Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21st Century Socialism

This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21^st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21^st century socialism”—a utopian state ideology promising the collective appropriation of natural resources without the dispossession of the peasantry. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that they are better understood as a simulation of urban modernity that is symptomatic of the predominance of ground rent in South American capitalism, and which conceals the violent repression of an autonomous indigenous project of petroleum‐based modernization. The original accumulation of 21^st century socialism can therefore be interpreted as a “fantasy of origins”, which functions to reproduce the primitive accumulation of capital.     

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.     

Rethinking Primitive Accumulation: Theoretical Tensions and Rural Southeast Asian Complexities

Abstract: This paper poses theoretical and empirical questions to the resurgent litera‐ture on primitive accumulation in critical political economy. The first section outlines the different understandings of capitalism, and of its relationship to primitive accumulation, in the literature, and argues that they complicate efforts to identify instances of primitive accumulation. The second section examines the history of frontier agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia to critique the literature's assumptions about who carries out, and who resists, primitive accumulation. The third section draws on work on Southeast Asian political economy to show that the literature pays insufficient attention to the institutions that govern capitalist social relations. The paper argues that these questions of agency, governance, and the nature of capitalism need to be answered in order to make effective use of the concept of primitive accumulation and to distinguish it from cognate concepts like enclosure and commodification.     

Agricultural dispossessions during the 1964–1985 Brazilian dictatorship

The objective of this study is to analyze dispossession processes in rural Brazil that took place during the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, when Brazilian capitalist agriculture had its most significant impulse. From a theoretical perspective, dispossessions that served capital expansion can be distinguished from those that did not. The first group includes processes that led to proletarianization of immediate producers who had been peasants, or to the capitalization of lands that they had been using for subsistence. Among processes that did not expand capital are those that involved the simple redistribution of the means of production—including land—or surpluses. State violence was one of the mechanisms used to execute many of these processes, which supported the expansion project of the dictatorial regime, particularly in northern Brazil. By converting means of subsistence—land—into capital, or immediate producers—peasants—into proletarians, these processes reproduced in contemporary formats what Marx had called primitive accumulation and that in late capitalism I call expanding dispossession.     

Primitive Accumulation and the Production of Abstract Space: Nineteenth‐century Mire Reclamation on Gotland

In Henri Lefebvre's work, abstract space entails qualitatively new ways of envisioning and strategically arranging the sites within which capital accumulation and everyday life are to unfold. This paper sets out to delineate how this premise can be profitably used to decipher contested tactics of primitive accumulation. Arguing from a particular case—nineteenth‐century reclamation of mires on the island of Gotland, Sweden—the paper explores how primitive accumulation was made possible through the conjunction of three spatialities, representing three key lines of struggle over abstract space. The abstraction and avowed homogeneity of space was produced and regulated by concurrent ideological maneuvers against customary practice, leveled by scientific discourse, and pursued through a legally endorsed material transformation of nature.     

Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Berlin's Refugee Housing Crisis

A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’. As the continent's top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin — a city that has absorbed the highest number of war refugees in Europe, many of whom remain without stable accommodation. Despite its significance, the scholarship has largely neglected the housing question within the European refugee crisis. The aim of this article is to cast a critical light on the complexities and contradictions glossed over by the refugee crisis trope. Drawing on the Berlin case, the author argues that resettlement initiatives need to be understood against the backdrop of austerity urbanism, particularly its insistence that markets can meet housing demand. By focusing on three types of shelter provisioning for refugees, the article reveals the multifaceted and nuanced ways in which the Berlin government, refugees and grassroots organizations contest, produce and navigate the moving frames of austerity urbanism in search of stable housing.     

Russia's economic agenda to 2020

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union the role of Russia in international relations has been in flux—a reflection of its changing capacities, positions and interests. To a certain extent, this variability has been defined by the Russian economy, which in the 1990s passed through a stage of deep structural transformation and severe financial crisis, but which then benefited from a period of fast and mainly stable economic growth in the first years of the twenty‐first century. Now, the serious economic decline as a result of the global crisis of 2008–2009 has been replaced by an unstable and uncertain recovery. In the 2000s a very specific political regime of personalized power under Vladimir Putin—set to be back as president in 2012—was established in Russia. During his next term Putin will face the most serious challenges to Russia's economic policy yet. According to some scenarios, these challenges could significantly destabilize the country's politics and economy. Russia is facing a demographic trap; the ageing of the population is increasing the pension burden on the budget, while the shrinking labour force will surely become an obstacle to growth. The dependence of the budget and balance of payments on the price of oil has grown so great that even price stabilization becomes a threat to macroeconomic stability. The poor quality of the investment climate leads to falling private investment which, in turn, hinders the much‐vaunted modernization of the economy. If combined, these problems will lead to the widening of the gap in technology and living standards between Russia and developed countries. Elimination of political competition and the impossibility of replacing political leaders through elections have led to widespread corruption and abuses, crony capitalism, and the complete undermining of the independence of the courts and law enforcement which further complicates the search for adequate responses to the mounting economic challenges. As there are no reasons to believe that Vladimir Putin is going to reform the country's current political system, the gradual accumulation of economic problems could well become the main threat to his presidency as Russia heads towards 2020.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining,Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields; accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature's materiality in processes of dispossession and accumulation.     

Populism during the period of the 1911 Revolution

Russian populism spread in China at the turn of the twentieth century in the name of anarchism, nihilism, and socialism, and gradually contributed to the formation of modern Chinese populism. Populism around the time of the 1911 Revolution had two characteristics: one was its deep hatred of capitalism which regarded capitalism as an ugly, decadent, and regressive historical phenomenon; the other characteristic was an attempt to get around the developmental stage of capitalism in order to proceed directly into socialism. Compared with Russian populism, modern Chinese populism did not have well-organized proponents, nor did it have any systemic system of populist political thought. It manifested itself more as a populist intellectual tendency without a strong self-awareness. Agrarian civilization and Confucianism provided the hotbed for populism, and a superficial understanding of Western capitalism was the main cultural drive that bred populism. The most important feature of modern Chinese populism was the fantasy of leaping from a backward agrarian country into socialism by surpassing capitalist industrialization.     

后金融危机视角下对资本主义、马克思主义与社会主义的反思

席卷全球的金融危机既对资本主义社会造成很大破坏,影响十分恶劣,却也彰显出马克思主义的价值和魅力,更让社会主义透现出光明的发展前景。但这并不等于资本主义行将灭亡、社会主义取得胜利的时机已经来临。金融危机给人们提出了一系列需要更加深入反思和认识的有关资本主义与社会主义的理论与实践问题,需要确立理性看待资本主义的态度,坚定马克思主义、社会主义的信念与信心。     

Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

Uneven Developments: From The Grundrisse To Capital

Abstract: Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital. This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its “problematic of uneven development”, that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence of capitalism from precapitalist relations. While this analysis is not entirely absent from Capital (cf the discussion of primitive accumulation), precapitalist formations are not treated as systematically in Capital. By contrast, uneven development enters Capital in the final section, particularly where Marx criticizes Wakefield. Reading these two texts together, I argue that the problematic of uneven development shifts from Grundrisse to Capital in a way that underscores Marx's growing stress on capital's imperial character. This shift has its roots in political events of the period when Marx rewrote Grundrisse into Capital.     

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-help in Thailand

ABSTRACT A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.     

Countermovement,Neoliberal Platoon,or Re‐Gifting Depot? Understanding Decommodification in US Food Banks

In this paper, I explore the decommodification that takes place in US food banks. I argue that food banks are neither Polanyian countermovements re‐embedding the market in society nor tiny platoons of neoliberalism that advance market relations and state withdrawal. Rather, food banks are best understood as re‐gifting depots that are part of the capital accumulation process. Recent scholarship on primitive accumulation, the disarticulations approach, and waste suggests that the devaluation of food products and the exclusion of human labor are everyday elements of capitalism. I conclude by examining the potential for progressive politics in US food banking.     

The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession

Abstract: Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansion of fictitious capital and secondary forms of exploitation, the debtfare state enhances the social power of money by allowing major credit card issuers (banks) to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates and policies that ensure the extension of plastic money to those who fall within Marx's category of the surplus population. While the expansion of debt subjects surplus workers to the disciplinary requirements of the market, it is unable to suspend the main tensions of cannibalistic capitalism, prompting ongoing reconstructions of the debtfare state.     

Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control,Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala

Abstract: Supported by the labour geography framework, I analyse how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism, by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organisation and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organised at global or extra‐local scales. Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalisation, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the very process of globalisation and the expansion of capital, empirically demonstrating the relevance of this in the globalisation literature. I deal with one region—Kerala—and processes in its labour markets, taking the case of apparel workers in an export‐promoting industrial park.     

The Shape of Capitalism to Come

Abstract: The starting point for this paper is the observation that a reshaping of global capitalism is underway, centred on the rise of dynamic centres of accumulation in Asia. It is argued that a critical understanding of this process (supported without reservation by such organizations as the IMF, the OECD and the World Bank) requires a questioning of the imagined link between “capitalism” and the “West”, and a recognition that the international organizations are committed to a universal project aimed at empowering capital and promoting competitiveness on a global scale. A case study is provided of the recently adopted plan for the creation of an ASEAN Economic Community as a “single market and productive space” by 2015. The regional context in which it is placed is contrasted with that of the European Union, and the need for further study of varieties of capitalism in emerging economies is noted.     

Capitalism,Crisis and Critique: Reassessing Régis Debray's ‘Modest Contribution’ to Understanding May 1968 in Light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme

In 1978 Régis Debray argued that, rather than threatening to overthrow capitalism, the student and worker revolt of 1968 actually strengthened the mechanisms of capital accumulation in France. Today the historical significance of May 1968 continues to generate much debate and scholarly interest, yet Debray's controversial thesis is largely absent from contemporary accounts of May's impact on post-1968 socio-economic and political change. Adopting the theoretical framework of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, this article shows that Debray's work correctly highlights the ability of post-1968 capitalism to appropriate the critiques of May. In certain respects, Debray offered a prescient analysis of capitalism's ‘new spirit’ as later described by Boltanski and Chiapello. The article also explores some of the political and theoretical implications of a grave anti-capitalist threat being paradoxically turned into a source of capitalist strength. While highlighting the notable shortcomings in Debray's argument, particularly its deterministic approach, the article suggests that Debray's stimulating analysis of May 1968 instructively reveals the importance of understanding and explaining capitalism, crisis and critique together.