Accumulation by dispossession and hazardscape production in post-corporate gold mining in Itogon,Philippines

This study investigates the experience of a gold mining community two decades after corporate mining activities ceased and were replaced by informal subcontract small-scale mining in Itogon, Philippines. Drawing on David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession and Daanish Mustafa’s hazardscape, we consider the lasting effects, from 1903, of dispossession upon the establishment of the first commercial mines in the Philippines as experienced by traditional miners in Itogon. Despite the closure of mining operations, mineral lands remain privately owned, resulting in the persistence of legal land dispossession among local small-scale gold miners. Mining activities still continue as small-scale miners are able to access abandoned mines through subcontract mining. Subcontract mining has changed the source of capital that funds mining activities from mining corporation to rent-seeking small-scale mining financiers, but the new economic relations still benefit from the capitalist logic of low natural resources and labour value. We argue that the production of hazardscapes is a consequence of accumulation by dispossession through (1) processes of expropriation of mineral lands and the consequent creation of free labour among local miners; (2) the externalisation environmental cost as an accumulation strategy that results in the production of socionatural hazards; and (3) exploitation of those who labour and who are made to work in precarious work environment while contributing to the production of hazardscapes.     

北大藏秦水陆里程简“阳”县考辨

北京大学入藏的秦代水陆里程简册中记载秦代有"阳"县存在,关于这一新出现的秦县,前辈学者认为可能是位于今河南省方城县的秦汉"阳城"。然而,从简册中记载的"阳"县下属各乡到其他地区的距离来看,"阳县"不太可能在今方城附近,而更有可能是位于先秦"唐"国故地的"唐"县。其他出土材料所见的"唐"县一般写作"阳",清华简《系年》中还有楚国曾灭"唐(阳)"置县的明确记载。秦代的阳县应该就是继承了楚灭唐国之后所设的阳县。     

Conceptualising European Privatisation Processes After the Great Recession

A wave of privatisation is unfolding in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly attention. This paper examines the case of Ireland, where an austerity strategy and European Union International Monetary Fund bailout conditionality have given impetus to the transfer of public assets to the private sector. Theoretically, the paper explains the roots of the phenomenon with reference to a reformulated concept of “accumulation by dispossession” whose usefulness lies in emphasising the politico‐economic drivers of privatisation, which have been neglected in the mainstream literature. A typology is presented that argues that accumulation by dispossession manifests itself, in practice, through four main processes: (1) private repossession of assets nationalised during the financial crisis; (2) restructuring of state‐owned enterprises; (3) commodification of assets and services hitherto located outside the market; and (4) privatised stimulus through public–private partnerships. The paper's framework should be useful to conceptualise ongoing privatisation processes in other European countries.     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

Assessing the Scale and Pace of Large Shell-Bearing Site Occupation in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area,British Columbia

Methodological advancements in geoarchaeology and spatial and chronological modeling are opening new avenues to interpreting large coastal shell-bearing sites. We document the developmental histories of two such sites around Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada, using systematic percussion coring, intensive radiocarbon dating, and 3D surface mapping with Total Station and LiDAR. We also re-analyze a third site (Boardwalk/GbTo-31) excavated and radiocarbon dated in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 2000s using archival field notes, site maps, and stratigraphic profiles georectified using LiDAR. We map the natural landform beneath the sites and document the degree to which people physically modified landforms through the deposition of massive shell accumulations. We model site development through time and space and use accumulation rates and OxCal modeling to test for intentional deposition events. All three sites demonstrate complex and heterogeneous occupation histories. At each we identify instances of very rapid deposition that effectively terraced and extended parts of the natural landform to create places for constructing houses, though these episodes take place within longer histories of slower quotidian deposition. The anthropogenic modifications to the coastline in this area are the result of these mixed processes associated with long histories of occupation.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.     

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.     

《钦定宪法大纲》与清末政治博弈

《钦定宪法大纲》是清末一个重要的宪法性文件,是各方政治势力博弈的结果。大纲的产生自有其合理的一面。虽然大纲带有浓厚的封建性,但诸多条文仍不乏合理性、进步性和民主性。大纲在中国宪政史上确立了根本法的地位,确立了二元制君主立宪政体,初步确立了分权模式,初步确立了权利义务观念,与西方宪政初步实现了形式上的对接。     

经商与爱人--关于稻盛哲学的挑战性

稻盛和夫是日本京瓷集团公司的创始人。该公司“2001年3月的年营业额超过4兆日元(大约为2700亿元人民币)、税前利润达4500亿日元(大约为300亿元人民币)”。^[1](P3)是什么使稻盛和夫在经营上成就这一辉煌伟业的呢?这便是,由以“敬天爱人”的基本思想为核心构架而成的稻盛经营哲学;以及靠商业伦理道德成为赢家的超凡境界。     

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.