For those of you who are new to this website, let me answer five questions that might be on your mind.
What is this website about?
I'll offer a sci-fi analogy. Imagine that a gigantic spider from outer space appears on planet Earth one dark day. It moves with terrific speed, spinning its web and entangling everything in its path from megacities to tiny villages. Imagine also that the spider is fast approaching the place you call home. Your home might be a ranch house in metro Atlanta, a penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York or an UNRWA tent in the Gaza Strip. What or where it is makes no difference. The spider will soon have it, wrapped up nice and tight. There's not a thing you or anyone else can do about it.
In this analogy, the spider is capitalism and the spiderweb is value. According to Karl Marx, value is the structuring principle that distinguishes capitalism from earlier modes of production and social formations. Value fuels technological dynamism such as the world has never seen before, declares war on all impediments to its expanded reproduction and inflames fantasies of a techno-utopian future. It turns active workers into alienated appendages of machines, creates an industrial reserve army of labor and gives rise to a permanent surplus population whose very humanity is put into question. It makes economic crisis a fact of everyday life, unleashes a never-ending train of spatial-temporal fixes and pushes the metabolic rift between nature and society to the breaking point. These are just a few of the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism. What they all have in common is value.
What, then, is value, whose influence is so ubiquitous under capitalism? Marx defines it as the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. This might sound dry and technical but it forms the foundation of his indictment of capitalism, critique of bourgeois political economy and call for socialist transformation. In his search for the origins of value, Marx burrows into "the hidden abode of production," where capitalists are busy appropriating the surplus labor time of their workers. Surplus labor time is the time workers spend creating value above and beyond the value of their labor power, the latter of which equals the value of the commodities they must buy in order to live and reproduce themselves as workers. For Marx surplus labor time amounts to unpaid labor. In its money form, unpaid labor becomes surplus value, the source of all profit. The production, realization and distribution of surplus value is the terrain on which the class struggle between capitalists and workers is waged.
Value does not stand still once it is created by workers at the point of production; it is always "in motion." Marxist geographer David Harvey observes that this motion can be compared to blood running through the human body, or water circulating above, below and on the surface of the earth. We might also compare value in motion to the journey of life. Having been born into the world, value embarks on its journey, a long and winding road with many detours and dead ends, before it finally returns home to the point of production. Value will now pass along its genes to the next generation of living labor. It will be reinvested in production by the capitalist who is under intense competitive pressure to market cheaper commodities with the most up-to-date, labor-saving technologies and organizational forms. At the moment of reinvestment, the spiral process of value production, circulation and accumulation begins anew, albeit on a larger scale than before.
Because value is constantly changing form as it circulates and accumulates, its original connection to labor recedes from view. The acts of labor that give birth to value are hidden behind a series of veils or mediations, none of which is more important than "the fetishism of commodities." Embedded in the transactions of commodity production and exchange, this mechanism of mystification turns relations between people into relations between things; commodities whose value is created by exploited workers under the direction of profit-seeking capitalists appear to create their own value out of thin air. Marx uses his dialectical method to penetrate through the mediations and mystifications so that value can be seen for what it truly is. Whatever form value might take at a given moment in the processes of production, circulation and accumulation, it remains in substance what it was on the day it was born: living labor.
As value moves through time and across space, capitalism and place join together in a contradictory unity. Every place finds itself in the cross-currents of value in motion, like a buoy being pulled back and forth between the needs of people and the needs of capital.
Most of us associate place with fixity, understood in both cultural and physical terms. Place is the solid ground under our feet as we go about our work and lives. It is the site of rituals and routines; the context in which we invest everyday activities with meaning; the space of lived experience and personal attachments; the stage on which we celebrate and mourn; the setting of memories and dreams; the platform of biological and social reproduction; the environment in which we fabricate a sense of self and community; the vantage point from which we observe the passage of time and contemplate the meaning of our approaching death. Philosopher Martin Heidegger pulls out all the stops by conferring on place the ultimate ontological status of being "the locale of the truth of being." Even if you are put off by Heidegger's constipated language and unrepentant Nazi affiliations, you will probably be sympathetic with his view that place possesses intrinsic value in and of itself, irrespective of the specific mode of production, social formation or discursive regime which happens to be dominant at the time.
For capitalism place is a built environment of production and consumption, an enabling condition of value itself. A digital analogy might be in order here. If socially necessary labor time is the computer program directing the accumulation process, place is the computer hardware that executes the instructions on the ground. Capitalism can no more operate without place than a computer can operate without its mother board. And nor can place operate without capitalism. The health and well-being of every place is critically dependent on the smooth flow of value through time and across space. Slow down the flow and places will wither; stop it and they will shrivel up and die. When an existing built environment no longer serves the needs of accumulation, capitalism will write it off and replace it with a new built environment better suited to those needs. For capital place is a means to an end. What is the end? Surplus value, better known as profit.
How do actually existing places manage this tension between the needs of people and the needs of capital, between the concrete values of lived experience and the abstract value of socially necessary labor time? This is the question I propose to explore here, camera in hand. This is what my website is about.
Why do I call myself a Marxist tourist?
I call myself a Marxist because it seems to me that the method, theory and concepts set out by Marx, and given a spatial turn by Harvey, should be the starting point for any critical inquiry into capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation. And I call myself a tourist because I travel by means of the multinational corporations that dominate the mass tourism and niche tourism industries. The same could be said of most people who travel by choice rather than necessity.
To state the obvious, the tens of millions of forced migrants who are in flight from economic, political and environmental catastrophe are not tourists. The Palestinians who are bombed out of Gaza City one day, only to be bombed back into it the next, are not tourists. But the rest of us who do not face such horrifying conditions and are able to travel voluntarily and comfortably courtesy of such profit-making digital platforms as Airbnb, Booking.com and Travelocity are in effect tourists, however much we may resent being labeled as such. This is as true for Marxists as for anyone else.
Exploring the world as a Marxist tourist has benefits of which most other tourists are unaware. It affords an opportunity to observe the inner workings of what Marxist political economist Raoul V. Bianchi terms "the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation," which is increasingly central to the processes of capital accumulation and place formation today. Armed with my Ninja-style, compact camera that packs all the digital firepower any sensible person could ever need, I often feel like a Marxist mole in the bowels of one of the fastest growing sectors of the capitalist global economy today—tourism.
In choosing to engage with the world through Marxist theory, documentary photography and capitalist tourism, I am aware that these ways of knowing are freighted with ideological baggage. My main guide over this political and ethical minefield has been Allan Sekula, a documentary photographer, critical essayist, cultural historian and film maker who joins Marx and Harvey as the three most important influences on the work I am doing here.
Sekula and I happened to overlap as undergraduates at the University of California, San Diego, during the early Seventies, though we never ran into each other on campus, much to my regret. His photo-documentary Fish Story and his documentary film The Forgotten Space are magnificent demonstrations of how the capitalist world can reveal it secrets when photography and theory, images and words, are allowed to work together rather than being locked up in separate compartments, as is so often the case in art galleries and museums.
Before his death in 2013, Sekula called for the "reinvention" of documentary photography along more radical and reflexive lines. My hope is that Capitalism in Place will make some small contribution to the project he did so much to advance.
Is this website for you?
Take a look at the bullet points below. If you recognize yourself anywhere in them, you should feel right at home here. If you don't fall into any of the groups listed, 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 the human sciences.
- MBAs looking for fresh ideas not to be found on their syllabi.
- Students of critical theory, especially Marxist theory.
- Photographers across the documentary, street, travel and journalistic divides.
- Visual storytellers, e.g. film makers, graphic novelists, street artists, curators.
- Self-identified travelers on the lookout for the next cultural experience.
- Self-identified tourists on the lookout for the next piña colada.
- Local hosts whose economic survival depends on tourism.
- The corporate big shots of global tourism whose profits depend on local hosts.
- Place-based activists fighting for social justice.
- Anti-capitalist activists across the socialist-anarchist spectrum.
How should you navigate this website?
You have three options:
First, start with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs on the navigation bar. They provide an explanation of the theoretical framework I use to analyze the processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about here. Next, go to 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 occasionally step out from behind the double 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 may choose to wolf down the photos and leave the essays and reflections for another meal. It's up to you. Capitalism in Place is not a fixed menu. Think of it as your friendly neighborhood tapas bar.
Why in the present moment might a website like this one be useful?
The social formation called capitalism and the mode of production to which it is inseparably linked exhibit a high degree of resilience and adaptability. They have weathered many a storm in their brief history, and their defenders see nothing but clear skies and calm seas ahead. The same could be said of many places (Rome and Tenochtitlan/Mexico City come to mind) which have been able to renew themselves in the face of the most extreme calamities. Yet it is an open question whether capitalism and place, to say nothing of most forms of life on planet Earth, can survive as we know them in the face of the ecological catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. Inasmuch as this catastrophe is grounded in the contradictory unity of capital accumulation and place formation, I will bring this introduction to a close by posing three questions about the not-so-distant future:
First, is the grow-or-die imperative of capitalism on course to cannibalize its own enabling conditions, and in so doing threaten every place under the sun?
Second, are we approaching a point beyond which living under capitalism is no longer compatible with living in place?
Third, how do we create life-affirming places that operate outside the deadly logic of endless accumulation?
Don't expect to find the answers here. Capitalism in Place has a more modest goal: to persuade you that the questions are worth asking.
