Welcome! If this is your first visit to my website, you will have plenty of questions. Let me try to answer eight of them straight away.
QUESTION 1. What is Capitalism in Place about?
This website is about how capitalism shapes place, how place shapes capitalism and how both of them, sometimes working together and other times at cross purposes, shape the multiple environments in which we live our lives.
QUESTION 2. What does the image above have to do with Capitalism in Place?
In addition to being a fan favorite at the local tattoo parlor, this image represents the Chinese concept of yin and yang. It captures a central feature of the relation between capitalism and place, which in the discourse of multiculturalism might be called unity in difference. But the specific unity that we will be examining here is not universal and timeless, always tending toward balance and harmony, as is the case for yin and yang. Rather than being a unity in difference, capitalism and place form a unity of difference, a dialectical distinction that Karl Marx was fond of.
The preposition makes all the difference, if you'll forgive the pun. The unity of capitalism and place is not a thing but a process bristling with contradictions and crisis tendencies. Through images and words we will explore this process by analyzing the dynamics of capital accumulation in relation to the material and cultural dynamics of place formation. I am especially interested in the built environment of cities, for this is where we can see most clearly the enormous power that capitalism exerts over the spatial form and cultural representation of place.
As you scroll through the photo galleries, essays and personal reflections assembled in this website, I will ask you to keep a close eye on the tension between the fluidity of capital and the fixity of place. This tension operates unseen beneath the surface of daily life but can slowly build up until it finally triggers a seismic event in the form of a full-scale crisis of accumulation.
I was born and raised in Southern California, a well-known hotspot for seismic events. So allow me to offer an earthquake analogy that speaks to the contradictory unity around which this website is organized: place is the San Andreas Fault of contemporary capitalism.
QUESTION 3. What is capitalism?
Capitalism is the social formation that dominates the world today. It encompasses an endless variety of social, legal, political, cultural and institutional arrangements at the center of which lies the technologically dynamic and contradiction-ridden system known as capital. What, then, is capital? According to Marx and Marxist geographer David Harvey, whose theories have been a major influence on the way I see the world, capital is a historic mode of production that nurtures, sustains and energizes the broader social formation in which it is embedded. Capital does not single-handedly determine capitalism, and nor does capitalism reflect a mirror image of capital. They are best seen as co-dependent totalities, the historically constructed yin and yang of modern life.
When the genie of capital escaped from the bottle of pre- and non-capitalist social formations during the industrial revolution of the 19th century, the world came face to face with a mode of production that is driven to "nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere," as Marx and his fellow revolutionary Fredrick Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. In contrast with other modes of production that aim to reproduce themselves at the same scale year after year, capital declares war on all barriers impeding its reproduction on an ever-expanding scale. Homeostasis is anathema to capital, a veritable death sentence. "Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production!" is how Marx characterizes capital's grow-or-die monomania.
You would not be far wrong in imagining capital as a heat-seeking missile, a monomaniacal device if ever there was one. The target of capital's missile is not the heat emanating from, say, a nuclear facility in Iran or a civilian hospital in Gaza, but the profit emanating from countless production and circulation sites where surplus value is created by living labor, appropriated by industrial capitalists and distributed among various claimants in the form of interest, rent, profit of enterprise and taxes. In tracking the moving target of profit, capital counts on its lightning speed, thanks to cutting-edge communication and transportation technologies which endow it with godlike powers of being seemingly everywhere at once. Capital embroiders the physical landscape with roads, railways, ports, airports, power grids, cell towers, fiber optic cables, telecommunications networks, data centers and so on, all in an effort to achieve "the annihilation of space by time," to borrow one of Marx's more evocative phrases. This is a mode of production that creates spatial and temporal configurations adequate to its own needs.
Yet there is a contradiction here: the massive, debt-financed physical infrastructures that facilitate and accelerate capital's movement across space end up pinning it down to particular locations for long periods of time. To relocate these infrastructures as new targets of profitmaking materialize is logistically impossible; to abandon them for more promising locations means writing off enormous capital investments with dire consequences for profit margins. Finding the ever-elusive balance between capital in its fixed and circulating forms is a hit-and-miss proposition at best, and helps make capital the most crisis-prone mode of production in history. If for whatever reason capital fails to grow through time as it expands across space, the result will be a crisis destructive of both surplus capital and surplus labor, which, ironically, creates the conditions for a new round of accumulation. With good reason, Harvey calls capitalist crisis "the irrational rationalizer of an irrational system."
QUESTION 4. What is place?
We all experience capitalism in place. While place is a close cousin of space, it shouldn't be confused with the cold, empty, abstract space of Descartes or Newton. Place is space imbued with meaning, the chosen terrain of some of our greatest novelists. The Mississippi has Twain, Yorkshire Bronte, Dublin Joyce, Yoknapatawpha Faulkner, Macondo García Márquez, Naples Ferrante, Paris Modiano. In the hands of these master story tellers, we come to see how social reproduction, everyday life, emotional attachments, cultural representation, tradition, natural processes, memories, class struggles, blood feuds, tribal identities, love, birth, sickness and death entwine in such a way as to reinforce the structured coherence of place.
The dynamics of place formation operate at a distance from those of capital accumulation, though that distance has been rapidly shrinking since the days when industrial capitalism was confined to a small patch of Europe. Unlike high-flying, profit-seeking capital, place at every scale thrives on permanence and embeddedness in the land. The spatiality and temporality of place are "sticky," resistant to change, at least by comparison with the plasticity of capitalist spacetime. Given its relative autonomy vis-à-vis the "laws of motion" of capital, place is best understood, I believe, as a critical site of social formation, which is why this website is titled Capitalism in Place rather than Capital in Place.
Place has attracted the attention of major philosophers such as Martin Heidegger who asked what is the meaning of being? No small beer for him. For example, when I say I exist, what do I mean? Heidegger tells us that the answer hiding in plain view: human beings exist in place, where they realize a kind of oneness with their world through the experience of living in it. Place is the site of "dwelling," an existential activity that goes far beyond building a shelter or putting a roof over your head. Thrust by chance into a world of things and other persons, human beings develop a pre-rational sense of their own being by assigning meaning to their everyday, practical interactions with the countless useful things and persons which make up their world. Heidegger characterizes this bedrock being as "inauthentic" because it doesn't go beyond the surface appearance of things. A deeper, "authentic" understanding of being emerges as humans anxiously contemplate the black hole of death that awaits them.
In certain respects, Heidegger's understanding of place chimes with Marx's treatment of the labor process mediating the metabolic relationship between society and nature. Both of these thinkers insist not only that human beings exist in the natural world rather than above or outside it but also that they discover their "species being" (Marx) or "authenticity" (Heidegger) in their efforts to shape that world. If you substitute "place" for "world" in the above sentences, you will have a better sense of the importance Heidegger attaches to the concept Dasein, the literal translation of which is "being there." Or you might try reducing Heidegger's argument to a simple formula, a+b=c, where a stands for being human, b for being in place and c for being "at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature."
Heidegger was certainly no Marxist. His preoccupation with death has no equivalent in the work of Marx who preferred to spend his time and energy exploring the possibilities of life. Nor does Heidegger's unwillingness to historicize philosophy, particularly his own, square with Marx's rigorous historical materialism, which the late Frederic Jameson summarized in his slogan "Always historicize!" And Heidegger's wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment project stands in marked contrast with Marx's more nuanced approach which retained the project's universalist principles but rejected its bourgeois compromises
Yet Heidegger's notion of belonging in and to place has a reactionary side. In his association of place with the wholesale rejection of the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, Heidegger provides philosophical cover for Jim Crow residential restrictions, exclusionary zoning, NIMBYism and, in the most extreme case, "blood and soil" movements that deploy ethnic cleansing and genocide in their mad pursuit of racial purity and territorial mastery—these exclusionary ideologies and practices fatten upon the discourse of place. Heidegger's own membership in the Nazi party from 1934 to 1945 is a cautionary tale, one that reminds us that high-minded talk about the purity, authenticity and "truth" of place can quickly morph into a bloody call to arms.
The larger point I wish to make is not that place is a force for either good or evil, but rather that it is, in both its benign and malign forms, synonymous with rootedness. To uproot place is to cut off its flow of oxygen, to kill it, as any number of ghost towns, rust belts and ruins bleaching in the sun bear witness. At the risk of belaboring the point, the central contradiction before us is the rootlessness of capital versus the rootedness of place.
QUESTION 5. Why do I call myself a Marxist Tourist?
My answer has three parts:
First, I call myself a Marxist because I believe that the arguments set out by Marx in Capital remain the indispensable starting point for any critical inquiry into capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation.
Second, I call myself a tourist because I rely on the mass tourism industry to travel, as when I book my flights through Travelocity, my lodging through Airbnb and my tourist "experiences" through interlocking global and local service networks.
Third, I call myself a Marxist tourist because the tourism industry allows me to travel to destinations near and far, observing, documenting and analyzing capitalist place formation from Marxist perspective.
QUESTION 6. Who do I think might be interested in this website?
If you recognize yourself anywhere in the bullet points below, the chances are good that you'll feel right at home in Capitalism in Place. If you don't, give the website a try anyway. You never know what may catch your eye or awaken some slumbering interest.
- Geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists.
- Urbanists in general, urban planners in particular.
- Those interested in the "spatial turn" in contemporary thinking.
- MBA students looking for fresh ideas they won't find on their syllabus.
- Readers of critical theory, especially Marxist theory.
- Documentary, street and travel photographers.
- Visual story tellers from comic book writers to street artists.
- Place-based activists fighting for social justice.
- Anti-capitalist activists on both sides of the socialist/anarchist divide.
QUESTION 7. What's the best way to navigate through this website?
You have three options:
First, start with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs. They provide a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding the deeper processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about. Next, dive into the galleries. Each photo has a caption indicating where it was taken and how it illuminates this or that aspect of the process of capitalist place formation. Finish up with the reflections. This is where I step out from behind the curtain of the camera and the theories in order to reflect on certain personal experiences that have left their mark on the work I am doing here.
Second, start with the galleries. If you like the photos and want to know more about the story they tell and why I took them, proceed to the essays and reflections.
Third, start and end wherever you please. Perhaps you prefer an unstructured, smorgasbord approach—a gallery here, an essay there, a reflection or two if you have the appetite for it. Or you might choose to scroll through the photos and leave the essays and reflections for some other time. It's up to you. Capitalism in Place is not a fixed menu. Think of it as your friendly neighborhood tapas bar.
QUESTION 8: Is this website all wrapped up and ready to go?
Not by a long shot! I will be adding new photos, deleting old ones and reworking the essays and reflections as I continue to travel and learn more about the process of capitalist place formation. Stay tuned for updates.
This website is a work in progress. How could it be otherwise given the unsettled state of world today? The troubled marriage between capitalism and place was sealed during the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Whether it can endure in the face of the multiplying crises we now confront is an open question. Since every dimension of this polycrisis—economic, environmental, social and political—is place-based and grounded in the dynamics of capital accumulation, it behooves us to ask:
- What happens when the growth imperative of capitalism threatens to cannibalize the enabling conditions and reproduction requirements of place?
- Are we approaching a point beyond which living under capitalism is no longer compatible with living in place?
- If so, how do we go about creating places for human and planetary life which operate outside capital and its laws of motion?
Capitalism in Place does not attempt to answer these questions. Rather, it will try to convince you that they are worth asking.