldom
existed in written form.
Some peoples were essentially nomadic, which meant they physically moved over time
from place to place, although the range of places may have been constrained by
customary agreements. Other peoples engaged in settled agriculture, which usually
implied some right to land usage, and some possibility of inheritance of these rights. In
many situations, there were persons who did not use the land themselves for
production but claimed the right to receive transfers of the usufruct in one form or
another from the direct users. Generically, we may call them overlords, who often
repaid these transfers by offering some kind of protection to the direct producers. It
was seldom the case that individuals, either direct users or overlords, had the kind of
title to the land that legitimated the sale of their rights to others.
The coming into existence of the capitalist world-economy changed all this in
fundamental ways, creating new constraints on utilizing the land for productive
purposes. It is these constraints that I wish to explore in this paper, which raises more
questions than it offers a series of analytic propositions about land rights in the world-
system.
1. Title to the Land
The single most important change imposed by the modern world-system is that it
established a systematic legal basis for what is called title to the land. That is to say,
rules were created by which an individual or a corporate entity could "own" land
outright. Owning land - that is, property rights - meant that one could use the land in
any way one wanted, subject only to specific limitations established by the laws of the
sovereign state within which this unit of land was located. Land to which one had title
was land that one could bequeath to heirs or sell to other persons or corporate entities.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
3
How did one acquire title to land that previously had no title in this specific legal sense?
The answer by and large was that one seized such land and simply proclaimed oneself
owner of the land. Sometimes this occurred by legal authorization from a superoverlord
(like a king). And sometimes it occurred in situations of conquest of a region by a state,
which then authorized such seizures. Usually the conquering state initially authorized
such seizures to participants in the conquest. And then later, this authorization might
have been extended to anyone the conquering state in question wished to permit to
seize the land.
Generally, this was considered "development" of the land - or in that wonderful French
expression "mise en valeur." Let us dwell for a moment on the French expression - in
wide use until at least 1945. Literally, the word "valeur" means "value." So if one put
something (mise) into value, one means that it then acquired value within a capitalist
economic system. Presumably, before the "mise en valeur," it did not have such value;
and afterwards, it did.
Of course, in almost every case, this land previously had been "used" for some purpose
by someone. However, once title was granted to a seizer, the person or group that
previously "used" the land lost whatever customary rights they had had, or thought
they had had, to the land. Quite often, they were literally evicted from the land. Or
else, they were allowed to remain on the land in some subordinate capacity, as defined
by the person who now held title to the land. Such seizure of previously untitled land
has been going on for the past five centuries. It is still going on today in whatever units
of land still remain somehow outside the domain of land to which there is legal title.
Seized land may, under certain political conditions, be reseized by persons who do not
have legal title. This is largely done by what we call "squatting" on the land. There are
today organized social movements which proclaim the moral and political right to
squat, particularly if the land in question is not being used actively, or if the person
who has title is a distant landlord. In many cases, the squatters are actual cultivators of
the land who however do not have legal title. For example, the Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) is a powerful social movement in Brazil that specifically
works to permit reseizure of the land. They seek further, so far without much success,
to get the Brazilian government to legitimate such reseizure. Squatting also occurs in
urban zones in unoccupied buildings.
Of course, the government itself can reseize land, by a legal process called eminent
domain. This has often occurred in various parts of the world. Normally to invoke
eminent domain the government must proclaim some social interest of the state in
preempting usage of the land. They may seize the land of small landowners in order to
give it to larger landowners, in order that the latter “develop" it in some way that is
deemed more productive. But the government may also do it as a political gesture, to
take land from persons considered outside/foreign settlers and "restore" it to persons
considered somehow indigenous to the state.
Both government seizure for "development" and squatting can, and do, occur not only
in rural areas, where the land is used for some agrarian purpose but in urban areas
where the land is used first of all for housing. Government seizures on behalf of
corporate housing developers occur with some frequency. But seizure by squatting is
also commonplace. These days, large urban areas, particularly in the Global South,
have extensive zones of settlement (such as bidonvilles, favelas, etc.) in which there is
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
4
such squatting - sometimes tolerated de facto by the legal authorities, sometimes
repressed, provided the state has sufficient means to suppress it.
The basic point is that title to the land is fundamentally a political question masked by a
legal veneer. Title to the land may or may not be enforced by legal authorities, who are
thereby making a political decision. In this regard, Proudhon's famous slogan, property
is theft, is no doubt the most apt description of land title.
The main ongoing legal and political issue is what happens after the initial seizure. If a
piece of property is acquired by theft, and is passed down to descendants for multiple
generations thereafter, or sold to others, does de facto continuity of legal ownership
confer either moral or legal rights to the land? This is the issue raised today by
movements of so-called indigenous peoples that are laying claim either to recovery of
land (full ownership) or at least to financial compensation for land that had been seized
- in many cases, centuries earlier.
Virtually the entire land area of so-called lands of settlement was originally seized in
this manner. This applies notably to areas of overseas European settlement - North
America, Australasia, the southern cone of Latin America, southern Africa, and Israel. It
applies however as well to the areas of purely land-based European expansion, as
Russia into Siberia and the Caucasus. Actually, of course, the same process is to be
found in the expansion in those areas wherein stronger non-European groups move into
adjoining areas that are weaker politically. This is what has happened historically in
China, in India, and in the many parts of Africa that were not White settler areas.
The main point is that the process of legitimating ownership by legal title is a
fundamental process of the capitalist world-economy. And its origin almost always lay
in seizure by force. But since it has been a virtually universal practice, undoing this
process is akin to leveling the Himalayas or the Alps. I suppose it might be technically
possible but it is politically impossible. This does not mean that adjustments cannot be
made as a result of pressure by social movements. But any adjustments would
necessarily constitute unsatisfactory compromises of mutually incompatible assertions
of moral and legal rights.
Why do people seize land? The obvious primary answer is that it is economically
profitable in some way to do so. It may be profitable because the land offers good
possibilities for production for the market. But it may also be indirectly profitable
because it pushes some people off the land, and such persons may then have to seek
remunerative employment elsewhere, and thereby serve the need of capitalist
producers elsewhere.
Of course, some of the land seized may not in itself offer much opportunity for
profitable production. It may be seized for "strategic" reasons - to defend the
collectivity of owners from counterpressures or countermovements; to guarantee the
possibilities for long-range transportation of merchandise; or simply to deny the use of
the land to other states or their citizens.
2. Space
The amount of land that is governed by title is, even today, not 100% of the global
land surface. But it has grown as a percentage of the total global land surface
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ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
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throughout the history of the modern world-system. Some people have always fought
back, resisting the demand to create title on the land they have customarily used. And
some people have escaped the consequences of their land having been seized by
fleeing to other land areas that are more remote from the persons engaged in doing
the seizing. This is what James Scott has called "the art of not being governed." It
accounts for the emergence and creation of zones in, for example, high mountainous
areas, which are considered both "traditional" and "primitive" by the holders of titled
land rights. These same zones however are considered zones of libertarian resistance
by those who have thus escaped. These zones are as doubtfully "traditional" (that is,
pre-modern) as most other phenomena we like to brand negatively as traditional.
The basic pressure on those who have sought to escape the process of the assertion of
restrictive land rights has been population growth. We know that the population of the
world has been growing steadily for the past 500 years. With only marginal exceptions
- the results of landfills - the area of the globe on which people can live has remained
the same. So, there are continuously more people per square mile globally.
Population growth has led to two forms of expansion. There is extensive growth, the
bringing of more and more land areas into the system of titled land. But there is also
intensive growth, the ever greater concentration of the population of the world into
close-contact areas. We call this urbanization. This is a process no one doubts and
which, in the last fifty years, has accelerated at a breathtaking rate, such that we have
moved into a world of multiple megalopolises, with the prospect of still more and still
larger ones in the decades to come.
The two processes together - extensive and intensive occupation of land areas
governed by the legal processes of the world-system - have created a whole range of
additional constraints on the ways in which the capitalist world-economy operates. It
seems elementary to observe that the situation of more people on the same amount of
land creates a pressure on every conceivable kind of resource that humans need to
survive. It also seems elementary to observe that if humans appropriate more land,
they inevitably have to eliminate competing users of the land - mostly fauna but also
flora.
While these processes have been in operation throughout the history of the capitalist
world-economy, they have become a cultural and political issue particularly in the last
fifty years, as the ecological effects of the modern world-system have become more
and more obvious and the negative aspects more and more blatant.
The first problem is water. Water is essential to life processes. The amount of usable
water in the world is not unlimited. One of the controversial features of land title is the
degree to which it involves total control of water resources that are accessible on the
titled land in question. The water conflicts between settled farmers and ranchers are so
central to the modern world that much modern fiction is devoted to discussing it. The
conflict between rural users and urban consumers is equally notorious.
What happens as a consequence? Governments make decisions about allocations,
which they then implement by various alterations of the land surface in order to ensure
certain kinds of flows of water that give preferential access to water to particular
groups. The construction of dams is one tried and true technique of doing this. When
dams change the flow of water and access to the water, they of course affect most
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Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
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immediately the land rights of owners and users in or near the trajectory of the rivers
that are being dammed.
There is however an additional more long-term effect. The process of altering flows and
access leads over time to more extensive usage of the available water and eventually
to desertification. This thereby reduces the available water supply at the very same
time as the numbers of persons seeking water worldwide has increased.
Furthermore, this is more than a question of the use of water that is located in rivers
and lakes and in the water table underneath the land areas. The demand for food
resources leads to more and more intensive usage of the ocean areas as sources of
food supply. Title to ocean areas has been increasingly asserted by the states. The
historic claim that a three-mile zone at the edge of land frontiers falls under a state's
sovereignty has escalated in recent decades into claims for a 200-mile zone. And
tomorrow still wider zones will almost surely be claimed.
The commodification of water - by individuals, by enterprises, and by states - has
expanded enormously, as the reality of worldwide water shortages has become more
evident. Of course, commodification of a vital resource means that there results
increasingly unequal allocation of the resource. Water struggles have thus become a
central focus worldwide of the class struggle.
What is true of water is equally true of food and energy resources. If there are more
people in the world, it means that more total food resources are needed. Since land is
increasingly appropriated for human use, there is less room for animals that roam. The
world has turned therefore to farming animal resources - that is, concentrating their
location in small, enclosed areas, controlled by ever larger corporate enterprises. This
not only polarizes distribution but has important negative health consequences both for
the humans and the animals.
The interstate conflicts over access to energy have become the everyday story of the
media. What is also much discussed these days is the ecological dangers resulting from
the kinds of energy utilized, and its impact on world climatic conditions. This is in turn
leading to one of the last but not least commodifications, that of the air we breathe.
Title to land meant initially title to what was on the land surface. But quite quickly, it
was extended to mean what lies beneath the land surface, and more recently to what is
in the oceans. Now it has begun to be asserted to the air rights above the land surface.
As more and more goods are produced on less and less land area per person in the
world, the issue of the disposal of toxic waste has loomed heavily. Who has title to
toxic waste, and where can it be deposited in a system in which there is title to land?
We know what is happening. As the dangers of toxic waste to human survival have
become more well-known, it has become less and less legitimate to dispose of it in the
public domain. This is not to say that such disposal has ceased - far from it - but it has
become less legitimate and therefore the disposers act more secretively.
The alternative to disposal in the public domain is disposal by purchased access to land
(or water) zones to which others have title. Where this can be done is of course in
direct correlation with the relative strength of zones within the world-system. In
wealthier zones, political resistance to purchased waste disposal sites is strong and
relatively effective. This is the so-called NIMBY phenomenon. The purchase of rights
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Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
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tends therefore to mean increasingly purchases in the Global South, which further
increases the polarization of the world-system.
Once again, this affects the land rights of those closest to the disposal areas. But it also
affects the long-term class struggle - in this case not over access but over non-access.
The basic issue can be readily summed up. More people equal more resource needs. To
the extent that resources are allocated within a system of title to land rights, the result
is fewer resources per person, more commodification, more ecological damage, and
more acute class struggle worldwide.
3. People and Peoples
After 500 years of the operation of a capitalist world-economy, where are we today, in
terms of both people and peoples? That is, what has been the impact on the lives of
individuals? And what has been the impact on the lives of groups? And perhaps most
importantly, what can either individuals or groups do about this impact? And what are
they doing about it?
If we start with people as individuals or quite small groups like families, it is quite clear
that their options and their freedom of action is constrained in very important ways as
the result of creating a system in which the use of land is governed by so-called title,
that is, by property relations.
It is reasonably important to look carefully at the concept of freedom of action. At a
superficial level, acquiring title to land seems to enhance individual rights. The owner
can dispose of this property as the owner wishes, subject to a small number of legal
limitations. The owner, it is argued, benefits directly from the owner's work input, in
that the owner can retain the benefits of improving the property.
This is no doubt more or less accurate. However, it leaves out of the equation the
unequal strength of different property-owners, and therefore of the ability of larger,
stronger owners to outcompete smaller ones and in effect force a transfer of ownership.
This is what we call concentration of capital.
An obvious simple example can illustrate this. Take two instances of where collective
property without individual rights to title existed and then was transformed into
individual rights to a small portion of the collective property. One would be a rural zone
in the Global South previously outside the system of titled land rights. A second would
be collective property in the ex-Communist states in the period following 1989. In both
cases, mandated privatization of the property created multiple small owners who
however were unable to maintain the property in a market situation. They thereupon
sold their rights to some larger entrepreneur. At the end of this process, they had lost
all rights within the erstwhile collective property, and economically were likely to be
worse off than before.
As we have seen, this is only a small part of the story. If we look at the demographic
and ecological consequences of the system over 500 years, we observe a considerable
and growing polarization of the world-system which, at an individual level, has
translated into a vast growing population who live below what is considered the
"poverty level." This is often masked by the considerably improved situation for
perhaps 15-20% of the world's population.
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Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
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What has happened to individual people is perhaps less dramatic than what has
happened to peoples. Groups of people - peoples - all like to assert their eternal
existence and their eternal moral right to exist and persist. This is of course mythology.
Groups come into and out of existence all the time, and always have.
Is there something different about this process within the framework of the modern
world-system? Well, yes and no. The answer is no if one emphasizes the fact that
groups have lives, that they are constantly changing in structure and design, in values
and boundaries, in size and importance.
But the answer is yes if we look at how groups come into and out of existence in the
modern world-system, as contrasted with how they did so previously. It has very much
to do with land rights. The modern world-system has made possible, via technological
improvements, larger and more rapid movements of peoples. We lump all these
movements under the vague cover label of migration. But this greater technological
facility of movement has occurred at the same time that there has been created an
historical system that is composed of so-called sovereign states within an interstate
system. These states have boundaries (albeit changing ones). And by systemic
definition, there are no zones outside this carving up of the world into sovereign states
(except marginally, and perhaps not for very much longer, the once totally-unoccupied
Antarctic).
Sovereign states, as part of their mechanism of survival as institutions, have by and
large all sought to become so-called nation-states. That is, they have all (or almost all)
practiced an underlying Jacobin ideology of integration. They have wanted to insist that
the multiple peoples located within their borders become part of the one people that is
being asserted as the legitimate expression of membership in the community of the
state.
In addition, in-migrants to the state have been regularly asked to surrender previous
cultural identities and submit to the dominant one of the putative nation-state. Once
again, however, this is essentially a political question. And in the past half-century,
there have been important movements of resistance to this process. The resistance
first of all has been the work of groups that consider themselves somehow more
indigenous to the region than others - for example, within the settler states. Or they
have been the resistance of groups who have been conquered by more powerful
neighbors and are seeking to "revive" their language or their autonomous institutions.
Today centrifugal forces are coming to be at least the equal of centripetal forces within
the political-cultural lives of the world's states. The virtues of being a pluri-national
state or a multi-cultural state are now being proclaimed in some countries.
The hard, cold fact is that there is no real possibility of creating truly multi-national
states with different policies in different zones concerning land rights, except possibly
when the so-called indigenous populations are an absolute majority of the population,
as in Bolivia. The clearest instance of this impossibility is occurring right now in
Ecuador.
Ecuador is considered by world standards a state governed by left forces, one of the
most radical politically in Latin America. The current president, Rafael Correa, was
elected with the strong support of the federation of indigenous movements in Ecuador,
CONAIE. He is today in deep conflict with CONAIE. What happened?
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
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Vol. 1, n.º 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 1-9
Ecology versus property rights: land in the capitalist world-economy
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The policies that give Correa the image of a political radical in today's world is first of
all that he takes much geopolitical distance from the United States, and secondly his
stance in regard to the foreign mining companies that have held various kinds of
concessions in mineral-rich Ecuador. He moved to revoke many of these concessions in
order to force the mining companies to renegotiate the terms of their arrangements. He
did this in order to obtain far greater revenues for the Ecuadorian government in order
to "develop" in various ways the country. Such attempts to reduce the advantages of
foreign corporations in favor of higher revenues for the states in which these
corporations operate have been a standard element in world politics for at least half a
century and have been generally considered to be a mark of a left position in world
politics.
CONAIE is not opposed to reducing the power and advantages of foreign miming
corporations. But they represent those parts of the population who are still largely
living on land that is not titled. The groups they represent also are disproportionately
located in the regions in which mining has been or will be undertaken. They therefore
are the most immediately subject to the negative ecological consequences of such
operations as well as to the land displacement consequences that have occurred or may
occur in the future.
The position of CONAIE is that Ecuador should change its constitution to proclaim itself
a pluri-national state. Furthermore, they demand the right of the indigenous
communities to give prior consent before extractive projects occur in their region. In
part, they intend to deny such rights, although it is possible they will also in part simply
demand control over the income that may come from consent, control that would
otherwise fall to the Ecuadorian state. Correa and CONAIE have also come into conflict
over water. In this matter too, the government wished to control access to water
resources, including the possibility of privatizing it. CONAIE insisted on absolute public
and community control over water resources.
Finally, there was a dispute over the prospection for oil in a national park area called
Yasuni. Correa took the position that the government might renounce such prospection
if countries in the North compensated it for the loss of revenue, a proposal that did not
go very far. He has reserved the right to proceed with prospection, with the strong
support of the national oil corporation, Petroecuador.
This account of recent events in Ecuador illustrates the fundamental dilemma of the
world left. On the one hand, the world left, especially in the Global South, has stood for
measures that would reduce the enormous real gap with the Global North. Correa is
simply pursuing this objective. On the other hand, the world left (or at least a growing
portion of it) is standing against further commodification of land rights and further
ecological degradation of the world. CONAIE is simply pursuing this objective.
The two strategies are contradictory and incompatible one with the other. Land rights
stand as the crucial deciding point. It is not at all clear today which way the world left,
as social movement, intends to go. At the moment, collectively it seems to be trying to
go in both directions at the same time. This is difficult, indeed probably impossible. The
conflicts within the world left about their fundamental strategy of global change risks
canceling all possibility of a successful outcome in the continuing struggle over the
successor system to a capitalist world-economy that is in structural crisis.
