Re‐Politicising the Analysis of “New State Spaces” in Hungary and Beyond: Towards an Effective Engagement with “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Abstract: Recent scholarship grounded in strategic‐relational state theory has offered a compelling approach to state spatial restructuring under neoliberal capitalism. By drawing on Hungary's post‐1990 state spatial reforms, this paper discusses a major limitation of state theoretical frameworks. In particular, the paper seeks to challenge state theorists’ generally subtle but persistent bias to capitalist economic structures, and argues that the above bias impedes an adequate and effectively critical account of state spatial regulation. Finally, it makes a case for a perspective on new state spaces that acknowledges the wider socio‐historical embeddedness of state space production, as well as its inherently political nature.     

Dewey's Materialist Philosophy of Education: A Resource for Critical Pedagogues?

This article looks at some similarities and differences between key elements of Karl Marx's critique of capital and John Dewey's philosophy of education, both substantively and methodologically. Substantively, their analyses of the relation between human beings and the natural world—what Marx calls concrete labour and Dewey generally calls action—converge. Similarly, methodologically they converge when looked at from the point of view of their analysis of the relation between earlier and later forms of life. In Marx's case, it is his comparison of the relation between capitalist society and earlier societies. In Dewey's case, it is his comparison of the relation between adult experience and childhood experience. Dewey's practical realization of his distinction of adult and childhood experience in the creation of a materialist curriculum embodied in the Dewey laboratory school in Chicago (of which Dewey was director from 1896 to 1904) also accords in many ways with Marx's theory of concrete labour. On the other hand, their analyses diverge substantively when viewed from the point of view of their critique of capitalist society; Marx united concrete labour with his concept of abstract labour to provide a basis for criticizing modern society on its own terms rather than in terms of Dewey's concept of a cultural lag. The divergence is explained by their divergent methodologies in analyzing modern capitalist society. Despite this difference, the article concludes that critical pedagogues would do well to incorporate Dewey's materialist curriculum into their own practices—with modifications.     

Legislating nature for biodiversity offsets in New South Wales,Australia

In the contemporary environmental management landscape, legislation is a principal means through which sustainable outcomes are negotiated. Yet the relations between legislation (as a social practice), nature and justice have been subjected to limited scrutiny. This paper explores these relations through consideration of a system of biodiversity offsets currently being implemented in New South Wales, Australia, following the enactment of the Threatened Species Conservation Amendment (Biodiversity Banking) Act 2006 (NSW). In this paper we investigate the work this legislation does in enacting the materiality of nature in order to explore the interrelations of materiality, law and concerns for environmental and ecological justice. We argue that the act of ‘legislating nature’ is simultaneously a ‘mode of matter-ing’ (Law 2004) that in the case of biodiversity banking (BioBanking), resituates biodiversity within new meanings, spatialities, human–nature relations, and which accounts for biodiversity at a state, rather than local, scale. Utilising the work of Latour, we examine the processes of ‘translation’ required to generate abstracted ‘biodiversity values’ that can be traded and moved between locations. Examination of these processes leads to a consideration of the broad requirements of environmental and ecological justice as a theoretical and political response to BioBanking.     

Critical Geographies with the State: The Problem of Social Vulnerability and the Politics of Engaged Research

Abstract: State interventions to govern social vulnerability highlight the complexity of contemporary states, marked by neoliberal agenda but also by progressive interventions and the desire for effectiveness. This paper draws on collaborative research with government agencies on social vulnerability in the Hunter region to assess the desirability of undertaking critical geographies with the state. We see states as contested terrains invested with the institutional capacity to mobilise diverse political projects. We argue that critical research in partnership with states is possible, as are mobilisations of the agency of state institutions to promote progressive policy development. The paper explores how we might use engaged research to intersect with the production and circulation of texts, technologies and practices within the state apparatus to achieve desirable change. While critical research with the state involves uncertainties and compromise, with no permanent resolutions, we conclude that states must remain centred in our critical conversations and praxis. In this paper we advance the case for the critical possibilities of policy‐oriented research with the state. We reflect on experiences of an engaged research project with state government agencies in the NSW Hunter Region involving the production and use of the texts and technologies as state interventions in social vulnerability. Working through the project's reflexive, collaborative methodologies and our use of critical GIS, we highlight the creation of opportunities to change how the components of social vulnerability were conceptualised, contest policymakers’ view of what was “relevant”, and shift framing rationalities and resultant state practices. As such the paper contributes to our knowledge of strategic research practices for pursuing critical, progressive projects with the state. Such engagement involves uncertainties and contingent compromise. Yet, as terrains of contestation wherein diverse political projects are assembled and propelled, states must remain centred in our critical conversations and in our critical praxis.     

Sexual citizenship in ‘the New Tasmania’

The state of Tasmania, the smallest in the Commonwealth of Australia, has recently reformed its law relating to relationships by amending over 100 pieces of legislation to include a range of relationships, including lesbian and gay partnerships, among those given recognition and legal entitlement. This government-sponsored legislation is represented as central to the program of economic revival, social reform and branding described as ‘the New Tasmania’. This article locates the relationship reform in this discourse of Tasmania's newness and in the context of neo-liberal approaches to globalisation. It argues that sexual citizenship takes a multitude of forms and its value, like the value of relationship reform legislation, cannot be easily determined. Indeed, it asks whether sexual citizenship as a form of belonging can ever be disentangled from the various contexts where it is performed. It concludes by privileging the desires and performances of sexual citizenship over the constitution of sexual citizenship in rights or recognition.     

Historical Archaeo-Geographies of Scaled Statehood: American Federalism and Material Practices of National Prohibition in California, 1917–1933

This paper discusses the ways that a more explicit engagement with the discipline of historical geography could contribute to archaeologies of the recent and contemporary past. Scholars working in this time period must consider multiple scales of connectivity between people and places through time and would benefit from political geography’s recent theorizing on scale and the state. We present a preliminary case study of what we term a historical archeo-geography drawing upon archaeological materials from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century sites to demonstrate how state and federal legislation is enacted at the household level.     

Real Institutional Responses to Neoliberalism in Australia

The paper defines the state's apparatus as a site of power and contestation. This view enables contingency in the realm of government to be taken seriously. Accordingly, the paper takes a critical view of the idea of neoliberalism as a general global process. The paper reviews Paul du Gay's history of the state's apparatus, including his nostalgia for bureaucracy and his disdain for entrepreneurship. The paper contrasts du Gay's stylised take with a study of shifts in institutional structures and behaviours in Australia's state apparatus since the mid 1970s leading to the present period of Howard neoliberalism. The paper positions these shifts in the context of Coombs‐led institutional reform in Australia; it examines the potential for institutional resistances and responses; and draws implications for how we view institutions as having agency in the political processes of state apparatus reform.     

Globalization and the closing of the universe of discourse: the contemporary relevance of Marcuse's “Marxism”1

This paper assumes that there is something in the logic of the capitalist mode of production such that, in the words of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,” giving a “cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” It assumes, that is, that there is an inherent tendency in capitalism to seek to globalize. Further, it is argued that one can plausibly claim that the capitalist mode of production has succeeded, or is succeeding, in globalizing against the countervailing forces of the managing state and organized labor. It is argued that this development represents, to use Marcuse's words, something like a “closing of the universe of discourse” or a “paralysis of criticism” and the emergence of a “society without opposition,” but in a context, in crucial respects, fundamentally different from that analysed by Marcuse in the 1960s.     

Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as government and critique (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Turkey is in the midst of a wide‐ranging reform of historic proportions, the most profound reorganization and restructuring of institutions and practices since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. These reforms, inspired and guided by the country's EU integration, are multifaceted but can be summarized as liberalization of economy, politics and society. While capitalist penetration and privatization are obvious features of the reform, its techniques, kinds of knowledge and objects, as well as its reflexive aspects – the ways in which it studies itself unfolding – have not been sufficiently conceptualized.     

Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg

The term pacification is regularly used in urban scholarship as a euphemism for state violence and social control. However, this term is used loosely and is underexplored as a concept. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing recent critical theory on pacification, which argues that the term captures the combination of war and police power in the replication of capitalist order. This concept will then be applied to a case study of “blitzes”, a practice which became central to urban management in Johannesburg from the late 1990s. Originally, the word was used to refer to aggressive raids led by the police in “trouble” spots, but has since been expanded to include inspections on general services. Understood as pacification, blitzes reflect how the state is constantly engaged in a low‐intensity war against perceived “disorder”, which is intended to control and discipline spaces in South Africa's largest city.     

LOCAL LAND POLICY OVERRIDES: WHEN ARE THEY APPROPRIATE?

The state has the power both to enable local communities to regulate land usage, as well as to override local jurisdictions' zoning policies. In Massachusetts, two pieces of legislation have empowered the state to override local land use control for the purpose of constructing two types of facilities: low and moderte income housing and hazardous waste treatment facilities. Both initiatives have stimulated considerable debate and controversy. This paper provides a framework or “test” for understanding the relative appropriateness of state overrides in general. In addition, the two Massachusetts case are discussed and analyzed according to these criteria.     

Materialist State Theory and the Transnationalization of the Capitalist State

Abstract: In contrast to assertions that the capitalist state is either losing control or that it has returned, this article argues that during the last two decades the state itself has been reshaped. To understand the processes that the capitalist state is exposed to it is necessary to conceive of it as a series of form‐specific practices. Which practices form “the state” is not a result of pre‐given institutions but of conflicts and struggles. The capitalist state, separated as it is from the relations of production, must not be made synonymous with the national state. Only as a result of certain relations of force does bourgeois rule acquire the form of the national state. These relations between classes are currently being dissolved by the ruling classes. The capitalist state is being reorganized and is constructing new elements of a transnational network state, whilst the state itself is governed through new techniques—that is, those of governance.     

A PRISM FOR CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM: TEMPORARY WORK AS DISPLACED LABOR AS VALUE

Temporary work provides a prism that separates out and thereby makes manifest some of the displacing effects of today's most diversified and expanded divisions of capitalist labor. The chaotic conceptions of statistics agencies and business commentators fail to come to terms with this displacement, while transaction cost theories of flexibility fare little better. By contrast, a Marxist attention to displacements in the chain of value can adequately theorize and explain the capitalist roots of alienation in temping. A Marxist account is also better placed to analyze the spatial and institutional displacement of the labor process through temping. Finally, when sensitized to its own economic limits, a Marxist reading of value formation can also open the door to analyzing other, non-economic, codings of workers' value.     

Women,Fascism and Work in Francoist Spain: The Law for Political,Professional and Labour Rights

The Sección Femenina (or SF, 1934–77), the female branch of the Spanish fascistic party, the Falange, created and successfully lobbied for the Law for Political, Professional and Labour Rights for Women (Ley de Derechos Políticos, Profesionales, y de Trabajo de la Mujer) in 1961. The law responded to and recognised the shifting world of women's work during the final years of the Franco regime (1939–75) and established the SF as an advocate for their labour rights. The new legislation simultaneously promoted employment opportunities for Spanish women and reinforced their traditional restrictions. This article explores this significant legal achievement for women's rights during the 1960s, discussing its meaning for the Franco dictatorship and for the female organisation that ushered in the new legislation. Ultimately, I argue that the law was a significant step for the advancement of women's rights and continued the piecemeal process of reform led by the SF. But it reinforced the group's paradoxical image as an organisation with fascist roots pushing (albeit in the workplace only) for reform.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

Towards Reconciliation of the Land Issue in Namibia: Identifying the Possible,Assessing the Probable

This paper argues that the case against a major land reform in Namibia is overstated and inaccurate, and that, in spite of its relatively harsh climate, the country contains sufficient land of good enough quality, and a small enough population, to undertake a major land reform. The paper suggests that the reasons why there is generally a conservative estimate of possible solutions to land hunger are largely related to the prevalence of a conservative colonial intellectual legacy in spite of radical ambitions stated by the SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) government. Furthermore, many commentators and officials in Namibia are following a pattern in Africa of ignoring lessons (positive and negative) from other countries—in this case particularly from aspects of Zimbabwe's land reform. The paper explores the comparison with Zimbabwe in order to emphasize the political lessons available for Namibia's land reform, but it also highlights practical lessons which exist, in spite of the fact that most of Zimbabwe's environment is generally much better suited to agriculture than is Namibia's.     

WHAT'S WRONG WITH ECONOMIC HISTORY?

In this polemical book, Francesco Boldizzoni argues that economic history is so moribund as to require resurrection. He maintains that economic history has been converted into a subfield of economics and has embraced the antihistorical and a priori intellectual style of mainstream economics departments: it has, in effect, ceased to be a form of history. Boldizzoni hopes to force a recognition of contemporary economic history's bankruptcy and to show the way toward a revitalization. He criticizes both economic history as retrospective econometrics, as in the work of Robert Fogel, and economic history as a branch of the new institutional economics, as in the work of Douglas North. Boldizzoni suggests that economic history should return to the sort of research and models that prevailed earlier in its own history—models based on induction from observed economic life rather than on deduction from the theories of contemporary microeconomics. He particularly singles out the work of Witold Kula, Moses Finley, and the Annales historians for emulation, but also praises the perspectives of economic sociology and economic anthropology. Boldizzoni's call for a return to a more inductive form of economic history is welcome, and his discussions of his heroes should remind us that economic history was once a vibrant and creative part of the history profession. But the book's advice is more useful for historians working on premodern than on modern economic life. The claim that self‐governing markets and interest‐maximizing individual actors are pure figments of economists' imaginations seems far less certain for recent than for premodern times. And his insistence that each society has its own distinct form of economic life that must be discovered inductively leaves unconceptualized the world‐spanning forces of capitalist development that increasingly shape societies everywhere. Boldizzoni's critique and his positive suggestions are certainly valuable, but he by no means supplies a sufficient recipe for economic history's resurrection as a vibrant field.     

The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the US Agency for International Development

Abstract: This paper examines recent changes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) regarding the connections between trade liberalization, development, and security. USAID has adopted “trade capacity building” as a framework for development, and, in conjunction with new US national security discourses, now operates under the assumption that underdevelopment is a source of state weakness that produces insecurity. I argue that these changes in how USAID understands and undertakes development constitute the neoliberalization of development. In accordance with these shifts, USAID has redefined critical aspects of its development mission, undergone internal restructuring, and altered its relationship with other US state institutions and capital. The actual prospects for achieving security or development are slim, however, as the agency remains wedded to definitions of both that suggest the only acceptable role for the state lies in facilitating further neoliberalization and promoting the stability of capitalist class relations. An overview of USAID's historical development, and a closer examination of the place of food aid and food security in the agency's development work, demonstrate this.     

RESTRUCTURING SOVIET AGRICULTURE: TOWARDS A SPATIAL DIMENSION

Recent Soviet reform legislation on agriculture (e.g., Land Law, Law on Property) is described and its implications for restructuring this troubled sector of the Soviet economy are surveyed. Collective, family, and individual contracting (and in some areas family farming on isolated farmsteads, or khutors) are altering the way collective and state farms are organized. Since provisions of the new legislation grant local soviets considerable authority in decisions on land tenure issues, the paper investigates how regional preferences and traditions in agriculture may reshape the rural landscape into one of greater diversity and increased spatial differentiation.     

Tax Havens and Global Capitalism: Vanuatu and the Australian Connection

The growth of tax haven activities has been a feature of recent global capitalist development, yet geographical analysis of these activities has been limited. Vanuatu has become the South Pacific's major tax haven, expanding through its ability to capture (mainly) Australian and Asian investment in the 1970s and 1980s. Tax haven activities in Vanuatu have increasingly contributed to local employment and income generation, despite the growth of competition from newer tax havens in the region. Vanuatu is not used by major Australian public companies to the extent that either Hong Kong or the Caribbean tax havens are used, and it is suggested that activities from Asia are increasingly dominating Vanuatu's finance centre. Recent Australian taxation legislation may reduce Australia's role in the Vanuatu tax haven further, although it is apparent that there are limitations to the legislation's effectiveness in stopping tax haven activities.