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

There are at least two broad ways of defining the keyword “class” and the related “classes.”  The first we could describe as an income definition. The other corresponds to different positions in the relations of production and class struggle. These are two related conceptions of the term, but which have different political trajectories. In this entry, I will spend time comparing these two notions, but with an increased emphasis on exploring the relational model, particularly the interconnection of objective and subjective notions of class and classes. 

 Table 1 previews the differences to be discussed in this entry. 

One way class is used refers to the income and wealth of a person or family. This is the most common conception of class in popular parlance and the way mainstream punditry seems to refer to class. People are grouped into lower, middle, and upper classes based on wealth and income. For example, a US News and World Report article titled “Where Do I Fall In the American Economic Class System,” simply lays out the income ranges for lower, middle, and upper classes while complicating the picture slightly by saying that many people “identify” as middle class (Snider 2020). Hence, it is a status based on individual (if relative) levels of prosperity or poverty.  At the aggregate level, the nature of income inequality in any society can usefully be measured through a Gini Index to show how concentrated wealth and income are.

The alternative approach to this treats class as a position in the relations of production. That is, classes have a qualitative, not only quantitative, definition, and are directly related to each other, often antagonistically. Marx and Engels propose this when they famously stated that all prior history has been that of various class struggles: slave and master, serf and lord, etcetera (Marx and Engels 1848). What is important about these are that they are positions in the mode of production that oppose and define each other. Marx’s fundamental classes in capitalism are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Capitalist accumulation requires the exploitation of workers to produce surplus value, but because capitalists own the means of production workers must sell their labor power for wages to survive (Marx 1867). Thus, the capitalist class (bourgeoise) and the working class (proletariat) are related to each other in an antagonistic way. These classes do roughly correlate to quantitative class definitions, i.e. lower class, middle class, upper class. For example, the proletariat must be in a lower income position as a class than capitalists, because by definition capitalists enrich themselves via the exploitation of workers for surplus value. Nevertheless, they represent two different analytical approaches.

We can also think of classes in the Marxian style both objectively and subjectively, as a social reality and as agents in that reality. First, objectively, this means that there is in fact a class relation between workers and capitalists. Capital is the driver of the economic system and workers have an objective relation to it, or else it would not be capital. However, this is a simplification of a much more complex objective class structure. There are a number of other classes in society. For example, the largest and historically most revolutionary class has been the peasantry. There are also the petty bourgeoisie, small capitalists. In recent years, there has been a dramatic expansion of the managerial class, who are not the proletariat, not owners, yet are aligned with owners against the proletariat.  Different societies have different class structures within the larger world capitalist system. For example, Latin America has a much larger informal proletariat and informal petty bourgeois, and a smaller formal working class. It relatedly has a significant semi-proletarian class, workers that engage in some wage labor and some means of subsistence (Portes 1985; Portes and Hoffman 2003).

Even within these more complex objective class categories there are fragments and antagonistic tendencies. For example, the capitalist class has its own fractures, blocs, and sectoral differences. Industrial capitalist class  and rentier capitalist class can have differing interests (ie. high rents require higher wages) (Stein 2019). Resolving conflicts within the ruling class thus requires the state to manage, whose members form a class apart in the bureaucracy but are linked to other classes (Miliband 1977). For example, US and global capitalism relied on “…the relative autonomy of the American state in developing policy and strategic directions and bringing about political compromises among diverse capitalist forces—and between them and other social forces (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 7).

The relational concept of class also carries with it a subjective form. That is, there is a balance of power between classes, meaning that they are not only structures but agents. For example, Panitch and Gindin (2012) emphasize this balance of power between working and capitalist classes as a crucial factor in the development of US and global capitalism, with the capitalist class organizing itself to defeat the working class following the profit crisis of the 1970s. 

However, classes as actors do not automatically emerge from their objective class positions. In marxist language, classes in themselves (objective) have to become classes for themselves (subjective) to be fully understood as agents in the class struggle. When and how this happens is a matter of some debate, with figures like Miliband noting that an active process consciousness is what makes the shift from “mass” to “class” (Miliband 1977, 23) while thinkers like James Scott and E.P. Thompson describe class and class consciousness emerging from struggle itself:

To put it bluntly, classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucial, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process. (E.P. Thompson, quoted in Scott 1985, 297)

Scott further notes that class struggle occurs in concrete contexts of experience, meaning that class antagonisms (and thus class struggle and formation) occur among other social relations that shape how those antagonisms are experienced and acted on (Scott 1985, 40–47). When Marx and Engels describe this in the Communist Manifesto, the class as a subject appears through linking sporadic struggles:

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. (Marx and Engels 1848, 481)

What this all seems to entail is that rather than a clear linear logic, a coevolution of antagonisms, struggle, consciousness, and relations of production produce classes objectively and subjectively, and must be historically situated to make sense of this coexistence. For example, the project of subordinate classes acting for themselves is complicated by the various strategies to contain them from dominant classes. Attempts to undermine a subjective working class have appeared through the creation of ethnicity as a labor control regime to stratify the labor force in the colonies of the burgeoning capitalist world system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 550–51). Others have described white citizenship in the US as explicitly as a “cross-class alliance” central to preventing a working class for itself in America, most clearly emerging in response to Bacon’s Rebellion (Olson 2004). The same is true for the constructions of gender difference dividing the subordinate classes (Federici 2004). In this way, if class is to be understood subjectively at all, then social relations like gender and race should not be seen as separate phenomena from class (and classes), but deeply related and co-constitutive, and vice versa (see Haider 2020).

So on the one hand, classes correspond to the objective relations of capital. On the other hand subjective classes are tightly linked struggle rooted concrete antagonisms. From these two points we should ask ourselves, are there undertheorized objective classes and subjective classes beyond the “working class?” What are the relations of capital today and where are the corresponding antagonistic experiences? If we follow David Harvey (Harvey 2018) (himself following Marx), we can see that the capital as value in motion moves through steps beyond only production, but also to realization, social reproduction, the distribution of value (Harvey 2018, 48). Through the neoliberal period we have seen an increase in the power of the financial capital, rooted in  US housing markets and mortgage debt (Panitch and Gindin 2012), and real estate capital has also become increasingly dominant (Stein 2019). Do we now see an objective tenant class in a co-constitutive relation with a rentier class? Do we also see a debtor and creditor class? Is there theoretically any reason to think that tenants and debtors could not become subjective classes? Rentiers and bankers undoubtedly already do act as classes. Additionally across the world, but acutely in Latin America, capital’s reliance on raw materials has drawn dramatic conflicts against extractive industry multinational corporations. These conflicts represent an antagonism over the use of common resources (like water) for social reproduction versus for capitalist appropriation. As such they represent conflicts at the boundaries of the background conditions and foreground of capital (Fraser 2014). In Central America for example, these conflicts have been rooted in the experiences and threats of destructive mining practices, but have also diffused into national, and regional coalitions against mining and even into other issues, like struggles over broader water rights in El Salvador. Is this an environmental or social reproductive class formation?

Contrasting the income versus social relations model of defining class and classes, we should ask what the different political implications are of each model. For the income model of classes, this could involve things like redistribution or social services via taxation at best. At the worst these are individual-centric policies like job training and targeted financing through things like microloans, reproducing a capitalist debtor-creditor dynamic (see Federici 2018). These individual-centric solutions (even if they are broadly introduced) cannot change the class relations that underlie the inequality in incomes. More job training will not change much if those jobs are still controlled by capitalist bosses. The relational notion of class leads us to think about altering the central relations of production, that is creating a democratically owned economy, or at least finding ways for the currently subordinate classes to shift the balance of class power in their favor. The two political directions are not necessarily exclusive. For example, redistribution would surely lessen the power of capitalists over their workers. But the income notion of class seems less equipped to take account of power, which is why classes as subjects will be necessary.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Critical Political Economy, Feminist Economics, Labor Power, Power, Social Reproduction, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.

———. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2018.

Fraser, Nancy. “Nancy Fraser, Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode, NLR 86, March–April 2014.” New Left Review, 2014. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II86/articles/nancy-fraser-behind-marx-s-hidden-abode.

Haider, Asad. “Class Cancelled.” 2020. https://asadhaider.substack.com/p/class-cancelled.

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

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Edited by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469–500. Norton, 1848.

Miliband, Ralph. Marxism and Politics. Oxford University Press, 1977.

Olson, Joel. The Abolition of White Democracy. U of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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

Portes, Alejandro. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Last Decades.” Latin American Research Review 20 (3): 7–39, 1985.

Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1): 41–82, 2003.

Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein. “Americanity as a ‘Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World.” International Social Science Journal 44 (4): 549–57, 1992.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985.

Snider, Sussana. “Where Do I Fall in the American Economic Class System?” US News & World Report, 2020. https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finance/articles/where-do-i-fall-in-the-american-economic-class-system.

Stein, Samuel. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso Books, 2019.

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

What is ‘capital’? In all accounts capital seems related to the means of production. Yet there is a crucial distinction between neo-classical economics and Marxian political economy in how they use the term. This distinction rests on whether capital is attributed as purely the means of production (the neo-classical view), or as a social relation (the Marxian view).

Orthodox economics sees capital as simply the means of production. In any introductory, mainstream micro- or macro-economics course, capital is likely to be introduced as one of the four factors of production: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. One economics text book defines it as “…the stock of equipment and structures used to produce goods and services” (Wessels 2006, 100). Capital in this definition remains a neutral entity, purely material or economic.

This is largely the understanding of Adam Smith. For Smith, individuals have their ‘stock,’ their property, and if they have enough saved, they may convert some of it into revenue: “His whole stock, therefore, is distinguished into two parts. That part which, he expects, is to afford him this revenue, is called his capital. The other is that which supplies his immediate consumption” (1776, 363). Seeking revenue from their capital portion of stock, someone may either invest it in fixed capital (improving land, buying equipment, etc.) or in circulatory capital (buying and selling for a profit). Yet how this is returned as revenue appears as natural, and without need for explaining, besides that fixed capital must eventually engage with circulatory capital for exchange if they ever hope to make any revenue.

Yet for Marx, capital retains a distinction beyond simply being the means of production, and instead is defined as a social relation. Like Smith, Marx understands that capital requires circulation to operate. Capital requires markets, where the value of commodities are realized in the process of exchange. Marx recognizes that commodities have both a use-value (their utility), and their value (the socially necessary labor required to create them), and this value is realized in exchange (their exchange value) (Marx 1867, chap. 1). That is, human labor creates commodities (C), whose values are exchanged into money (M) (as Marx says there is a ‘metamorphosis’), which turn back to commodities again as people secure what they need to survive in a society with a division of labor. This is represented as C-M-C, where through exchange the value of a producer moves from commodity and back to commoddity, or C-C. Yet Marx also notes that because money and commodities both are expressions of value, it is possible for money through exchange to buy commodities, resell, and to return back to money M-C-M, a process which only makes sense for the initial holder of money to put into exchange if they expect to receive more money. This is represented by M-C-M’, M’ equalling surplus value. This M-C-M’ is the “general formula for capital, in the form in which it appears directly in the sphere of circulation” (Marx 1867, 257). M-C-M’ is the formula for capital: money purchasing commodities to return with more money, in other words, value increasing its own value—M-M’. But to move past Smith and neo-classical economics, it is necessary to explain why this is a social relation.

First, the valorization of capital cannot occur only in exchange. Buying low and selling high will be balanced out into equilibrium eventually (Marx 1867, chap. 4). Instead, to get more value from capital can only occur through labor power, a commodity which produces more value than it takes to create. In other words, humans are capable of working longer than needed to produce enough to live. Because workers with their own means of production and reproduction might as well work as little as possible, this labor power is only available to capital as a commodity when workers do not control the means of production. This means that they must be forced to sell their labor. The worker must be doubly “free,” free to sell their labor power and free from means of production. (Marx 1867, 272–73). So capital represents and requires—definitionally for Marx—the exploitation of the laborer as the source of surplus value by the owner of the means of production. This is the capitalist, who is “capital personified…” whose aim is “the unceasing movement profitmaking” (Marx 1867, 254).

We can describe the development of capital as a social relation in the following steps:

• C-C⇒Exchange based in value. 
• C-M M-C⇒ Through money, the temporal and spatial aspects of exchange are set loose, allowing circulation.
• C-M-C ⇒ Use value oriented. Money as means of payment/exchange. Ends in consumption.  
• M-C-M ⇒ Exchange value oriented. Money as capital. Never ends. 
• M-C-M’ ⇒ M’=Surplus Value=Labor power commodity

What this means is that capital can take the material appearance of the means of production, but it is the social context that makes it capital. “A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton . It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar” (Marx 1849, 207). The fact that capital appears in the form of commodities further shows the social relations, because for Marx commodities in exchange are a fetishized form of human labor being exchanged, because the value of all commodities are based in labor (Marx 1867, chap. 1). The labor in the commodities of the means of production continues to confront the labor commodity in the production process “It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialised labour over direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital” (Marx 1849, 207).

Understanding capital as a social relation is especially important when we consider the similarities between Marx, and Smith, and even Hayek (1945) on the division of labor and what Marx calls the social metabolism of society (Marx 1867, 198–99). All of these thinkers show that the division of labor has created a highly complex set of economic relations that create interdependencies throughout society. Yet the neoclassical economists only understand this process of exchanging commodities and deriving revenue from capital as the best way to run the economy. Here is Smith:

To maintain and augment the stock which may be reserved for immediate consumption is the sole end and purpose both of the fixed and circulating capitals. It is this stock which feeds, clothes, and lodges the people. Their riches or poverty depends upon the abundant or sparing supplies which those two capitals can afford to the stock reserved for immediate consumption (Smith 1776, 370).

So for Smith, capital exists simply as a factor of the necessary production in society. Marx takes a much more critical stance. First he notes that “[t]he simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs” (253). This is Smith’s stance more or less, but then Marx continues: “As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless” (Marx 1867, 253). As this valorization requires labor acting upon natures use values as the source of new use values in commodities, it is clear that what capital drives towards is not the wealth of society, but the endless accumulation of capital, and thus endless exploitation of labor. Almost strangely, capital exists to expand itself it is an autonomous entity. ““For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization’ [Selbstverwertung ]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.” (Marx 1867, 255)

The social relation of capital is also complicated further when Harvey describes capital in Marx as value in motion, through production and valorization, purchase and realization, and the reintroduction of value back into production (Harvey 2018). Furthermore, capital and value appear in various forms (for example fixed capital like a factory or railway). This means for Harvey that capital must be viewed simultaneously as a thing and a process, and the contradiction between value fixed in capital and the need for value in motion is central (Harvey 2014, 70–78).

These distinctions between capital as wealth or the means of production and as a social relation matter for contemporary politics. A debate between Tomas Pikeyty and Frederic Lordon shows this. Lordon launched one of few critiques from the left of Pikkety’s Capital in the 21st Century (Lordon 2015). The critique centers around the problem of, first and foremost, what capital is. Lordon criticizes Piketty’s conception of capital as wealth, the general holdings of the wealthy and counters that capital is a social relation. It is not only property, but is “lucrative property,” and following Marx the only way to make property into self-valorizing capital requires the addition of labor, and thus the social relations of employment. Thus, while Piketty notes the returns on capital outpace growth, he does not explain why, the most important question. This differentiation between capital as the wealth of the wealthy versus capital as a social relations of domination affects political strategy.  Lordon critiques Piketty’s proposed solution of a global wealth tax to undermine inequality because taxation treats the symptoms, not the causes of problems of capitalism. Instead the focus should be on employment relations wages labor that form the relational model of capital (Lordon 2015; See also a television version of this debate Ce Soir (ou jamais!) 2015).

(See Accumulation, Class, Money)

Bibliography

Ce Soir (ou jamais!). “Frederic Lordon + Thomas Piketty: ‘Does Capitalism Deserve a Good Lesson?’ (English Subtitles).” Vimeo, 2015. https://vimeo.com/312817077.

Hayek, F. A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30.

Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lordon, Frédéric. “Why Piketty Isn’t Marx.” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1, 2015. https://mondediplo.com/2015/05/12Piketty.

Marx, Karl. “Wage Labour and Capital.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 203–17. WW Norton, 1849.

———. Capital, Volume One. In The Marx-Engels Reader, 294–438, 1867.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. UK ed. edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1776.

Wessels, Walter J. Economics. 4th ed. Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

In the Marxist critique of political economy, labor power is a concept distinct, though not wholly separate, from “labor”. Put quite simply, labor power is the ability to work. This is to say, as Marx posits in the sixth chapter of Capital, that labor power refers to a person’s mental and physical faculties, which they actively engage when producing any variety of use-values (Marx 1992). The distinction here is subtle, but important. Approaching the two concepts from another angle, we might think of labor power as a potential yet to be realized, while labor(ing) is the activity that realizes this potential and thus depletes it.

As anyone who has made use of their labor power comes to find out, it is not a spring from which we can draw indefinitely. In fact, Marx explicitly points out that the act of exercising one’s labor power uses up a quantifiable amount of their “muscle, nerve, [andbrain.” (Marx 1992). Work, therefore, can not be carried on without pause. In this way, while a capitalist may dream of a worker who does not need to eat, sleep, or use the restroom, the real existing human body imposes biological limitations on the production process. It is only by attending to the above mentioned needs that a worker can reproduce their labor power so that they may return to work.

Under a capitalist mode of production, the working class is dispossessed from the means to create its own subsistence (food, shelter, etc). It is through this process of deprivation (i.e. primitive accumulation) that the working class is created — its very existence being defined by ownership over nothing more than its labor power. Having been stripped of all else, in order to survive and reproduce itself within a capitalist economy, the working class is forced to secure its livelihood through the only avenue made available: the sale of its labor power on the market. Capitalists and ‘free’ laborers encounter one another in the market and enter into a contract that promises a definite amount of labor power for a certain price, which appears to us in the form of remuneration, or a wage. Thus, through this process, labor power becomes transformed into a commodity.

Like any other commodity, labor power has a value. Marx asserts that the value of labor power is determined in the same way that the value of any other commodity is determined: “by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article” (Marx 1992). As we’ve explored above, labor power is the ability or potential for activity, which once realized, leaves labor power depleted, necessitating renewal through the fulfilment of a worker’s biological needs. It’s here that we can see how the value of labor power is formed. The cost of the socially necessary labor time required to fulfill the average biological needs of a worker forms the basis of labor-power’s value.

However, Marx takes care to point out that labor power is a strange commodity, different from others insofar as the determination of its value is subject to the specific historical-social conditions in which it is being or has been formed. This means that there will be some unevenness across geographies in what workers require or expect as necessary to carry out the reproduction of their labor-power.

While Marx’s analysis in Capital assumes an ‘ideal’ capitalist system, we must also pay attention to other externalities that can change and disrupt how the value of labor power is determined — for instance, by class struggle. Workers, acting in their own interest, will and have historically demanded an increase to the value of their labor power, usually via the concrete struggle for increased wages. A hyper-localized example of this can be found in the 2019-2020 Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) strike initiated by academic student employees across the University of California (Cowan 2020).

Bibliography

Cowan, Jill. “Why Graduate Students at U.C. Santa Cruz are Striking.” New York Times, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/us/ucsc-strike.html

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1992.

Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Capital did not magically emerge from the mists of prehistory. Instead, like all things, it has a historical-material genealogy that can be traced. Classical political economists like Adam Smith however, glossed over the kind of archaeological work that would be necessary to uncover where and how capital first came into being. As Smith states in The Wealth of Nations: “A weaver cannot apply himself entirely to his peculiar business, unless there is beforehand stored up somewhere […] a stock sufficient to maintain him. […] the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour” (Smith 2003, emphasis added). This is short shrift to be sure, but according to most contemporary scholars, it’s the first reference to a type of accumulation that is a necessary precondition for the advent of capitalism (Perelman 2004).

The central feature powering the nascent capitalist economy, as depicted by Smith, was that of diligent individuals who, by thrift and ingenuity, came to accrue wealth by locating or creating markets where commodities could be sold. These individuals, more precisely merchants, were simply turning to their advantage another process portrayed by Smith as naturally emergent; that of the division of labor. While Smith doesn’t discount the possibility of conflict, exploitation, or conquest in the course of this process, he fails to recognize their presence as essential midwives in the birth of capitalism.

Rather than obscuring the arrival of capitalism by casting its appearance as natural, Marx insists that we must investigate the specific material forces that led to this particular outcome. Unlike Smith, Marx turns our attention to the 16th and 17th century’s mass dispossession of European peasants from their lands. It was these acts of de jure expropriation — which Marx finds exemplified in the English enclosure movement — that transformed the feudal peasant into the proletarian and thus began to consolidate the constituent elements of a capitalist mode of production:

Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Marx 1992)

Marx, contravening Smith, asserts that this was not a process of mostly peaceful evolution driven by innovation. Instead it combined the legal and physically coercive powers of the state with the private will of landlords. The reality of this mass dispossession entailed the obliteration of traditional feudal lifeways, the divorcing of peasants from their means of subsistence, and the quite literal uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people from the land that they had lived on for generations.

This new “double freedom” that Marx points to — freedom from old obligations to the feudal system, but also freedom from the means of production — forced the pupal proletariat class to become purveyors of the only thing that it retained claim to: labor power. In supplanting serfdom, this new arrangement, Marx posits, is the intinus of the entire capitalist system. In his own words: “The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. […] The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” (Marx 1992).

It was not lost on Marx that this process of dispossession and seizure had been exported globally in the form of European colonialism. As Marx saw it, though the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples had begun as a project galvanized by aspirations of national enrichment and glory, the birth of the market gave colonialism new purpose. The material spoils of colonial accumulation worked to supercharge the end-stage transformation of European economies from feudal to market based. Put bluntly by Marx: “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital” (Marx 1992).

Fundamentally Marx is making the assertion that violence, dispossession, and coercion — in short, primitive accumulation — were not ancillary to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but that these were its definitive features. Recent scholarly contributions have challenged the orthodox understanding of primitive accumulation as a temporally confined event. Of particular interest is Silvia Federici’s Marxist-Feminist interpretation of primitive accumulation in her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch. In it, she argues that capitalism requires a constant influx of looted capital in order to function. Moreover, she challenges Marx’s thesis that the supplantation of feudalism by capitalism was a positive and necessary historical stage on the road to socialism. Instead, Federici asserts that the birth of capitalism represented a reaction to efforts by peasants who sought to further expand the commons. Within this argument she draws special attention to the constant and continuous expropriation of women’s social reproductive labor as the primary example of historical and ongoing primitive accumulation (Federici 2014).

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2014.

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1992.

Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press, 2004.

Smith, Adam, and Andrew S. Skinner. The Wealth of Nations. Penguin, 2003.

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Fetishism refers to the perception of the social relation involved in production not as relation among people, but as economic relation among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. In Karl Marx’s 1867’s Capital. Critique of Political Economy, the theory of commodity fetishism is presented in Volume I in the first chapter at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organization of labor is mediated through market exchange. To explain the process where social relations between people assume the fantastic form of relation between things, Marx uses an analogy from the religious world: fetishism. For Marx (1887), fetishism “attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (1887).

Part of Marx’s critique to political economists is that some are misled by the fetishism inherent in commodities. Marx shows that fetishism of commodities has its origin in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them. For Marx (1887), a commodity is a mysterious thing:

Simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.

Massimiliano Tomba (2009) explains that “Marx is looking for a distinctive element, capable of indicating what transforms ordinary products into commodities. It is the very nature of exchange that changes in the capitalist mode of production. The fetishism of the commodity derives from this” (48-49). For Marx, the most developed perversion, the constituted fetish of capitalist society, is the relationship of capital to itself, of a thing to itself. The extreme expression of this perversion is interest bearing capital: the “most externalised and most fetish-like form” of capital (Bonefeld 2001, 3). In his analysis of Marx’s theory in commodity fetishism, Soviet Marxian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937), argues that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has not occupied the place which is proper to it in the Marxist economic system. For Rubin (1990), “The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value” (5). In his introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Fredy Perlman points out that Rubin’s book is a comprehensive, tightly argued exposition of the core of Marx’s work, the theory of commodity fetishism and the theory of value. Rubin clarifies misconceptions which have resulted, and still result, from superficial readings and evasive treatments of Marx’s work (Perlman 1990, xi).

As previously mentioned, Marx borrowed a concept from the religious world to explain the process wherein a social relationship of production is transformed into an object. In his essay, “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought” (2003), Argentinian/Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel provides a textual “rereading” of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism. Dussel rereads this concept according to Marx’s scattered but significant comments on religion as they extend throughout the whole of his work. In Part I, “The Place of the Subject of Religion in the Whole Work of Marx,” Dussel demonstrates Marx’s differentiation between a critique of the essence of religion and its manifestations, arguing that there is a space in Marx for an anti-fetishized liberatory religion. In Part II, “Toward a Theory of Fetishism in General,” he provides a methodological account of such a religion, as well as a panorama of the content of this essence of religion. These accounts provide the basis for more clearly identifying both religious fetishism and the fetishist character of capital.

According to Dussel (2003b), “Marx always starts from the exteriority of living labor, of the other than capital whose supposed elimination can fetishize capital. The fetishization needs as a condition the annihilation of that which is other than capital” (102). The other than capital, the “no-capital,” is the worker. The worker is the condition of possibility of fetishization (absolutization) of the totality of capital but it is negated by capital. The negation of the worker or the negation of exteriority means the absolutizing self-affirmation of capital—the self-positioning of capital as a totality without an external relation to itself—which is the ontological base of fetishism, of value, and all of its determinations.

Thus, the negation of the other as other is the essence of the fetishistic character of capital. As Dussel (2003b) states, the “absolutization of a ‘part’ (capital) from the ‘whole’ (capital-work) constitutes the reality of the fetishist character” (106). However, capital not only negates the other but also the community of persons as the place of production which permits the constitution of capital. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “On the one hand, the other, the poor, the worker as exteriority is denied and subsumed in capital as a wage earner…On the other hand, concretely and by the dissolution of the former modes of appropriation and production, the worker isolated from his community of origin is individually and privately subsumed by capital” (104).

For Dussel (2003b), in the form of the commodity appears the fetishist character of capital where value, as the ultimate essence of capital, turns into a fetish: “it has turned into an autonomous, autonomized Power, which begins to have all the attributes of a ‘god’: a subject self-creator out of nothing, eternal, infinite in space (destroying all barriers until reaching the world market), a civilizing power, a source of freedom and equality” (107). But capital is the fetish to which the blood of human victims is offered: “the worker is sacrificed in the holocaust of the fetish” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues:

For Marx capital is the fetish that accumulates human blood (value). Human blood, value, circulates in capital. And ‘in this as in religion man is dominated by the works of his own brain, in capitalist production he is dominated by the works of his own hand,’ by a ‘cannibalistic voracity of surplus labour.’ If that god made by man’s hand exists objectively to whom living work is sacrificed, the fetish demands, as true worship, the holocaust of the capitalist himself. (108)

Dussel then analyzes the fetishist character of each determination of capital. First, the fetishist character of commodity is based on the fetishist character of capital as a base now separated from every reference to living work. Second, money, the form of manifestation closest to being capital, is the determination or form of capital which by nature appears as the fetish as such. Third, work as capital: the fetishization of live work—for the capitalist and for the worker himself. “Work subsumed in capital, work as capital, is a form of the appearance of capital (as its own creative source of value), and therefore ‘work (living) is indeed identified with wage labour’, work has been fetishized by the worker himself: for him he is a commodity” (Dussel 2003b, 112). According to Dussel, the fetishization of the labour capacity is produced when it is not related to the productive labour force of living work. Thus, “The fetishization of work is the subjective constituent of the fetishization of value, of capital as such” (Dussel 2003b 113). Fourth, the means of production, especially the machine, is fetishized. As Dussel (2003b) argues, “Marx always thinks of the machine as a monster, a fetish, a dead organism that is only revived and resurrected due to living work” (114). Therefore, for Dussel (2003b), Marx “thinks anew on the fetishized means of production, as divine immortal entity in whose veins the absolute circulates (the absolutized value: not relative to work, nor to its social condition, nor to its essential exchangeability or need for realization)” (114). Fifth, the product not as product (the fruit of living work), but as capital first and secondly, capital as a fetishized product. Fetishization or false appearance are two phenomena that come from the same source: the absolutization of value. The product has a value: value refers to all the paid and unpaid labour contained in it. The fetishization of the product consists in believing that the cost price is equal to the value of the article. As Dussel explains, the fetishization of capital (of value) institutes the fetishization of the product. But on the fetishization of this hangs the fetishization of circulation.

The product would seem to have value in itself, as a thing, for that, value would have to be attributed to the product as product, and the market (fetishization of circulation with respect to production) must also be fetishized. “The fetishization of the ‘world of commodities’ of the horizon of circulation, of the market, is what establishes the ‘form of commodity (warenform)’ which all the products of capital adopt” (Dussel 2003b, 117). What the fetishization of circulation hides is the place of production as a curse: “The temple of the Beast, the fetish is the factory; it is the place of the death of the worker and of his exploitation, like a hell” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues, “for Marx there is a superficial fetishized level of circulation where it would seem that profit is generated (more value from capital itself) and the other term of the relationship is denied and hidden: the productive process, the deep level. Again fetishization, like absolutization, is to deny one term of a relation by autonomizing the other (in this case circulation, the market)” (119). As Dussel (2003b) explains:

The invisibility of the origin, of the reality and explanation of invisible phenomena permits the fetishization of value (of capital); it is the foundation for such an ideological mechanism. Thus the enigma, the mystery, the mystification, the fetishization of all the determinations of capital and especially profit is possible because everything is situated on the mere horizon of circulation. The fetishization of circulation is an ontological horizon from whence is known that everything that is presented in the capitalist system as the origin of the mechanism of ideologizing the capitalist political economy. By ignoring the production process (where the surplus value is produced), circulation is absolutized. The law of value becomes the law of reality. The totality of capital and circulation has denied the outward appearance of living work and production. (119-120)

Finally, Dussel refers to the progressive fetishization of the valorization process. Capital which yields interest is not related directly to the work which produces surplus value and presents to view the character of a capital that creates new capital, value which produces value from itself. According to Dussel (2003b):

To the false consciousness, interest would seem to be the fruit of money: value created from nothing by the power of capital. God on earth, fetish, Moloch—inasmuch as, in reality, the life of such a fetish is the blood of workers offered in the holocaust of the accumulation of value. Fetishized, autonomized or absolutized (separated from the relation where it is only a term) we reach the final consequence of this “secular” or “worldly religion”…Behind fetishized capital, land and wage labor, is the fetishization of value as such—as the origin of these three fetishes, these three gods, this worldly, secular trinity like the three faces of Moloch, the Beast, like the parody of an inverted Christianity…Each fetish, each face of Moloch has its fruit, its pleasure, its pay and all by virtue of their own value: capital, the profit; land, the rent; and wage labor, its salary…All these fetishized forms (separated from their origin) hide their base: the living work or labor that has created them. The denial of the relation to living work or labor is the origin and possibility of their fetishization. (121)

Marx unveils capital, commodity, money, etc., as religious gods or divine forms. For this reason, Dussel considers that Marx develops a religious critique of political economy. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “In the strict sense Marx makes a religious critique of political economy; that is, he uncovers the mechanisms of domination of capitalism as fetishist structures that are demoniacal, satanic and idolatrous. The ‘fetishist character’ of capital is precisely its strict religious statute” (122).

Bibliography

Bonefeld, Werner. “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution.” The Commoner 2 (2001), http://www.commoner.org.uk/02bonefeld.pdf

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part I of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, no. 1 (2003): 1-28.

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part II of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, 2 (2003): 93-129.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1887). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

Perlman, Fredy. “Introduction: Commodity Fetishism.” In Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, edited by Isaak I. Rubin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Rubin, Isaak I. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44–65.

“Regime” can be defined as a regular pattern of occurrence or action (as of seasonal rainfall), the characteristic behavior or orderly procedure of a natural phenomenon or process, mode of rule or management, a form of government, a government in power, or a period of rule. The widespread informal meaning is a pejorative term describing a government that the speaker doesn’t like or that has authoritarian features (The Assad regime in Syria). Within the political science meaning, a regime is the set of institutions[rules] that determines who gets access to principal offices of the state, and how publicly binding decisions are made. The three main types of political regimes are Autocracy, Anocracy, and Democracy. In general terms, in a democracy the most powerful decision-makers in the state (executives and legislators) are selected through periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes with near-universal adult suffrage. An anocracy is defined by real but unfair competition and access, which mean that the will of the people is not truly translated into representation. Some of the impairments to democracy can be electoral fraud, unfair media access, patronage, etc. An autocracy is not representative and can assume the forms of dictatorship, single party systems, military governments, etc.

The conceptual definition of regime is quite broad, but being a mode of rule or management, it is connected to principles of political economy and modes of production. Capitalist production regimes are intertwined with many societal players like governments and transnational courts, they are “institutional framework conditions for economic activity. They structure the production of goods and services by way of markets and market-related institutions. The “rules of the game” of economic activities, that is, the incentives and constraints of economic transactions, will be formulated through an ensemble of institutions in which economic activities are embedded” (Teubner, 2017, p. 84). Within capitalism, there are two main production regimes: liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economy (CMEs). In LMEs most firms coordinate many of their activities via market mechanisms, while, in CMEs a typical firm’s relations with other actors turn more heavily on strategic coordination (Hall, 2001). If we consider labor institutions and their connection to regimes of production, research points out that companies in CMEs tend to make “extensive use of specific skills, while those in LMEs rely on general skills can be used to explain, not only cross-national variations in firm strategy but also national differences in educational systems, social policy regimes, and gender segmentation across occupations” (5). 

We are seeing how varieties of capitalism are determined by specific regimes of productions, but also by their interaction with other institutions. These institutions are regimes themselves, as they implement a set of procedures that influence the movement of capital. Important players in the capitalist game are transnational arbitration courts like the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the United Nation Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) (Cutler & Dietz 2017). These courts are crucial in the regulation of international trade as their rulings end up affecting the movement of capital across nation-states, as well as the relationships among institutions worldwide. These juridical regimes can go as far as weighing in contractual disputes between firms and entire countries. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is an instrument that allows an investor to bring a case directly against the country hosting its investment, without the intervention of the government of the investor’s country of origin. This juridical regime has emerged as a concrete example of the private transnational governance by contract involving a complex network of private and public authorities that link local and global politico-legal orders within dense contractual agreements (Cutler & Dietz 2017). ISDS contractual disputes are arbitrated by private ad hoc tribunals established either under the auspices of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) (Nichols 2018). The establishment and the development of these transnational courts are a response to the growth of capitalism beyond the borders of the nation-states, the production regimes presented above have their “historical sources in the old unity of nation-state and national economy. However, with the dominance of transnational enterprises and their subsidiaries, and with the globalization of markets and their differentiation into various branches, this unity has been broken. The production regimes have expanded beyond their territorial state borders” (Teubner 2017, 84). Yet, international trade tribunals are also active contributors of such expansion due to their procedural bypassing of state law.

Bibliography

Beckers, A., and Kawakami, M. T. “Why Domestic Enforcement of Private Regulation Is (Not) the Answer: Making and Questioning the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Codes.” Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 1-13. Indiana University Press.

Cutler, A. C., and Dietz, T. The Politics of Private Transnational Governance by Contract. 1st ed. Routledge, 2017.

Hall, P. A., and Soskice, D. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003.

Nichols, S. “Expanding Property Rights under Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): Class Struggle in the Era of Transnational Capital.” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2018): 243-269. doi:10.1080/09692290.2018.1431561.

Teubner, G. “Corporate Codes in the Varieties of Capitalism: How Their Enforcement Depends on the Differences Among Production Regimes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 81-97. Indiana University Press.

Europe as a construct is more than its geographical representation. In order to shed light on the concept of Europe, it is crucial to consider its geographical, historical, political, economic, and social aspects. 

According to Merriam-Webster, Europe can be defined as “continent of the eastern and northern hemispheres that has the Atlantic Ocean to its west, the Arctic Ocean to its north, Asia to its east, and Africa and the Mediterranean and Black seas to its south…area 3,997,929 square miles.” This geographical definition is often paired with an overlapping understating of Europe as the European Union, a supranational institution of twenty-seven member states. However, we can better define the concept of Europe through five main areas—geography, history, politics, economics, and society—informed by Michael Hard and Antonio Negri, and Michel Foucault among others. Ultimately, this expanded definition of Europe is rather blurry, and it overlaps with the terms like empire and capital.

Geography:

While the geographical connotation is often the most commonly known, it is important to connect Europe with the notion of nation-state. According to Negri and Hardt in Empire (2000), the modern system of nation-states developed out of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which defined the territorial boundaries that became fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: “Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of the construction of Eurocentrism”  and thus, the modern idea of Europe (70).

History:

Hardt and Negri refer to the Roman Empire as a precursor to the modern, global Empire that they theorize, and Rome played a central role in the creation of Europe. Taking over the role of the Greeks, the Romans came to represent the Occident, as the natural opposite of the Orient. This distinction was mainly drawn upon religious and cultural lines, but it fueled an early imagination of what is in Europe and what is outside it, what is East and what is West, and what is European and what is the “other”. According to Stuart Hall (2018), the first time that the term Europe was recorded seems to be in the eight century in reference to Charles Martel’s victory over the Spanish Moors at Tours, France. Since then, the blocking presence of Islam to the south and east became the defining feature of Europeanness; “Its continental identity was primarily Christian, for its name was Christendom more often than it was Europe” (Hall, 197).

Politics:

Connecting with the core feature of the nation-state and popular understanding, Europe can also be understood as the EU, a supranational confederation of sovereign nation states that agree to transfer part of their powers to a central power in exchange for real or perceived positive outcomes. The European Union is a unique economic and political union between 27 EU countries in the European continent. Its first iteration, the European Economic Community (EEC) was created after WW2, to foster economic cooperation, with the goal of avoiding conflict by making the member countries become economically interdependent (Europa). From a juridical standpoint, even though Hardt and Negri (2000) talk about it referring to the United Nations, the EU can be seen as “a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts” (9).

Economy:

The economic sphere is central in defining Europe as capitalism is intertwined with the development of Europeanness. Exploration, colonialism and imperialism evolved the idea of Europe by increasing contact with the “other”, and by exploiting the technological divide between civilizations. Exploration began as a capitalist endeavor and culminated with the colonial exploitation of much of the world. Negri and Hardt present Empire as the modern manifestation of covert capitalist interest, corroborating the idea that the development of the West has been indeed a story of economic gain. “Capital has indeed always been organized with a view toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporations really begin to structure global territories biopolitically” (Foucault in Hardt and Negri, 31). Nowadays, private corporations have supplanted the national colonialist and imperialist systems in earlier phases of capitalist development. Like them, corporations directly structure and influence territories and populations across the globe.

Society:

While numerous and complex, the sociological implications of the concept of Europe can be linked to biopolitical production: “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, xiii). Foucault’s concept of biopolitics traces the historical development of a European society relying on disciplinary institutions to one of control, a society of control (Empire) that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Examples of this are visible in some policies actualized by the EU that aim at creating and fostering an Europeanness that is not really there. Programs like Erasmus (student exchange) and visa-less travel within EU countries are affecting the identities of people and normalize certain constructs. In a hegemonic manner, the state/society/corporation/ruling class can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and enacts (in)voluntarily (Foucault, 2008). Supranational corporations in particular, act beyond Europe and its “borders” producing needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—in other words, producing producers (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 32). From a Marxist perspective, the Empire brings to the world the annihilation of space by time, where the individual is no longer confronted with the local mediations of the universal but with a concrete universal itself (Hardt & Negri,19). In Doreen Massey’s words, the global reach of capital/Empire/Europe enact economic, political and cultural social relations each “full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 7).

(See Empire, Enclave, Enclosure/Border, De/Reterritorialization, Sovereignty)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Aims and Values.” European Union, 2019. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/principles-and-values/aims-and-values_en. 

“Europe Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Europe. 

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978- 1979, New York: Palgrave, 2008.

Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest:Discourse and Power [1992].” Essay. In Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley. Duke University Press, 2018. 

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

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” aughty, [1991].
http://www.aughty.org/pdf/global_sense_place.pdf.

Lucia Vitale
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Amy Kapczynski defines intellectual property rights as an “…alchemy that turns immaterial expressions and ideas into tradable commodities…” and, more specifically, the “…legal entitlements that give their holders the ability to prevent others from copying or deploying the covered information in specific ways” (2010, 23). As described by Nichols (2018), intellectual property is the idea that knowledge might be captured as a unit of property and then kept from others who might benefit from its use. It is often justified with the assertion that protecting the processes of research and development has bigger, generalizable benefits to society. “In this way, the interests of the industries benefiting from the expansion of intellectual property rights are articulated as synonymous with those of the general interest…” (247). ‘Intellectual property rights’ as a term may be broken into two constitutive elements: that of ‘property’, and that of ‘rights’. In order for pharmaceutical companies to claim ownership over an immaterial object, each of these components must undergo important permutations.

As enshrined in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), intellectual property comes in three main forms, patents, copyrights, and trademarks. In order for a patent to be granted, an invention must be new, useful and ‘nonobvious,’ and once granted, an inventor can prevent others from making, using or selling their invention for twenty years. Once a copyright is granted, which are principally used for expressive or literary works, authors or artists can prevent others from copying or performing ‘derivatives’ of their original work for upwards of 100 years. The trademark is used to protect a distinctive trade name in commerce, thereby permitting the holder to place protections around its use so as to “…ensure that consumers are not confused about the origin of the good” (Kapczynski 2010, 23). Heywood (2002) calls the TRIPS agreement “the most refined institutional attack on health” for the ways it not only expanded Western intellectual property law, but also the way TRIPS suddenly invoked rights language to defend intellectual property ‘rights’ (221). Patent protections have arguably had some of the most explicit consequences for global wellbeing and carry with them a constellation of institutions which uphold and protect these ‘immaterial expressions.’ 

Marx’s Capital (1867) considers property an indispensable part of the capitalist production cycle. Without landed property and rent, a capitalist will be unable to accumulate from the commons. Harvey (2018) writes that while Marx was attentive to the distinctive capitalist forms of property, he was unable to predict the extension of market logics into the immaterial realm:

What [Marx] did not anticipate was that new forms of capitalist rent might also evolve within the evolutionary structures of capitalism and that rent-seeking might go well beyond that which he found both necessary and functional as well as politically tolerable for a mature form of capitalist development…what are we to make of rent-seeking through ownership of intellectual property rights? (Harvey 2018, 37)

Just as capitalist economies developed institutions to protect the landed property of the bourgeois class in Marx’s time, so too have contemporary capitalist economies developed institutions to protect the immaterial intellectual property of actors such as multinational corporations. If we see new, useful and ‘nonobvious’ ideas as a part of the commons just as landed property was, in Marx’s eyes, a part of the commons, then the notion of who is able to claim these rights becomes an important one.

In a 1949 essay critiquing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Hannah Arendt provocatively asks her reader “who has a right to claim rights?” (Arendt 1949a). Centering the individual, Arendt asserts that the ‘universal’ and ‘inalienable’ nature of the rights put forth by the UDHR cannot exist outside of a political community which can guarantee these rights. The Declaration therefore embodies a paradox, how can the rights of man be inalienable if they require a state and a corresponding legal apparatus to uphold them? Without the protection of a political community, an individual is therefore alienated from her rights. Agamben (1995) calls this figure cast out of the Bios (and therefore political life) and reduced to bare life, homo sacer, a figure that can be sacrificed with impunity. If an individual can only be endowed with the full rights of man when a legal apparatus is present, how might we explain non-person entities claiming rights?  The landmark 2008 US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) asserted that conservative non-profit Citizens United had, just as individuals, the right to free speech under the First Amendment and could therefore not have its expenditures on political communications be restricted by the government. In this way, the US Supreme Court extended the ‘right to claim rights’ to a non-person. Taking two important permutations of the components of “property” (claims on material goods become claims on immaterial goods) and of “rights” (an individual’s rights claim becomes a non-human’s rights claim) in the term intellectual property rights allows entities such as pharmaceutical companies to protect ‘property’ such as lifesaving vaccine formulas. In this way, intellectual property law can be said to “regulate life itself” (Kapczynski 2010, 24).

The notion of intellectual property rights carries with it an institutional legacy that has legitimated claims of exclusion on the grounds of ownership for several decades. Refined over eight rounds of negotiations, twenty-three countries signed onto The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1948 during the post-WWII years. It was not until the United Nation’s (UN) World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was established in 1967 that ‘intellectual property’ had a more central role in global governance. WIPO promised “…to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among States and, where appropriate, in collaboration with any other international organization” (Convention Establishing the WIPO 1967). While intellectual property rights became more formally acknowledged as ‘property’, WIPO did not contain in its articles any formal punitive measure for countries not in compliance with the protections. The World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT in 1995 as the central organizing institution of trade at the global scale. In the same year that the WTO was established, WTO member countries signed the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to ensure “…minimum standards of protection and enforcement that each government has to give to the intellectual property held by nationals of fellow WTO members” (WTO 2021). The TRIPS Agreement contained within it a dispute settlement system, and the authority to sanction countries who did not comply (Birn, Pillay, and Holtz 2017, 312, 392).

While the patents protected by intellectual property laws have arguably been the most consequential to the distribution of global wellbeing (over, for example, copyrights or trademarks), medical patents by pharmaceutical industries have received a bulk of the attention from activists over the last decades. In 2001, after years of coordinated protest actions, AIDS activists around the world were successful in pressuring global intellectual property legal apparatuses in amending the original TRIPS Agreement with the Doha Declaration. When scientists identified the HIV/AIDS virus in the 80s, the epidemic was already spreading around the globe. In 1996 antiretroviral therapy (ART), an effective treatment for the management of the HIV/AIDS virus, emerged as an answer to stopping the epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS. The patent for ART treatment was protected under TRIPS for a period of twenty years at the time of its invention, sparking activist groups in South Africa, notably the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and in the United States, notably the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to pressure national and supranational legal institutions that protected the intellectual property rights of ART treatments. In 1999, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (PMA) v. The President of the Republic of South Africa case was brought to the South African supreme court. The PMA argued that manufacturing generic drugs while still under patent was a violation of the South African government’s ratification of the 1994 TRIPS Agreement and was therefore a violation of their rights to intellectual property. Also employing rights language, TAC framed their argument in terms of “the rights to ‘life, dignity and access to health care services’ as enshrined in the South African Constitution and numerous international human rights agreements” (George 2011, 184). Ultimately, PMA’s withdrawal of the lawsuit helped to form “…a strong normative foundation upon which to build further protection for the right to health” (George 2011, 197).  

 In 2001, just weeks after an anthrax scare in the United States, 140 trade ministers gathered in Doha, Qatar and enshrined the following protections in the “Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health”, also known as the Doha Declaration,

…the TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. (Doha WTO Ministerial 2001)

Motivated by the anthrax scare and its efforts to stockpile generic Cipro, an antibiotic that could be used to treat anthrax exposure in the case of a large-scale bioterrorist attack, the US signed the declaration (Sun 2004). Two legal mechanisms, compulsory licensing[1] and parallel imports[2], comprised the legal base upon which the TRIPS Agreement was modified. Klug (2005) argues that even these modifications were not capable of ensuring equitable access to life-saving medicines. Since compulsory licensing, the more easily accessible of the Doha Declaration’s legal mechanisms, required countries to have access to their own manufacturing, it inherently excluded countries without the capacity to produce their own pharmaceuticals. The 2003 pre-Cancún agreement laid out a pathway for countries without manufacturing capabilities to claim compulsory licensing rights to protect the public health of their populations, although it “…has since been criticized for placing so many preconditions on its implementation as to make it unworkable” (135).

Sociologist Deborah Gould (2004) considers the role of emotion in the ACT UP protests of the 1980s and 1990s, specifically focusing on the idea of the ‘public funeral’ as a social movement tactic. In it, AIDS activists would perform funeral services for their comrades lost to the AIDS virus in front of government buildings. Figure 1 calls attention to the similar political nature, i.e. that both diseases have excluded the deployment of life-saving medication using claims at intellectual property rights, of both the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 viruses (ACT UP 2021). 

Despite these criticisms, the Doha Declaration has nonetheless provided an important legal infrastructure to bypass intellectual property rights in the name of public health, leaving many in the midst of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out pushing for a special TRIPS waiver to, as one particular activist campaign terms it, “free the vaccine” from exclusionary intellectual property protections (“Free The Vaccine” 2021). South Africa and India called for a TRIPS waiver on the intellectual property contained in the COVID-19 vaccine in October of 2020, and the United States followed on May 5, 2021. Just three days after the United States’ statement, biotechnology company and one inventor of the MRNA vaccine against COVID, Moderna Therapeutics, Inc., released a statement asserting that it would not enforce its intellectual property rights during or after the pandemic (Moderna 2020). In a response to the statement, James Love, director of non-profit Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), called for “every manufacturer of a vaccine, drug or diagnostic [to] follow suit and publish the patents relevant to the technology, waive or license rights in those patents, and provide constructive transfer of manufacturing know-how and access to cell lines and data when necessary” (Love 2020). Vocal opponents of sharing the vaccine’s “recipe” with other manufacturers include Bill Gates, a major influencer of global public health policy. During an interview on Britain’s Sky News, Gates cited safety standards in manufacturing, and explicitly not intellectual property constraints, to explain why a TRIPS waiver will ultimately fail to bring the world closer to equitable vaccine access (Savage 2021; Kapczynski and Ravinthiran 2021). Sparke (2017) categorizes global patent protections as one way that economic neoliberalization keeps lifesaving medical technologies and drugs out of reach to the world’s poor. It is through the legal apparatuses of institutions like the WTO, and through our legal understanding of what it is to claim a “right” that immaterial objects, such as the recipe to produce lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines, are taken out of the commons and claimed as property.

[1] “Compulsory licensing enables a competent government authority to license the use of a patented invention to a third party or government agency without the consent of the patent-holder” (“Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement” 2021).

[2] “Parallel importation is importation without the consent of the patent-holder of a patented product marketed in another country either by the patent holder or with the patent-holder’s consent” (“Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement” 2021).

 (See Accumulation,  Free Trade)

Bibliography

ACT UP. “ACT UP NY Face Backlash Over Equating COVID-19 Pandemic with AIDS Crisis.” Attitude. 2021. https://attitude.co.uk/article/act-up-ny-faces-backlash-over-face-mask-equating-covid-19-pandemic-with-aids-crisis/23089/.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Arendt, Hannah. “The Rights of Man: What Are They?” Die Wandlung, 1949a, 4th edition.

Birn, Anne-Emanuelle, Yogan Pillay, and Timothy H. Holtz. “Health Equity and the Societal Determinants of Health.” In Textbook of Global Health. Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199392285.001.0001.

Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization. 1967. https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283854.

Doha WTO Ministerial. “Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health.” TRIPS WT/MIN(01)/DEC/2. 2001. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min01_e/mindecl_trips_e.htm.

“Free The Vaccine.” Campaign website. Free The Vaccine for COVID-19. 2021. https://freethevaccine.org/about/.

George, Erika. “The Human Right to Health and HIV/AIDS: South Africa and South-South Cooperation to Reframe Global Intellectual Property Principles and Promote Access to Essential Medicines.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18 (1): 167, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2979/indjglolegstu.18.1.167.

Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Tomas Ocampo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Extractivism is derived from the word “extract” or “extraction.” To extract is to take something out using effort or force, while extraction refers to the act or process of extracting something. Typically, extraction refers to obtaining a substance or resource, such as natural resources like metals or oil, via physical force—to literally remove them from their location. However, the word extract can reference any kind of extraction, from digital information to labor and culture. Extractivism today is used to reference many of these other “frontiers” from which something can be extracted, not just extractive industries of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020). Additionally, the concept of extractivism is related to the Spanish word extractivismo, which refers to the discourse of “left-intellectuals and grassroots activists in Latin America” on the extractive model (extractivism) that has been adopted by several Latin American governments (Riofrancos 2020). As such, extractivism for them is a political and economic model of accumulation, or appropriation, founded on intensive and extensive exploitation of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020; Svampa 2019). Therefore, extractivism concerns the intensive exploitation of natural resources under a capitalist mode of production, and the social struggles resulting from the impacts of extractivist activities. In this sense, the term extractivism connects the theoretical concept to political contestation (Gudynas 2013). However, despite the increasing attention to the topic, especially in Spanish speaking countries, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language still does not include the term extractivismo (Acosta 2013). 

Extractivism refers not only to natural resource extraction but also large-scale excavation activities of renewable and non-renewable resources that “are not processed (or processed only to a limited degree), especially for export” (Acosta 2013, 62). Similarly, Eduardo Gudynas (2013) contends that the concept of extractivism should include three dimensions: volume of resources extracted; intensity of extraction; and destination of the resource. In this sense, extractivism is a particular case of extraction of natural resources, in large volume or high intensity, which are essentially oriented to be exported as raw materials without or with minimal manufacturing (Gudynas 2013, 3). Some activities included in this understanding of extractivism are mining, hydrocarbons, export monocultures, and fisheries (Gudynas 2013); hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas (known as “fracking”), coal and oil extraction; gold, copper and ore mineral mining, and the surrounding infrastructure including roads, pipelines and storage facilities; large-scale single-crop or cash-crop plantations (i.e. palm, soy) that do not support or feed surrounding communities; projects that take critical water sources from communities and ecosystems, such as hydroelectric dams and commercial water bottling operations; corporate- and profit-driven renewable energy and climate mitigation projects carried out at the expense of rights of indigenous peoples and local communities (Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach).

 These activities have caused immense environmental damages —in some cases irreversible  damages— and lead to deleterious social consequences, including: deforestation and biodiversity loss; acidification of soils and water in natural run-off, which pollute rivers, seas, air, and soils; massive holes in the ground/earth; the toxification of soil and ecosystems from the use of toxic chemicals in minerals extraction; public health problems resulting from toxic waste and polluted water; forced displacement of peoples; negatively altered traditional ways of life and means of subsistence; impoverishment and unemployment; division of communities; destruction of indigenous peoples’ sacred places; and the violation of human rights, discrimination, persecution, and criminalization of social activists. In this sense, the definition of extractivism is deeply linked to the social and environmental transformations carried out historically by extraction as an economic model, unevenly distributed across geographies and axes of social difference. As such, the extractive economic model is a type of accumulation based on an over-exploitation of natural resources as well as the expansion of frontiers to territories formerly considered ‘unproductive’, building large-scale projects of transport, communication and infrastructure with high levels of capital investments and risks for society, the economy and environment (Svampa 2012).

Extractivism is sustained by extractivist industries that export raw materials, while domestic industries are underdeveloped. This causes enclave economies, where the primary export activities are not integrated in the rest of the economy, inputs and technologies are imported, a significant proportion of technical staff is recruited from abroad, and do not foster national industrial chains, thus remaining tied to international financial markets and fluctuations (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013; Svampa 2012). In addition, the increasing complexity of the global capitalist economy has put into practice a sort of subordination of industrial activities, which are subordinated under financial logic, changing traditional structures and processes of industrial paradigm (Gago & Mezzadra 2017), showing thus the evolving but dependent nature of the extractive sector.

Additionally, extractivism does not refer only to particular activities, but is part of a specific mode of accumulation (Acosta 2013), or as a development model itself (Wolff 2017; Brand et al., 2016), because extractivist activities are deeply rooted in transnational commodities flows and are part of the territorial unevenness of global capitalism (Riofrancos 2020). The topic has been widely developed by contemporary Latin American scholars, highlighting the colonialist implications of extractivism. Certainly, Latin America and the Caribbean have historically experienced extractivism as a structuring model of the region. It constituted an economic mechanism of colonial and neocolonial capitalist plunder, appropriation (Acosta 2013), and dispossession, which unfolded in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Therefore, extractivism is deeply linked to the colonial capitalist system. However, the important changes carried out by neoliberal capitalism has marked a different tendency of the extractivism model. The commodity boom at the beginning of the twentieth first century has marked the increasing growth in the exportation of natural resources, causing what Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale (2014) called the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Commodities Consensus. Indeed, in recent years, extractivism has spread throughout Latin America and beyond, precisely because of international demand. However, despite the historical nature of extractivism, it has acquired recent aspects based on new types, scales, speed, and integration of extractivism across environments/societies. The result is that extractive ventures are approved and implemented to serve export interests, perpetuating the subordination and dependence of those countries. As a result, the capacities of national governments to regulate extractivism are limited and subordinated (Gudynas 2013).

 Problematizing the structural nature of extractivism, scholars have developed Marxist perspectives that understand extractivism as an economic problem internal to capitalism regarding the ever growing and intensive use of energy in the capitalist accumulation process (Diamanti 2018). Extractivism thus represents a technical system of processing nature through labor, introducing greater transformation. In this sense, it is a technical form of the capitalist mode of production, rather than a mode of production itself. Nevertheless, any mode of accumulation develops certain relationships between human beings and nature, and according to Alvaro García Linera (2013) all societies, capitalist or non-capitalist, have performed a certain level of extractivist activities. As such, extractivism constitutes a specialization in the productive activities within capitalist societies, based on the colonial and post-colonial division of labor and production throughout the world. As a consequence, dependent economies on the extraction and exportation of raw materials are located mostly -but not exclusively- in certain places in the world, such as Latin America and Africa. However, other analyses offer different and new perspectives to understand the extractive industries into transnational supply chains, based on Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital (Arboleda 2020b) and the financial exploitation in contemporary capitalism that operate under extractive modes (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).

 The complexities of extractivism have opened new analysis and conceptualizations and the concept has acquired new striking paths from different approaches and fields, pluralizing the initial idea of extraction of natural resources, and turning towards urban extractivism, data extractivism, financial extractivism, and green or aeolian extractivism (Riofrancos, 2020). Recent studies point out that extractivism has even moved to extra-global frontiers like lunar and outer space landscapes (Klinger 2017), or raise the idea of deterritorialized extraction, which transforms the spatio-temporal processes of extractive industries, including the nonhuman nature in the production of value (Labban 2014). Regardless, the political debate around extractivism identifies certain continuities and variegated forms it acquired regarding different political projects, mainly placed in Latin America, showing the discursive/ideological realm of the term. For instance, the idea of “neoliberal” extractivism versus “neo-” or “progressive” extractivism (Burchardt and Dietz 2014; Gudynas 2009), which shows the structural continuities of an extractive imperative in the region (Arsel et al. 2016). The most prominent conceptual stem is neo-extractivism. Neo-extractivism refers to the continued reliance on extractive activities under a nationalist developmental stance to improve the social welfare of the population through the benefits of exportation of raw materials (Acosta 2013), a criticism that Latin American scholars have pointed out against progressive governments, mainly the so-called pink tide. The central claim of this criticism is that progressive governments in Latin America continued the same extractive economic model rather than moving towards a new economic model.

Some scholars have posited that neo-extractivism maintained and reproduced key elements of the extractivism from the colonial period (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013). In this sense, neo-extractivism maintained the same structure that subordinates Latin America’s position in global markets, something that some scholars have called the extractive imperialism (Veltmeyer & Petras 2015), and from a different perspective, the resource imperialism in late capitalism (Arboleda 2020a).

On the other hand, neo-extractivism is not only linked to progressive governments in Latin America, but to different countries and realities especially since the year 2000 as part of a new phase in the capitalist development and socio-ecological transformation (Brand et al. 2016). According to some scholars, “neo-extractivism is not only an economic/technical form of resource appropriation or a renaissance of the Latin American economic model, but rather should be seen as a central expression of political domination, in which the material, cultural, and socio-political dimensions and conflicts of a new development model coalesce” (Brand et al. 2016, 150). Based on this perspective, we are facing a neo-extractivist development model or transformation in the capitalist mode of accumulation, which we can think of as a geography of extraction that transcends the focus on intensity and scale of natural resources because it is rooted in the internal dynamics of the production of value at the world scale (Arboleda 2020a). Similarly, Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra (2017) have pointed out the need to expand the notion of extractivism considering contemporary processes of valorization and accumulation of capital, where current development models of capitalism take place, alongside social struggles and progressive governments of Latin America. Thus, a new notion of extractivism comprises other economic domains, such as finance, real estate, logistics, digital technology, and knowledge (Gago & Mezzadra 2017; Arboleda 2020a). In this sense, there are no such continuities in the development model, leaving peripheral extractives spaces in a strictly subordinated position, but a new phase of contemporary capitalism, where a critique of neo-extractivism should expand the category of exploitation, including financialization, and rethink dispossession (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).

Finally, another recent debate seeks to elaborate knowledge toward alternatives to extractivism, such as post-extractivism, Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay, the ecosocial pact, economic degrowth or stationary growth (Riofrancos 2020; Arsel et al. 2016). These proposals seek to promote a “re-encounter with indigenous worldviews in which human beings not only coexist in harmony with Nature but form part of it” (Acosta 2013, 81). These efforts stem from calls from scholars and activists to rethink how communities and governments can move beyond extractivism, and from indigenous groups and movements that have long witnessed – and felt – the effects of extractivism on their territories. Whatever direction a “post-extractivism” future holds, the rich debate on extractivism and its many delineations and perspectives continues. Some ongoing questions are related to the links between the criticisms from post and anti-extractivism, and the possibilities for a structural change, just transitions, climate justice, and indigenous sovereignty, among others. The continued relevance of these debates are significant issues to many academic disciplines including political economy.

[1] The author acknowledges the members of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at University of California Santa Cruz, for the meaningful conversations and contributions to this definition. 

(See Accumulation, Enclave, Fossil Fuels, Nature, Neocolonialism, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty)

Bibliography

Acosta, Alberto. “Extractivism and neoextractivism: Two sides of the same curse.” In Beyond development: Alternative visions from Latin America, edited by M. Lang & D. Mokdrani, 61–86. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2013. https://www.tni.org/en/publication/beyond-development.

Arboleda, Martin. Planetary mine: Territories of extraction under late capitalism. New York: Verso, 2020.

Arboleda, Martin. “From Spaces to Circuits of Extraction: Value in Process and the Mine/City Nexus.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 31 (3): 114–133, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1656758.

Arsel, Murat, Hogenboom, Barbara, and Lorenzo Pellegrini. “The extractive imperative in Latin America.” The Extractive Industries and Society 3 (4): 880–887, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2016.10.014.

Brand, Ulrich, Dietz, Kristina, and Miriam Lang. “Neo-Extractivism in Latin America – one side of a new phase of global capitalist dynamics.” Ciencia Política 11 (21): 125–159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.15446/cp.v11n21.57551.

Diamanti, Jeff. “Extractivism.” Krisis Journal for Contemporary Phylosophy 2: 54–57, 2018. https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/31857636/Krisis_2018_2_Jeff_Diamanti_Extractivism_2.pdf.

Ellner, Steve. Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020.

“Extract.” Lexico. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/extract.

“Extraction.” Lexico. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/extraction.

“Extraction.” Merriam-Webster. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraction.

Gago, Veronica, and Sandro Mezzadra. “A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism.” Rethinking Marxism 29 (4): 574–591, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2017.1417087.

García Linera, Álvaro. “Once Again on So-called ‘Extractivism.’” MR Online, April 29, 2013. https://mronline.org/2013/04/29/gl290413-html/.

Gudynas, Eduardo. “Extracciones, Extractivismos y Extrahecciones. Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de recursos naturales.” CLAES, Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social, 2013. https://ambiental.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/GudynasApropiacionExtractivismoExtraheccionesOdeD2013.pdf.

Klinger, Julie Michelle. Rare Earth Frontiers. From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. https://cornellopen.org/book-details/.

Labban, Mazen. “Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (3): 560–576, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.892360.

Riofrancos, Thea. “Extractivism and Extractivismo.” In Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South. https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/extractivism-and-extractivismo.

Svampa, Maristella. “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development.” Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik 28 (3): 43–73, 2012. https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-28-3-43.

Svampa, Maristella. “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (1): 65-82, 2015.

Svampa, Maristella. Neo-extractivism in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Svampa, Maristella, and Enrique Viale. Maldesarrollo. La Argentina del extractivismo y el despojo. Buenos Aires: Katz editores, 2014. http://www.katzeditores.com/svampa/svampaMD.htm.

Veltmeyer, Henry, & James Petras. “Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship.” International Critical Thought 5 (2): 164–182, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2015.1031943.

Wolff, Jonas. “Contesting Extractivism: Conceptual, Theoretical and Normative Reflections.” In Contested Extractivism, Society and the State, edited by B. Engels & K. Dietz, 243–255. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58811-1_11.

Revised by UCSC Politics Graduate Students

Empire is commonly defined as the rule of one monarch, oligarchy, or sovereign state over another group of states or countries (Lexico). While sometimes conflated with imperialism, empire is generally considered distinct in that imperialism is seen as a policy or system of extending a country’s power over another society through colonization or military force (Lexico). This practice of imposing foreign control over another territory is commonly known as colonialism, or the practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, including occupation and economic exploitation (Lexico). Whereas imperialism is the mechanism of colonialism, colonialism is the arrangement of political control of one country over territory via military force and occupation. Again, these terms are often conflated, however they are considered distinct and in the case of empire, the onus is on the absolute control of one political entity (the state) over another. Looking at Michel Foucault (2008), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), and Matthew Sparke’s (2005) works can help us explore the concept of empire in two ways: “Empire” as a distinct, “decentered global space,” and empire as an “informal imperialism operating in and through increasingly globalized networks” linked to American hegemony after the end of World War II (Sparke 2000, 244-245).

While connotations of words usually relate to their social construction, as in, how people generally perceive of the word and what they might think of when they consider it, looking at its root can open the door to different ways of looking at the word, and help us understand a deeper meaning of what the word might convey. The word empire comes from the Latin root imperium which comes from the word imparare: (im-/in- meaning either “within/throughout” or sometimes “without/not”) and (-parare meaning order, prepare, command and provide, which is derived from the root -pere meaning to produce/bring forth/grant/allot, and also encompasses the reciprocals of these words). Related to these are words like “imperative,” or “operate.” In Latin, the word imperium means supreme power, command, and authority – bearing similarity to the English definition of empire, which refers to an extensive group of states under a supreme authority, or as the absolute control over a person or a group.

Delving deeper into the inner workings of the concept, empire can be conceptualized as not only invasive, that is, a dynamic of power in which the supreme commands and rules what is under it, but also pervasive, “within and throughout,” that which orders, prepares, commands, and provides. It is control over, and management throughout. It is the dye which colors the structures, architectures, livelihoods, and social lives of all that it encompasses (Hardt & Negri 2000). Empire is thus related to Foucault’s conception of “biopower,” which is understood as the power over human bodies, including the management of populations of people (Foucault 1978). Foucault conceives of it as the circumstance in which power in the modern world has become encoded into the social order of human beings. It is distinct from discipline, which by ways of deterrence and punishment of people seeks to enforce the status quo of a ruling power and manifests as the project of protecting the biological livelihood of people, who constitute the power of the body politic. According to Foucault, the state in the modern world has become a ‘scientific’ apparatus of ‘truth’, meaning that the state has restricted its own self from “over-governing” in modern times as it submits to the logic/rationale or truth of the political economy (less governance equals less interference with the truths that arise from the logics of the market, like ‘true prices’). In becoming so, things like the “health of the workforce” become precious to the state as the efficiency of the population is tantamount to the establishment of the “truths,” which rule the style of governance. As scientific discoveries become a hegemonic force for the establishment of truth in the modern day, people submit to the truths of science, which promise to illuminate the path towards the optimum well-being of people.

Therefore, while the rational indicates the new style of the state, one which strives towards maximum efficiency, it also lays claim to the behavior and social life among people, who perpetuate the rational through their behavior and interaction, and contribute to the creation and reification of this empire. Essentially, history, defined as sets of practices which extend backwards into past time-space and relay the truths of that time-space, has eventually culminated into this new set of practices and thus “truths” in which we find ourselves in today, and these truths and logic (of efficiency, particularly economic/market efficiency) require that we submit to them as the best path towards human well-being, but also that we continue to perfect them and discover more of these truths to submit ourselves to. This is what births biopower: the entirety of the state has a vested interest in the biological efficiency of the population, and ultimate authority over births, lives and the deaths of mutineers of this rationale. Thus, the empire is: invasive, it commands; and it is pervasive, it is lived.

In part of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) book Empire, the authors conduct a historical review of the transformations of power in authorities and societies to show how it has culminated in the “empire” that we live in today. Hardt and Negri examine the European origins of “Empire” and link the concept of Empire with “the Christian origins of European civilizations” (10). They write that “Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths” (10). To maintain the social order and achieve social peace, the conductor is given the power to do whatever is necessary, from launching “just” wars against external enemies to fighting against threats within. However, physical force itself is not the basis of “Empire.” Hardt and Negri argue that “the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” is paramount (15). It is called into being to resolve conflicts and it enlarges the “realm of consensus that supports its own power” (15).

For Hardt and Negri, “Empire” is a concept of a single logic of rule that controls economic and social production and exchange (xii). This rule became a “new global form of sovereignty” following the globalization of the 20th century which saw the decline of nation-state sovereignty and the inability of nation states to control their economic and cultural exchanges. “Empire” developed in step with capitalism and became the global form of sovereignty that best furthered its processes (xvi). This makes “Empire” a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii).

“Empire” is a concept characterized by a lack of boundaries to its rule, which Hardt and Negri outline in four parts (xiv). First, this concept posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or rules over the entire world without territorial boundaries. Second, it operates as an order that does not originate from conquest, suspends history and fixes its existence to eternity; in other words, a regime without temporal boundaries outside of history or at the end of history. In this view, the “Empire” is all that ever was or will ever be. Third, the “Empire” operates on all parts of the social order (it is totalizing). Beyond its control over territory, population and human interaction, the “Empire” creates the world it inhabits and seeks to directly rule over human nature and social life, making “Empire” a paradigmatic form of biopower. Lastly, “Empire” is always dedicated to a perpetual and universal peace despite the violence encoded within it (xv). It “presents its order as permanent, eternal and necessary” (11). The new Emperor is not a fixed point of supreme authority which reigns over the “Empire,” but rather, the Emperor exists within and without the social order, the subjects and the sovereign mutually constitute one another, though all seem to be subordinate to this empire.

Although Hardt and Negri believe that European imperialism is over, they do not place the US at the center of their “Empire” (and in fact would argue there is no central state that forms the heart of “Empire”), though it is still important to sustaining capitalism’s logic of rule. For Panitch and Gindin (2012), however, the US is the central state that has shaped the international order post World War II and worked to shape laws and institutions within states, making it a kind of informal empire. The supranational world power through which US as an empire arose is in part due to the United Nations and the international order it shaped following the end of World War II that was at once built on state sovereignty as much as it acted above state sovereignty. Rather than force other countries via colonization or imperialism to adopt capitalist economic policy, the US helped create the international institutions that governed the international order, including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and so forth. By setting the parameters under which countries could operate, and enforcing this order through coercive actions unilaterally and multilaterally, it became the aegis of capitalism in the 20th century, a new kind of empire. This conception of the US as an empire of finance capitalism is noted by former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism: “Here is the ‘empire’, the empire of finance capital, in fact if not in name, a vast sprawling network of inter-continental activity on a highly diversified scale that controls the lives of million of people in the most widely separated parts of the world, manipulating whole industries and exploiting the labour and riches of nations for the greedy satisfaction of a few” (35-36). Attending to the ways that the current global system of finance capital (or global capitalism) has been shaped and constructed by states, especially the American state, is crucial for Panitch and Gindin, and others. The end of the Bretton Woods system, rise of neoliberalism and globalization requires examining the United States’ role as an informal empire and the tensions and contradictions that American hegemony brings. Matthew Sparke (2005) discusses this at length in “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Imperialism,” and argues that the “Empire” of Hardt and Negri smooths over the global space to develop a singular force acting as the sovereign, which “obscures and enables the privileges that accrue to the United States as the major structuring and steering influence of contemporary global capitalism” (258). If there is an actual existing empire tied to global capitalism, the US is closer to the center of it than any other state. Sparke makes a prescient note of this empire that goes a bit further than Hardt and Negri’s conception of “Empire”: the dynamics of neoliberalism and globalization have facilitated a “biopolitically productive regime that has actually worked to legitimize and consolidate ongoing and generally informal forms of American imperialism” (Sparke 2005, 311).

(See Accumulation, Geopolitics, Neocolonialism)

Bibliography

“Colonialism.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/colonialism.

“Empire.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/empire.

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

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