Author Archives: hlmclaug

MONEY

Posted on by

Nate Edenhofer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

What is money? Given that money has so many uses in contemporary capitalism and so many different expressions, understanding what money is requires examining the different roles that money plays. David Harvey notes a wide range of functions of money which are “a measure of value, a mode of saving, a standard of price, a means of circulation, or it can function as money of account, as credit money, and last but not least as a means of production to produce capital” (2018, 61–62).  Multiple angles must be taken then, to define money.

First, most clearly, and widely agreed upon is that money is a means of exchange. That is, money serves as a sort of lubricant to make exchanges easier. Adam Smith shows this through the problems of barter. What is a cattle farmer, he asks, to do when he needs salt, exchange for an entire cow’s worth of salt? When money enters the equation—in the form of metal, for example—the farmer has a solution. He can sell the cow and piece out the value in later exchanges (Smith 1776, 43).

Karl Marx also noticed that money is central to the circulation of commodities, most importantly that it is a “form of appearance of value” (Marx 1867, 188), which serves as a universal equivalent to other commodities. This matters for Marx because, similar to how money splits up a commodity like Smith’s cow into tiny pieces, it also splits up buying and selling, allowing the process of exchange to expand temporally and spatially (Marx 1867, 208–9). This, in turn, means purchases do not immediately entail sales, opening up the possibility of crises, hoarding, manipulation of the money supply and inflation/deflation, and the valorization of capital (Marx 1867, chaps. 3–4).

In addition to being a means of exchange, money also serves as an expression of value. This is apparent to a certain extent in classical liberal writing. For example, John Locke understands property and value both to be derived from labor, the unequal distribution of property only being limited by what can be used (or traded) by the owner without spoilage. He writes:

…it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metalls not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. (Locke 1689, 302)

For Locke (and in liberalism generally), what money does is justify an endless accumulation of value through exchange, crystallized into the money form. The role of money as a means of exchange and as a store of value are linked here.  

This concept of money as a store of value was also central for Keynes. He argued against classical economists who were looking at money as simply as a means of exchange of commodities. Money actually was a store of value itself, and allowed for people to delay consumption and express judgments about their economic security (Carter 2020, 264–65). This meant that economic fears could lead to saving and hoarding money, which in turn would slow and damage the economy as spending stopped.  

As noted above, for Marx, money is also fundamentally tied to value. Value is objective but immaterial, and as such it needs a material expression, which is money. Value is how commodities are understood as equivalent, and money is the universal equivalent of all other commodities. As Harvey writes: “Value is the social relation and all social relations escape direct material investigation. Money is the material representation and expression of this social relation” (Harvey 2018, 5).

Defining money as a representation of value, and as a means of exchange opens up an additional purpose for money–that is, money as capital. Marx noticed that for capitalists to not hoard money and to put it back into circulation, they must expect to have a greater amount  returned in future. Expressed differently, if they put value (as money) into circulation it must return as more value (in the form of more money), which requires the valorization process of production and labor (Marx 1867, chaps. 4–6). Crucially though, money capital and industrial capital have split: “[F]rom the standpoint of the circulation of money capital, processes of valorisation and realisation are mere inconveniences on the way to profit making. If interest-bearing capital could find a way to augment itself without passing through valorisation and realisation then it would do so” (Harvey 2018, 68). Money capital appears to outpace other forms of capital, but this must eventually involve labor and production to achieve new value. Financialization can serve to funnel existing value upwards to financial capitalists, but interest bearing money capital—i.e. creditors—will over time require value to be repaid, because “ debt is a claim on future value production that can be redeemed only through value production. If future value production is insufficient to redeem the debt then there is a crisis” (Harvey 2018, 80).

Yet, treating money as the universal equivalent commodity may itself be a problem, and helps us to see the strong political nature of money. For Karl Polanyi, there is an inherent problem with treating money as a commodity at all. Because commodities are defined (by Polanyi) as objects produced for consumption in the market, money (like land and labor) is not a true but “fictitious” commodity. Money does not come from production but is simply a “token of purchasing power” directly created by central banks (Polanyi 1944). The key problem with the fictitious money commodity for Polanyi was the havoc that would come from fluctuations in money prices affecting the prices of all other commodities (including the fictitious commodity of labor), which would inevitably lead to the destruction of enterprise (and society itself) during the period needed to re-reach equilibrium. “With money, the threat was to productive enterprise, the existence of which was imperiled by any fall in the price level caused by use of commodity money” (Polanyi 1944, 204). Because of this, central banks had to regulate the supply of money. So in a market system money had to be treated as a commodity with a price as a foundation, and it simultaneously had to be regulated to avoid destroying that system itself.

That Polanyi shows money is treated as a market commodity while being simultaneously manipulated by the policies of central banks, points to the political role of money. While gold was the expression of money (and thus value), this was highly problem prone, and instead had to be represented symbolically through paper currency. This placed money and value into two deeply connected but different systems (Harvey 2018, 62–63). Crucial to the money system is its expression in various forms and currencies. Since World War II, the US Dollar has been the dominant global currency; it has become an internationally secure store of value as the US “Treasury–Fed–Wall Street money market nexus” has become central to global finance (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 119). As a part of the Bretton Woods system emerging in 1944, the US dollar was pegged to gold. However, this peg was broken under the Nixon administration–because the US had been producing dollars in excess of its gold reserves–moving the world’s reserve currency into one with a floating exchange rate. This led the value of the Dollar to be determined by market demand (for both dollars and dollar-denominated securities), which led to increasingly complex opportunities for accumulation in foreign exchange markets (Sparke 2012, 148–65). Whether the dollar could be replaced as the world’s reserve currency (by the Euro or Chinese Renminbi) remains in the realm of speculation (Plender 2021). 

As more and more of the world’s debts were backed by the Dollar in the 20th century, the US’s ability to control inflation became a central priority of financiers globally (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 131). The most drastic management of this inflation was the Volcker Shock, when Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker let interest rates rise dramatically, triggering a major reduction in the dollar supply and a subsequent increase in its value. Debtor nations were forced to reckon with how to pay debts denominated in dollars now worth significantly more money in their own currencies, and this helped coerce neoliberal policies into place via emergency loans to repay debts that came with neoliberal restructuring (Harvey 2007). Thus, currency is a part of money that is directly imposed by the state and is tightly bound to sovereignty (Lordon 2014, 10). It is, as such, inherently political. This has added weight when the obvious point is considered that, in capitalism, money is the means of subsistence–processes of primitive accumulation have divorced people from non-monetary means of subsistence and driven them into wage labor or informal but still monetized economies: “for in a decentralized economy with a division of labor, material reproduction passes through the gateway of money” (Lordon 2014, 7; see also Mohandesi and Teitelmen 2017). Thus, money, currency, and the power over it, carries deep and serious political implications. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carter, Zachary D. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Random House, 2020. 

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1689.

Lordon, Frédéric. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. London: Verso, 2014.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Ernest Mandel. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1867. 

Mohandesi, Salar, and Emma Teitelmen. “Without Reserves.” Chapter. In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, 37–67. Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto Press, 2017. 

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso Books, 2012.

Plender, John. “The Demise of the Dollar? Reserve Currencies in the Era of ‘Going Big’.” Financial Times, May 25, 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/408d4065-f66d-4368-9095-c6a8743b0d01. 

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944. 

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  1776 [2010].

Sparke, Matthew. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

ACCUMULATION

Posted on by

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

In its orthodox usage, the accumulation of capital refers to the process by which an investment of profit or assets generates a return. This could be an investment in financial, fixed, and/or non-productive assets, or the “human capital” of the workforce. The overall purpose of accumulation is to increase the value of the initial investment and produce new capital. After briefly summarizing its role in Adam Smith’s work, this entry will focus on accumulation’s nuanced role in the Marxist tradition, which sees the concept emerge as a key component in the capitalist mode of production.

Smith does not explicitly lay out the contours of capital accumulation (he never uses the term). However, according to Duncan Foley, Smith begins The Wealth of Nations (1776)

with a vision of capitalist economic development as a self-sustaining, largely self regulating virtuous circle of capital accumulation. The growth of wealth through private  initiative creates a wider and deeper market that allows for a more detailed division of  labor, which in turn raises labor productivity and creates more wealth. (Foley 1999, 4)

Smith views accumulation in the capitalist mode of production positively, as the “central engine of economic development” (Foley 1999, 4). Key to initiating this process of capital accumulation is frugality. Smith writes that

Whatever a person saves from his revenue he adds to his capital, and either employs it  himself in maintaining an additional number of productive hands, or enables some other person to do so, by lending it to him for an interest, that is, for a share of the profits… so the capital of a society, which is the same with that of all the individuals who compose it, can be increased only in the same Manner. (1776, 448)

Smith also writes that accumulation occurs through investment in “durable commodities,” the  means of production, and in the workforce: “It is by means of an additional capital only that the  undertaker of any work can either provide his workmen with better machinery or make a more  proper distribution of employment among them” (456). Capital reinvestment leads to greater efficiency in production which leads to greater wealth: accumulation as a “virtuous circle.”

Karl Marx’s concept of accumulation is somewhat different from both the contemporary (neoclassical) usage and its role in the classical political economy he criticized. For Marx, capital is a process, not just money and assets (not just a “thing”). It is expanding value, appropriated from the surplus-value of the working class’s labor, “the reconversion of surplus-value into capital” (Marx 1990, 734). The profits gained from appropriation are reinvested to gain more capital, which for Marx signals accumulation. He writes that “Accumulation is the conquest of the world of social wealth. It is the extension of the area of exploited human material and, at the same time, the extension of the direct and indirect sway of the capitalist” (740). Smith sees a “positive feedback between the extent of the market and the division of labor,” but Marx argues that this is based on the exploitation of labor (Foley 1999, 108). Capital, for Marx, therefore takes both constant (fixed) and variable forms. Constant capital is investment in production, whereas variable refers to wages paid to labor. In Capital Volume I (1867), Marx first mentions the “Sisyphean task” of accumulation in the context of money hoarding (1990, 231), which is similar to Smith’s claim that “Parsimony, and not industry, is the  immediate cause of the increase of capital” (448). Accumulation is first the act of saving. However, Marx sees capital accumulation as more than saving and reinvesting, it is also “vampire-like, [it] only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (324). Through the extension of the working day, laborers are paid less than they produce and capital (in-motion) expropriates this surplus labor. For Marx, as for Smith, accumulation increases social wealth. However, Marx also sees exploitation and its resulting exacerbation of inequality as a result.

Capital’s vampire like qualities are “obscured both by the splitting-up of  surplus-value and by the mediating movement of circulation” (Marx 1990, 710); they are hidden behind a veil of appearances. The classical political economists had  “metamorphosed” this process into a “pretended law of Nature… [which] excludes every  diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which  could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic  relation” (772). In the capitalist mode of production, “the labourer exists to satisfy the  needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to  satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer” (772). Another key aspect of Marx’s theory is the crisis of overaccumulation, a situation in which the profit rate can’t keep up with the amount of capital invested (“the falling rate of profit”). Marx thought that this would inevitably reoccur and eventually lead to a new mode of production: socialism.

Marx concludes Capital Volume I by discussing the concept of primitive accumulation, the moment where laborers are “freed” from control over the means of production. Marx effectively ends his long theoretical account with the historical origins of capitalism, its initial bouts of accumulation. Primitive accumulation, “(the ‘previous  accumulation’ of Adam Smith) which precedes capitalist accumulation… is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” (873). Primitive accumulation signals the historical beginning of wage labor and “a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into mercenaries, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital” (881). Most of the early political economists had attributed primitive accumulation to peaceful and hardworking merchants who had gained an excess of capital independent of state power. For Marx, however, primitive accumulation occurs through slavery, colonialism, forced dispossession, and “the spoliation of  the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism” (895). This implies that the violence of dispossession is not an aberration of capitalism but its precondition, and that the state plays a role in primitive accumulation.

Rosa Luxemburg offers a significant addition to Marx’s analysis of accumulation in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), and David Harvey expands upon both with the notion of “accumulation by dispossession” According to Luxemburg, the growth of capitalism leads to a search for new markets and labor pools in non-capitalist areas. Without new markets to resolve the crisis of overproduction, capitalism would collapse. For Luxemburg:

The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system–a policy of spheres of interest–and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process. (Luxemburg 1913, 452-3, as cited in Harvey 2003, 73)

David Harvey explains that the dual aspects of surplus value appropriation and the expansion of markets are “‘organically linked’ and ‘the historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together’” (Harvey 2003, 73). Accumulation occurs through expropriation as production expands; it simultaneously occurs through imperialism and war (“accumulation by dispossession”). Harvey effectively brings Luxemburg and Marx’s primitive accumulation up to the present day, writing that the “the whole pattern of turbulence in the relations between state, supra-state, and financial powers on the one hand, and the more general dynamics of capital accumulation (through production and selective devaluations) on the other, has been one of the most signal, and most complex, elements in the narrative of uneven geographical development and imperialist politics to be told of the period since 1973” (70). Financialization, “crisis capitalism,” the privatization of industries in the public sector and lands in the public trust have drastically increased since the neoliberal turn of the mid 1970s. According to Harvey, unproductive and speculative investing has a geographic component and is creating “deep impacts upon the overall dynamics of capital accumulation… it facilitated the re-centering of political-economic power  primarily in the United States but also within the financial markets of other core countries (Tokyo, London, Frankfurt)” (72).

Other notable scholarship on accumulation includes Joan Robinson’s  post-Keynesian/Marxist analysis of economic growth, The Accumulation  of Capital (1956), Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on world systems theory, feminist critiques such as Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale (1986) and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (1998), and Jason W. Moore’s ecological critique Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015). Federici, for example, takes a feminist approach to accumulation, arguing that the  disciplining of women’s bodies, the reorganization of the medieval family structure, and the rise  of witch hunts were crucial to primitive accumulation, and that capital accumulation does not signal a liberatory stage of history. According to Federici, primitive accumulation did not just constitute “the expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the  enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the ‘New  World,’… [but] the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of  women to reproduction of the work-force” (1999, 63). Furthermore, as women’s “labor, their sexual and [their] reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources,” the body was not only commodified but also regulated and cast in a new light (hence the witch hunts)  (170). Federici shows us how accumulation also appropriates “differences and divisions within the working class,” and exacerbates hierarchies of gender, race, and age (not just bodies) in the capitalist system at large (63-4). 

Moore, on the other hand, constructs a combined environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist analysis of accumulation, placing its logic within a greater “world ecology.” For Moore, accumulation is not just a way of appropriating wealth or power, but of appropriating nature’s “free gifts,” and of  organizing nature itself. Capitalism depends on “appropriating the unpaid work/energy of  humans and the rest of nature outside the commodity system” (Moore 2015, 54). Moore writes that  “Every great wave of accumulation begins with a high ecological surplus” (the sources of unpaid  work in service to accumulation), meaning that accumulation is more than just transferring wealth from the noncapitalist world (98). Accumulation is oriented toward “restructuring  the relations of production–human and extra-human alike–so as to allow the renewed and  expanded flow of Cheap labor, food, energy, and raw materials into the commodity system” (98). Taken together, these last two works offer greatly expanded notions of accumulation, and demonstrate how we might continue to see it as a guiding logic of  capitalism today.

(See Capital, Class, Nature, Primitive Accumulation, Production, War)

Bibliography

Harvey, David. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register, 2004: the New Imperial Challenge, edited by Colin Leys and Leo Panitch, Merlin, 2003, pp. 63–87. 

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge, 2013,
 libcom.org/files/luxemburg%20the%20accumulation%20of%20capital.pdf. 

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014. 

Foley, Duncan. Notes on the Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy.
1999, www.economia.unam.mx/jarojas/poleconprintFoley.pdf. 

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Penguin Books, Inc., 1990. 

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. 

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Electric Book Co., 1998.

NATURE

Posted on by

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Nature refers to the natural, or material world, the physical substance and its order which constitute reality. In relation to political economy, a given concept of nature inevitably leads to particular views of politics and/or economics. “Nature” might imply an entity separate from, the same as, or related to culture/society, the naturalization of social constructs or historical phenomena, or the existence of a pre-political “state of nature,” and thus provide a particular lens with which to view today’s environmental and political-economic crises. Our conception of nature influences both systems and subsequent analyses of political economy. Conversely, political economy has a great effect on nature. Nature can both encompass political economy and be subsumed by it; nature both defines and is defined by political economy. This keyword entry will first survey the idea of nature in politics and political economy throughout Western history, then discuss contemporary debates over the concept.

Amongst the Ancients, the physikoi or “students of nature” were concerned with nature, or physis, and stood in contrast to Sophists who emphasized nomos, convention or law (a predecessor to “nature vs. nurture”). Aristotle sought to explain the natural world and moral philosophy in tandem, and famously declared “that man is by nature a political animal” [sic] (Politics 1.1253a), raising the ever-present question regarding our human place in nature, and the potential for a unique human nature. He also criticized profiting from interest and the use of money as an end rather than as a means, claiming that was “not by nature” (Politics 1.1257a-1258a). The connection between nature and politics would be more pronounced in Hellenistic Greece and Ancient Rome (our English word comes from the Latin natura, meaning “birth”) which prescribed a natural order to politics and household management.  Medieval views of nature largely built off of Aristotle and the Christian nature as creation, while Renaissance views of nature harkened back to the Ancients. Dante, for one, echoed Aristotle by  placing usurers in the “hottest part of hell (circle 7) because they [make] money not from the  productive sources… Nature or Art, but from speculative changes in interest rates” (Mazzucato 2018, 64).

The Enlightenment and scientific method brought new mechanistic conceptions of nature, and new political and economics ideas regarding sovereignty and property. René Descartes’  mind-body dualism is often cited as a reflection of the split between nature and society under emergent capitalism. Nature (body) became divorced from active history, merely “stuff” to be acted upon or taken advantage of by a society of colonial powers (mind). Nature also appeared in Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s respective atomist philosophies and concepts of the “state of nature.” Hobbes argued for a supreme sovereign, or “Leviathan,” to repress a state of nature where there was “war of all against all” and where life was “nasty, brutish, and  short” (Hobbes 1839, 113, 117). Locke on the other hand, saw pre-political humans living together in reason, without a common judge. We supposedly gave up this place in nature to create a political sphere for the public to flourish; Locke used this to justify a natural right to property. Where Aristotle saw politics as a part of nature, both Hobbes and Locke saw the political world as supplanting a prior theoretical state of nature (although they hold two very different conceptions of that nature). In the eighteenth century, coinciding with the formalization of capitalism, the discipline of political economy, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, nature continued to largely be viewed as passive stuff for exploitation, but not without significant pushback. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson idealized nature and wrote positively of its inherent good. Nature had a vital aspect which influenced the organic attributes of their political-economic thinking, opposed to the mechanistic nature and political economy of capitalism.

Among political economists of the early modern period, physiocrats like François  Quesnay viewed nature, specifically land, as the source of all value. According to Mariana  Mazzacuto, Quesnay understood “the economy as a ‘metabolic’ system… Contrasting sharply  with the prevailing mercantilist thinking that gave gold a privileged place… Nature actually  produced new things: grain out of small seeds for food, trees out of saplings and mineral ores  from the earth from which houses and ships and machinery were built” (35- 36). “Productive” work involved bringing these natural resources into society, while everything else (no matter how necessary) was classified as “unproductive.” For Adam Smith and David  Ricardo, on the other hand, labor was the source of wealth, not nature. However, Smith’s famous work is after all an inquiry into the “nature” of the wealth of nations, and here we might also locate the origins of longstanding maneuver to naturalize capitalist political economy. Smith used the term “natural price” to describe a price equal to the cost of production (Smith 1776,  83). The market had natural qualities.

Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s political economic writings appear to offer a  distinctly “promethean” or anti-ecological view of nature (Bellamy Foster 1999, 372). He writes that “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature” (Marx 1939, 14, as cited by Harvey 2019, 147). The means of production are human products both in and over nature, but labor remains the source of value. Nature transforms itself through humanity. However, against those who claimed that Marx wore “ecological blinders” John Bellamy Foster locates the theory of a “metabolic rift” in Marx’s work, writing that Marx was aware of the ecological crisis of his day (diminishing soil fertility), the “extreme separation of town and country under  capitalism,” (2002, 6) and “took into account the coevolution of nature and human society” (1999, 373). According to Bellamy Foster, Marx saw capitalism as unable to  successfully replenish and maintain its necessary natural environment. Capitalism had effectively destroyed a metabolism with nature inherent in the labor process (Bellamy Foster 1999, 381). While not overtly concerned with political economy, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection brought nature back to the center stage of history. Darwin greatly influenced  philosophical contemporaries like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Some thinkers perverted his work through “social darwinism,” culminating in the twentieth century with Nazi Germany’s infamous  trope of “blood and soil,” the natural relationship between peoples, their productive capacities, and specific lands. This concept of nature is prevalent in some strands of right-wing economic nationalism today.

The term nature is often taken for granted: nature is a reservoir of resources, a thing “out there” which we utilize, maintain, and confront as the climate changes. However, many theoretical questions surrounding the term still concern political economy: can we talk about a determined nature? Do we separate or create a hybrid between nature and society? And is capitalism within nature? These theoretical questions help us frame empirical inquiries regarding resource extraction, climate politics, and management of the commons/public trust. Regarding a determined nature or socially constructed natures, philosopher Kate Soper writes  that “it has become increasingly obvious that the reference to ‘nature’ is no more than a kind of  shorthand: a convenient, but fairly gestural, concept of ecopolitical argument whose actual meaning (or meanings) in this context are slippery and far from clear” (1999, 47). On the one hand, (deep) ecologists point to a definite, singular nature which precedes and remains distinct from human culture. On the other hand, some critics emphasize nature’s “culturally constructed or purely discursive status” (1999, 48). Noel Castree, for example, writes that “what we call ‘nature’ is shot through with the interests, aims and presuppositions of what we usually take to be its opposites. This means that claims that nature is not socially constituted, in significant measure, are part of the war of persuasion… Making sense of nature is itself explicitly participating in it” (Castree 2014, 142). Soper thinks we must reject both the determinist  nature, which places “all human beings as equal enemies of nature” and abstracts from the social relations and sexual division of labor responsible for ecological abuse” and the constructivist view which hurts “the possibility of transnational ecological agreements”  (53). On the one hand, the determinist nature ignores the unequal responsibility and geographic effects of climate change. On the other hand, the view which emphasizes ideas of nature might hinder political organization, and at its worst, imply that climate change is also merely an “idea” (Malm 2017, 26). 

The question which follows, where (or if) to draw a line between nature and society, is often compared to the Cartesian model. Today, a split is broadly rejected, and scholars often adopt a hybridity where nature and society are no longer (because of capitalism), or never were, distinguishable. According to Andreas Malm, “Much contemporary theory cannot get enough of proclaiming that society and nature have become impossible to tell apart because in fact they are one and the same thing” (44). Malm believes that this hybridity (best exemplified by Bruno Latour) merely regurgitates the Cartesian model because a “unity” still implies two underlying elements. Instead, Malm offers us a clarifying view of substance monism but property dualism, where nature and society are made up of the same stuff but have different properties (65). Here, natural properties affect social properties but not the other way around. Everything is within nature (including society), but society cannot alter the constraints of nature (like gravity). 

The broad question of capitalism’s place in nature is largely defined by how one chooses to answer the prior questions. Looking back to Marx, who saw humanity as both in and over nature, we see that there are no capitalist social relations without nature, but nature is also the object of capitalist domination. Jason W. Moore offers one notable addition to this with his concept of “capitalism in the web of life.” Moore rejects the Cartesian duality, places capitalism in nature, and describes capitalism as a way of organizing nature (Moore 2015, 30). Another notable conception of capitalism and nature is provided by Neil Smith, who also builds off of the hybrid view and argues that capitalism’s goal of producing nature “was written into the DNA of capitalist ambition from the start”; where the production of nature in prior societies was “incidental,” it is inherent in the capitalist system (Neil Smith 2007, 22). Throughout the history of capitalism, the commodification of nature has generally “involved harvesting use values as raw materials for capitalist production” (17). In the neoliberal era, however, a

new generation of ecological commodities … are simultaneously excavated (in exchange value terms) from pre-existing socio-natural relations and as part of their production they are reinserted or remain embedded in socialized nature – the more ‘natural’ the better… [financialization] radically intensifies and deepens the penetration of nature by capital.  (17)

What was once a mere pool of resources to be pillaged, nature is now a “biodiversity bank,” a lens which should ostensibly help us care for it (19). However, environmental legislation and the “ecological commodities” of “allowable natural destruction” end up helping financial capitalism expand, and are developed unevenly across the United States and the globe. According to Neil Smith, green capitalism seeks to more carefully destroy and co-produce nature, and this has only accelerated and expanded with financialization: “When the price of ecological credits changes, investment priorities do too; when the weather changes, the price of pollution credits changes as traders anticipate greater or lesser generation of electricity; when interest and currency rates change, environmental policies are directly affected by capital moving in or out” (Neil Smith 2007, 25). What was once considered in social terms (the preservation of nature) is now calculated through the logic of the market. Capitalism expands into and through nature; nature is a new “accumulation strategy.”

Finally, while this keyword entry has been highly theoretical, we should remember that nature is also of immediate concern to political economy in the context of extraction, conservation, and climate change. However, the comparative political economy of resource extraction, the management of natural resources, and (transnational) responses to climate change depend on coherent conceptions of nature, and we would therefore do well to take a critical approach toward the use of the word nature in political economy.

(See Accumulation, Biopolitics, De/Reterritorialization, Extractivism, Fossil Fuels, Primitive Accumulation)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Politics. The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 

Castree, Noel. Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy. Routledge, 2014.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction.” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 2002, pp. 6–16., doi:10.14452/mr-054-04-2002-08_2.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2, 1999, pp. 366–405.,doi:10.1086/210315.

Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse: Notebook VII – The Chapter on Capital.” Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.html.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. 3: Leviathan. Edited by William Molesworth, vol. 3, John Bohn, 1839.

Locke, John. “Property.” Second treatise, §§ 25–51, 123–26. University of Chicago, 1689. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html.

Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World Verso, 2017.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything Making and Taking in the Global Economy.  Allen Lane, 2018.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Electric Book Co., 1998.

Smith, Neil. “Nature as Accumulation Strategy.” Socialist Register, 2007: Coming to Terms With Nature, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, vol. 43, Merlin, 2007, pp. 1–21.

Soper, Kate. “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress and Ecology.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 10, no. 2, 1999, pp. 47–70., doi:10.1080/10455759909358857.

LABOR MIGRATION

Posted on by

Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Even though its existence has been a constant throughout human history, the use of the term labor migration gained traction in post-World War Two Europe as a response to the need of a new workforce to replace the one lost during the war. In general, this term refers to the movement of able-bodied men from former colonies and developing countries to West European countries that suffered a great loss of lives during the World Wars and that were dealing with an economic boom boosted by aid policies like the Marshall plan. According to Rita Chin (2002), in Germany, Austria and other European countries, young laborers would be allowed to stay one or two years and due to their fleeting status, they were called “guest workers” or migrant workers. According Article 2(1) of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families defines the term “migrant worker” as: “a person who is to be engaged, is engaged, or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national”(IOM Report, 2018). As we are seeing, there is some uncertainty surrounding the specific definition of labor migration and migrant workers. This is principally due to the fact that such categories are contingent on geographic, legal, political, temporal, etc. contexts that are specific to the country that defines them and the policies that address them, including in relation to place of birth, citizenship, place of residence and duration of stay (IOM Report, 2018[LV1] ).

It is important to point out that the term labor migration exists in part outside traditional trade and economic theory because “owners of labor have both feelings and independent wills. Indeed, most aspects of human behavior, including migratory behavior, are both a response to feelings and an exercise of independent wills” (Stark & Bloom 1985, 173). The social aspect of this matter is at the core of social science research regarding issues of multiculturalism and integration. Due to the demographics of the countries involved in the migration routes of today and the past, race and diversity are the central nexuses of social attrition. As Balibar (1991) puts it, “collectivities of immigrant workers have for many years suffered discrimination and xenophobic violence in which racist stereotyping has played an essential role” (1991, 20).

Having briefly addressed the migration part of the term, it is crucial to explain the concept of labor and its relation to the worker: The term labor became common starting in the nineteenth century, around when the revolutionary “labor theory of value” was developed. The idea is that the value of goods/commodities is determined by the labor/work put into their production. (Smith 1776; Marx 1887). In Marx’s terms,

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it. […] Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labor, contained in the article. The quantity of labor, however, is measured by its duration, and labor-time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours. As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time. (Marx 1877, 11)

Relying on this definition of labor, Smith discusses the importance of the division of labor in order to achieve maximum wealth/productivity. He proposes that rather than have laborers taking care of the whole production of a single good, dividing the labor among specialized “mono-taskers” would prove itself more fruitful and efficient. This efficiency is related to the skills of the laborer and therefore to the time and resources needed to produce the finished commodity. Smith (1776) goes on by stating that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, since “when the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment” (35). His idea holds true also in the case of labor migration, specifically in post-World War II Europe. The economic boom implied an enlargement of the market and the lack of workforce could not fulfill the demand for unskilled labor that is characteristic of the theory of division of labor. To remedy such need, many European countries developed legislation and other programs aimed at fostering the influx of cheap, unskilled, specialized labor from their colonies, former colonies, and other developing countries.

The division of labor is important because its diffusion in the developed economies opened the doors to the need of large quantities of relatively unqualified labor that could quickly specialize and become integrated within the production chain. In Germany for example, the “guest workers found employment as unskilled or semiskilled laborers, especially in areas that required heavy or dirty work, shift work, and repetitive production methods. This allowed German nationals to move into more desirable kinds of tasks” (Chin 2002, 47). The specialization of labor caused by its division creates “‘undifferentiated human labor’, that is ‘like all other commodity producing labor, it is . . . labor in its directly social form’” (Marx 1887; Marx 1990 as cited in Tomba 2009, 50). Labor becomes an exchangeable good removed from the means of production where owners of labor must usually move along with their labor, uprooting themselves and their families with sociocultural implications that end up affecting the individuals involved as much as the hosting country. On the other hand, the  owners of production inputs or commodities, can simply trade their end products abroad so as to maximize profits or utility (Stark & Bloom 1985; Smith 1776). The commodification of labor affects the decision making of the owners of labor in a manner that is foreign to the owners of the means of production. In fact, according to Marx, the worker as an economic entity is directed to activities chosen by the bourgeoisie in order to profit by extracting the maximum surplus value possible through the exploitation of the worker.

(See Labor, Europe, Enclosure/Border, Sovereignty, Capital)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chin, Rita. “Imagining a German Multiculturalism: Aras Ören and the Contested Meanings of the ‘Guest Worker,’ 1955–1980.” Radical History Review 2002, no. 83 (2002): 44–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2002-83-44. 

Marx, Karl. “Capital: a Critique of Political Economy.” Economic Manuscripts: Capital:
 Volume One, 1887. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/. 

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. MetaLibri Digital Library, 2007 [1776]. https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf. 

Stark, Oded, and David E. Bloom. “The New Economics of Labor Migration.” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (1985): 173–78. 

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44–65.
 https://doi.org/10.1163/146544609×12537556703115. 

“World Migration Report 2018.” World Migration Report, 2019.
 https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/2018.

ORDOLIBERALISM

Posted on by

Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Boyeong Kim
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Ordoliberalism, like neoliberalism, is a body of thought and a mode of governance. The idea began to germinate with the debates of the Freiburg School founded in the 1930s at the University of Freiburg and further developed through the journal Ordo (the Ordo Yearbook of Economic and Social Order) established in 1948. Although its origin can be traced back to post-WWII Germany as a specific European social market economy (Foucault 1979; Leiva 2021), ordoliberalism is more than a part of the German economic history (Beck and Kotz 2017; Horn 2021; Havertz 2019) that is still being witnessed in the current ordoliberalization of Europe (Biebricher 2019), or even globally, with what Slobodian (2018) has called ordoglobalism. Contemporarily, ordoliberalism has gained attention especially in its relationship with neoliberalism, for similarly going beyond the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century by seeking to create a new institutional framework to make free markets work. Whether it is a variant of neoliberalism (Brown 2019; Biebricher 2019; Slobodian 2018) or not (Jessop 2019), for both bodies of thought it is important that juridico-political institutions create space for the economy. Despite the striking commonalities, mixtures and overlaps between ordoliberalism and neoliberalism addressed in recent works (Slobodian 2018; Biebricher 2019), in this definition we focus on distinctive features of ordoliberalism.

In his 1978-79 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault identifies two streams of ideas that have provided a basis to contemporary neoliberalism: German ordoliberalism (1948-1962) and the Chicago school of economics (1970s/80s). The question that the liberal thinkers of ordoliberalism (or the Freiburg school) such as W. Eucken, F. Böhm, A. Muller-Armck, and F. von Hayek strived to answer was “how to link together the legitimacy of a state and the freedom of economic partners, while accepting that the second must found the first, or serve as its guarantee” (Foucault 2011, 105). The idea of ordoliberalism diverts from eighteenth century liberalism inasmuch as its main concern has not been about freeing the market but about how the market could be a guiding principle of state and social organization. An important mutation of ordoliberalism from the traditional liberal projects is that while the latter saw that the market principally serves as a space of exchange, ordoliberals has emphasized competition as the essence of the market, which has been a “historical objective of governmental art and not a naturally given” (Foucault 2011, 120). The free market is never something that naturally occurs, ordoliberals argued, rather it has to be actively produced, revealing laissez-faire as nothing but a naïve dream.

Ordoliberalism aims for a strong state based on an ethical and juridical-political order to ensure that competition happens smoothly in a capitalist, free market society. The Freiburg School used the word “ordo” as a reference to medieval theology (Slobodian 2018), in which the idea of “functional and humane order” (Horn 2021) as a mode of social organization was emphasized as more than merely a mode of configuration for market exchange. Thus, the ordoliberal mode of social organization involves ethico-political commitments and a specific legal order (Jessop 2019) that Eucken and Böhm called an “economic constitution” to be the central task of the ordoliberal project (Miettinen 2020). That the economic constitution does not refer to a literal legal document, but a desired legal order (Slobodian 2018), implies a certain image of a moral economy where the legal and ethical rules protect the political order and free competition from unhinged personal interests within market activities (Jessop 2019). To that end, ordoliberalism assumes that the state plays an important role in securing economic order, ensuring the competition of a free-market society and avoiding the possibility that economic forces increase their power in society (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998; Vatiero 2010). Thus, ordoliberals argued that a “strong state, a government with the courage to govern” must be created  (Röpke 1950 as cited in Biebricher 2019, 72).

The epistemological and political drives that were at the center of ordoliberalism are related to historical events alongside the crisis of liberal thought at the beginning of the twentieth century. After examining different political regimes and their economic programs such as Nazism, England’s the Beveridge Plan in the UK, the Soviet Union’s planned economy, and the American New Deal, the liberals of the Freiburg school concluded that state intervention that resulted in destructive effects, while the market economy itself had no intrinsic defects. Therefore, they proposed a reversal: “a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state” (Foucault 2011, 116). The correct form of (strong) state intervention, guided by the market, would be the key to overcoming the crisis of liberalism.

As Foucault (2011) referred to this historical period as a field of adversity that ordoliberals sought to address, Biebricher (2019) similarly contends that ordoliberalism, like neoliberalism, was a reaction to the crisis of liberalism, where the main problem was political rather than economic. The crisis of liberalism during the first half of the twentieth century was related to the fact that individual freedom and the freedom of the market were challenged by state power and economic institutions (Vatiero 2010; Biebricher 2019).

As a result, ordoliberals sought to reduce the political and economic power of states, thus expanding the notion of liberalism, while simultaneously re-embedding the economy in society, and challenging the myth of laissez-faire and market fundamentalism attributed by Polanyi (Slobodian 2018). Ordoliberals believed that liberal economy is not a spontaneous reality or a natural result of laissez-faire; market freedom needs an economic order provided by the state (Horn 2021). In this sense, ordoliberals took a moderate position by rejecting classical laissez-faire liberalism (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009). Indeed, Hayek, who is considered an ordoliberal, referred to laissez-faire as one of the mistakes and aberrations that cause harm to the liberal cause (Biebricher 2019).

While ordoliberals of the Freiburg School tried to redefine economic rationality, the Chicago School’s attempt was more radical: they attempted to exert economic rationality into every inch of human life. The reorganization of society under the principle of “competition” and “entrepreneurship” led to a new governmental mechanism that differed from modern disciplinary power and created a new subject, an ‘entrepreneur of self’ that voluntarily invests themselves, manages their own risks, and internalizes market principles and desires. Some scholars have pointed out that although ordoliberalism is seen with negative connotations related to neoliberalism, ordoliberalism comes in a number of varieties, and it seeks a strong state to contain the power of the market, making a good contrast to the Chicago School of liberalism (Beck and Kotz 2017). Others claim that Eucken’s competitive order is a good way to reach (social) justice (Wörsdörfer 2013). Still others present more complicated pictures. For example, recent work reveals how the ordo-neoliberal version of social market economy carried out in Chile resulted in an interventionist state which watched over the economic order of market competition, and commodified and financialized social rights (Leiva 2021). Hence, concerns about alleged self-regulating markets and new types of political endeavors are notable in current political debates. If the early twentieth century was the end of the liberal era (Slobodian 2018), the twentieth first century could be the beginning of a post ordoliberal/neoliberal era, or as Biebricher (2019) has pointed out, the beginning of an authoritarian liberalism. Regardless, the theory and practice of ordoliberalism remains important in contemporary political economy.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Varieties of Capitalism, Variegated Neoliberalism, Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Beck, Thorsten, and Hans-Helmut Kotz. Ordoliberalism: A German Odddity? CEPR Press, 2017. 

Biebricher, Thomas. The Political Theory of Neoliberalism. Stanford University Press, 2019. 

Boas, Taylor C., and Jordan Gans-Morse. “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44, no. 2 (2009): 137–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-009-9040-5. 

Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University Press, 2019.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Havertz, Ralf. “Right-Wing Populism and Neoliberalism in Germany: The AFD’s Embrace of Ordoliberalism.” New Political Economy 24, no. 3 (2018): 385–403.
 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2018.1484715. 

Horn, K. “Ordoliberalism: Neither Exclusively German nor an Oddity. A Review Essay of Malte Dold’s and Tim Krieger’s Ordoliberalism and European Economic Policy: Between Realpolitik and Economic Utopia.” The Review of Austrian Economics, 2021.
 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-020-00536-3. 

Jessop, Bob. “Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalization: Governing through Order or Disorder.” Critical Sociology 45, no. 7-8 (2019): 967–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519834068.

Leiva, Fernando. The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile. SUNY Press, 2021. 

Miettinen, Timo. “Ordoliberalism and the Rethinking of Liberal Rationality.” Political Economy and International Order in Interwar Europe, 2020, 269–95.
 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47102-6_10. 

Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 

Vatiero, Massimiliano. “The Ordoliberal Notion of Market Power: An Institutionalist Reassessment.” European Competition Journal 6, no. 3 (2010): 689–707. https://doi.org/10.5235/ecj.v6n3.689.

Wörsdörfer, Manuel. “Von Hayek and Ordoliberalism on Justice.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35, no. 3 (2013): 291–317. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1053837213000199.

Yergin, Daniel and Joseph Stanislaw. “Ordoliberals.” Adapted from Commanding Heights. 1998. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_ordoliberals.html

GEOPOLITICS

Posted on by

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The word geopolitics comes from Greek gê, or “earth,” and politiká, or “affairs of the city.” Beyond these aspects, it is a somewhat loose term, broadly used to describe the relationship between physical and human geographies, politics, and/or international relations (IR). It refers to the study of “world politics,” but might encompass geoeconomics, globalization, political geography, political/environmental relationships, or the geostrategic discourse of IR realism. Furthermore, it is widely researched, spoken about, and thus defined outside of the academy. One popular voice on geopolitics, journalist Tim Marshall, claims that

Geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion. (2015, 2)

Marshall’s concern with “the [overlooked] physical realities that underpin national and international politics” (2) is but one aspect of geopolitics. Another aspect relates to political economy: to ports and trade routes, migration, borders, and the new powers of global finance which go beyond environmental and “balance of powers” analyses. Furthermore, in the subfield of critical geopolitics, scholars like John Agnew, Gerard Toal, and feminist geopolitical theorists like Jo Sharp examine the way ideas and discourses surrounding geopolitics influence actual geopolitical practices. Critical geopolitics does not deny its own “fictions,” but attempts to establish a more “cosmopolitan” and “self-critical” analysis (Toal 2010, 316).

Important works from the history of geopolitical thought (an extensive account of which is provided by Agnew in Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (2003)) include Thucydides’ analysis of land and sea powers in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which posits the inseparability of human (political) actions and physical environments, and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which draws a direct connection between climate, “temper of the mind,” and a society’s governing laws (Montesquieu 2008, 438). Where Montesquieu’s economically minded contemporaries, Physiocrats like François Quesnay, would see economic value as derived from land (nature), these strands of ancient and early modern geopolitics suppose that power is derived from earth’s physical spaces.

Geopolitics as a truly global analysis began in the nineteenth century with the rapid development of industrial capitalism, colonialism and global empires, formal interstate relations, and an understanding of the world as a complete entity. Agnew writes that “World politics was invented only when it became possible to see the world (in the imagination) as a whole and pursue goals in relation to that geographical scale,” (2003, 5) and categorizes the discourse of geopolitics, or “geopolitical imaginaries,” into three historical periods: “civilizational geopolitics, naturalized geopolitics and ideological geopolitics, respectively. World politics in each of the epochs has been organized around the characterizations of space, places and peoples defined by these modes of representation and communication” (Agnew 2003, 85). Agnew’s first geopolitical imaginary, nineteenth century civilizational geopolitics, is based on an international political economy 

characterized by a European Concert in which no one state ‘laid down the law’ for the others within Europe, and by an emerging British economic dominance in much of the rest of the world… Its main elements were a commitment to European uniqueness as a civilization; a belief that the roots of European distinctiveness were found in its past; a sense that though other cultures might have noble pasts with high achievements, they had been eclipsed by Europe; and an increasing identification with a particular nation state as representing the most perfected version of the European difference. (2003, 87)

This understanding of world politics helped to establish the notion of a progressive, developmental trajectory for nation-states, and a hierarchy between “advanced” Europe and  a “backward” colonial periphery. 

Building off of this, thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and the Anglo-world, ascribed geopolitical hierarchy to nature, a “naturalized geopolitics.” This new imaginary “involved elaborating systems of environmental/geographical accounting; classifying states and regions in terms of inventories of resources, racial characteristics, economic and political organization, and climatic types… natural attributes determined national destiny” (Agnew 2003, 101). Naturalized geopolitics envisioned nations as organic bodies which swallowed up weaker nations and needed national economies to counter failing global financial systems. Swedish geographer Rudolph Kjellén first used the phrase “geopolitik” (Kjellén is also credited with coining “biopolitics”), and would greatly influence German geopolitical theorists Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer. Ratzel, for one, saw the territorial state as “the organized expression of the place-specific peoples they ruled—an expression of their Geist (spirit)—and state power was intimately linked to the extent of territory and size of population a state controlled” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 26). Ratzel and Haushofer developed the concept of a “vital space” or lebensraum, which would become an central part of Nazi ideology via the latter’s student, Rudolph Hess (Esposito 2008, 16). This style of organic geopolitics is also rooted in the “environmental determinism” characteristic of Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu, and which underlies darker currents of anti-globalization movements, the alt-Right, and “eco-fascism” today (neo-environmental determinism also enjoyed a popular resurgence with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)—no association with the latter, nefarious politics). Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith argue that “However arcane this idea might seem today—even repulsive in the wake of Nazi geopolitics—the organic state represented a considerable conceptual democratization compared with the absolutist state it succeeded” (26, 2009). In other words, geopolitics had adapted to a developing capitalist, bourgeois state—it sought a more nuanced view and left behind the brute civilization statism of the nineteenth century.

The geopolitics of the Cold War, Agnew’s third era of “ideological geopolitics,” was characterized by competition between global superpowers as the representatives of their respective political economic systems. For the US, this meant

indirect stimulation of economic growth by means of fiscal and monetary policies; commitment to a growing global marketplace based on a global division of labour; accepting the dollar as the principal world currency; hostility to Soviet-style economic planning; assuming the burden of policing political changes that could be construed as damaging to the stability of the world economy. (Agnew 2003, 103)

According to Agnew, when it comes to geopolitics “the intellectual and the political are not separable. Geopolitics has served statecraft, usually that of particular states” (127, 2003), and there is no better example of this unity than in the work, inside and outside of academia, of geopolitical theorists and Cold War American statesmen Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński (the latter of whom famously referred to geopolitics as a “grand chessboard” (1997)). Rather than just a conflict between states (as civilizations, organic entities, or political economic systems), ideological geopolitics attempts to establish a static, ahistorical world politics—a status quo to be maintained. With the end of the Cold War, this vision of ideological geopolitics has become threatened, as Hardt and Negri conclude in Empire (2000), from fundamentalisms “understood both from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences of primordial identities and values… conceived as a kind of historical backflow, a de-modernization” (2000, 146). Therefore, any resistance to global order is also seen through a global lens: “Conflicts with apparent local roots were thus read as local manifestations of the superordinate global one. Links to outside powers in the form of supplies of arms or the furnishing of advisers were read as the only causes of local conflicts” (Agnew 2003, 109).

Today, geopolitics is more directly connected to global economic systems, to geoeconomics; it is situated in a confusing web of fluctuating economies and new state roles in the market. For IR strategist Edward Luttwak, geoeconomics has, in fact, taken over geopolitics among core powers. It is a spatial neoliberalism where the geopolitical social is replaced by geoeconomics as the predominant mode of state strategizing; geopolitics remains the strategy of developing peripheral states. Others, such as Cowen, Smith, and Matthew Sparke, have complicated this shift to geoeconomics. Cowen and Smith write that “the assemblage of territory, economy and social forms that was both a foundation and effect of modern geopolitics… is currently recast by an emerging geography of economy and security that might best be captured as geoeconomics with its own attendant social forms” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 23). They see a tension, however, between the two spheres rather than a complete shift: security issues are “increasingly defined by conflicts between geopolitical territorial logics and geoeconomic market logics” (32). Conflicts arise at places like ports, where “more than 90% of global trade occurs… [and] where many key struggles over ‘security’ and ‘economy’ are being waged” (2007, 33). They argue that attempts to protect American economic investments, like the American Container Security Initiative (CSI), have effectively extended US borders, and thus geopolitical power and accompanying conflict across the globe (34). Geoeconomics has not totally replaced geopolitics, but has become crucial for understanding the latter.

Sparke, on the other hand, argues that “geopolitics and geoeconomics are better understood as geostrategic discourses” rather than periods, and through the “cultural politics of geopolitical representation … it is possible to explore how geopolitics and geoeconomics operate as alternately fearful and hopeful discourses shaping the worldviews of U.S. security strategists and their audiences” (Sparke 2007, 340). The “geopolitics of fear” is used to justify foreign wars, expansionist policies, and domestic repression, while “visionaries” of “geoeconomics of hope” tend to “fantasize about connectivity and pace” (also at the service of war, expansion, and repression (340)). Furthermore, Sparke, inspired by David Harvey (1985), writes that the confusing array of geopolitical terms can be clarified by understanding  “the ‘external’ dialectic of geopolitics and geoeconomics… as an overdetermined expression of the ‘internal’ uneven development dialectic in capitalism between spatial fixity and spatial expansion. Geopolitical economy can in turn be treated as the analysis of the relays between these internal and external dialectics” (Sparke 2017, 484). In other words, the relationship between geopolitics and geoeconomics reflects capitalists’ desire to both consolidate investments and protect space, and expand for new accumulation and markets, and is similarly “shot through with contradictions” (487).

Finally, despite the aforementioned state absolutism, naturalization of geopolitical hierarchies, and geopolitics’ association with chessboard-views of the world, one should not draw the impression that geopolitics is necessarily militaristic or expansionist. The intellectual and political aspects of geopolitics continue to be closely related; the discipline is a site of politics, and any claims to total positivism are ahistorical and unfounded. According to Toal, new imaginations might fall under the umbrella of “critical geopolitics,” the “general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that characterize modernity” which includes a skepticism toward the objectivity of texts, a challenge to “state-centric readings of world politics,” and critical histories of geopolitics in order to recover it from militarism and nationalism (2010, 316). A new vision of geopolitics can break from the game-like, colonial tradition which defined the previous eras, while providing both analyses of and practical responses to issues surrounding globalization, demographic changes, security, and resource scarcity.

(see Biopolitics, Capitalist State, De/Reterritorialization, Empire, Nature, War)

Bibliography

Agnew, John A. Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997. 

Cowen, Deborah, and Neil Smith. “After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics.” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. 

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 

Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography. New York, NY: Scribner, 2015.

Montesquieu. “The Spirit of the Laws.” Essay. In The Great Political Theories, edited by Michael Curtis, 425–40. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. “Opening Remarks” from “New Directions in Critical Geopolitics: an Introduction.” Edited by Laura Jones and Daniel Sage. GeoJournal75 (2010): 315–25. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9255-4. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers97, no. 2 (2007): 338–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00540.x. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Globalizing Capitalism and the Dialectics of Geopolitics and Geoeconomics.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space50, no. 2 (2017): 484–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518×17735926.

Sparke, Matthew. “Geoeconomics, Globalisation and the Limits of Economic Strategy in Statecraft: A Response to Vihma.” Geopolitics23, no. 1 (2017): 30–37.
 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1326482.

FOSSIL FUELS

Posted on by

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Fossil fuels—crude oil, coal, and natural gases—are naturally occurring, high carbon substances which release energy upon combustion. They are created through the decomposition, compression, and heating of dead organisms in the earth’s crust. This process takes millions of years, effectively making them a “non-renewable” energy source. Fossil fuels are a crucial part of global capitalism, trade, currency systems, labor struggles, transportation, infrastructure, colonialism, state geopolitical strategies, war, pollution, and climate change. In 2018, fossil fuels made up roughly 82% of fuel consumption globally.

Coal was capitalism’s “first” fossil fuel, propelling the industrial revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. It had long been used for domestic purposes and manufacturing that required heating, but, as Andreas Malm explains, “For coal to be universalised as a fuel for all sorts of commodity production, it had to be turned into a source of mechanical energy – and, more precisely, of rotary motion” (Malm 2013, 18). Scholars have often thought the steam engine became popular because it was an effective substitute for hydropower during periods of water scarcity. However, in a critical analysis of “fossil capital,” Malm argues that the shift from riverside mills to coal powered steam engines in northern England was not due to scarcity or cost, rather it was a purposeful maneuver by industrialists:

In steam-engine manuals, essays on the factory system, testimonies from manufacturers and other contemporary sources, this is the single most salient motive: steam was a ticket to the town, where bountiful supplies of labour waited. The steam engine did not open up new stores of badly needed energy so much as it gave access to exploitable labour. (33)

Energy could now come from anywhere, and manufacturing regions sprung up on top of coal fields in places like Western Pennsylvania, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Southern Wales, and Silesia. Coal transformed daily life, relations between city and country, and the agrarian countryside itself. Water power actually remained cheaper until 1870, at which point steam engines had long predominated energy production, proving that fossil fuels were a crucial part of the control of labor (31). Malm also suggests that fossil fuels facilitate the creation of value: 

Valorisation proceeds through combustion. Fossil capital, in other words, is self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into CO2…One could think of this as the biophysical shadow of Marx’s general formula of capital, coming to the forefront only in the times of unexpected biospheric dusk. (52)

The fossil fuel cycle appears as an epiphenomenon; fossil fuels are one of nature’s free gifts added to the commodity without a second thought—that is, until nature comes fighting back in the form of climate change (“biospheric dusk”). Malm concludes that fossil fuels are best understood as a social relation: they don’t become fuel on their own, nor do they “satisfy subsistence needs. Rather, fossil fuels necessitate commodity production and waged or forced labour as components of their very existence” (17).

Despite the implications of these theories, coal’s role in the history of capitalism is not completely characterized by exploitation and dispossession. Timothy Mitchell has notably theorized the relationship between fossil fuels, political power, and democracy, noting “the ability of organised workers to assemble a political machine out of the networks and nodal points of a coal-based energy system had shaped the kinds of mass politics that emerged, or threatened to emerge the first half of the twentieth century” (Mitchell 2013, 42). However, these nodal points in the “fossil fuel network”—the factory floor, railroads, docks, etc.—were greatly altered with the emergence of oil. Mitchell explains:

From the 1920s onwards, about 60 to 80 percent of world oil production was exported. So much oil was moved across oceans that, by 1970, oil accounted for 60 per cent of seaborne cargo worldwide. Compared to carrying coal by rail, moving oil by sea eliminated the labour of coal heavers and stokers, and thus the power of organised workers to withdraw their labour from a critical point in the energy system. Transoceanic shipping operated beyond the territorial spaces governed by the labour regulations and other democratic rights won in the era of widespread coal and railway strikes. (37-38)

Western powers turned to oil and its smooth transportation as a way to manage democratic politics. Colonial powers and oil companies also purposefully delayed extracting oil from the Middle East (namely in what is now Iran and Iraq), in order to control its price and keep friendly authoritarian regimes in charge.

While coal is still used today (China produces much of it), in the twentieth century the world’s predominant fossil fuel became oil. In his massive history of oil and its politics, The Prize (1991), Daniel Yergin highlights three themes which underlie the story of oil: the expansion of capitalism, oil’s role in national geopolitical strategies, and the emergence of a “hydrocarbon society” (Yergin 2009, xv-xvi). For example, oil changed the nature of the corporation and production at the turn of the century. Standard Oil became one of the first multinational corporations, controlling all aspects of production and processing. Oil also changed the face of war: in the First World War, factories were able to mass produce weapons and ammunition, and merely a quarter of a century after the development of the internal combustion engine, tanks and planes entered the battlefield. Control of oil was a major strategic objective in WWII—Hitler’s drive to oil fields in the Caucasus set the stage for some of the deadliest battles in history.

In the postwar years, energy consumption rose dramatically across the globe. According to Yergin, “Total world energy consumption more than tripled between 1949 and 1972. Yet that growth paled beside the rise in oil demand, which in the same years increased more than five and a half times over” (523). In the US, demand for oil grew with the economy, and as a response to massive labor strikes in the country’s coalfields. Moreover, demand grew with “the transformation of America into an automotive culture” and “the emergence and proliferation of a temple dedicated to the new fuel and the new way of life—the drive-in gasoline station” (192). Oil also facilitated “the industrialisation of agriculture” and “the rise of synthetic materials” during this period (Mitchell, 140-141). While Russia had dominated oil production at the start of the century, and the USSR and Saudi Arabia would lead production by the 1980s, the US was the world’s largest producer in the middle of the century. Panitch and Gindin explain that after WWII, the US 

assumed responsibility for overseeing the international oil companies’ control of [oil in the Middle East, and]… the source of European oil supplies was shifted, so that by 1950, 85 percent of Europe’s oil was coming from the Middle East. This preserved American oil for American needs… the nature of postwar economic growth in both the US and Europe led to an explosion of demand for oil. A mobile suburban car culture; the expansion of trucking for mass production and distribution; the growth of commercial aviation; new industries in chemicals, plastics, and fertilizer—all this required more oil, cheap oil, and above all secure oil… The relationship between the American state and US oil companies in this process thus already epitomized “globalization”: US companies producing for markets abroad. (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 103)

The US was therefore not just seeking to control oil for its own consumption but to balance power in international relations during the Cold War. Consequently, fossil fuels became more closely tied to finance. At Bretton Woods, there was a broad consensus that “postwar financial stability, and thus the future of democracy, depended on managing the storage and exchange of key commodities. Increasingly the movement of just one commodity, petroleum, provided the mechanism that stabilised, or threatened to disrupt, the democratic order” (Mitchell, 112). After other currencies were pegged to the dollar, dollars began to outpace gold reserves due to rapidly expanding, fossil fuel driven global trade. However, the value of the dollar survived because “countries had to use the American currency to purchase the essential materials that formed the bulk of international trade, above all oil” (Mitchell, 111). Oil provided the basis for faith in ever expanding growth, and thus underpinned the “economy” as a distinct, recognizable entity.

Fossil fuels also became tied up with movements for self-determination in the global south. On the one hand, the first half of the century had proved that “oil equals power” (Yergin, 212). Yergin explains that on the other hand, “now more than the economics of the marketplace had to be factored into the equation. If oil was power, it was also a symbol of sovereignty. That inevitably meant a collision between the objectives of oil companies and the interests of nation-states, a clash that was to become a lasting characteristic of international politics” (212). Out of this climate of self-determination (not to be confused with democratization), the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded in 1960. OPEC is an international organization of states seeking a united front in policy-making, reducing competition, and setting global oil prices. OPEC countries do not produce most of the world’s oil, but they collectively control a high proportion of its reserves.

In response to American support for Israel during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, OPEC’s Arab countries raised production taxes and launched an oil-embargo against the US, inducing a price shock. OPEC countries grew wealthy “sitting on petrodollars. OPEC countries were able to send out loans to whoever wanted them, developing countries couldn’t help themselves” (Hobsbawm 474). Furthermore, Yergin explains that “the price shock of 1973 was the rise of a new line of work–oil price forecasting. Before 1973, it had not really been necessary. Price changes had been measured in cents, not dollars, and for many years prices were more-or-less flat. After 1973, however, forecasting blossomed’” (653). This crisis, perhaps what should have been a warning against reliance on fossil fuels, had no effect on consumption. Eric Hobsbawm argues that the events of 1973 (we can also add the 1979 oil shock following the Iranian Revolution) prove that, in a free market society, the effect of multiplying energy costs twelve-to fifteen fold in six years, is not to diminish energy use but to make it more efficient, while encouraging massive investment in new and environmentally dubious sources of irreplaceable fossil fuel. These changes would lower the price again and encourage more wasteful use (570).

Consumer demand for fossil fuels has remained high since the 1970s. However, despite it waning from the public discourse by the end of the century (Yergin, 765), oil returned to the center stage of world politics following 9/11 and wide suspicions that the US invasion of Iraq was ultimately about oil. Above all, fossil fuels are more relevant than ever because of a widespread understanding that climate change is accelerating. Fossil fuels are the physical cause of our crisis, or as Malm shows us, they might rather be considered the social cause (see above). Fossil fuels have long been criticized for pollution—smog, oil spills, and ocean acidification. However, the carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere has raised global temperatures about 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution, leading to melting ice caps and warming and rising oceans. In conclusion, the eminently political nature of fossil fuels, as well as the nexus between oil and the state that has been described here, continue to be relevant in the context of climate change. In the US, for example, in the wake of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, many states passed critical infrastructure bills, effectively criminalizing protests against oil pipelines and hydraulic fracking sites. There is little doubt that we could “cut global emissions by 7.6 Percent every year for the next decade to meet the 1.5°C Paris target”; to say that oil states/companies will let the collective mobilization necessary for a just transition happen is quite another proposition.

(see Bretton Woods, Crisis, Geopolitics, Extractivism, Nature)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“ALEC’s Attacks on People of Color, Civic Engagement, and Dissent.” ALECAttacks. Center for Constitutional Rights, 2019.
https://www.alecattacks.org/alec-attacks-civic-engagement-and-dissent.

“Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?” NASA. NASA, May 10, 2021. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.

Malm, Andreas. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry.” Historical Materialism21, no. 1 (2013): 15–68. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12341279.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2013.

“World Energy Balances 2020: Overview.” iea.org. International Energy Agency, 2020. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/23f096ab-5872-4eb0-91c4-418625c2c9d7/World_Energy_Balances_Overview_2020_edition.pdf.

Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

ENCLAVE

Posted on by

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

An enclave is a territory, be it political, economic, social, ethnic, cultural, or some  combination, surrounded by another distinct territory. This is not to be confused with an exclave, a territory geographically separate from but ‘belonging to’ a central territory. However, exclaves can also be enclaves; for example, between 1949 and 1990 West Berlin was both a political enclave within East Germany and an exclave of West Germany. Subnational economic and urban enclaves have become increasingly relevant in contemporary capitalism and globalization as they provide spaces for reterritorialization, deregulation, racial and socio-economic segregation, financial secrecy, ecological privilege, a ‘fascistic locality’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 362), and erosion of the public sphere.

Enclaves come in numerous forms. Among sovereign states, Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City are enclaves. States such as the Gambia (surrounded by Senegal), or subnational municipalities such as the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla (surrounded by Morocco) on the Mediterranean coast and the US state of Alaska, are within another territory apart from a coastal border, and are therefore considered partial enclaves. Other types include embassies and military bases like the many American “enclaves” scattered across the world, special security zones like the fortified international “green zone” in Baghdad, and post-Soviet “closed cities” which host secretive military research. Many enclaves are open and exist without conflict, like the village enclaves on the Belgian-Dutch border. The status of some, however, are violently disputed, like the majority Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan. The latter is an example of a political and ethnic enclave, but there are of course ethnic enclaves which are not inherently political (one only has to look at an ethnic map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Middle East, to see the ill-fated task of dividing political borders around ethnic enclaves). Ethnic enclaves contain a high concentration of an ethnic group compared to surrounding areas, for example “Chinatowns” in American cities. These enclaves work to strengthen social capital and often form networks with each other, but remain part of their surrounding municipal territory.

While political and ethnic enclaves are important for political-economic analyses in terms of capital flows and social capital theory, economic and urban enclaves are more overtly  relevant here. On enclaving in the context of globalization, Matthew Sparke writes

The projects and landscapes involved range in spatial scale from large transnational  regions and special economic zones, to sub-national resource-extraction enclaves, to  business improvement districts within cities and towns, to self-contained tourism resorts  such as Disneyland and cruise ships, to personal strategies of self-securitization that  range from buying weapons and fortified deadbolts to investment in such mobile enclaves as SUVs, yachts, and for the most mobile yet enclaved of all, private executive jets. (2013, 313)

Enclaves throw a wrench in the narrative of a borderless, deterritorialized world as they  reterritorialize at many levels. Economic enclaves such as special economic zones (SEZs), or free trade zones, are especially prevalent in burgeoning East and South East Asian cities (not to be confused with former concession enclaves like Hong Kong and Macau). According to  Sparke, they “represent especially opportunistic economic efforts to fix global capital in local  space through political exceptionalism,” (314-5). SEZs attract both “peasant farmers who have  lost their farmlands as much as to economists who have lost faith in traditional governments”  (316). These enclaves both consolidate labor, they keep workers inside, and keep institutional  regulatory barriers outside. This is evident in the very architecture of SEZs, which are often  demarcated by the same security apparatuses which guard the military enclaves mentioned above and the urban enclaves discussed below.

Continuing on the macro-level, some scholars believe that enclaves precipitate new analyses of globalization. James Sidaway, for instance, writes that in a break from “prior meta-geographical demarcations; the categories such as ‘Developed’ and ‘Third World’… have shattered and re-converged around enclaves” (2007, 336). What we recognize as uneven development is “increasingly expressed in enclave spaces… being governed by a range of legal norms and bounded in an array of formal and informal means that frequently cut-across established state boundaries” (Sidaway 2007, 322). Sidaway cites a range of examples: mineral enclave economies in sub-Saharan Africa, export processing zones in East Asia, and the international (western) enclaves in the financial Gulf State cities. Dubai, for example, has a “constellation” of expatriate compounds, wealthy urban villas, fortified shopping malls, and migrant worker quarters back to back with different types of sovereignty for each. The creation of a financial and tech hub allows its rulers to formally compartmentalize modern or “open” “Western business culture and recreational decadence” and traditional “lineage-based power and Islamic law” into separate geographic spaces (335). To say that the UAE, or any country for that matter, might be too crude of a statement when development appears through an enclaved patchwork.

In contrast to the “open” neoliberal discourse surrounding formal economic enclaves,  wealthy urban enclaves are often “closed” out of fear, the desire to exclude, and to enhance social  prestige. Just as the economic enclaves “are predicated on efforts to exclude and/or suspend the  rights of others” (Sparke 2013, 314), “Urban enclaving has also been marked by similarly stark  divisions between the privileged spaces of class-advantaged citizenship and the dangerous and  dispossessed margins of sub-citizenship” (323). Urban enclaves have become more prevalent in  cities with the loss of industry, the movement of finance to city centers, and increased crime rates  in the last forty years. According to Teresa Caldeira,

all types of fortified enclaves share some basic characteristics. They are private property  for collective use; they are physically isolated, either by walls or empty spaces or other  design devices; they are turned inward and not to the street; and they are controlled by  armed guards and security systems that enforce rules of inclusion and exclusion… they  possess all that is needed within a private and autonomous space and can be situated  almost anywhere, independent of the surroundings. In fact, most of them have been  placed in the old periphery and have as their neighbors either favelas or concentrations of  autoconstructed houses. (1998, 119)

Caldeira implies that these enclaves emerge dialectically with peripheral slums. Enclaves “appeal  to those who are abandoning the traditional public sphere of the streets to the poor, the  ‘marginal,’ and the homeless” (114). Furthermore, urban enclaves are visually indistinguishable  from their military and economic counterparts. When building these “High tech castles,” as Mike Davis calls them, “Residential architects are borrowing design secrets from overseas embassies  and military command posts” (1992, 248). Peter Marcuse, for one, defines these spaces as “citadels,” distinct from pure enclaves. Both are “spatially concentrated areas [with]…members  of a particular population group” (1997, 314). However, whereas the enclave self defines “by ethnicity or religion or otherwise, [and] congregate[s] as a means of enhancing… economic, social, political, and/or cultural development,” the citadel is “distinctively post Fordist” (313) and is “defined by its position of superiority in power, wealth, or status in relation to its neighbors, [and] congregate[s] as a means of protecting or enhancing that position” (314).

Urban enclaves are not necessarily physical  “fortresses” or “citadels.” There are  other ways of protecting and enhancing their position. Marcuse writes that “social patterns and  even legal restrictions may be in place that define those areas of concentration as sharply as if  there were physical walls” (320). Davis concurs, citing “luxury enclaves like Beverly Hills and  San Marino” which restrict “access to their public facilities, using baroque layers of regulations  to build invisible walls. San Marino [California], which may be the richest, now closes its parks  on weekends to exclude Latino and Asian families from adjacent communities” (246). The urban enclave, like its economic counterpart, develops through both physical and legal  infrastructure. Locating a fusion of economic and urban enclaves marked, Sparke writes that  residents of “Business Improvement Districts” (BIDs) “can join anti-tax revolts with impunity,  and they can support politicians who campaign for ‘smaller government’ and other neoliberal  reforms without worrying that this will diminish their own special services. BIDs therefore also  represent a political and economic bid to entrench neoliberal norms of citizenship in urban  space” (327). BIDs do not require physical infrastructure to “entrench neoliberal  norms of citizenship” and create their enclave space.

Economic and urban enclaves enhance political and economic exclusivity, and in doing  so erode the public sphere. The goal of these enclaves is “to segregate and to change the  character of public life by bringing to private spaces constructed as socially homogeneous  environments those activities that had been previously enacted in public spaces” (Calderia 1998, 129). For example, “When planning and development lead to the conversion of office space to residential space in the financial district of Manhattan, the result is a further separation of those  working there, now living there also, from the rest of the city” (Marcuse 1997, 319). Beyond  zoning, practices like parking permits, checkpoints, and internal passport control might precede the construction of actual walls, but all seek to move public activities into the private. In Empire  (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also identify this phenomenon:

The urban landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common square and the public encounter to the closed spaces of malls, freeways, and gated communities… it no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms of a dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside and outside. The place of modern liberal politics has disappeared, and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial  society is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of politics has  been de-actualized. (2000, 188)

Furthermore, the assumption that a fortified enclave or gated community is inherently a local  phenomenon, or has some claim to local nature, is misplaced. Sparke writes that “gated  communities nevertheless remain worldly in their own way, frequently referencing one another  in attempts to normalize the landscapes of neoliberal privilege” (323). Inside the urban enclave, it is difficult to tell exactly where one is in relation to the outside world, only that one is in the spectacle of a global enclave.

Following this, we can add the emergence of an “ecological enclave.” Steve Vanderheiden uses the term “eco-fortress” to describe a mentality towards climate change “characterized by a desire to maintain exclusive control over scarce resources at the expense of  the disadvantaged” (2020, 20). It “prioritizes sustainability within one’s own  territory above competing ideals like justice and democracy that it practically sets those aside,  rather than seeking any kind of balance” (24). Vanderheiden is speaking philosophically, but the  “eco-fortress” can also describe a literal type of enclave. For example, many coastal homes in Southern California are surrounded by fortress-like seawalls which literally erode public space,  beaches in the public trust, and keep public crises (climate change) out of sight and out of mind.  In The Slums of Aspen (2013) Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David N. Pellow describe an eco-enclave of wealthy and ostensibly liberal, environmentally-minded residents in Aspen, Colorado and the peripheral migrant laborers crucial to the city’s economy. There is a growing link between  environmentalism, immigration reform, nationalism, and enclaves where

people who construct themselves as the rightful inhabitants or owners of ecological systems and resources exclude  others from gaining access to those spaces… some people ‘naturally’ belong… while others naturally do not belong… a new twist on the ‘old’ racism associated with biological differences;  it just comes wrapped in a green package. (Park and Pellow 2013, 203)

The eco-enclave might appear as a special garden community, or an ark to outlast climate change, but it often masks old racist tropes.

Finally, offshore “enclaves” lack a clear inside-outside dynamic, but have a crucial role  in the global political economy. Oceanic enclaves are surrounded by international waters, and  include private islands, tax havens, mobile superyachts, and the Silicon Valley dream of cities at  sea. Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, together with libertarian venture capitalist  Peter Thiel have founded the Seasteading Institute, which envisions future cities in international  waters and a unique seazone in French Polynesia. According to Liam Campling and Alejandro  Colas, as both “an actual place and a legal fiction, the offshore world is characterised by  exception and exemption: from the laws, regulations and oversight that obtain ‘onshore’ (be that  geographical mainland or a legal body of norms and conventions)” (Campling and Colas 2021,  268). The offshore world is seemingly a space for both financial secrecy and futuristic, utopian  projects free from politics. However, like their terrestrial counterparts, oceanic enclaves recreate new political sovereignties and “the security of being firmly plugged into the legal, financial and communication networks of global capital” (277). These enclaves become not just a place of separation or deterritorialization, but the recreation of landed enclaves at sea, a reterritorialization.

(See De/Reterritorialization, Enclosure, Geopolitics, Nature, Underdevelopment)

Bibliography 

Caldeira, Teresa. “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation.” Chapter. In Cities and Citizenship, edited by James Holston, 114–38. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Campling, Liam, and Alejandro Colas. “Offshore.” Chapter. In Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, 267–310. London: Verso Books, 2021.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Vintage Books, 1992.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Marcuse, Peter. “The Ghetto of Exclusion and the Fortified Enclave: New Patterns in the United States.” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 3 (1997): 311–26.

Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, and David N. Pellow. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013.

Sidaway, James D. “Enclave Space: a New Metageography of Development?” Area 39, no. 3 (2007): 331–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00757.x. 

Sparke, Matthew. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. Wiley Blackwell, 2013.

Vanderheiden, Steve. Environmental Political Theory. Polity Press, 2020.