About This Website

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

Welcome! If this is your first visit to Capitalism in Place, you will have plenty of questions. Let me answer nine of them straight away. I will pose three more at the end of this introduction but you'll have to answer those on your own.

QUESTION 1. What is this website all about?

It is about how capitalism and place shape the environments in which we live our lives. The relationship between these two complex systems can be likened to the yin-yang image above which, in addition to being a fan favorite at the local tattoo parlor, symbolizes the Chinese concept of unity in difference. But we will need to tweak the symbol a little to make it fit the case of capitalism and place. Imagine that the two halves of the circle are precision-made steel parts joined by a bad weld. As long as the weld holds, the symbol will serve its intended purpose, projecting the universal, timeless and differentiated unity of the cosmos. But when tiny cracks in the weld expand beyond a certain critical point, weakening the structural integrity of the whole so that the two parts begin to separate along the central fault line, the yin-yang will be revealed as a unity not in difference but of difference, a unity subject to change and prone to rupture—in short, a contradictory unity.

I have put a lot of miles on my Honda and earned tons of Visa points on my credit card observing and documenting how the contradictory unity of capitalism and place plays out on the ground. The photo galleries, essays and personal reflections assembled here are my attempt to make sense of what I have seen through the stereoscopic lens of my camera and Marxist theory.

QUESTION 2. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is the reigning social formation in the world today. It is a veritable rat's nest of contradictory unities, encompassing an endless variety of social, legal, political, cultural and institutional arrangements at the center of which lies the technologically dynamic and contradiction-ridden mode of production known as capital. Note this distinction between capitalism and capital: they are not the same thing or things at all, but co-dependent totalities, as Marxist geographer David Harvey points out. In contrast with homeostatic modes of production which are structured so as to reproduce themselves at the same scale generation after generation, capital wages war against every obstacle to its expanded reproduction. A steady-state economy is the kiss of death for a capitalist class that owns the means of production and subsistence, controls the levers of investment and pursues profit with the single-mindedness of a heat-seeking missile. And it is the road to oblivion for a mode of production whose prime directive is what Karl Marx characterized as "production for production's sake, accumulation for accumulation's sake." If capital is unable to sustain a compound rate of growth through the exploitation of living labor, the appropriation of surplus value and the commodification of the "free gifts" of nature, it will lurch from crisis to crisis. The internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of the capitalist mode of production reverberate across the the length and breadth of the capitalist social formation, subjecting place to periodic waves of creative destruction.

QUESTION 3. What is place?

I see place as "dwelling" space, to borrow a term from German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Unlike the cold, empty, abstract space of Descartes or Newton, place is space imbued with lived experience and meaning. Marx had relatively little to say about place formation (Engels, by contrast, said a great deal), but he left behind a wealth of insights into the capitalist production of space, which have been brilliantly unpacked by Harvey. Novelists do a much better job rendering the textures of meaningful space than do philosophers, economists and specialists in the social sciences, which might explain why both Marx and Harvey have a weakness for Balzac. The Mississippi has its Twain, Yorkshire its Bronte, Dublin Joyce, Yoknapatawpha Faulkner, Macondo García Márquez, Naples Ferrante, Paris Modiano. In the hands of these master story tellers, readers come to see how social reproduction, the qualities of everyday life, emotional attachments, cultural representations, memories and traditions, the metabolic relation of humans to nature, class struggles, blood feuds, love, birth, sickness and death entwine in such a way as to reinforce the structured coherence of place. By structured coherence I mean the spatio-temporality of place. Looking at the broad sweep of history, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that process of place formation moves at a leisurely pace across space and through time, at least by comparison with that of capital accumulation. Permanence, or what some institutional economists call "embeddedness," is the hallmark of place.

QUESTION 4. How do capitalism and place form a contradictory unity?

While the dynamics of place operate at a distance from those of capital, that distance has been shrinking steadily ever since the genie of capital escaped from the bottle of pre- and non-capitalist social formations in western Europe during the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. The capitalist mode of production must "nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere," as Marx and his fellow revolutionary Fredrick Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. In its monomaniacal search for profit, capital nestles and settles in place. It reconfigures whatever spatial forms are present around its own needs. It widens the chasm between town and country, transforming urban places into primary sites of commodity production and the social reproduction of the working class. It likewise transforms the built environments of place into catchment basins for surplus capital and labor, channeling investment into infrastructural projects that reduce the pressure of overaccumulation and the risk of crisis. Spurred by the intensification of interplace competition that accompanied the dismantling of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation after the 1970s, debt-financed infrastructural investment has become central not only to place formation but to capital accumulation as a whole, creating new openings for the speculative excesses of finance capital. Today, the spatio-temporality of place is subsumed under the logic of capital as never before.

As you scroll through the photos, essays and reflections, keep a close eye on the tension between the fixity of place and the fluidity of capital, between dwelling and accumulation, meaning and profit. This contradictory unity 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 like the 2007-2009 meltdown that began in housing markets of the US and Europe and came to an end only when the China launched the most ambitious program of state-led place formation in world history.

QUESTION 5. Why do I call myself a Marxist Tourist?

I do so for a number of reasons. First, 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, because I rely on the mass tourism industry to book my flights, lodging and "experiences" (e.g. Travelocity, Airbnb, etc.). Third, because in recent decades tourism has become increasingly central to both capital accumulation and place formation, constituting a "tourist-real estate regime of accumulation," in the words of Marxist political economist Raoul V. Bianchi. Fourth, because my goal in traveling is not "to see the sights," which is what tourists have been doing ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to wander the earth, but to understand how and why this particular regime of accumulation plays such a prominent role in the process of capitalist place formation today.

QUESTION 6. Who 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 the human sciences.
MBAs looking for fresh ideas not to be found on their syllabi.
Students of critical theory, especially Marxist theory.
Documentary, street and travel photographers.
Travelers of all kinds from piñacoladistas to New Age questers.
Curators, graphic novelists, street artists and other visual story tellers.
Place-based activists fighting for social justice.
Anti-capitalist activists across the socialist-anarchist spectrum.

QUESTION 7. What's the best way to navigate this website?

Option1: 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.

Option 2: 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.

Option 3: 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 another 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?

QUESTION 9. Why should we care about capitalism and place?

Capital and capitalism are totalities marked by 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 smooth sailing ahead. The same could be said of place which seems capable of renewing itself even in the most turbulent and uncertain times. Yet it is an open question whether capitalism and place, to say nothing of the contradictory unity between them, 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 interlocking dynamics of capital accumulation and place formation, I will bring this introduction to a close with three final questions about the not-so-distant future:

Is the grow-or-die imperative of capitalism on course 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 the answer is yes to either of these questions, how do we go about creating places that operate outside the co-dependent totalities of capital and capitalism?

Capitalism in Place can't answer such questions. But it might be able to persuade you they are worth asking.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist