The main incentive for the multiform land grabs is the utilitarian, profit-oriented use of land. Among the leitmotivs of the present wave of land grabs, especially on the global South, one could find the increasing ecological problems, and the speculation for the likely future boom of food prices. The centralization of land control and the food production that is dominated by profit based industrialized factory farms is hamstringing agrarian small producers and is aggravating the population of slums; from the other hand it is incompatible with the needs of an ecologically sustainable agriculture and the food sovereignty of the peoples.
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People without land, land without people. Material and spiritual expropriation of land in Hungary
The questions of the ownership and use of land have generated a huge flood of scandals during the last year in Hungary. Naturally, the land question is not something new: agriculture is still the main element of the Hungarian economy, as it was also before WWII, in the age of state socialism and following 1989 as well; hence the acquisition of land, the relations of ownership and of power could be seen completely in the struggles for the land. As far as possible, the authors intended to review both the historical and the more present questions and hope that a wider dialogue about the land could arise on this base.
Reflections on the New International
Also Peter Gowan wrote that the incorporation of East Europe into the capitalist world system is highly similar to imperialism. The starting point of the study of István Mészáros is that structural crisis of the system of capitalist production specifically falls into military interventions, in which globalized capital (which disposes the strongest positions in the so called postmodern countries) turns against modern and pre-modern regions "in order to perpetuate their so-called »liberal imperialisms and the total domination of the militarily less powerful countries by unleashing »death and destructions." According to the study, despite former experiences there are positive preconditions nowadays to organize a more combative International.
At the social crossroads (about capitalism and socialism)
This interview was made even before the first issue of Eszmélet was published, but it remained unedited and unpublished then. After 25 years now we present a curt version of this editorial conversation, since we believe that not only its questions, but also the answers were given are still relevant today.
No. 101 | (Spring 2014)
Table of contents
- At the social crossroads (about capitalism and socialism)
- Mészáros István : Reflections on the New International
- Szabó Tamás, Fülöp Ádám : People without land, land without people. Material and spiritual expropriation of land in Hungary
- Fred Magdoff : Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession
- Mônica Dias Martins : Learning to Participate: The MST Experience in Brazil
- Laurent Delcourt : The expanding techniques of agrarian business on the South hemisphere
- Jancsó Miklós : This silly profession. An interview by Andrew James Horton
- Krzysztof Rucinski : Two men against history A comparative analysis films by Miklós Jancsó and Andrzej Wajda
- Barta Tamás : The early period of the Hungarian folk-dance movement – social ideology or national art?
- Fóris Ákos : The Holocaust in the area of the Western Group of Occupation Forces. Account of the Solicitor Division of the State Protection Authority in the case of Nándor Pápai, 12th of January, 1950.
- Bartha Eszter : Collective farms in the grip of the state
- Tütő László : Head Party – Belly Party
