Neoliberal desire is re-arranged around land grab.
The ongoing restructuring of land by property developers forms the infrastructure of neoliberal expansion.
As the capitalist forces run out of resources to exploit and extract from, expanding into the last remaining spaces of land is critical to generating a surplus.
The rhetoric of the smart city forms the communicative architecture of neoliberal expansion across the Global South.
The everyday work of securing spaces for consolidation and profiteering is played out by property developers.
Across spaces of the Global South, these property developers work hand-in-hand with everyday goons to extract land.
An entire system of land mafia is built around this economy of extraction, deploying violence and the threat of violence to extract land.
In West Bengal, amidst the decline of the Left, the accelerated rise of land mafia has been enabled by a political culture of violence.
This political culture of violence tied to land and privatization took off in the declining years of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and then was consolidated by the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). The CPI(M) had turned away from its organizing work of land redistribution to depending on petty land privatizers to sustain its political culture in its later years. The culture of violence of the TMC in West Bengal today is largely held up by petty and medium-scale land mafia, who then feed into larger property developers.
Alongside this framework of violence is the neoliberal desire for generating profits through the incorporation of everyday resources into the market economy.
For many families in West Bengal for instance that sustained on collective economies of sharing, aggressive atomization has taken the form of the pursuit of the market.
In familial contexts, this pursuit of the market takes the form of unfettered greed, the desire to generate revenue out of the process of commoditization.
The commoditization of land and the turning of land into a source of quick money has driven families across Bengal's largely agrarian and mofussil economies into the scavenging economy of land transactions. An entire economy of land and property developers is built on this economy of everyday greed. A moral economy built on the socialist commitments to land redistribution has been transformed into an economy seeking to maximize the returns from privatized land.
The greed works through the trope of generating revenues from land without the labour.
For families without sustained sources of decent income in the neoliberal economy, turning familial land into the hands of property developers is the source of quick money.
The whiteness of this ongoing process of colonization is turning families against each other, breaking apart familial ties, replacing familial bonds of trust and love, and replacing familial ties with the ever-expanding desires of/for the market.