By Zef Preci
Tirana Times, March 06, 2026 – Two centuries ago, Karl Marx offered a blunt description of how capitalism is sometimes born and consolidated: through what he called “primitive accumulation,” a historical process—often violent—by which people are separated from their land and productive assets, while wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. The story he told was not mainly about contracts freely entered and markets calmly expanding. It was about dispossession, coercion, and the decisive role of the state in enforcing a new distribution of property.
Albania is not reenacting nineteenth-century England. We are not a colonial empire, and we do not live in Marx’s time. Yet it is hard to watch today’s conflicts over land and property—especially along the coast—without recognizing a familiar pattern. The unfolding dispute in Velipojë, including the protests around Bax-Rrjoll, is not an isolated incident. It follows earlier tensions in Theth and Orikum, and it fits a broader decade-long trajectory in which the state has increasingly shaped the rules, the institutions, and the enforcement mechanisms that determine who keeps property and who loses it.
This is not an argument that the current governing majority is “Marxist,” nor a claim that elections do not express popular will. It is an argument about governance: about how public power can be used to restructure property relations in practice, whatever ideological label a government wears. When the state repeatedly adjusts laws and institutions in ways that weaken owners’ security and strengthen privileged access for a small circle of politically connected actors, the outcome resembles a modern version of primitive accumulation: a transfer of assets, not by open competition, but through legal shortcuts, administrative pressure, and selective enforcement.
The 2016 law on strategic investments and its repeated extensions over a decade became a pivotal instrument in this architecture. In principle, attracting investment can be legitimate. In practice, “strategic” status has too often functioned as a lever to override ordinary safeguards, marginalize rightful owners, and fast-track projects in prime locations. Paired with amendments to tourism legislation—such as the creation of “priority tourism development zones”—and with institutions like the Coastal Agency endowed with broad powers, the system increasingly bypassed the judiciary and compressed due process into administrative decisions that citizens struggle to challenge effectively.
The social consequences are equally telling. Under the banner of development, rural Albania has been encouraged—sometimes pushed—toward depopulation. Programs like the much-advertised “100 villages,” often presented as visionary, frequently appeared disconnected from the real structural problems that keep the countryside poor and vulnerable: fragmented agricultural land, incomplete property registration, degraded irrigation and drainage, weak state support for livestock and production, and a pattern of donor or budget spending that looks impressive in reports but changes little on the ground. When public policy fails to secure basic services such as healthcare and education outside the main cities, “choice” becomes coercion by circumstance. People move not because opportunity calls, but because survival demands it.
In Marx’s account, coercion is not only physical. It is institutional. One modern equivalent is the manipulation of registries and property documentation. Albania’s Cadastre has long been at the center of public controversy. Past warnings about missing or damaged records and investigations into abuse of office and disappearance of official documents have circulated widely. Yet the public remains uncertain about accountability and outcomes, while the perception of impunity persists. Here a basic point must be stated plainly: overlapping claims, dubious transfers, and systematic capture of valuable land cannot happen at scale without political decisions at the top and cooperation down the administrative chain. Where responsibility dissolves into silence, citizens naturally conclude that impunity is not accidental—it is engineered.
That is also why the politics around anti-corruption enforcement have become so charged. The sensitivity toward SPAK is not merely a legal debate; it is a test of whether a country can finally break the tradition that the powerful remain untouchable while ordinary citizens are told to accept “development” as compensation for lost rights. When the state appears eager to discipline the weak but hesitant to confront the strong, rule of law becomes a slogan, not a system.
Marx also wrote about colonial exploitation as an instrument of accumulation, a concept that may sound outdated. Yet Albania’s economic structure still carries uncomfortable similarities to post-colonial patterns: exporting cheap labor and raw materials, while domestic industry remains thin and citizens leave in large numbers—often at rates that rival countries experiencing far greater instability. Call it what you want, but it is not the profile of a self-confident economy building prosperity on productive capacity at home. It is the profile of an economy that has not found a fair development model, and therefore compensates with extraction—of people, of land, of public assets.
In recent years, the legislative toolbox has expanded: changes touching tourism, protected areas, the so-called “Mountain Package,” and proposals that risk handing valuable public assets—such as tourist ports—to preferred investors through questionable procedures that sidestep competition and transparency. Add to this the Albanian Investment Corporation, designed to mobilize public real estate but widely feared as a channel for transferring it into the hands of government clients. Add, too, the proliferation of new public companies across sectors, including ones already liberalized, and even in domains with critical importance for public procurement and digital governance. The pattern raises a fundamental question: are these instruments serving the public interest, or are they building a parallel economic order in which access depends less on merit and more on proximity to power?
None of this is an argument against entrepreneurship, investment, or economic freedom. Private initiative matters. Property rights matter. History has judged Marx’s broader prescriptions harshly, and rightly so. But history has also shown something else: when property rights are insecure, when legal certainty is shaken, and when citizens suspect that laws are tailored for a few, a society does not modernize—it fractures. Investors who are serious about building long-term value do not thrive in environments where the rules can be rewritten to fit political needs. And citizens do not build their lives where the ground beneath them can be taken with a stamp.
Velipojë is therefore not only a local dispute over plots of land near the sea. It is a national mirror. It reflects the quality of our institutions, the credibility of our courts, the integrity of our registries, and the limits we place on state power. Above all, it reflects whether governance exists to protect citizens equally, or to manage citizens while reallocating assets upward.
Changing course cannot depend solely on the goodwill of those who govern. It must increasingly become the demand—and the sustained action—of those who are governed. If Albanians want to live and build their future on the land of their ancestors, they need more than promises of development. They need legal certainty, transparent competition, accountable institutions, and a state that protects the weak as faithfully as it serves the strong.
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