The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom

There exists an influential and growing political‐economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.     

New rent seeking strategies in housing in Spain after the bubble burst

This paper analyses the new rent seeking strategies in housing implemented during Spain’s financial crisis. The Spanish Model presents a paradigmatic case of the need for capital to reinvent itself through the articulation of new mechanisms for the production and appropriation of urban rent, as the crisis revealed the limits of strategies that were implemented during the bubble period. Amongst these new strategies, the paper analyses the rescue of financial entities, the creation of a ‘bad bank’ and the establishment of Spanish REITs. These mechanisms are leading to financialisation of rental housing and the emergence of vulture funds as new transnational owners of housing.     

Governing Homo Subprimicus: Beyond Financial Citizenship,Exclusion, and Rights

The paper presents an alternative to scholarship on the distributional politics of finance that emphasizes citizenship‐based claims to new financial rights. To compensate for the dominance of exclusion‐based etiologies of financial marginality in financial geography, I reframe financial exclusion as a problem of financial government—that is, as a problem of conducting the conduct of risky populations without threatening the security and autonomy of financial markets. Drawing on Foucault's distinction between technologies of discipline and security, I describe how barriers to the extension of financial government create tiered processes of financial subject formation. The inchoate “subprime’ financial subject produced is the correlate of a specialized financial governmentality—a homo subprimicus eminently governable by financial means. I close by calling for greater attention to questions regarding the relationship between technologies for valorizing bare life, new systems of financially mediated value extraction, and emerging capitalist class processes.     

Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction

Neoliberalization has swept across the world like a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment, entailing much destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers, but also of divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought, and the like. To turn the neoliberal rhetoric against itself, we may reasonably ask: in whose particular interests is it that the state take a neoliberal stance and in what ways have these particular interests used neoliberalism to benefit themselves rather than, as is claimed, everyone, everywhere? Neoliberalism has spawned a swath of oppositional movements. The more clearly oppositional movements recognize that their central objective must be to confront the class power that has been so effectively restored under neoliberalization, the more they will likely themselves cohere.     

Assessing the Effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone Geography and Anthropology

Abstract: Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under‐acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step.     

Between compassion and racism: how the biopolitics of neoliberal welfare turns citizens into affective ‘idiots’

A sharp increase in racism and xenophobia, alongside an increase in philanthropy and charity, mark Europe’s Janus-faced reaction to the social consequences of the economic crisis. This paper goes beyond the racism/xenophobia vs. charity/philanthropy dualism, arguing that these seemingly antithetical responses have more in common than we may think.

• (1)?Both are equally divisive and ‘othering’ practices. Whilst racism transforms human beings into de-humanized entities in order to be able to hate them, charity transforms human beings into dependent objects in order to be able to offer aid.

• (2)?Both are strongly affective yet deeply apolitical reactions of people who lose their political agency as they become imbued with fear and insecurity; of citizens who turned into indebted apolitical objects, when social solidarity and welfare provision turned from a collective responsibility into a private affair.

When housing, healthcare, etc. became accessible mainly through private loans and mortgage markets, private welfare debt became the biopolitical tool that enrolled the workforce into volatile financial speculative practices and turned citizens into fear-imbued ‘idiots’, i.e. private individuals who can only care for their private matters. Understanding the biopolitics of privatized welfare and increased household debt as the process that drives this transformation of citizens into ‘idiots’ allows us to move beyond the false dilemma of charity vs. racism, in search of a politics of solidarity.     

A Hostile Takeover of Nature? Placing Value in Conservation Finance

Conservation finance is a nascent field that claims to “deliver maximum conservation impacts, while, at the same time, generating returns for investors” (Credit Suisse/WWF). While geographers have questioned the ability of conservation finance to play a significant role in international biodiversity conservation, an emerging cohort of boutique private equity firms are actively generating returns on North American conservation projects. This raises the question: how are these firms generating profits, and in turn, returns for their shareholders? Drawing from a Marxian understanding of finance as redistributive, I argue that these firms are generating profits through a process similar to a corporate hostile takeover. Using the examples of ranchland and timberland investment in the United States, I show that (1) the materialities and historical geographies of these landscapes play a crucial role their monetization, and (2) shareholder returns are generated through a combination of traditional real estate sales and revaluations, public monies, and commodity production.     

Entrepreneurial Urbanism After the Crisis: Ireland's “Bad Bank” and the Redevelopment of Dublin's Docklands

The development of Dublin's Docklands was paradigmatic of the speculative storm that overwhelmed the Irish economy between the late 1990s and the crisis of 2008. It also served as a textbook case of entrepreneurial urbanism, with the development agency driving private‐led development on a former industrial and waterfront site. Following the crash, however, the key actors have been decimated: the development agency itself, the developers and the banks. This article traces the re‐emergence of Docklands development in order to analyse post‐crisis urban development. I argue that the latest phase of development reproduces key aspects of entrepreneurial urbanism, but also includes novel aspects. In particular, the National Asset Management Agency, a “bad bank” set up to rescue the financial sector, emerges as a major force. The article contributes to debates on urban development after the crash, and the specific relationship between post‐crisis entrepreneurial urbanism and financialization.     

Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier

The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certification, and critically, explored how greening might pay. Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon “green” value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconventional resource discovery requires a highly partial view of buildings’ socio‐natural entanglements in and beyond the city. I illuminate these efforts and their obscurities by exploring the experience of an exemplary green building in San Francisco, an office tower that has successively served as a headquarters organizing a vast resource periphery in the American West, a symbol and driver in the transformation of the city's own second nature, a financial “resource” in its own right, and most recently, an asset in an emerging global market for green property.     

Against Value: Accumulation in the Oil Industry and the Biopolitics of Labour Under Finance

Current theses on the financialization of capitalism postulate a shift from investment in material growth to financial channels, with the implication that the extraction of value from the labour process is no longer the central locus of corporate profitability and that the antagonism between labour and capital in the accumulation process has been displaced by the tension between corporate managers and financial markets. This article challenges both claims of financialization and its political implications. Using an analysis of the oil industry in the US, focusing particularly on layoffs, I argue that, instead of inhibiting material accumulation, financialization signals a change in the form of investment that has led to the intensification of labour and its deepening subsumption under capital, transcending labour exploitation and extending the sovereignty of capital over the life of living labour.