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.     

Reflections on disaster colonialism: Response to Yarimar Bonilla's ‘The wait of disaster’

After Maria, “el desastre es la colonia” became a popular hashtag in social media and was observed in graffiti and art in different parts of the country, and abroad. Yarimar Bonilla's paper continues emerging conversations amongst scholars and activists on how the colonial matrix of power is linked to the social production of disasters, and indeed, is itself a disaster. Engaging with these conversations, in this commentary I want to highlight six aspects that I consider central to a coloniality of disasters research project: necropolis and permanent war and exception; development as biocidal disaster; differential colonial vulnerabilities; climate colonialism and debt; disaster capitalism; and decolonial disaster subjectivities.     

The “Environment Making State” and Climate Change: The French “Cat Nat” Reinsurance Scheme Under Strain

In 2012, SCOR, one of the world's largest reinsurers, sued the French state, challenging a public–private natural disaster insurance scheme, called the “cat nat” regime. It campaigned in favour of a “real” natural disaster insurance market. The purpose of this paper is to grasp the logic of this litigation. It reveals growing tensions regarding the insurance of natural disasters, against the backdrop of climate change. To make sense of this, we will build on Christian Parenti's theory of the “environment making state”. This approach aims at understanding the interaction between capitalism, states, and nature. The question we will pose is: what happens to “environment making” institutions in times of crisis? Crisis leads to the “politicisation” of “environment making”: decisions concerning the management of natural hazards are increasingly taken by the executive branch. This “politicisation” may represent an important evolution in the relationship between capitalism, states, and nature in the future.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons,Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the “iron cage.” This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the “shell as hard as steel”: a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which “steel” becomes emblematic of modernity. Steel, unlike the “element” iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a “shell” suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's “iron cage” as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a “traveling idea,” a fertile coinagein its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers.     

Political geography lecture: Social forms,spatial forms,and the New Right. Celebrating Capital at 150 and explaining the rise of the AfD

The federal elections of September 2017 that swept the authoritarian-nationalist political party with leanings toward the extreme right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), into the national parliament marked a significant change in Germany's political landscape. The platform of the AfD is built on three pillars: nationalism/racism, sexism/homo-/transphobia, and neoliberal market-radicalism/utilitarianism. This lecture proposes a form-analytical approach to historical-geographical materialism that pays proper attention to both the social forms and the spatial forms of capitalism to shed light on how the principle of abstract equality is challenged by the AfD in a selective manner within these three pillars. Bringing together two branches of Marxist theory—form analysis in the tradition of the West German state derivation debate and Marxist theories of the production of space—it argues that the socials forms of capitalism are productive in that they both veil and make processable the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but that this productivity faces substantial obstacles that are inscribed into the spatial organization of capitalism, i.e., its spatial forms—namely territory, scale, and (a reactionary understanding of) place. Drawing on these theoretical deliberations, the three pillars of the AfD platform are discussed. Although the abstract equality of market individuals is fully embraced by the AfD and its constituency, women and L.G.B.T.Q.I. people are denied the full realization of the potential of the principle of abstract equality. In particular, nonmembers of the ethnically and territorially defined demos are denied abstract equality altogether. Taken together, this lecture argues that the way in which the social forms of capitalism face substantial obstacles in the spatial forms within which they are organized helps to explain why a party with one core theme—a nationalist and racist position on migration, refugees, and Islam—can be so successful in the current conjuncture.     

The (Mis)Use of Disaster as Opportunity: Coerced Relocation from Celaque National Park,Honduras

Abstract: “Disaster capitalism” refers to political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio‐economic divisions. Here the basic tenets of disaster capitalism are applied in another context: how natural disasters can be used to impose exclusionary protected area conservation principles with similar socio‐economic consequences and ecological ramifications. The post‐Hurricane Mitch relocation of resident populations from Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a case study whereby a natural disaster, combined with the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, created the opportunity to implement a universal model of exclusionary nature protection. The resultant displacement and increased semi‐proletarianization of the affected population effectively served the capitalist interests of international conservation and the agro‐export coffee industry and, contradictorily, worked against the proclaimed goals of nature preservation through exclusionary national park policies.     

Covid-19 is an unnatural disaster: Hope in revelatory moments of crisis

Abstract

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders, grounded planes, quarantined more than half of the world’s population, triggered anxiety en masse, and shaken global capitalism to its core. Scholars of the political ecology of disasters have sought to denaturalize so-called “natural” disasters by demonstrating their uneven consequences. Work in the political ecology of health similarly accounts for how risk of illness and disease are socio-economically mediated. While this scholarship has demonstrated the need to contextualize the unequal fallout from ecological and health disasters in ways that reveal the festering wounds of structural inequality, we know much less about how hope is cultivated in moments of crisis. The current revelatory moment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to find hope in the rubble through the deconstruction of framings of crisis as “error” and by homing in on the current and potential role of tourism to contribute to a more socially and environmentally just society. This reframing the pandemic as an "unnatural" disaster opens new debates at the intersection of tourism geographies and political ecologies of hope in revelatory moments of crisis.     

Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth,History and Memory in NW Amazonia

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light.     

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.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.     

Liberation Theology and Zombies: Paralysis and Praxis

In Fredric Jameson's formulation it may now be “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” What Jameson suggests is that our current preoccupation with the drama of the apocalyptic belies a deeper paralysis of the imagination, and with this the concomitant loss of actions conducive to a new politics. Jameson's comments here foreground a contradiction in our experience of late capitalism, representations of dramatic rupture which obscure fundamental political stasis. This paper takes Jameson's reflections and the contradiction of action which is also non-action as the point of departure to query the current state of Liberation Theology, particularly the work of Ivan Petrella, to defend the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, and ask how our contemporary predicament might be illuminated by Danny Boyle's zombie film, 28 Days Later.     

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.     

New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism

Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

A Loving Attack on Caputo’s ‘Caputolism’ and his Refusal of Communism

Abstract

For various reasons, John D. Caputo is one of my favorite philosophers. However, one may identify two basic weaknesses or contradictions when it comes to his thoughts on political economy: (1) Caputo insists on capitalism—even if it be a significantly transformed capitalism (what I will be calling here “Caputolism”)—but he does not question whether capitalism can accommodate the required reforms; and (2) Caputo’s refusal to entertain the possibility of communism as a good/better alternative to capitalism, even though he has referred to an earthly “Kingdom of God” composed of a “radical community of equals”—which (strongly) resembles communism, thus rendering his refusal of communism all the more perplexing.     

The Historical Constitution of the Political Forms of Capitalism

Abstract: This article provides a general overview and critique of approaches to state theory, from the Marxist “state derivation“ debate of the 1970s, through to regulation and world‐systems perspectives, to theories which encompass imperialism. It proposes that a theory of the political forms of capitalism should have three elements: it should be based on analysis of the different historical processes by which capitalist states have been and are constituted; it should elucidate the specificities of the various political forms of capitalism; and it should explain the continuing existence of a plurality of states and imperialist relations.     

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.     

The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the Twenty‐first Century

Abstract: This essay starts from the presumption that “the communist hypothesis” is still a good one, but argues that the idea of communism requires urgent re‐thinking in light of both the “obscure” disaster of twentieth century really existing socialism and the specific conditions of twenty‐first century capitalism. I explore the contours of the communist hypothesis, chart the characteristics of the revolutionary capitalism of the twenty‐first century and consider how our present predicament relates to the urgency of rethinking and reviving the communist hypothesis. Throughout, I tentatively suggest a number of avenues that require urgent intellectual and theoretical attention and interrogate the present condition in light of the possibilities for creating communist geographies for the twenty‐first century.     

The cultural practices of Europeans

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in “atypical”, precarious forms of employment in all European Union states, and the political significance of the issue of “employment in the cultural sector” has increased noticeably. There are several reasons for this. One is the change from a post-industrial economy to a cultural economy and a forced process of economisation of societal welfare-state fields such as health, education and culture. The “marketisation” of culture and the “culturalisation” of the market means that on the one hand “high” culture is becoming increasingly commercial and, on the other, cultural content is increasingly shaping commodity production. These processes run concurrently and are part of a general trend in post-modern society.

The article follows the thesis of a recently published EU study on job potential in the cultural sector [MKW Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH / Österreichische Kulturdokumentation. Internationales Archiv für Kulturanalysen et al., (2001). Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitalisation (Brussels: European Commission DG Employment and Social Affairs) (summary: http://www.kulturdokumentation.org/eversion/rec_proj/potential.html)] which identifies a new type of employer and/or employee—the “entrepreneurial individual” or “entrepreneurial cultural worker”—who no longer fits into previously typical patterns of full-time professions of the European welfare state system.

The former “cultural worker” has been transitioning into a “cultural entrepreneur” or—as others put it—into a “sole service supplier in the professional cultural field”. According to the historian Heinz Bude's argument, western European societies find themselves in a process of “transformation into flexible, digital capitalism, away from the Keynesian welfare state to a Schumpeterian performance state and a ‘variable geometry of individual incentives’”. What is developing here is the guiding concept of the “entrepreneurial individual”, i.e. individuals who do not follow prescribed standards but who (have to) try out their own combinations and assert themselves on the market and in society. In this context, the creative cultural sector is of broader interest for new labour market concepts and strategies. In addition to the general change, new technology is leading to the emergence of new job profiles in the creative cultural sector so that the image of artists and creators is changing fundamentally. The new creative workforce is meant to be young, multiskilled, flexible, psychologically resilient, independent, single and unattached to a particular location. The article stresses the argument that these new realities of work and labour have to be recognised more extensively in up-to-date labour market strategies and cultural policy concepts. Western societies have to learn to cope better with these new general working and living conditions which affect a continuously increasing number of cultural workers/entrepreneurs—people who have to make their living from micro-entrepreneurialism. The article argues that cultural and employment policies should find innovative ways to accommodate the ambivalent efforts and needs of cultural workers/entrepreneurs (without capital). In conclusion, it will point out that the knowledge-based society has also given birth to historically new forms of employment not yet represented in the traditional canon of the political representation system (political parties, interest groups, etc.). Cultural policy-makers should take this into account in thinking about adequate social security schemes for their clientele, and labour policy-makers should be more aware of the major employment potential of the cultural sector on the one hand and, on the other, of the often precarious working and living conditions currently prevailing in it.