Introduction: Uneven development and social difference in capitalism

The last 10 years have seen a flourishing of re-engagements with capitalism in critical social sciences and humanities fields that not so long ago dismissed such attention as totalizing, reductionist and economistic; including, but not limited to, history (Beckert et al., 2014), ethnic studies (Day, 2016; Melamed, 2015), Frankfurt School critical theory (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) and social institutionalism (Hodgson, 2015; Streeck, 2011). Though it is important not to fetishize the newness of such interventions – as their lineages can be traced to older, if occasionally marginalized, currents of thought – there is a certain contemporary dynamism and political urgency in these recent formulations. In bringing capitalism ‘back in’, scholars are reinventing the conceptual and methodological vocabulary by which this historically and geographically specific mode of production and social formation is theorized and studied.

Paralleling the return to questions of uneven (and combined) development in geographical political economy (e.g. Dunford and Liu, 2017; Omstedt, 2021; Peck, 2016, 2019; Peck et al., 2023; Pickles et al., 2015; Sheppard, 2016; Werner, 2015; Wright, 2020), others have turned to theories of racial capitalism, social reproduction and coloniality to capture the differentiating processes imbricated in capitalism’s relentless expansion and its on-going reliance on a diverse set of constitutive ‘others’ for its survival (e.g. Bhambra, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Bledsoe and Wrigth, 2019; De Lara, 2018; Ebner and Johnson, 2021; Fraser, 2014; Leroy and Jenkins, 2021; Moore, 2015). Responding to distinct disciplinary debates, marshalling different methodological strategies and invoking diverse theoretical genealogies, these parallel re-engagements nevertheless share an insistence on conceptualizing capitalism as an overdetermined whole and complex totality, animated through a matrix of spatial and social difference. Yet, debates on the spatial and social differences at the core of capitalism’s historical geographies are for the most part disparate, occurring within the silos of particular disciplines and sub-fields (though see e.g. Bair and Werner, 2011; McDowell and Massey, 1984; Werner, 2015).

Building on a set of sessions held at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, ¹ this Exchanges section brings together five papers by ten scholars across four disciplines – geography, sociology, anthropology and global political economy – to probe how the problematics of uneven development and social difference in capitalism can be engaged in conjunction with each other. In doing so, we posit that if capitalism is reproduced through logics, discourses and practices that create, and marshal, difference into its categories of value, we need theoretical and methodological frameworks which help us understand how these differences are co-produced, circulated and contested. And if, as Smith (2008 [1984]) argued 40 years ago, the uneven development of capitalism results from capital’s contradictory tendencies towards equalization and differentiation, this process is best understood in raced, classed and gendered, as well as geographical, terms. In what follows we lay out the contributions of the various papers collected here and reflect on some cross-cutting themes.

This section: From the empirical to the programmatic

This Exchanges section travels from more empirically-engaged reflections linked closely with contributors’ research sites and methodological strategies to more programmatic interventions that respond to theoretical and methodological challenges posed by a conception of capitalism as an overdetermined – simultaneously differentiated and differentiating – global formation.

Due to issues with Sage’s production process, the contribution by Ebner (2023), erroneously appeared already in Volume 55, Issue 4, June 2023 of the journal. Nevertheless, to retain the integrity of the original conversation, we introduce it here as the first paper of the exchange. Building on over 2 years of ethnographic research, Ebner asks how an engagement with the U.S.-Mexico borderlands might help us understand capitalism’s uneven development. Drawing on Ramírez’s (2020) concept of a borderland analytic, she outlines how a methodological orientation to borders visibilize the ways in which multiple processes of bordering underpin the creation of relational (and racialized) hierarchies that assign differential value to human life, labour and place. Rather than an obstacle to capitalist development, the production of socio-spatial difference through the border effectively underwrites forms of economic devaluation key to the borderlands’ ‘competitiveness’ and continued relevance in a restructuring global economy. An engagement with borders and borderlands, then, reconstructs the ‘work’ that they do as part of processes of uneven development more broadly, which evolves through the (re)ordering and recoding of socio-spatial differences, rather than from their elimination.

Among the papers correctly gathered in this issue, Ilias Alami’s contribution proposes that combining insights from the critique of political economy and the Black Radical Tradition holds considerable potential for theorizing racialized difference and uneven development across contexts. Provoked by his research on finance in Kenya, he examines the difficulties we encounter when generalizing across multiple sites and calls for an engagement with the method of abstraction to more carefully specify the relationship between financialized accumulation, racialization and uneven development. Though the utility of abstraction in debates surrounding racial capitalism is fraught and contested, he argues that it is precisely the real ‘abstractive powers’ of the social categories of race and money that demand such an engagement. On these terms, a relational comparison of various sites of raced finance would help us to see how these interrelated forms of abstraction articulate with concrete practices, enabling us to understand how the mobilization of racialized and spatial difference enhances processes of capitalist discipline mediated by money and how the real abstractions of money in turn reproduce patterns and processes of uneven development and racialization.

Through examples from their respective ethnographies on land tenure in Jamaica and energy transitions in the U.S. state of Georgia, Rachel Goffe and Nikki Luke explore the relationship between social reproduction and racial capitalism’s uneven development. In their piece, both energy infrastructures and access to land are core to the social reproduction of dispossessed and disenfranchised communities, sustaining them through successive rounds of racialized devaluation. As such, they are also key to the ability of these communities to bear the hidden costs of enduring forms of extractive accumulation by the state and private capital. Focusing on how the state facilitates the capture of reproductive ‘life-times’ in service of capital, Goffe and Luke show how different space-times of social reproduction underpin the social relations of racial capitalism’s uneven development, while also exceeding them.

Responding to the recent DuBoisian turn in sociology, which she argues has sought to bring back race and colonialism to the theoretical canon albeit while often demoting capitalism and class to secondary concerns, Kristin Plys proposes ways to think about historical capitalism and its coloniality that are dialectical, labour-centric and explicitly anti-colonial. To do so, she engages the theoretical and methodological contributions of the Dar es Salaam School of History, World-Systems Analysis and the New Indian Labor History. Plys posits that while synthesizing Marxist and postcolonial theory has its challenges, these approaches provide a guide to doing thoughtful anti-imperialist history and theory, in which race and colonialism matter, even as labour, political economy and uneven development remain central concerns. In the neoliberal academy – and in particular in relatively restless disciplines such as geography, where the pressure is strong to engage with the next new theory – Plys reminds us that present debates have much to gain by (re)engaging the global Marxist traditions that sought to grapple with so many similar theoretical and political dilemmas.

Kasmir et al.’s programmatic statement on the utility of theories of uneven and combined development (UCD) in anthropology is the collection’s final reflection. Similar to Plys, they draw inspiration from older Marxist approaches in anthropology that centre capitalism and coloniality in their empirical inquiries. For these authors, UCD is a theoretical resource that has the potential to guide ethnographic research beyond mainstream anthropology’s default invocation of cultural multiplicity to understand how these differences are themselves products of unequal interrelations across space and time. Ethnographic approaches, in turn, illuminate historically-grounded theorizations of uneven and combined development. Their methodological orientation emphasizes how social formations are emergent from processes of uneven development, rather than fully formed, and rooted in political struggles, both progressive and reactionary. This approach has the potential to both de-fetishize the abstractions of capitalist development and attend to the more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts ‘combination’ of socio-spatial difference, and the heterogenous but unified struggles to overcome them.

Methodologies and politics of uneven development

Through bringing together early career researchers with more senior scholars, this Exchanges section explores the geographies and genealogies of knowledge production within and surrounding the contributors’ various disciplinary and intellectual interventions. Far from subsuming diverse extant literatures under the rubric of uneven development, the pieces instead explore the methodological and theoretical affinities and differences between (and within) these frameworks, as part of our existing toolkit for studying an overdetermined capitalism. A recurrent concern of these interventions is the difficulties encountered when trying to think across questions of uneven development and social difference as distinct but interrelated problematics that have generated their own bodies of theory over decades of scholarly labour. In the AAG sessions that inspired this collection, a concern was raised about the risks of trying to combine such large and unwieldy theoretical frameworks. We can acknowledge the problem of fully doing so but nevertheless argue that these five contributions illustrate a productive path forward: pushing for selective conversations across various approaches while still highlighting limitations of a neat synthesis.

Rather than presenting singular, unified or prescriptive guides, then, these papers demonstrate that there is much to be gained from staging expansive conversations and theoretical and methodological encounters, even in the face of entrenched attitudes of incommensurability and the challenging work of translation.

As guest-editors of this Exchanges section, we arrive at these debates from a conception of uneven development with a well-established lineage to economic-geographical debates in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Harvey, 1982; Massey, 1995; Smith, 2008 [1984]; Storper and Walker, 1989). The section, however, also grows out of a commitment to rethink the theoretical toolkit of uneven development in political-economic geography, to expand it beyond its Euro-American centrism, its privileging of the dynamics of (de)industrialization and urban restructuring, and its polarization along a binary opposition between necessity and contingency (see Peck et al. (2023) for a recent conversation on these varied genealogies). As the reflections collected here show, there are important differences in positionality, methodology and theory that inform how scholars engage with social difference and uneven development within and without the geographical discipline.

Painting with broad brush strokes, the contributions by some – geographers like Ebner, Goffe and Luke, as well as a global political economist like Alami – are positioned in relation to (relatively) strong disciplinary political-economic traditions, where engagements with race, gender and coloniality have been comparatively marginalized. These reflections join a burgeoning effort in their respective fields to bring social difference to the fore in analyses of capitalism. The papers by the non-geographers, Plys and Kasmir et al., on the other hand respond to trends in sociology and anthropology, disciplines in which political economy has long been a minority pursuit, and that have seen a recent turn even further away from engagements with capitalism and class struggle. As such, these authors position their interventions from the margins of their respective fields, keen on excavating older Marxist scholarship in an effort to push back against recent movements to decentre capitalism in scholarly inquiry. In bringing these differently positioned concerns together, we highlight that, while in one manner travelling in opposite directions, there is space for them to meet en route, reflecting our commitment to approaches that blend critiques of political economy and theoretical frameworks that offer insight into how raced, gendered and colonial differences are reproduced as core to capitalism’s uneven development.

While the different reflections mobilize different turns of phrase and vocabularies depending on disciplinary orientation and intellectual tradition, the five interventions share important underlying conceptual and methodological principles in their (re)thinking of capitalism. They all put processes of uneven development at the centre of their various approaches. As Jamie Peck has said recently (Peck et al., 2023: 8):

. . .there are some really demanding questions concerning how to ‘animate’ uneven development in our research designs and practices, how to disturb what so often becomes a kind of ‘background’ status, and how to connect (and interrogate) the relations between the local, here and now, both with other locals and with the more-than-local, out there and elsewhere.

Together, these papers take up this methodological challenge. For example, while they invoke different strands of relational analysis – for example, relational comparison/articulation (Alami), borderland analytic (Ebner), historical ethnography (Kasmir et al.) – the papers demonstrate the importance of operationalizing an approach to uneven development that illuminates the present as a result of historical conjunctures, that links the local and the global, that expands theory production beyond the so-called Global North, and that relates the concrete materiality of the everyday to the violence of abstraction.

These interventions also recognize the importance of de-fetishizing how socio-spatial differences exist as both concrete realities and abstractions with real categorial, symbolic and material power (money, borders, race, property, labour). Instead of simply reproducing capital’s self-representation of a world already homogenized by commodity-logics, they emphasize how capital (re)produces complex patterns of difference even as it expands to submit increasingly more spaces and social realms to its distinctively abstract logics of market dependence, competition and efficiency. In this, they each propose variations on what Makki (2015: 491) has aptly labelled ‘a differentiated but interactive conception of capitalism’, that is, a conception of capitalism in which difference is neither an after-thought nor simply the completion of the story, but baked into the analysis at the start while, indeed, comprehended as continually (re)produced through the very relationality of the social whole. Taken together, then, these papers echo Robinson’s (2000: 26) fundamental insight that the historical tendency of capitalism was ‘not to homogenize but to differentiate’, even as such varied processes of differentiation – in geographical, raced, classed and gendered terms – are inevitably ‘combined’ in ever novel ways throughout the historical unfolding of capital accumulation on a world-systemic scale.

Finally, the interventions also emphasize the importance of struggle, and of the ways that the geographies and temporalities of uneven development are emergent; even if capitalism’s evolution is premised on patterns and processes of uneven development, the form that this takes cannot be assumed. Actually-existing core-periphery relations, racial categories and gendered divisions of labour cannot merely be derived from previous histories and socio-spatial relations, but are forged through a myriad of concrete social struggles. While capital strives as much for differentiation as homogenization, the world is never fully subsumed under its imperatives. Inspired by this reality, the contributions are rooted in a range of concrete political commitments, invested in the specificities of the struggles that emerge in relation to the forms of uneven development they explore, both to better understand why and how these struggles emerge, and to trace their interrelations across space and time for the purposes of political intervention.