Geographies of subsumption

Abstract

This article draws on heterodox scholarship on capitalist subsumption to revise core approaches within Marxist and critical geography. The article argues that a heterodox account of subsumption provides us with an analytical tool with which to understand the geographies of capitalist difference without recourse to spatial determinism nor nonrelational accounts of externality. While heterodox approaches to subsumption are experiencing something of a renaissance within critical theory more broadly, the concept has been scarcely engaged by Marxist and critical geography. This is despite the tacit engagement with stagist interpretations of subsumption common among dominant Marxist and critical geographical approaches. With this in mind, the article first aims to develop a critique of Marxist and critical geographers’ engagements with the question of subsumption, and second aims to explore how a dynamic account of subsumption helps us unpack the unstable heterogeneity of capital's sociospatial totality, and draw attention to capital’s highly differential sociospatial forms and political fault-lines. In doing so the article will suggest three key ways heterodox approaches to subsumption intervene in debates within Marxist and critical geography. First the paper argues that a more dynamic conceptualisation of capitalist subsumption entails a revised understanding of capitalist landed property and dispossession. Second, that such an approach contributes to a more politically grounded understanding of capitalist uneven development. And third, by attending to the differential social forms of capital, subsumption can nuance ongoing geographical debates concerning racialised and gendered capitalism.