- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Regional Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
THE PLACE CALLED HOME: CAPITAL AND CAPITALISM
The time has come to do what the teacher tells her her pupils when they start talking past one other, "Define your terms!" I will take a dialectical approach to defining capital and capitalism. The important thing to remember as I work through these definitions is that dialectics is about processes not things. In the dialectical method of analysis, there are no neat and tidy boundaries separating either the processes being studied or the concepts and terms we use to study them. Dialectically speaking, everything is understood in relation to everything else.
What is capital? in his three-volume magnum opus Capital, Marx analyzes the inner workings or "laws of motion" of the economic system that took the world by storm during the industrial revolution of his own day. Capital is the name he bestows on this latest in a long line of class-based modes of production, which include slavery of the ancient world and serfdom of feudal Europe. In contrast with other political economists like Adam Smith and his modern-day disciples, Marx does not equate capital with a "stock" of revenue-producing assets. To do so would be tantamount, in Marx's view, to mistaking the parts for the whole. The latest robotic harvester deployed by Cargill or the newest automatic package machine installed in Amazon's warehouses or the $11.6 trillion managed by financial behemoth BlackRock or the wad of investment cash you keep close to hand in anticipation of the next big thing out of Silicon Valley—these capture only "moments" of capital, when it assumes the appearance of a thing. For Marx capital refers to the totality of processes, relations and moments which structure the accumulation and circulation of value and surplus value, a pair of critical concepts which we will unpack in the next essay. Capital is a shapeshifter, always in motion. To put it another way, it is the totality of contradictory relations and crisis tendencies which impel this revolutionary mode of production to do what none of its predecessors could even imagine, much less achieve—self-reproduction on an ever-expanding scale. Capital must grow or die.
What is capitalism? Like capital, it is a totality or processes and relations. But unlike capital, it is a loosely bounded totality that extends beyond what Marx dubs the forces and relations of production. Capitalism encompasses the endless variety of social, legal, political, cultural and institutional forms which co-evolve with capital, enveloping it in an environment largely hospitable to its well-being. In the 142 years since Marx's death, capitalism has spread like a crusading religion or an invasive species, depending on your point of view, so that now it is the dominant type of society everywhere in the world. It has absorbed non-capitalist societies in its path or simply annihilated them. You might be surprised to learn that Marx never uses the term capitalism in any of his writings and nor did anyone else on the political left until after his death in 1883. What we call capitalism today is often referred to by Marx as "modern bourgeois society." He also leans on the generic term "social formation" when discussing the extra-economic conditions that are necessary for the reproduction of the capital, even though they do not strictly speaking form part of it. These conditions include the legal system that defines private property rights and contracts, the state apparatus that guarantees them, the metabolic relation that mediates society and nature, and the infrastructures that support the social reproduction of the working class. Capitalism is the air capital breathes, just as capital is the soil in which capitalism grows.
If the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist social formation are distinct but co-evolving totalities, how do they mesh together? This is a contentious topic for Marxists an non-Marxists alike, in part because the author of Capital spent his most productive years writing about capital not capitalism, though this does not stop him from offering brilliant insights into the the law, the state, the metabolic relation to nature and social reproduction. Following closely in Marx's footsteps, Harvey likewise keeps the spotlight on the dynamics of the capitalist space economy, acknowledging that questions of gender, race, identity are of crucial importance but properly belong to the study of the capitalist social formation. In the standard account of the relationship between the two totalities, which is based chiefly on Marx's preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, capital is depicted as the economic "base" that determines the "superstructure" of capitalism. On the face of it, this one-way relationship between capital and capitalism does not square with Marx's insistence on the co-evolving relations and multiple determinations that constitute all totalities, capital and capitalism included. How, then, do we reconcile the base-superstructure reductionism suggested by the preface with the clear, consistent and open-ended dialectics of Capital?
Harvey offers the useful analogy of a cruise ship to illustrate how we can treat capital and capitalism as distinct but co-evolved totalities without reducing one to a mere reflection of the other. He asks us to picture capitalism as the passengers and crew aboard the ship, who are are differentiated by class, sex, gender, race, religion, nationality, wealth, income, status and so on. These differentiations matter a great deal to the people on board, and to their interactions as the ship goes from port to port. Where is capital? It is below deck. Capital is the mighty engine that toils around the clock, its sole purpose to keep the ship, passengers and crew moving across the water until they all reach their final port of call, namely profit. I would respectfully give this somewhat mechanical analogy a small tweak by reimagining the fate of Harvey's cruise ship when its many years of faithful service have come to an end. Let's say that 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 (capital) will one day anchor an artificial coral reef teeming with all manner of marine life (capitalism). 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 so that they can snap underwater photos of its faded name on the hull, Capital.
What does this mechanical-ecological analogy, which foregrounds the distinctive functionalities of capital and capitalism within an interconnected whole, tell us about place? The Venn diagram above represents place, capital and capitalism as overlapping circles. What I am trying to convey here is the idea that place occupies an in-between space relative to the two totalities. Viewed as a locus of capital, place is the space in which the mode of production and its laws of motion take concrete form on the ground. From this perspective one can say that place is space produced by capital to satisfy its own needs. But when we view place as a locus of capitalism, it appears not as a product of capital but as one of its enabling conditions. Because capital needs actually existing places to reproduce itself on an ever-expanding scale, it must to some degree accommodate their specific reproduction requirements in the spheres of law, the state, the metabolic relation to nature and social reproduction. One might go even further and say that place is the space where all of the enabling conditions of capital meet and mingle. It is the living concretization of capitalism, the enabler of the enablers. When I close my eyes, I see place as a buoy in choppy waters, straining at is moor line, pulled this way and that in the cross-currents of the two totalities.
In short, place is constrained but not subsumed by the capital's laws of motion. At the end of the day, there is always some wiggle room in the zones of overlap where place encounters capital and capitalism. This "relative autonomy" of place, to borrow a term from the French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, gives people and their places access to vital resources with which to resist, even contest, the logic of capital. How much wiggle room, relative autonomy and latitude for contestation is there? It all depends on the balance of class forces on the ground, which is itself the product of historical and geographical factors that cannot be predicted in advance. We should never underestimate the brute power of capital to mold places in its own image, but nor should we overlook the zones of overlap formed by place, capital and capitalism, where alternatives, even radical alternatives, can emerge not in a vacuum but in place.
I can recall one more thing my teachers used to tell us in class, "Give concrete examples!" In deference to Sister Mary Reparata and all the other teachers who had a hand in showing me how to think, I am now going to share with you the concrete examples of four homes in which my parents lived during their 68 years of marriage.
Diagram: The Four Moments of Place Formation