Continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana: the real-life stories of dispossessed peasants in three mining communities

<jats:p>The purpose of this article is to provide an opportunity for the peasants in three mining communities in Ghana to voice their experiences of primitive accumulation under contemporary global neo-liberalism. There is a plethora of literature on the exploitation of Africa, drawing on theories of new imperialism or ‘accumulation by dispossession’. However, there is not much grassroots empirical work on how different social groups experience accumulation by dispossession. It seems that NGOs and journalists do better on this than intellectuals. I seek in this article to contribute to filling this lacuna, by focusing on the hardest hit social group, namely, the peasants. I also argue that the existence of this lacuna has major theoretical and political implications for the struggle for alternatives to capitalism and ‘development’ that is distinctly anti-imperialist. The article is based on data collected through focus group discussions and in-depth personal interviews with peasants affected by surface mining activities of transnational mining corporations in three mining communities in the resource-rich Western Region of Ghana: Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie.</jats:p>

section_content: We have heard about the democracy in Ghana, but we are not part of it. (Dei Nkrumah, a peasant in Dumasi, 21 November 2008) After several years of political instability and military dictatorships, Ghana is back in the limelight as a beacon of hope for Africa because of its relative political stability and exemplary democratisation process since the 1992 elections. In the West Africa subregion, where Ghana is surrounded by countries mired in civil war (Co ˆte d'Ivoire) and pseudo-democracies (Togo and Burkina Faso), the euphoria surrounding Ghana's democratisation is not unfounded. However, the kernel of my argument is that Ghana practises liberal democracy, a model of democracy that serves as a thin veneer for exploitative mechanisms and power relations of the global capitalist order. 'Continuous primitive accumulation', an inherent feature of the capitalist mode of accumulation (De Angelis 2004, p. 60 ) is one of the mechanisms and power relations that liberal democracy masks in Ghana. 

ISSN 0305-6244 print/ISSN 1740-1720 online # 2011 ROAPE Publications Ltd http://dx. doi. org/10. 1080/03056244. 2011. 633827 http://www. tandfonline. com Before his election, Hon. Koffie was also an activist of WACAM in these communities, and struggled with the peasants against enclosures. 

Though my sample is not random, nonetheless, the voices of the peasants below illuminate broadly the violence of continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana. For the purpose of transparency, I must add that I do not intend the voices of the peasants to be understood as what they said in verbatim; as these have gone through translations from Twi to English. I had an interpreter to assist me where I could not understand certain difficult vocabularies and proverbs. I recorded their voices with a digital voice recorder and then transcribed them into English, careful to capture as much as possible of what was said. What is certain is that the essence of what my respondents said was captured in the interviews.
section_name: Introduction

section_content: A historical sketch of the mining context in Ghana will illustrate clearly that continuous primitive accumulation in the era of neo-liberalism is a continuation of the exploitation of Ghana by global capital since the obnoxious slave trade in the sixteenth century, classical colonialism in the nineteenth century, to present-day 'neocolonialism' or 'new imperialism' (Nkrumah 1965, Harvey 2003). Besides slave trading, the exploitation of natural resources, particularly gold, is one of the concrete manifestations of global capitalist accumulation in Ghana during the classical period of 'primitive accumulation' that Karl Marx theorised and documented. It is also the touchstone of the exploitative terms under which Ghana's economy, like other African economies, has been articulated to the global economy for centuries (Amin 2002). Exploitation of Ghana's natural resources started with the 'free' trade in gold between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Portuguese, Dutch, and later, English merchants bought gold cheaply from local miners in the Akan areas of the Gold Coast, to the gold rush and colonialism in the late nineteenth century (Dumett 1998, Hilson 2002). 

The atrocities of foreign mining capital against the three mining communities studied in this article thus have a long history, dating back to the 'gold rush', in the period 1877 -1885 when mining capital entered the Wassa area of the then Gold Coast, an area that included the three mining communities under study here. As documented by Raymond Dumett, peasants and local miners were dispossessed of their lands by foreign mining capital during the Wassa 'gold rush' in a manner that is remarkably similar to the dispossession that happened with the rush of foreign mining companies into Ghana in the era of neo-liberalism. This happened with the collaboration of the local capitalist class, chiefs, and concession-middlemen (Dumett 1998, pp. 22-23, 178 -180), just as continuous primitive accumulation in the era of neo-liberalism is happening with the complicity of the Ghanaian political/state elites and corrupt chiefs who have their selfish material interests in the activities of the foreign mining companies. 

After Ghana's independence in 1957, the mining sector came under the control of the state, following the recommendation of a commission of enquiry into the mining sector set up by Nkrumah's socialist-oriented government. Under the auspices of the State Mining Corporation, formed in 1961, the state took control of all existing mining companies, with the exception of the Ashanti Goldfield Corporation (AGC) in Obuasi. However, in 1972 the Acheampong-led National Redemption Council (NRC) military regime nationalised AGC by decree (NRCD 132), and it was renamed Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (Ghana) Ltd (Hilson 2002, pp. 22-23). The era of global neo-liberalism arrived in the 1980s and opened the Ghanaian economy to the exigencies of global capitalism through the free-market macroeconomic reforms implemented under the economic recovery programme (ERP), the Ghanaian version of the World Bank/IMF's structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). 

As part of the liberalisation and privatisation principles of the SAPs, state-owned mines were privatised. To prime the economic conditions for profitable accumulation by global capital, generous investment incentives were given to foreign mining companies under the guise of promoting foreign direct investment (FDIs), which is hoisted by development agencies and bourgeois scholars as the pathway for development in Africa. In line with this belief, the Rawlings military dictatorship that governed Ghana in the 1980s passed the Mining and Minerals Law (PNDCL 153) which granted the following investment incentives to mining capital: tax reductions and breaks, variable royalties between 3 and 12%, removal of restrictions on the transfer of dividends, reduction of mining tax from 45-55%, and so on (Hilson 2002, p. 24). 

The neo-liberal Kufuor-led government also passed the Mining and Minerals Act, 2006 (Act 703) that made the investment incentives more generous; for example, instead of royalties of between 3% and 12%, it sliced it by half, to between 3% and 6% (Act 703, section 25). What is even worse, it legalised the dispossession of the peasants in so many ways, of which only a few can be mentioned here: it stipulated that any land with minerals can be leased by the state for mining without the consent of the traditional owners of the land, the peasants (Act 703, Sections 1 -3); it sanctioned the lease of huge tracts of land for a period of 30 years, subject to renewal (Act 703, Sections 41, 44); once granted the lease, the mining company is given the right, with few limitations, to do anything necessary to exploit the minerals and dispose of them in the way they choose (Act 703, Sections 46 and 48), and the original owners of the land (the peasants) virtually lose their rights over their property, considering the lax terms of compensation and strict conditions imposed on them if they are to farm on their lands (Act 703, Sections 72 -75). In Stephen Gill's terms, both the defunct PNDCL 153 and its successor, Act 703, are quintessential cases of 'new constitutionalism', where constitutions are used not to guarantee the rights of ordinary citizens, but rather to 'redefine the terrain of normal politics so as to "lock in" the power gains of capital and to "lock out" or depoliticise forces challenging these gains' (Gill 2002, p. 48).
section_name: Global capital and mining in Ghana

section_content: To understand why primitive accumulation -a distinctly violent and undemocratic dynamic of capitalism -continues in the twenty-first century and in democratic countries like Ghana, we need to understand the underlying logic of the capitalist social order and the centrality of the role of the state in it. One important characteristic of the capitalist mode of production distinct from other modes of production is the purpose of production: it is undertaken mainly for profit or value-added and not for use or consumption. The capitalist class invests money in the production process with the ultimate goal of making more money, and not for consumption or to generate surplus value for the purpose of collective good as in, say, the communal mode of production or the moral economy of the peasants (see Scott 1976). The thrust of the capitalist mode of production, Karl Marx tells us, is its 'boundless drive for enrichment' and its 'passionate chase after value' (Marx 1976, p. 254 ; see also Brenner 2006, p. 80). This characteristic makes the capitalist system fiercely competitive and extremely individualistic. It also makes it inherently exploitative of, and unjust to, specific classes of people and geopolitical areas. It will suffice here to simplify by saying that the exploited classes are the working and other cognate lower classes, and the exploited geopolitical areas are the non-industrial and raw-material-producing countries or the peripheral countries. The exploiting classes are the capitalist/propertied classes and the exploiting geopolitical areas are the industrialised or core capitalist countries -those that Amin (2000, p. 599 ) conceptualised as the 'Triad' (the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan). 

The capitalist system accumulates on a worldwide scale and brings areas in the backwaters into a web of exploitative relations governed by institutions of the capitalist global economy (Soederberg 2006). Despite its worldwide accumulation, it does not lead to capitalist development in most of the peripheries (especially Africa), let alone give their citizens equivalent high living standards as in the core capitalist countries. Historically, not only has the working class in the core capitalist countries been exploited by the capitalist class, but even worse, the peripheral countries are exploited by the core capitalist countries through the structural mechanics of the capitalist global economy. Africa and most peripheral countries have, therefore, been plundered of their resources by the core capitalist countries through subtle strategies of neocolonialism (Nkrumah 1965, Shivji 2009). 

Samir Amin has since his influential Accumulation on a world scale unceasingly theorised and systematically demonstrated how the exploitation of the peripheral countries happen and the way in which it serves as the main cause of 'underdevelopment' in these countries (Amin 1974; Amin 2000; Amin 2002 ). Amin sees the exploitation as primitive accumulation, which for him, does not 'belong only to prehistory of capitalism' but is 'contemporary as well'. He argues correctly that whenever the capitalist system enters into relations with precapitalist modes of production, its sole purpose is to transfer value from the precapitalist to the capitalist formations, through the 'mechanisms of primitive accumulation' (Amin 1974; pp. 3, 22). Amin has in mind the classical and popular Marxian notion of primitive accumulation where the emergence and development of capitalism in the capitalist centres are said to be inextricably linked to exploitation of resources from the peripheral countries through historically specific mechanisms such as the trade in slaves, mercantilism, colonialism etc. These were the prehistory of capitalism because, as the radical structuralists have argued, it was this initial wealth looted from the peripheral countries that served as the foundation of capitalist development in the core capitalist countries on one hand, and, on the other, 'blocked' development in the peripheral countries (Brenner 1977, p. 67, Amin 1974, p. 22). 

The extraction of natural resources from Africa by global capital, as Nkrumah documented in his book over 45 years ago, clearly demonstrates this exploitation: he argued persuasively that minerals are meant for export in their raw state to feed industries in the metropolitan capitalist state, 'to the impoverishment of the countries of origin' in Africa (Nkrumah 1965, p. 4). For example, despite the rush of mining capital into Ghana in the era of neo-liberalism, and despite the several billions of dollars worth of gold the foreign mining companies have exploited from Ghana, the contribution of the mining sector to the GDP of Ghana is negligible. Highlighting this, a mainstream source, The Economist, wrote: 'Gold accounted for 40% of [Ghana's] exports in 2008, with a value of $2. 2 billion. But the government received only $116m in taxes and royalties from mining firms -less than 4% of the country's total tax take' (The Economist 2010). This is unsurprising because, far from being the sort of FDI that has promoted development in countries such as South Korea, China, Taiwan, and so on, the purpose of mining capital in Ghana is to 'loot' -in the blunt terms of Patrick Bond -and not to invest in the country as the organs of new imperialism -the World Bank and IMF -will want us to believe. 

The above notion of primitive accumulation has been seriously questioned by the compelling criticisms of Marxists like Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood (Brenner 1977, Wood 2002). Drawing on Marx, these critics point out that what was crucial for the development of capitalism was the transformation of social relations of production that are historically specific to the capitalist mode of production, not the wealth accumulated from the peripheral countries. For Marx, 'primitive accumulation plays. . . about the same part as original sin in theology' (cited in Shivji 2009, p. 26). What is crucial in this conceptualisation of primitive accumulation is the creation of a unique social condition whereby people (the majority in society) have no other means of social and material (re)production than to sell labour power to the propertied class for wages (Shivji 2009, pp. 26-27). In Polanyian sense of the 'double movement', primitive accumulation was the first movement that subjected the lives of people to the atomising discipline of the self-regulated market, it was what caused 'the catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people', and it was the 'satanic mill' that ground people who hitherto had control over their lives into a hapless mass of labourers with only the sale of their labour as their means of livelihood (Polanyi 2001, pp. 35, 81). Through primitive accumulation, as one authoritative source points out, 'objects rule subjects, deeds command the doing, and the doing of human activity is channelled into forms that are compatible with the priority of capital's accumulation' (De Angelis 2004, p. 64). 

What is indisputable to Marx himself is the fact that primitive accumulation -in the crude sense of wealth accumulation from the periphery countries -did take place, that it contributed to the advancement of capitalist development at the centre, and ravaged the periphery. Furthermore, the mechanisms for primitive accumulation were violent. For example, Marx drew an explicit link between slavery and colonialism and industrial capitalism:

In this light, what Amin has done, which is very insightful about the (mal-) articulation of the economies of African countries with the capitalist global economy, is to show that primitive accumulation and its 'underdevelopment' effects on Africa have continued into the twenty-first century, long after 'the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production'. Recently, Issa Shivji has sought to underscore that 'primitive accumulation is not simply historical, but continues contemporaneously with the development of capitalism, specifically in the periphery' (Shivji 2009, p. 28 ; see also Bush 2009). 

Amin, Shivji, De Angelis and Bush's theory of the historical continuity of primitive accumulation is particularly useful if one focuses on the violence of primitive accumulation, not just at the country and continental level (henceforth, macro-level) analysis of the looting of the resources of Africa under new imperialism or 'accumulation by dispossession' (Bond 2006, Shivji 2009 ), but on the bottom-level (henceforth, micro-level) analysis of how different social groups (in this article, the peasants) in Africa continue to suffer this violence. At this level, the 'the continuing relevance of "enclosures" as [a] constituent element of capitalist relations and accumulation' manifests itself concretely, even in the twenty-first century (De Angelis 2004, p. 61). Perhaps, De Angelis is one of the few scholars of recent times concerned to argue the historical continuity of primitive accumulation at the micro-level, doing so persuasively. Distinguishing between 'historical primitive accumulation' and 'inherent-continuous primitive accumulation', he illustrates theoretically that the capitalist logic of accumulation needs primitive accumulation not just as a one-time incident -say, as part of its birth pangs -but as a continuous dynamic that drives its mode of production until such a time that it is overthrown and replaced with an alternative mode of production (De Angelis 2004). 

Following De Angelis, I see the activities of foreign mining companies in the aforementioned mining communities of Ghana as enclosures of the commons, and more so, with striking similarities to the classical enclosures that Marx and Polanyi described in England in the sixteenth century in terms of the violence perpetrated against the peasants and the complicity of the state therein. In the rest of the article, I shall report on these enclosures through the voices of the peasants, showing that despite its violence and its undemocratic nature, primitive accumulation as enclosures defies temporal and political limitations, thanks to the powerful nature of capital (Nitzan and Bichler 2009). It is neither a barbaric mode of accumulation that belongs to the uncivilised past like slavery, nor an appalling social injustice that is perpetrated by an undemocratic liberal state like the one in existence in England in the sixteenth century. Though barbaric, appalling and unjust, enclosures are happening in the twenty-first century and in liberal democratic states like Ghana. 

Mining capital and enclosures in Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie are mainly peasant communities, though Prestea has been a mining town from colonial times through to the era of neo-liberalism when the state-owned and underground mines were closed down and later sold to private owners. Inhabitants of these communities live off the land by a combination of hunting, gathering (snails and mushrooms) and the planting of staple such as maize, plantain, cassava, coco yam, palm nut and cash crops such as cocoa, a major export earner. The forest also provides firewood as the main source of fuel for the women for cooking and the snails serve as an important source of protein, used to prepare soup to go with fufu, a popular Ghanaian dish prepared from a mixture of cassava and plantain or coco yam. 

Because of the important role that land plays in their livelihoods, women participants in my focus group discussions (FGD) complained bitterly about the activities of the aforementioned mining companies which have deprived them of their culture and right to gather firewood, mushrooms and snails from their farms. This is what one female participant said in my Dumasi FGD:

At first we used to go to the forest to gather snails to prepare our soup and to sell to make extra income to buy our clothing and to cater for our other necessities. But as a result of the mining activities, we can no longer gather snails because the mines have occupied all the forests and more so, the snails have all disappeared. (FGD with women in Dumasi, 20 November 2008) The forests also serve as home to the shrines of the people and the source of herbs for treating various illnesses. On this latter point, we should note that herbal medicine is what most rural people in Ghana rely on when they fall ill, in the absence of clinics (let alone hospitals) in rural communities. Land is, therefore, the most important factor in the social reproduction of the people of these communities, just as it is in other peasant communities in Africa. Fortunately, unlike the typical 'dependent peasant' of the manorial production system under European feudalism (Poly and Bournazel 1991, p. 247), the peasants in Ghana are 'free' peasants; in the sense that they have access to land by virtue of their membership of the lineage or clan in which they are born. This is because, in Ghana, land is a corporate property of the lineage or clan, and is traditionally not alienable. 2 As Dei Nkrumah, a farmer from Dumasi told me in an interview, every clan in the area has a parcel of land that its members can use for farming. Nkrumah went on to underline the sacred significance of land in Ghana: traditionally, land does not belong to the living alone, but to their ancestors before them and the unborn. According to him, they inherited the land from their ancestors with the undertaking that the land will pass on to their children and grandchildren (IDI with Dei Nkrumah, in Dumasi, 21 November 2008). The sacred significance of land seems to dominate the consciousness of the people in these communities with regard to property ownership, because participants in my focus group discussions passionately alluded to the fact that they inherited the land from their ancestors, and are going to bequeath it to their children, who will also bequeath it to their children; and then the linearity of land inheritance continues like that to the far, far future. 

Unfortunately, similar to sixteenth-century England where the quest for wool led to the enclosure movement by the landed class in order to use the land for sheep rearing, the quest for gold has led to land seizures by foreign mining companies with the complicity of the Ghanaian state. Therefore, if 'sheep ate men' -in Thomas Moore's terms, 'sheep devouring men' -in the sixteenth-century enclosures of England (Moore 1967, p. 12, Wood 2002, p. 109), gold is 'eating' or 'devouring men and women' in Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie in the twenty-first century enclosures in Ghana. In view of the large tracts of land taken from the peasants in Ghana, this is not stretching the comparison too far. The fact is, unlike underground mining where arable land is not destroyed, surface mining, which is the mode of mining used by the foreign mining companies in Ghana because of its profitability, destroys a lot of arable land as it requires large tracts of land, for both the actual mining and as dumping sites for the waste produced from the mining. That is why the farmers must be expropriated of their land, regardless of the economic and social cost to them. The horrific environmental destruction to biodiversity caused by surface mining is almost irreversible; likewise the human health hazards from environmental pollution (Palmer et al. 2010, Conant and Fadem 2008, Ch. 21). 

True, the situation in Ghana is not as brutal as the enclosures in sixteenth-century England in terms of the crudity of the violence used. However, the way land is acquired and used by these mining companies, the deadly environmental consequences that the people would have to live with for generations, and the immediate effect of the deprivation of the use of their lands make the situation in Ghana comparable with the original enclosures. On land acquisition, Hon. Koffie told this author in an interview in Accra on 15 July 2009 that the peasants literally have no say in the process; in fact, they may not even be aware that they are about to lose their main source of livelihood. The first point of contact for the mining companies when they arrive in Ghana is not the owners of the land but the Ghana Mineral Commission. These companies get maps from the Ghanaian government showing the location of the area where the minerals are found and the size of the concession. The granting of concessions is sealed in Accra with the state, regardless of whether the land earmarked for mining contains farms, hamlets or villages. The point at which the people get involved in the process of the acquisition is paradoxically the point their dispossession is executed -exactly the point their involvement is useless. That is when they have to negotiate with the mining companies -who would have acquired the concession from the state already -for compensation (see Act 703, Sections 73 -75). 

The peasants in the three communities complained bitterly about the devastating effects of enclosures and surface mining on their livelihoods. A female participant in my FGD in Dumasi had this to say:

There is one important thing for us as peasant women in this village that I must mention. We are not educated to get a different job so we depend solely on our land. When we go to the forest, we can fetch firewood free for our own energy needs and to sell for income. But what has the Ghanaian state done? It has given all our land to the white man to mine for gold; and not to do underground mining but surface mining, destroying all our arable lands. In the midst of all this, I cannot say the state of Ghana is good to me or responsive to me. On top of that, the Ghanaian state has given the white man the authority to do whatever they want to us: I have my own land and I cannot have access to it; my water sources (the streams) have been polluted, etc. Up till date, the Ghanaian state has not come to our aid, either to check these mining activities or to provide us with potable water since the mines have polluted our water sources. For me, there is nothing that the Ghanaian state can do for me to view it as a responsive state; so both the past and present government have not helped us. (FGD with women in Dumasi, 20 November 2008) The same story is echoed and re-echoed in the other two communities. This runs through all the six transcripts for the six focus group discussions that I held in the three communities, and cut across gender lines. The male peasants in Dumasi told similar stories of enclosures in their communities:

Me for example, I am a stranger in this village yet when I came into this village I was given land to farm to feed my family. But now the state has given the land to the mining companies and now I don't have a farm to feed my family. So the state has to do something about the mines and the land issues in this village. Imagine that we live in the rural areas yet food items are very expensive. These days when you buy 10,000 cedis' worth of cassava to prepare fufu, the food won't even satisfy one person let alone the whole family. So the government has to stop the surface mining else in future we will all be landless. (FGD with men in Dumasi, 20 November 2008) The enclosures have also affected commercial farming because some of the participants in my FGDs complained about the destruction of cocoa, palm nut farms and fish ponds. Two of them talk about their plight below:

One respondent: Now that the mines have come to this village, we don't get jobs. And if you go to make a farm, thinking that you would invest in the farm for your own future and the future of your children, the mines will come to destroy it without compensation. You will labour on your farm up to an advance stage and the mine companies will use Caterpillar to destroy the farm. 

Another respondent: These cocoa farms are at different stages of growth, some farms have already been destroyed and others are earmarked for destructions -no adequate compensation is paid to us. The mines too have constructed drains that drain waste water from the mines into our cocoa farms. This waste water kills our cocoa trees; it has poisoned the land so crops like cassava cannot yield again. (FGD with men in Dumasi, 20 November 2008) Considering that it takes more than three years to nurse a cocoa plant before it begins bearing fruit, and that the cocoa plant has a lifespan of more than 30 years (both being very conservative estimates), no rational farmer will agree to his/her cocoa farm of, say, 10 years of age being destroyed even if he/she is promised the most attractive compensation. Let alone in these cases where the farmers claimed that no compensation was paid to them, and in others the compensation was 'woefully inadequate', as Hon. Koffie put it. According to Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, the founder and head of WACAM -an NGO that advocates the protection of the human rights of residents of the mining communities -'Newmont paid 69,000 cedis (about $8) for a Cocoa tree to Cocoa farmers in Kenyase when a Cocoa tree can earn a farmer about half a bag of Cocoa beans for a year (about $25 per year) and the economic life of a Cocoa tree is between 40 and 50 years' (Owusu-Koranteng 2008, p. 469). Clearly, the paltry amount of money paid as compensation for enclosure in Ghana affirms the ruthlessness of capital in its quest for profits. In any case, even if the compensation were adequate it can never be adequate enough to mitigate the harm that these enclosures have caused to the peasants. As discussed above, the significance of land is more than material, and so is the harm caused by enclosure: it affects the whole way of life of the peasant community. 

The precarious life chances of the peasantry are captured by Tawney's metaphorical man 'standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple might drown him' (cited in Scott 1976, p. vii). Faced with this predicament, the social reproduction of peasants has always depended on the doctrines of the moral economy, of which land as the commons is a key element (Polanyi 2001, p. 171, 187 -188; Scott 1976, p. 5). The moral economy of the peasant is clearly endangered by the activities of foreign mining companies in Ghana, and as the above stories indicate, the peasants are 'drowning' -and unsurprisingly so because the enclosures constitute a tsunami, not just a 'ripple'. Note, for example, the high cost of food that the peasants complain about. Usually, food insecurity is not a problem to communities with such fertile arable lands, debarring natural disasters. Now it is. The motif that thus runs through the stories the peasants told me is 'skin-tight', as some of them put it in Twi, the local dialect in which they spoke to me. The 'mining companies have made our skin to tighten us too much', one of them said. This means the mining companies have made life very, very hard for them.
section_name: The logic of capitalist accumulation and continuous primitive accumulation

section_content: Unfortunately, the Ghanaian state that is supposed to protect the peasants is complicit in the violence of primitive accumulation. This paradox is based on the fact that it is a neo-liberal state and like the liberal state of sixteenth-century England, it protects the interests of capital, not its citizens; certainly, not the peasants and other subaltern classes. Like the primitive accumulation in England, the coercive apparatuses that the state is privileged to control exclusively are needed to perpetrate or protect the perpetrators of the injustices of enclosures. This contradicts the grand dichotomy between the 'political' and the 'economic', one of the liberal dogmas -the mantra that liberal scholars and commentators recite in the era of neo-liberalism. 

Ellen Wood helps us to unravel the paradox of the acclaimed minimalist state, which is at the same time so extensive that its hand is very visible in the economies of capitalist countries. She argues powerfully that a unique characteristic of capitalism is its capacity to 'detach economic from extra economic power' (Wood 2003, p. 5 ), yet 'capitalism, in some ways more than any social form, needs politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity, and predictability in its social arrangement' and sometimes, even outright political coercion (Wood 2002, p. 178, Wood 2003, p. 10). This is so, because the scope and depth of the primitive accumulation that Polanyi and Marx documented in sixteenthcentury England -the near-total and all-encompassing uprooting of those who lived off the soil -would have been impossible without the brutal and visible hand of the liberal (not the same as democratic) state. As documented by Marx in Capital Vol. 1, soldiers were deployed to root out families from the countryside and to burn down their villages. So brutal was the exercise that one old woman who refused to leave her hut was burnt to death when the soldiers set it in flames (Marx 1976 (Marx 1867, p. 891), p. 891). 

Similar stories of state brutality were told in my focus group discussions and in-depth personal interviews. Participants told stories of how the Ghanaian military was quick to deploy and to suppress them any time they organised any resistance because the Ghanaian state has stationed military garrisons in their communities purposely to protect the mines from the angry victims of the enclosures. The following proceedings from one of my focus group discussions capture the visible hand of the Ghanaian state in modern day enclosures:

Moderator: What do you do to resist the confiscation of your lands?

The dominant respondent: We have demonstrated against the mining companies but each time that we organise one, soldiers are called to beat us. There have been instances where some of the demonstrators have been injured by the brutalities of the soldiers. Besides the brutalities of the soldiers, any time we ask for permission from the police to demonstrate, they refuse us. Also when we send petitions to the state about the activities of the mining companies we don't get any response. 

Moderator: Did these military brutalities take place during Rawlings dictatorship or in this era of democracy?

Respondent (laughing): This happened in the era of democracy. In 2006 In, they beat them, in 2007 In they beat them, and in 2002 In, 2003. Yaw Mensah and others were beaten in 2000. If it were Rawlings's time we would say it is military era so it is normal. 

One respondent (speaking alone): One person was shot here. Another person was made to eat the raw meat of a rat. He was coming from the farm where he had hunted for the rat, but he was accused of walking on the road of the mine companies. 

Another respondent: Now in this village, we don't have freedom because of the mines. You can be walking to the farm and be arrested by the mine companies for trespassing on their land, just because you are walking on a road they have constructed for their activities. In this village about fifteen people have been arrested for this petty complaint and sent to jail for it. Some have even died while in jail. [One participant interjects: 'jailed for just walking to your farm']. Two weeks ago, I was arrested and detained for three days for going to cut wood from the bush to construct my room. Yes, I was arrested for cutting wood from my own land. At the police station, I was told I have trespassed on the land of the mine companies. I was detained for three days before I was released on bail. Master, in this village we don't have any peace of mind. In fact, as I am sitting if I had access to a gun, I will disturb a lot; I will disturb a lot. (FGD with men in Dumasi, 20 November 2008) For most of these peasants, the democracy that Ghana is widely known for has not reached their communities, as one of them has stated in the epigraph. They questioned, for example, why in a democracy soldiers are deployed in civilian communities; and pointed out that they did not see such military brutalities in their communities even under the widely proclaimed brutality of the military regime of Rawlings.
section_name: The complicity of the Ghanaian neo-liberal state in continuous primitive accumulation

section_content: What this article has achieved is to document the concrete manifestation of the violence of continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana at this present historical conjuncture of global neo-liberalism. The orthodox approach in the critical political economy literature is to focus on macro-level analysis of the exploitation of the peripheral countries (especially Africa) by the core capitalist countries, using the lenses of new imperialism or 'accumulation by dispossession'. This approach tends to totalise the victims of accumulation by dispossession in the peripheral countries just as it does to its beneficiaries in the core countries. This does not and cannot illuminate the huge difference in the suffering of the injustices of new imperialism by different social classes who are at different positions in the power structures of African countries. What I have done here is to illuminate the plight of one of the most marginalised social groups in Ghana, the peasants. 

Disaggregating the victims of accumulation by dispossession has considerable theoretical and political implications for the struggle for alternatives to capitalist development. Often, the target of resistance is capitalism and the end of this resistance is socialism. 

However, this begs the question of whether socialism necessarily ameliorates the plight of the victims of enclosures. If socialism is the non-negotiable alternative to capitalism, the question that poses itself poignantly is whether socialism is immune to the violence of primitive accumulation. Historically and economically, the answer must be no. Economically, every economy -socialist, capitalist, mixed, etc. -must necessarily involve production and distribution of surplus, or some form of accumulation. Production, whether in a capitalist or socialist system, necessarily requires labour and exploitation of natureespecially in economies of scale. If the preceding assertion is true, then it points ominously to primitive accumulation even in socialist social formations. Historically, the case of 'really existing socialism' in Russia illustrates that socialist social formations are not immune to primitive accumulation. Though the peasants in Russia participated in fighting to overthrow the tsars, Stalin's collectivisation policy under his First Five-Year Plan (1928) (1929) (1930) (1931) (1932) sought to 'make them the main basis and victims of the socialist version of primary capitalist accumulation' (Moore 1967, p. 481), conceptualised somewhere as 'socialist primitive accumulation' (Hobsbawm 1995, p. 382). 

Analysing accumulation by dispossession at the micro-level and with attention to disaggregating its victims complicates the problematic of alternatives to capitalism and the ends of anti-imperialism struggles. It also complicates the search for a remedy for the 'underdevelopment' of Africa; namely, 'development'. When Barrington Moore argued that the development of the core capitalist countries came at the cost of horrific violence and human suffering, he was referring directly to primitive accumulation (Moore 1967). Considering the positive results of primitive accumulation in the core capitalist countries -industrialisation and mass and conspicuous consumption -modernisation scholars (including Marxists) may argue that primitive accumulation is a good trade-off for the sort of human suffering happening in Africa without it. For example, Geoffrey Kay argued that it is an 'unpalatable fact that capitalism has created underdevelopment not simply because it has exploited the underdeveloped countries, but because it has not exploited them enough' (cited in Bernstein 1976, p. 59). This raises a question as to whether the demise of imperialism would necessarily mean the demise of continuous primitive accumulation, if Africa wants to follow the Western model of development. I will argue it would not. If so, then the relationship between primitive accumulation and imperialism is more complicated than it appears on the surface. All these are the political and theoretical issues that my study of continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana raises for scholars of both critical and mainstream political economy and urges them to reflect on in their efforts to understand the (under)development puzzle of Africa, and how to solve it. As demonstrated in the 'Kenyan debate' in the pages of this journal in the 1980s and in the work of Bill Warren, we should bear in mind that Marxists have grappled with the question of capitalist development as one of the solutions to this puzzle (Kaplinsky 1980, Leys 1980, Warren 1980). Finally, in light of the scramble by agricultural corporations for land in Africa as documented in the pages of this journal (see Bush et al. 2011), the theoretical and political issues raised here are germane to research into current developments in the political economy of Africa.
section_name: Conclusion

section_name: Acknowledgements

section_content: The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Canada provided funding for the doctoral research on which this article is based. I am very grateful for their assistance. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
section_name: Acknowledgements

section_name: Note on contributor

section_content: Jasper Ayelazuno defended his PhD dissertation in May 2011 at York University, Canada. This article is based on his PhD research in Ghana. He had worked in law enforcement in Ghana and with the UN Peacekeeping Missions in Bosnia and Kosovo before joining academia. He is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. Notes 1. For example, FIAN International, a human rights NGO, has documented the atrocities that Iduapriem's mining activities are wreaking on the people of Teberebie and has used social media to publicise them to the wider public (see FIAN 2009). 2. This is by no means to uncritically glorify this traditional landownership system as pristine and free of inequality or non-capitalist class divisions. As documented by Dumett (1998, pp. 272-273), this system was corrupted during the Wassa 'gold rush' when chiefs commercialised land by leasing it to foreign mining firms and the local capitalist class. This practice has continued till today, as illustrated by Kojo Amanor in his study of Southeastern Ghana (Amanor 2010). This notwithstanding, the traditional communal system has proved resilient, so the assertion that Ghanaian peasants are not landless is still valid.
section_name: Note on contributor