Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia's oil palm zone. By Tania Murray Li, Pujo Semedi, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2021. pp. 256. $26.95 (pb); $102.95 (hb). ISBN: 9781478014959, 9781478013990

This timely book by Tania Li and Pujo Semedi offers a grounded account of how the operation of plantations transforms space. Plantation Life focuses on the transformations enacted by corporations owning and running those plantations and the ‘social, economic, and political relations that plantation corporations set in place […] and […] the forms of life they generate’ (p. 3). The authors present the life of workers and communities in the Natco and Priva oil palm plantations, the former state-owned and the latter privately owned. This detailed approach to ‘plantation life’ conceptualizes the presence of corporations in the form of occupation and shows how such occupation creates certain forms of abandonment. The authors deploy a rich ethnographic and historical approach to place these plantations at the crossroads of different unique conjunctures, spatial, social, legal and political, which enable ‘corporate profits’ and produce certain ‘forms of life’. This book's content is based on more than 5 years of field research in Tanjung, in Indonesian Borneo, incorporating a decolonial, collaborative and situated approach.

From 2010 to 2015, the authors along with a team of 60 undergraduate and graduate students conducted interviews, surveys and participant observation. This fine-grained ethnography contributes to a burgeoning scholarly conversation about plantations and the ‘plantationocene’ (Davis et al., 2019; Haraway, 2015; Haraway & Anna, 2019; Tsing, 2015; Wolford, 2021). This time, Li and Semejo turn their attention to the interfaces between corporations and state power that enable plantations to be profitable endeavours. Their account shows how the operation of modern plantations implies wider transformations in the life of villagers and workers in the plantation zone through the forms of occupation that it entails. In the enforcement of state mandates to bring ‘development’ to remote areas, companies decide which forms of life they nurture and which ones they abandon. In this capacity, plantations limit access of community members to land and water and create new forms of citizenship, in conditions outside the control of local communities. In this corporate-shaped landscape, communities have adapted their livelihoods to resist and, in a way, also benefit from the plantation corporations by receiving bribes or even stealing. The authors present their argument in seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion.

In the introduction, Li and Semedi lay out the theoretical concepts informing the book ‘corporate occupation’, ‘imperial debris’ and ‘extractive regimes’. In Indonesia, plantation corporations fulfil the double mandate of serving the public good and creating profits in a way that delegates state power to those corporations. This mandate defines the ‘occupation’ that enables plantation corporations to organize life bio-politically. This organization of life is based on the racial categories and assessments that shape the colonial government and land law in Indonesia, in particular, the myth of the ‘lazy native’ that has organized land use since the 18th century. Histories of coffee, tea and rubber colonial Dutch plantations in Indonesia are the blueprint of the relations between the Indonesian government and palm oil plantations today as well as the regimes through which plantations extract value. Such ‘extractive regimes’ shape contemporary plantations in Indonesia in the form of ‘illicit extraction’ and an ‘order of impunity’ (p. 14). State incentives for plantations that come from the colonial period have developed into a regime of ‘corporate welfare’ (Hall, 2012), paired with strong repression from the government in the 1960s that eliminated unions and workers' organizations. In this context, a rent-seeking ‘mafia system’ has developed as a tool to capture some of the profits produced by the plantation, privatize public resources and secure access to land for plantations. This system takes advantage of ‘choke points in bureaucratic structures’ (p. 17) and operates through state institutions. The subsequent five chapters delineate how corporate plantations enact changes in workers' and villagers' livelihoods and the landscape.

Chapter 1, ‘Establishing plantations’, pays attention to the creation of plantations Natco and Priva and to the process through which land was acquired. Natco was established in the 1980s in the location of a former rubber plantation that did not occupy the totality of the land that was allocated to operate. When the concession was granted to Natco, the company decided to utilize the totality of the land, replacing trees and crops that were planted by local Dayak communities in the previously unoccupied areas. The authors refer to the histories of local elders who remember how Natco did not respect existing land uses and rights that originated during the time of Dutch colonialism, forcing oil palm plantations in the region and replacing existing fruit and rubber trees without paying compensation to villagers. This occupation was legitimized by a deployment of the colonial imaginary of unproductive and irrational local communities, even when it was met with resistance. In the case of Priva, the plantation was established on a concession bought by the company owner. The land was occupied in collaboration with the national authorities and the Ministry of Transmigration of Indonesia, which brought migrants from other regions in the country. Local community leaders were involved in the process of persuading and forcing villagers to lease land for the plantation, so the concession was able to expand. The procedures of obtaining land leases created opportunities for community leaders, government officials and plantation administrators to alter concession maps, capture rents and access land. As suggested by the authors, the ‘corporations were an occupying force’ (p. 57), which, by taking over the land of farmers and their rice and rubber fields, also negatively impacted their livelihoods and landscapes. These impacts create forms of degraded citizenship that nominally recognize Dayak and Malay workers and villagers as bearers of rights but deny the effective realization of those rights in the face of expanding oil palm plantations.

Chapter 2, ‘Holding Workers’, discusses the strategies used by Natco and Priva to secure labour. As labour is not bonded, the decision of workers to work for these plantations depends on their perceptions of the working and power conditions in which they negotiate access to work. Here, the experience of seven workers serves as evidence for the authors. This chapter highlights the contradiction between a discourse that poses plantation corporations as providers of stable jobs in remote areas and the reality of plantations relying on casual workers who endure exploitative working conditions, especially when there is a labour reserve to draw from. The existence of this ‘labour reserve army’ is an effective compelling force to secure labour in both plantations. This chapter traces how this force collates down to the calculations and risk assessments that workers make to decide whether or not they continue working for these corporations. Workers include in their assessments their feelings of ‘security, loyalty, precarity and fury’ (p. 89), making of affect a central element in the organization of labour-capital relations in plantations. ‘Familism’, as the logic organizing relations between workers and managers, allows for the operation of a ‘mafia system’ that serves to distribute resources across different actors. This system creates a symbiotic relationship with the corporation, which in some cases is considered unfair by workers. These ‘mafia practices’ constitute a form of life generated by corporate plantations that in some cases has been the object of resistance by workers in Tanjung. Such mafia practices included the hiring of migrant workers to reduce labour costs for the plantation but also the hiring of these migrant workers by older plantation workers to hold production bonuses. In some cases, new workers are hired based on their kin relations and not their skills to carry out plantation tasks. These practices also extend to plantation managers who tamper with the harvest size and even add fictitious employees to the payroll in order to obtain a cut from the payments of plantation workers.

Chapter 3, ‘Fragile Plots’, focuses on the conditions of contracted palm oil production. The subjects in this chapter are landed farmers, ‘oil palm out-growers’ who live under occupation by the plantation corporations. This occupation is ‘territorial’ and ‘dispersed in multiple practices, sites and institutions that enable […] the corporation to extract value from their labour while avoiding responsibility for their fate’ (p. 93). This chapter focuses exclusively on the case of Priva, which has the upper hand in its relation with the farmers on which it depends. This dependency has been produced by debt and infrastructure inside the plantations. Debt, cooperatives and roads make producers effectively reliant on the corporation running Priva. Transmigrants who came to the region looking for a bright future as independent farmers found themselves exploited through tool booths that allocated control over the flow of income to plantation managers and village leaders. From price manipulation and inflated debt figures to unfair deductions from producers' incomes made in cooperatives, the out-growers scheme is defined by exploitation. In this chapter, Li and Semejo present this exploitation in stark contrast with the thriving lives of independent farmers dedicated to rice and rubber production in Tanjung, while out-growers are unable to cover their needs with income from their 2-ha oil palm plots.

Chapter 4, ‘Forms of Life’, pays attention to the legal and institutional arrangements that sustain the occupation of these corporate plantations. In plantation zones, law is applied selectively, in a way that has both protected corporations and made them vulnerable to extortion. It has also created forms of citizenship that entitle producers to rights that are not enforceable. Plantations secure support and protection from the government through the mandate of government officials to support the operation of these plantations as well as by funding campaigns of village and district authorities. In the case of Priva, the company bribes journalists, government officers and village leaders to gather community support and avoid negative reports in the press and government agencies. In Natco, disputes with workers and theft cases were resolved internally without resorting to the police, in line with the ‘familism’ that organizes relations inside the plantation: ‘Families demand loyalty, and everyone is expected to help guard the family's reputation’ (p. 130), the authors recall. This familism that organizes labour-capital relations is accompanied by the project of creating an ‘exemplary site of modernity’ (p. 131) through the plantation. This project implied the deployment of of gender, ethnic and racial hierarchies between plantation managers and workers and between plantation staff and neighbouring Malay and Dayak communities.

Chapter 5, ‘Corporate Presence’, looks at the existing critiques of the corporate regime organizing plantation production in Indonesia. Li and Semejo center on three aspects of these critiques that have contributed to the expansion of plantations, instead of effectively questioning this regime. The first aspect is the limited scope of critiques at the transnational, policy, provincial, and district levels. Those fall short of recognizing the forms of exploitation and occupation that sustain palm oil plantations across the country. Technical fixes aimed to ensure production is sustainable, transparent, respectful of human rights, and compliant with the law take the plantation occupation and their corporate mandates for granted. The second aspect is the reformist character of sustainability initiatives that aim to make ‘bad oil’ good, repeating ‘the narrative that oil palm is intrinsically good’ (p. 167). Initiatives such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil and the policy of No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation operate on the assumption that implementation of certain standards can ensure that oil palm plantations operate in ‘harmony’ with local communities and the environment (p. 176). The third aspect identified by the authors refers to the lack of criticism of the apparent efficiency of corporate plantations for growing oil palm and their appropriateness in contributing to employment generation and local development. Professional management is deemed more appropriate, even when smallholder production is more efficient per unit of land, creates more diverse and secure livelihoods for communities and is more resilient in the face of market changes. This discourse is matched with a series of policies that privilege corporate plantation production with favourable regulation, tax breaks, protest quelling and financial bailouts.

In the conclusion, Li and Semejo present their conceptualization of ‘corporate occupation’ as a political technology (p. 185) that aligns different subjects and practices to secure the production for profit in plantations. This deployment allows the authors to enrich the political economy approach presented in this book, with an analysis of the imperial debris: the state's mandates and actors that form the occupation regime. The double-edged sword of coercion and impunity marks this regime, as well as the ‘degradation of citizenship’ of workers and villagers alike. These elements, central to the plantation occupation regime, have also proved to be deleterious for corporations by exposing them to bribery and theft inside the ‘mafia system’.

Overall, this is an engaging and insightful piece that provokes the reader to think of corporations as an occupying force that shapes and is shaped by forms of state power. Plantations here are conceptualized in the intersection between the state and corporations, organizing life beyond the moment of production. Li and Semejo contribute here to current conversations in social reproduction theory that pay attention to the production and reproduction of life under capitalism, even if this is not directly referenced in the book (see, e.g., Bhattacharya, 2017; Katz, 2001; Mezzadri, 2019). As shown in Plantation Life, These processes are neither incidental nor peripherical for capitalist production. Instead, forms of life created through the occupation regime are instrumental to capital accumulation. Contributing to a better understanding of the articulation between these different forms of life, this book points to the role that state power and its institutions play in capitalism.

While the book does not refer explicitly to the relationship between state and capital, this question lies at the core of the argument presented. State institutions and regulations are organized simultaneously by modern and colonial ideologies in a configuration that puts them at the service of profit production and distribution. Policies implemented by states can be thought of as mediations of global dynamics of value production and accumulation under capitalism (Charnock & Starosta, 2018). Shaped by the specific historical conditions and spaces where these practices take place, state policies and institutions contribute in various ways to accumulation. Plantation Life points at those state-capital relations and offers insights into how these relations impact the livelihoods and the landscape inhabited by villagers and workers in oil palm plantation zones, both as domination force and object of resistance.

Collaborative analysis and writing constitute an additional interesting element of the book. Li and Semejo have included an appendix presenting the challenges of writing collaboratively and considering the racial, linguistic, and colonial relations of power that define the process. Both authors approach their research from different standpoints and intellectual traditions (the book's preface starts with a conversation between Li and Semejo on what the plantation is and explains how the two authors arrive at different definitions based on their personal trajectories). However, in a rare and significant effort, the authors dedicate a section of the book to show how they account for those differences in the moment of writing, considering the implications of writing this piece in English, the colonial language of global academia.

This book is a significant contribution to understanding labour-capital relations in modern plantations and constitutes a valuable reading for those working in oil palm production and Indonesia. This detailed and deep exploration of life under plantation occupation will serve as a reference for others who can subsequently replicate this effort to study other plantations. As Li and Semejo observe, this book invites comparison to help us understand why these forms of life appear and refine our theoretical understanding of corporations, state power, and accumulation in the time of the ‘global plantation’ and the ‘plantationocene’.