If you are are visiting this website for the first time, let me answer five questions that might be on your mind.
1. What is Capitalism in Place about?
This website is about how and why capitalism makes the places in which we make our lives. All of us are born into a world not of our own making, a world "given and transmitted from the past," as Karl Marx puts it. Since the industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, if not earlier, capitalism as a social formation and capital as a mode of production have been a gigantic force making, unmaking and remaking the world and its places. These closely linked totalities operate like a network of spiders, spinning their webs and entangling us in invisible threads of dependency on the world market and on what Marx calls the "law of value." The place you call home might be a tract house in the Atlanta suburbs, an UNRWA tent in the Gaza Strip or a penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York. No matter where you live, the capitalist spiders are hard at work, day and night, wrapping up your pocket-size piece of the world in their web of webs. The arachnid analogy is tailor-made for a mode of production and social formation whose sticky filaments reach out in all directions, crisscrossing the planet and all the places we inhabit. What better logo for this website than the spider, webmaster par excellence?
According to Marx, capitalism is the first society in history organized around the production, consumption, exchange, circulation, distribution and accumulation of value. Defined as the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity, value serves as the regulatory principle operating across all stages and varieties of capitalism. Value is always in motion, always casting off old forms and assuming new ones as it circulates and accumulates through time and space. But whatever thing-like form it may take at a given moment in time, and however far removed it may be from the point of production, value always retains its connection to living labor. For Marx capital is nothing other than the totality of value flows and transformations. It is not a thing but a process, not timeless but historically grounded, not universal but socially constructed, not self-equilibrating but driven to expand by its own internal contradictions and crisis tendencies.
Place is central to capital, capitalism and value. To use a digital analogy, if the law of value is the computer software directing the overall process of capital circulation and accumulation, place is the computer hardware that puts the directions into action on the ground. The hardware of place encompasses the built environment of production and consumption. Factories, call centers, warehouses, highways, airports, bridges, cell towers, water management systems, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, theme parks, festival marketplaces, gated communities, industrial parks, downtown business districts, suburban tract developments and on and on—these elements constitute the skeletal system or "composite-complex commodity" of place, to use Marxist geographer David Harvey's term. Capital could no sooner operate without the physical structures and infrastructures of place than a computer program could operate without the machine's motherboard. But for value to be in motion some part of it must be fixed in place and embedded in the land, making it unavailable for other uses. How big a part and for how long? Nobody knows. If there were a point at which fixed capital could co-exist in perfect equilibrium with circulating capital, and if this point could be determined in advance, the historic trend lines of capitalist spatial development would be smooth and steady rather than jagged and unstable.
Capitalism and place form a unity, albeit a contradictory one. As Harvey has shown, the circulation of value through the built environment is directly implicated in the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of the capitalist mode of production. The systemic tendency toward overaccumulation, a situation that occurs when there is a surplus of capital relative to profitable investment outlets, can be temporarily deferred in time and displaced in space by channeling the surplus from the sphere of production into large-scale infrastructural development projects that anchor the built environment of place. Place therefore serves as a sponge soaking up surplus capital that would otherwise stall the accumulation process or throw it into reverse. Harvey calls this "the spatial-temporal fix," in which the word fix has the double connotation of fixed capital in the form of the built environment coming to the rescue and fixing the problem of overaccumulation. Because such spatial-temporal fixes require long-term financing for projects that are inherently risky, and because they involve the intervention of what Harvey calls the "state-finance nexus," the stage is set for speculative bubbles to form in the real estate market, which then spill across the private and public sectors, culminating in a general crisis of the sort that nearly tanked the global capitalist order in 2008. There are no permanent solutions to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, only short-term fixes that move contradictions around in space and time, until the day of reckoning arrives, when devaluation in the form of a crisis swallows up surplus capital and surplus labor in one big gulp. The spider doesn't spin webs for nothing; it must have its meal.
In addition to its role as a volatile site of capital accumulation, place serves as a contested arena of cultural representation, and never more so than during the last forty years of neoliberal globalization, as the relaxation of cross-border capital flows intensified the zero-sum game of interplace competition. Place branding has emerged as a favorite strategy of governing regimes in the hunt for highly mobile global capital investment. Given the importance attached to the cultural and historical endowments of place, especially in the burgeoning tourism sector, it is not surprising that these decades have witnessed fierce battles between real estate interests and local actors over whose culture, heritage and identity should be authorized to serve as the quasi-official brand of a given place, be it a neighborhood, city, region or nation. Governing growth regimes have enjoyed an enormous advantage on this terrain, since they are able to deploy a repertoire of carrots and sticks to ensure that the brand selected promotes the tacit goals of market-driven urban policy in the neoliberal era, namely gentrification, displacement, privatization and securitization. By putting cultural representation in the service of capital accumulation, place branding provides a textbook example of how the law of value appropriates and assimilates whatever cultural materials are at hand in order to satisfy capital's reproduction requirements, all in the name of lofty ideals like heritage and sustainability.
2. Why is this website subtitled, Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist?
My answer comes in two parts, the first of which you can probably guess by now. 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. What about the second part: why do I call myself a tourist? Let's begin by setting aside the false binary of tourist and traveler, the first of whom, we are told, marches in lockstep behind the tour guide in anticipation of the next piña colada, while the second breaks ranks to cut her own path, motivated purely by the desire to immerse herself in the world and its wonders.
In specifying what a tourist is and isn't, I prefer to suspend the question of subjective motivation—boorish tourist versus brave traveler—and focus attention on the interconnected infrastructure of travel in the 21st century, a spiderweb if ever there was one. By my reckoning a tourist is anyone who travels by means of the multinational corporations that dominate the capitalist mass tourism industry. This would include just about everyone who travels by choice rather than necessity. Unless you are one of the growing millions of forced migrants who are trying to escape economic, political or environmental catastrophe, the chances are good that you are a tourist every time you pack your bags. In planning a trip abroad or even one closer to home, and having ruled out both swimming and hitchhiking, I have no choice but to use the interlocking services provided by such capitalist digital platforms as Airbnb, Booking.com and Travelocity who stand between me and the locals I will be doing business with—just like you and everyone else who travels by choice.
The capitalist spiderweb of mass tourism illustrates the point I made earlier that all of us, Marxists included, have to make our lives in a world not of our own making. Exploring the world as a self-identified Marxist tourist presents both challenges and opportunities. Not only has it challenged me to think critically about how and whether my privileged life and mode of travel can co-exist with my Marxist view of the world; it has also given me the opportunity to observe at close hand 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. When I visit and photograph popular destinations on the mass tourism itinerary, and join the conga line of camera-toting vacationers, I do so as a kind of Marxist mole, with eyes and camera "brushing against the grain," as documentarian Allan Sekula puts it.
In choosing to engage with the world through Marxist theory and documentary photography, I am aware that these ways of knowing are freighted with historical, cultural and ideological baggage requiring critical and self-critical examination. My main guide over this political and ethical minefield has been Sekula, a documentary photographer, critical essayist, cultural historian and film maker. He joins Marx and Harvey as the three most important influences on the work I am doing here. Curiously enough, Sekula and I overlapped as undergraduates at the University of California, San Diego, during the early Seventies, though I never ran into him on campus, much to my regret. His photo-documentary Fish Story and documentary film The Forgotten Space are magnificent demonstrations of how the world can open up in fruitful ways when we combine photography and writing rather than locking each of them up in solitary confinement, as the wardens of art galleries and museums tend to do.
Drawing on his understanding of Marxist theory and the history of photography, or what he calls the "historically grounded sociology of the image," Sekula is able to turn his critical gaze on two related contradictions. The first concerns capitalist globalization in the neoliberal period, as exemplified by the containerization revolution that has transformed maritime labor, freight transport and the spatio-temporalities of the sea. The second concerns the genre of documentary photography as it emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite their laudable commitment to social realism, the giants of documentary photography such as Lewis Hine and August Sander were blinkered, Sekula explains, by their failure to shake off the bourgeois sentimentalism suffusing the larger program of social reform to which they were allied, and to question their positivist faith in the photograph as "an unmediated copy of the real world." Yet rather than conclude that the early practice of documentary photography represented a failed experiment in social realism, Sekula calls for its "reinvention" along more radical and reflexive lines. My hope is that Capitalism in Place will make some small contribution to this project of reinvention.
3. 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.
4. How should you navigate this website?
You have three options:
5. Why in the present moment do we need a website like this one?
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:
Capitalism in Place can't answer these questions, but it might be able to persuade you that they are worth asking.