About This Website

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

Capitalism and Place, Yin and Yang

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

If this is your first visit to Capitalism in Place, you will have plenty of questions for me. I'll try to answer nine of them straight away.

QUESTION 1. What is this website all about?

It is about capitalism and place. To be more specific, it is about how the processes of capital accumulation and place formation "work together" to shape the geographical landscapes around us. I have put work together in scare quotes in order to highlight the crisis tendencies that lie at the heart of capitalist spatial dynamics. Capitalism and place produce landscapes that are in a constant state of churn, where the shape-shifting logic of creative destruction has ample room for maneuvering. They pair up to form what in dialectics is called a contradictory unity. According to the Marxist geographer David Harvey, whose many books and essays have profoundly shaped my understanding of capitalism and place, a contradictory unity can be said to exist when two or more processes are conjoined in such a way that they simultaneously underpin and undermine each other.

The image above, for which we have my wife Allyson to thank, might help you visualize what I mean by contradictory unity. The yin-yang earring she is wearing represents the ancient Chinese concept of unity in and through difference. It has been appropriated by New Age popular culture across the globe. If you don't believe me, just drop by your local tattoo parlor, yoga studio, vape shop or craft fair, where you will find no shortage of yin-yang swag on display. I want you to imagine that this particular earring was found in the booth of one such craft fair by a shopper who has decided to buy it as a gift for his wife. She will be pleased, he is certain, because it projects an idea near and dear to her heart, namely that beneath the surface froth of life pulsates a universal and timeless force of unity. What our shopper doesn't know is that the two halves of the earring he has just purchased are held together by a defective weld. When the invisible cracks in the weld expand beyond the point of no return, undermining the structural integrity of the whole and causing the two parts to separate along the central fault line, the yin-yang earring will be revealed as a fragile unity, one that is subject to change and prone to rupture—in short, a contradictory unity.

So as we peel back the layers of capitalism and place, and get closer to the underlying contradiction uniting them, you might want to reflect on the flawed yin-yang earring whose two parts appear in the photo as an indivisible whole. But the danger lurks that one day, without warning, they will split apart and go their separate ways.

Capitalism in Place is itself a contradictory unity, one that combines the analytical and the personal. On the one hand, I use documentary photography and Marxist theory to analyze a world being whipsawed by the contradictory unity of capitalism and place. You can think of this website as a Marxist guidebook to the spatial turbulence documented in the photo galleries and discussed in the essays. On the other, I weave into the analysis a personal narrative of how I ended up as a self-identified Marxist tourist who shortly after his retirement in 2018 decided it would be a terrific idea to spend his golden years traveling, taking pictures and writing about why he took them. When I veer off the beaten analytical track, as I often do in the reflections, and take you a detour through my life story, Capitalism in Place will morph from a Marxist guidebook into my own personal time machine in which I travel into the past to reconnect with my younger self (or selves). For the current, older version of myself, these two journeys across space and through time are inseparable.

QUESTION 2. What is capitalism (in relation to capital)?

I will take a dialectical approach to defining my key terms, capitalism, capital and place. The most important thing you need to remember as we work through these definitions is that in dialectics there are no neat and tidy boundaries separating processes and the concepts and terms that represent them. Dialectically speaking, everything is defined in relation to everything else.

Capitalism is the reigning type of society in the world today. It encompasses a wide variety of social, legal, political, cultural and institutional forms that have co-evolved alongside the revolutionary mode of production analyzed by Karl Marx in his three-volume magnum opus Capital. For Marx the term capital refers not to a thing, say a stock of productive assets or a sum of money sitting in a Charles Schwab investment account, but to a cluster of interwoven processes that govern the accumulation and circulation of value and surplus value. He never uses the term capitalism in any of his writings, no surprise since it did not enter the vocabulary of the political left until after his death in 1883. Marx leans heavily on the term "social formation" when discussing the extra-economic conditions that are necessary for the reproduction of capitalist mode of production, even though they do not strictly speaking form part of it, such as the legal system that defines private property rights and contracts, and the state apparatus that guarantees them.

In explaining how capitalism as a social formation and capital as a mode of production operate and interact with one another, Harvey offers the analogy of a cruise ship. Capitalism is represented by the passengers and crew who are busily engaged in their respective social roles as pleasure seekers and pleasure providers, while capital is the mighty engine below deck whose only role is to keep the ship, passengers and crew moving across the water and toward their final port of call, namely profit. I suggest that we give this somewhat mechanical analogy an organic tweak by imagining what will happen to this cruise ship when its many years of faithful service have come to an end. Let's pretend a decision is made to send it to the bottom of the sea as part of an environmental mitigation project. If all goes well, the sunken ship will one day anchor an artificial coral reef teeming with all manner of marine life. It will be reborn as the enabling condition of a brand new ecosystem and a popular tourist destination as well, much to the delight of the project's corporate sponsors. Weekend scuba divers will pay top dollar to explore the corral-encrusted vessel and to snap photos of its faded name on the hull, Capital.

As these metaphors suggest, capitalism and capital are not things, much less the same thing or separate things. Each of them is a "totality" of distinct but inextricably interlinked processes, another dialectical concept that threads through the works of Marx and Harvey. The totalities of capitalism and capital are welded into their own contradictory unity. Each of them produces a specific blend of space and time in the process of reproducing itself, which will undoubtedly sound strange to anyone who assumes that space and time exist independently of social and natural processes. The totality of capitalism has a more "leisurely" space-time signature than does the turbo-charged totality of capital which is all about the here and now. What I mean by this is that the dynamics of space and time under capitalism must be flexible enough to accommodate the everyday rhythms of social reproduction as well as the requirements of accumulation, while under capital, by contrast, they are pressed into the service of one and only one end—the acceleration of turnover time as a means to increase profit. As far as capital is concerned, social reproduction is somebody else's problem, a matter best left to working-class individuals and households to manage as best they can.

Capital represents a radical departure from earlier homeostatic modes of production and social formations that were structured in such a way as to reproduce themselves at the same scale generation after generation. Marx calls this "simple reproduction." Capital will not be so constrained, waging war against every obstacle to its "expanded reproduction" in space and time. A steady-state economy would be a nightmare for capitalists who own the means of production and subsistence, control the levers of investment, fetishize labor-saving technology and pursue profit with the single-mindedness of a heat-seeking missile. The very idea of a no-growth or degrowth economy is the antithesis of a mode of production whose prime directive is "production for production's sake, accumulation for accumulation's sake," as Marx put it. Capital must sustain a compound rate of growth through the exploitation of living labor, the appropriation and reinvestment of surplus value, and the commodification of the "free gifts" of both nature and human nature. If it fails to do so, the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of the capitalist mode of production will reverberate across the the length and breadth of the capitalist social formation, with profound implications for place.

QUESTION 3. What is place (in relation to capitalism and capital)?

I see place in the first instance as the space of "dwelling," to borrow an evocative term from German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. Unlike the cold, empty, abstract space of Descartes and Newton, place is space imbued with lived experience and human meaning. Marx had relatively little to say about place formation, unlike Engels who said a great deal based on his first-hand knowledge of Manchester, where he spent years working in his father's manufacturing business. Even so, Marx left behind a wealth of insights into the capitalist production of space, which have been brilliantly unpacked by Harvey.

To appreciate the material and psychological textures of meaningful space we would be well advised to follow the example of Marx and Harvey and immerse ourselves in literary fiction. They share a particular fondness for Balzac. When Harvey was recently asked by an interviewer about his "intellectual influences" beyond Marx, he answered without hesitation, "novels." He points to the case of the renowned cultural theorist Raymond Williams, the product of a small working-class town in Wales, who turned to the writing of fiction when the disciplinary conventions of Marxist cultural theory seemed unable to unlock the multi-layered significance of place in relation to class, nationality and personhood. Novelists can't resist the imaginative possibilities of place. La Mancha has Cervantes, the Mississippi Twain, Yorkshire Bronte, Dublin Joyce, Yoknapatawpha Faulkner, Macondo García Márquez, Naples Ferrante, Paris Modiano, Newark Roth. These master story tellers are able to show us how emotional attachments, cultural representations, memories and traditions, desires and fantasies, the qualities of everyday life, the metabolic relation to nature, class struggles, blood feuds, love, birth, sickness and death entwine in such a way as to reinforce the structured coherence of place. The protagonists of these stories are deeply attached to their places, real or imagined, and go to great lengths to keep them the way they are or, if that's not possible, to keep them alive in their dreams and memories.

I am not a novelist, so allow me to use a visual aid, the tried-and-true Venn diagram, to illustrate the structured coherence of place in relation to capitalism and capital. Take a pencil and draw two overlapping circles. One of them represents capitalism as a social formation, and the other capital as a mode of production. In which circle does place belong? The answer is both, in the zone of overlap. Viewed as a locus of capitalism, place is an indispensable enabling condition of the mode of production to which capital must in some measure adapt, even submit. But viewed as a locus of capital, place is the product rather than condition of the mode of production, the moment when capital's germinative processes and "laws of motion" take concrete spatial form on the ground. In dialectical terms, place "internalizes" the contradictory unity of capitalism and capitalism. It is like a buoy staining at is moor line, being tossed back and forth in the cross-currents of the two totalities.

QUESTION 4. What is contradictory unity (in relation to capitalism, capital and place)?

While the dynamics of place formation operate at a distance from those of capital accumulation, this 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 colonizes whatever spatial forms are present and available, and reworks them around its own needs. Capital widens the chasm between town and country as it transforms urban places into primary sites of commodity production and the social reproduction of the working class. It likewise repurposes built environments, especially urban ones, into catchment basins for surplus capital and labor, channeling investment into infrastructural projects that relieve the pressure of overaccumulation and reduce the risk of crisis. Neoliberal deregulation in recent decades has intensified interplace competition at all scales and opened up the floodgates to speculative investment in real estate markets, with the result that urban built environments have become central drivers of place formation, capital accumulation and crisis formation. Today, the spatio-temporal dynamics of place formation are anything but leisurely.

As you scroll through the photos, essays and reflections, keep a close eye on the "ever-deepening tension between fixity and motion in the landscape of capital," as Harvey puts it. Operating unseen beneath the surface of daily life, this contradictory unity of capital and place is like a ticking timebomb capable of exploding in a full-scale crisis of capitalism, as was recently demonstrated in the 2007-2009 meltdown that began in speculative housing markets, located chiefly in the US and Europe, and came to an end only when the People's Republic of China launched the most ambitious program of state-led place construction in world history. Capitalism in the Global North was bailed out less by the state-finance nexus, spearheaded by the US Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, than by the rising superpower of East Asia, all in the name of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The contradictory unities of late capital are rich and deep.

Yet there is another side to contradictory unities. While place formation is constrained by the capital's laws of motion, it is not wholly subsumed in them. There is always some wiggle room in the zone of overlap between capitalism and capital, which gives people and their places access to vital resources with which to cope, even contest, the spatio-temporal rationality of capital. How much wiggle room depends on the balance of class forces and the complex interplay of historical contingencies, as Marx demonstrates in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his rip-roaring narrative of the 1851 coup d'état in which Paris and its workers were able to exploit, for a brief period of time, the opening created by the contradictory unity of capitalism and place.

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 and spatialized by Harvey remain the indispensable starting point for any critical inquiry into capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation. Second, because when I am planning a trip, especially one abroad, I hold my nose and book my transportation, lodging and "experiences" through the multinational corporations that dominate the mass tourism industry. Third, because in recent decades this industry 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" or wander the earth, which is what tourists have been doing ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, but to understand how the contradictory unity of capitalism and place shapes the world 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.
Photographers across the documentary, street, travel and journalistic divides.
Visual story tellers, e.g. film makers, graphic novelists, street artists, curators.
Travelers on the lookout for the next cultural experience.
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.

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

Option1: start with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs on the navigation bar. They dive deeper into the Marxist theoretical framework set out above, providing a fuller account of the processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about. 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 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.

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 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.

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 the contradictory unity of 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 by posing three final questions about the not-so-distant future:

Is the grow-or-die imperative of capital on course to cannibalize its own enabling conditions, and in so doing wipe any semblance of place off the map?
Are we approaching a point beyond which living under capital 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 interlinked totalities of capital and capitalism?

The website before you can't answer these questions, but it might be able to persuade you they are worth asking.

Click Here for "About Chuck Steffen"

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

Capitalism and Place, Yin and Yang

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist