The Class Dynamics of Ocean Grabbing: Who Are the ‘Fisher Peoples’?

Abstract

Amidst processes of (uneven) dispossession and displacement of coastal populations—often termed ‘ocean grabbing’—scholar-activists, NGOs and the leadership of different social movements invoke, so-called, ‘fisher people’ as the political subjects of resistance. These ‘fisher people’ are often cast as capital's other as part of a normative and moral critique of ocean grabbing and purportedly the agents of change towards ‘blue justice’. Arguing for the importance of analytically differentiating within and between both classes of capital and classes of labour, this intervention draws on a seemingly clear-cut case of violent ocean grabbing in Southern Myanmar to question prevalent assumptions around undifferentiated ‘fisher peoples’. The intervention argues that the literatures on ocean grabbing and blue (in)justice could usefully draw from the conceptual tools of Marxist agrarian political economy to better analyse concrete social relations of production and reproduction.