The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

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.     

Black Belonging,White Belonging: Primitive Accumulation in South Africa's Private Nature Reserves

Evictions have been shown to be a mechanism of primitive accumulation in nature conservation. This paper adds an historical analysis to the discussion on primitive accumulation in conservation by exploring the seemingly innocuous mechanism of White belonging to land in South Africa's private nature reserves. Contemporary articulations of White belonging are replete with stories and images of White male “pioneers” from the colonial era who, upon arrival in “empty lands”, were able to create economies out of nothing. Such representations of history on private nature reserve websites and other promotional material invisibilise Black belonging and legitimise private conservation. By illuminating the inconsistencies in the empty lands narrative and the legacies of three championed conservation pioneers from the 19^th century, this paper argues that White belonging is a mechanism of primitive accumulation, while Black belonging continues to be expressed in various ways in contemporary South Africa.     

富裕佃农:英国现代化的最早领头羊

农业是英国资本主义发生的策源地,而不是商业或者手工业,后者要以农业的发展为前提和基础。英国原始积累成功的秘密,在于农民个体的普遍积累,在于大规模的圈地运动以前,英国农民已经经历了长时期、普遍的积累,并在此过程中产生了一批殷实的、又有一定社会地位的富裕佃农。他们一心扩大耕地和牧场,或买卖或转租或垦殖,很早就一直以零敲碎打的方式进行“圈地”;更重要的是,富裕佃农最早创立了工资雇佣生产方式。它有着一套全新的游戏规则,不承认等级,漠视身份,最大限度地追求市场利润,完全不同于庄园经济。富裕农民经济在市场上击败了领地经济,迫使领主不断肢解领地地产,进一步扩大富裕农民经济的规模,资本主义租地农场主阶级逐渐形成。显然,农业资本主义是富裕佃农推动的,领主不过是被佃户逼上商品经济的“贼船”。是约曼——富裕农,还有他们的延伸体乡绅,而不是领主或新贵族,成为英国现代农业的发起人。     

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.     

Gender and sexual violence,forced marriages,and primitive accumulation during the Cambodian genocide, 1975–1979

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children died during the Cambodian genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production as a means of building socialism. A crucial question regarding these practices was whether the CPK implemented policies designed specifically to destroy the traditional family structure of Cambodia. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, this article argues that policies and practices forwarded by the CPK constitute a variation of primitive accumulation; and that transformations of the traditional family structure were conditioned by the overall social organization of production initiated by the CPK. However, a more pressing form of gendered violence is apparent – a mode that pivots on the social ordering of the CPK’s political economy.     

The Village that Turned to Gold: A Parable of Philanthrocapitalism

International development is increasingly financed and implemented by a nexus of billionaires and corporate foundations known as ‘philanthrocapitalism’. This article develops a critique of this paradigm, focusing on the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and its implementation in Bonsaaso, Ghana. The author interprets the MVP as a staging of the neoliberal fantasy of origins — an imagined history of the spontaneous emergence of capitalism in the frugal activities of smallholder farmers. In Bonsaaso, this fantasy has been shattered by the violence of primitive accumulation — the separation of the peasantry from the land through which capitalist social relations are actually established. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bonsaaso, the author describes how an influx of foreign gold miners has plunged the region into a profound socio‐ecological crisis. Despite producing several internal reports on this crisis, the MVP has failed to respond to it, and has instead sought to restage its fantasy in a new Village in the north of the country. Yet an analysis of its background documents and financial networks demonstrates the complicity of the MVP in the political economy of primitive accumulation underway in Bonsaaso. The case provides a cautionary tale against the promise of a good and pure capitalism.     

Labour Migration,Capitalist Accumulation,and Feudal Reproduction: A Historical Analysis from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

This paper engages with the long‐running debate on the transition from farm‐based livelihoods to capitalism in the context of labour migration. Tracing the historic evolution of modes of production in the peripheral Mithilanchal region of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, it notes how the economic processes which are today driving the peasantry into the labour force through migration are not directly connected to the process of capitalist accumulation in the diverse locales where labour is employed, as is somtimes implied in the research on classic situations of “accumulation by dispossession”. The entry of the peasantry into the surplus labour pool is instead linked firstly, with a complex convergence of internal changes within a non‐capitalist feudal mode of production on an economic, cultural and political level, and secondly, with the stresses brought about in the wake of expanding capitalist markets. The paper notes however that migrant labour still generates substantial profits for capitalism with a sharing of surplus between the latter, and landlord‐money lenders. It argues that the relationship between modes of production in this context, is neither functional nor coincidental, and is linked instead with larger – at times opportunistic – class alliances which have evolved to fit the current political‐economic conjuncture.     

A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

The attempted extirpation of Indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such ‘annal of mankind’ written in ‘letters of blood and fire’. More pointedly, by contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, it is argued that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in the novel. The latter include the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.     

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 spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

Radical geographers have emphasised the centrality of class relations to the production of social space. In particular, this literature makes the distinction between the homogenising “abstract space” of global capital and meaningful, specific social “places.” The tension between the two expresses itself in spatial forms, creating the landscapes of capitalism. This political-economic conception of space and place is generally under-explored in the Australian context, particularly regarding the highly important post-World War II Long Boom period. This article interrogates the spatiality of this epoch through David Ireland's award-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Rooted in the notion of literary geography, which argues that literature “knows” things about the space of the society into which it is born, the article argues that Ireland portrays and handles in a particularly vivid and powerful way the dialectical articulations, simultaneously contradictory and intertwined, of space and place in the spatiality of Australian capitalism. Whilst he ultimately concludes that the powers of capital's abstract space dominate, he nevertheless demonstrates that through explicitly spatial projects of place-making, workers can attempt to impose their own political economy on the spatial form.     

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

Industrial Warriors: South Korea’s First Generation of Industrial Workers in Post-Developmental Korea

This study analyses the skills upgrading programmes of South Korea’s first generation of skilled workers, focusing on their political and social trajectories from bulwarks of the developmental regimes up until 1987, to a “labour aristocracy” of regular workers employed mainly in large companies in heavy industries in South Korea. The term “labour aristocracy” highlights how the “regular workers”, employed mostly in monopolistic large enterprises in heavy industries, have better wages, job security and other social benefits than “non-regular workers” and other regular workers employed in small and medium companies. It argues that these “Industrial Warriors” were the product of the Korean developmental state’s creation of an egalitarian social contract, and that the political and social trajectories since then must be seen in its totality. This is necessary because it manifests the profound change in Korea’s political economy from state-grassroots synergistic developmentalism to neoliberal industrial capitalism, wherein having a regular job has become a substantial asset in an era of non-regular employment. This study contributes to the literature on the political economy and to sociological discussion of the Korean developmental state that continues to this day and is far from over.     

Cleaning up after the Celtic Tiger: scalar 'fixes' in the political ecology of Tiger economies

This paper explores intersections between political economy and nature in the so-called Tiger economies that have risen to prominence since the 1960s. Whilst Tiger states are in many ways emblematic of the extremes of late capitalism, they are nevertheless characterized by socio-natural environments that are distinctive, both in terms of the political and economic interests that have underpinned them and their rates of production. Whilst produced under a distinctive set of capitalist social relations, the dialectical reading offered herein chooses to foreground the agency that socio-nature itself possesses in relation to prevalent class interests. This agency is conceptualized in terms of a series of cultural wars over transformed nature. Using a theoretically provocative case study that examines the politics of waste management in Ireland, the paper argues that in reflecting upon the role of such culture wars in the constitution of dominant social relations in Tiger states, the concepts of scalar strategies and struggles over scale may prove useful. Whilst social contests over the scaling of governance have tended thus far to focus upon the dialectical relations between scale and political economy, the paper argues that ecological projects too are fundamentally produced by and implicated in the structuration of scale. In calling for dialogue between political ecological studies and recent work in geography that has sought to theorize scale as a social process, the paper hopes to contribute towards the development of a political ecology of Tiger states.     

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.     

The Iron Triangle of Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Political Economy of Urban Corruption in Spain

Despite a cascade of corruption scandals over the last decade, the role of political corruption has yet to be accounted for in the scholarship on Spanish urban entrepreneurialism. This is an omission that extends to the broader literature on the topic as well. This paper looks at the theoretical causes of this neglect and explores ways of integrating corruption into the study of urban entrepreneurialism. To do so, it offers a systematic analysis of the role of clientelism in the political economy of Spanish inter-urban competition. Contrary to the existing literature, which at best explains away corruption as a logical outgrowth of intensified competition for real estate capital, this paper argues that corruption is rooted in a political structure that precedes the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism. This structure is identified as an “iron triangle”, a complex of colluding interests formed by the state, the real estate industry, and political parties.     

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.     

Hardworking Newcomers and Generations of Poverty: Poverty Discourse in Central Washington State

This research is part of a project that aims to reinterpret geographies of poverty in the American Northwest by focusing on the intersections of cultural and political–economic processes that produce poverty differences. This paper contributes to this aim by unpacking poverty beliefs by race at the local county level. This qualitative analysis is grounded in a brief discussion of the political economy of Kittitas County in Central Washington State, which provides space to analyze the theoretical linkages between structural and cultural constructions of poverty differences. Specifically, this paper argues that first generation “hardworking” Hispanic immigrants embody the “working poor”, while individual explanations of poverty are articulated as the “intergenerational poor”, who are racialized as white and choose poverty as a lifestyle. In this vein, many local residents use the marker of “generation” to distinguish between white, lower class individuals who choose to be poor from a group of Hispanic newcomers whose poverty stems from structural forces such as non‐living‐wage jobs and discrimination. This forms one part of a larger strategy to “blame the individual” for the existence of white poverty. This analysis poses new theoretical insights into the intersection between difference markers such as race, class, and generation and contributes to the literature on racial differences in poverty explanations. The geographical specificity of poverty discourse argues for further grounding of the poverty literature in material conditions, which will allow for more nuanced understanding of the creation and persistence of poverty in poor communities.     

Nature's Materiality and the Circuitous Paths of Accumulation: Dispossession of Freshwater Fisheries in Cambodia

This paper examines recent conflicts over freshwater fisheries in Cambodia using the notion of accumulation through dispossession as a conceptual starting point. Despite a recent material turn, theoretical literature on the political economy of the environment has only partially incorporated an ecologically nuanced view of nature into analyses of its transformation under processes of capital accumulation. The biophysical characteristics of riverine fisheries are predicated on the ecohydrologic dynamics of water flows, and these characteristics dictate strategies of appropriation for both subsistence and commercial use. The complexity of these material characteristics is compounded in the case of Cambodian fisheries, where an array of state‐ and market‐driven processes promote the dispossession of resources and constrain the livelihood opportunities of rural communities dependent on fishing. Theories of capital accumulation and how accumulation induces socioecological conflicts can be very useful, firstly, for explaining the origins of environmental conflicts and, secondly, for grounding the analysis of such conflicts in the politics of accumulation as mediated by state actors. Conversely, theoretical framings of primitive accumulation must examine the “things” being accumulated (eg riverine fisheries) in far more biophysically specific ways, and must recognize the circuitous pathways, particularly in cases involving developmental states, that strategies of accumulation follow.