For those of you who are new to this website, let me answer five questions that might be on your mind.
1. What is this website about?
It is about how and why capitalism makes the places in which people make their lives.
Imagine capitalism as a gigantic spider drawing every place on the planet into its web. The place you call 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. But whatever and wherever it is, the spider works day and night, entangling your piece of earth in a web of dependency on value.
Value lies at the heart of capitalism. It is what separates capitalism from earlier modes of production and social formations, what makes capitalism a revolutionary force such as the world has never seen before, what condemns capitalism to a future of intensifying contradictions and never-ending crises, what is pushing capitalism to the edge of planetary environmental catastrophe and what Marx hoped would bring forth from capitalism an alternative social order based not on profit but on human flourishing.
What, then, is value, this word we use all the time? Marx defines his corner-stone concept as the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity, which sounds dry and technical but forms the foundation of his devastating critique of capitalism and his revolutionary call for socialist transformation. To understand how value comes into being we must follow Marx into "the hidden abode of production," for it is here that capitalists appropriate for themselves the surplus labor time of their workers. This surplus value is equal to the value of the commodities workers produce on the job above and beyond the value of the labor power they expend in the making of said commodities. The appropriation of surplus value, which Marx terms "exploitation," defines the antagonistic class relation between capitalists and workers, and makes class struggle the daily reality of life under capitalism.
Value does not stand still once it is created; it is always "in motion." Marxist geographer David Harvey compares this motion to blood running through the human body, and water circulating above, below and on the surface of the earth. Having been born into the world, value embarks on its life journey, going off this way and that, until it finally makes its way back home, the point of production, where it will be reinvested so that the processes of circulation and accumulation can begin anew, albeit on a larger scale.
Because value is constantly changing form as it circulates and accumulates, its original connection to labor recedes from view. The act of labor that birthed value and the exploitation accompanying that painful delivery are hidden behind a series of veils or mediations, none of which is more important than "the fetishism of commodities." Embedded in the very nature of commodity production and exchange, this mechanism of mystification turns social relations between people into material relations between things. 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 circulation and accumulation processes, it remains in substance what it was at the beginning: living labor.
As value moves through time and across space, capitalism and place join together in a contradictory unity. 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.
For people place is ideally solid and dependable, the ground beneath their feet as they go about life. It is the site of culture and meaning-making, the space of lived experience and human attachments, the scene of biological and social reproduction, the environment in which a sense of self and community takes shape. 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." Few people use Heidegger's phenomenological language or concepts, but most share his view that place has value for reasons having little if anything to do with either capitalism, socially necessary labor time or surplus value. For people place possesses intrinsic value in and of itself, no matter what mode of production, social formation or discursive regime happens to be dominant at the time.
For capital place is a built environment of production and consumption. It is the enabling condition of value itself. Let's use a digital analogy. If socially necessary labor time is the computer program directing capital, place is the computer hardware that puts the program in motion 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, not an end in itself.
How do actually existing places reflect 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.
2. 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.
I call myself a tourist because it seems to me that nowadays we are all tourists, like it or not. We are often told that tourists march behind the tour guide, looking forward to the next piña colada, in stark contrast with travelers who cut their own path, motivated purely by the desire to see the world and its wonders. Tourists are crass consumers, travelers cultural seekers.
I am skeptical of this either-or formulation because it focuses entirely on subjective motivations and personal identities rather than on the capitalist structures of travel. By my reckoning a tourist is anyone who travels by means of the multinational corporations that dominate the mass tourism industry and niche tourism industry. This covers just about everyone who travels 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 self-identified Marxists like myself as for anyone else. But exploring the world as a camera-toting Marxist tourist pays special dividends that most other tourists would not appreciate. It affords an opportunity to observe and photograph 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 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, 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.
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.
- 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.
4. How should you navigate this website?
You have three options:
- 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.
- Or 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.
- Or 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.
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:
- 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?
- Are we approaching a point beyond which living under capitalism is no longer compatible with living in place?
- How do we create life-affirming places that operate outside the deadly logic of endless accumulation?
Capitalism in Place can't answer these questions, but it might be able to persuade you that they should be on the table for discussion.
