The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification,assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.     

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.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Innovation Advantages of Cities: From Knowledge to Equity in Five Basic Steps

This paper explores the reasons why cities are often major centres of innovation, even in some less favoured regions and countries. It starts with an anatomization of the dominant factors that explain why key less favoured settings developed 'new economy' clusters through institutional interaction with Silicon Valley. The analysis concludes that public research resources and private commercialization funding are central, supported by a wide array of private but few public innovation support services. It then examines a number of cases from cities in less favoured regions and countries where innovation has occurred. The conclusions are that the research-venture capital model is present and explains innovation in each case. However, in some cases public venture capital has to substitute for private due to market failure, or a phenomenon termed 'Silicon Valley Offshore' has been induced. Cities are innovative where they concentrate the desired scientific and investment knowledge capabilities.     

‘Pillagers’ and ‘brigands’ in the hundred years war

The sufferings of French non-combatants, particularly peasants, during the Hundred Years War have been described and deplored from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. A concern for the victims has often left little room for a careful study of the aggressors, thepillars andbrigands of the contemporary records. This article seeks to identify these latter, to distinguish them from each other and from the noble warriors, often called ‘men-at-arms’. It will be shown that the first, brutal, contact between armed men and unarmed ‘civilians’ was not, as the contemporary moralists suggested, between noble and non-noble, but between non-noble and non-noble: between common soldiers and bandits, on the one hand, and peasant victims, on the other. The chivalrous and adventurous war of knights and squires was sustained on the day-to-day level, by the activity of foraging pillagers. Brigandage was a consequence of their activity, not another name for it.