CASAS’ member, Bosman Batubara has published this article in Capitalism Nature Socialism.
Abstract: This article uses value-based analysis to examine how landscape is subsumed under capital in Indonesia’s new capital city. It identifies three distinct yet interrelated phases which show the deepening processes of landscape subsumption under capital. First, on the basis of cutting down the primary forest, logging extraction started in the 1960s, demonstrating the formal subsumption of landscape under capital, producing absolute surplus value. Second, industrial plantations started in the 1990s replaced the self-growing forest, reflecting real subsumption, generating relative surplus value. Finally, the city’s development started in the 2020s embodies speculative subsumption of landscape under capital, marked by value-grabbing (extractive yet non-productive of value) and the shift of that place from an operational landscape of extended urbanisation to an urban centre. Based on documents (archive and policy) analysis and six months of fieldwork, the article shows how these transformations reproduce spatial unevenness, displacing Indigenous communities and dispossessing them of land and forest access.
Read his article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2025.2523366
Follow us on our social media
CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.