Human Geography

The current crisis originated in steps taken to resolve the crisis of the 1970s. The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these measures had a distinctive class character, and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberalism. While this ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom, and that the “nanny state” should be dismantled for the benefit of all, neoliberal practice meant that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus massively introducing “moral hazard” into the financial system. The resulting system amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class. Capitalism can survive the present trauma, and the capitalist class can reproduce its power, but the mass of the people will have to surrender their wages, many of their rights and hard-won asset values to those in power and to suffer environmental degradations, to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards, which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. This may require more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized state control to stifle unrest. Yet crises are moments of paradox and possibilities. So how can the left negotiate the dynamics of this crisis? It has long been the dream of many in the world, that an alternative to capitalist irrationality can be defined, and rationally arrived at, through the mobilization of human passions in the collective search for a better life for all. These alternatives – historically called socialism or communism – have been tried in various times and places. But in recent times both have lost their luster. We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of Marx's account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations among seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices: a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption; b) relations to nature; c) social relations among people; d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs; e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects; f) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements; g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction. An anti-capitalist political movement can start in any of these. The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways. The left has to look to build alliances between and across those working in the distinctive spheres. Yet the current knowledge structure is clearly dysfunctional and illegitimate. Revolutionary transformations cannot be accomplished without, at the very minimum, changing our ideas, abandoning cherished beliefs and prejudices, giving up various daily comforts and rights, submitting to some new daily life regimen, changing our social and political roles, reassigning our rights, duties and responsibilities and altering our behaviors to better conform to collective needs and a common will. The world around us – our geographies – must be radically re-shaped, as must our social relations, the relation to nature and all of the other moments in the co-revolutionary process. There are various broad fractious currents of thought on the left as to how to address the problems that now confront us. Much work has to be done to coalesce these various tendencies around the underlying question: can the world change materially, socially, mentally and politically in such a way as to confront, not only the dire state of social and natural relations in so many parts of the world, but also the perpetuation of endless compound growth? Communists, Marx and Engels averred, in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order, as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as dead and buried there are, by this definition, millions of de facto communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is possible'?

A cacophony of crises challenges neoliberalism and marks a fundamental reversal in capitalism itself. This is a systemic failure of the capitalist mode of production to renovate and renew itself through a multiplicity of environmental and resource crises and the financial crises which has important links with the real economy. Capitalism cannot survive by simply inventing new institutions – global or national – or by shifting to another phase. New nationalisms and protectionisms loom on the horizon, while darker shades of xenophobia are another possible scenario. A further possibility lies in the emergence of informalized labor markets and economies as a result of the last phase of neoliberal globalization. Informalization or disposessed surplus labor has some revolutionary potential. The paper discusses various alternatives based on the new economy of the informalized sectors

The events triggered by defaults on ‘sub-prime’ mortgages have been widely described as constituting a ‘crisis’. But a crisis of what exactly? Several different explanations of the 20 month drama that unfolded from summer 2007 have been proposed by a wide range of commentators. These include journalists, academics, politicians, business-people, pundits and public administrators, among others. This essay parses this superfluity of crisis talk into five principal accounts. It focuses on the Anglo-American scene. The interpretations presented range from the simplistic and populist to the complex and specialised. They are compared and contrasted, and in each case their diverse normative implications are sketched. As a Marxist, I argue that the fifth interpretation – which speaks to macro-economic imbalances and asymmetries of class power – is the most compelling. But I also argue that each of the other interpretations can be narrated and politicised in such a way as to advance Left arguments for far-reaching socio-economic reform. Yet, this fact notwithstanding, the Left – by which I mean those positioned left of both New Labour and the Democrats – has so far failed to use the recent crisis to its political advantage. This, I suggest, is a sign of its long-standing marginality in Britain and the US – a marginality so entrenched that even an acute economic crisis has been unable to alter it. This crisis thus reveals a seeming paradox: the continued strength of neoliberal capitalism despite itself.

This article critiques and offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ using an actor-based and relational epistemology. ‘Culture’ and ‘creativity’ have been socially constructed in scale-specific terms that overlook everyday practices that can diverge from dominant patterns and suggest hopeful possibilities, which ironically are lost in many Left-leaning narratives. Hopeful possibilities are traceable analytically to circuits of material and discursive value, which are inextricably related but can entail different trajectories across scales. Tracing these trajectories requires analytical attention to microscale activity, that is, to individual actors’ material practices, which produce mutable, discursive and material value at multiple scales.

The daily media is filled with images of catastrophic events which seem increasingly frequent and violent. In parallel there are a large range of scientific studies, debates in the policy arena, and a growing number of international institutions focused on disaster reduction. But a paradox remains that despite advances in technology, disasters continue to increase, affecting many individuals in rich as well as poor countries.

The tranquil setting in the North Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota obscures a centuries-old history of resource conflict between indigenous Ojibwe people and whites. The subsistence activities of the Ojibwe, including hunting and fishing, have been restricted by whites to ever-smaller geographies in part to bolster capitalist extractive industries and tourist economies. Only recently have the Ojibwe successfully reasserted their treaty rights to hunt and fish off their reservations through litigation with the States of Wisconsin and Minnesota. White business owners- in what became known as the walleye wars- subsequently spurred violent protests at lakes where the Ojibwe exercised their reclaimed right to spear valuable sport fish. Other Ojibwe legal victories during the course of the walleye wars forced state fish and game authorities to better cooperate with the tribes to regulate fish and game outside the reservation system. One example is the killing of thousands of fish-eating birds called cormorants on an Ojibwe-controlled island in Leech Lake, Minnesota. Ojibwe authorities and state fish and game managers touted their work together to exempt the cormorants nesting there from protection because they both claimed the waterfowl destroyed the local walleye fishery. I argue this killing of cormorants is actually an extension of the original walleye war aimed at the Ojibwe because both events criminalized subsistence in order to protect fish as capitalist commodities. Violence is necessary in the criminalization process to replace the labor of subsistence with labor that produces surplus and exchange value from walleyes. Thus I argue this constitutes a fundamental contradiction for the Ojibwe who must manage walleyes simultaneously as a means of subsistence and as commodities for the market. The real danger here is that Ojibwe authorities- in the act of shooting cormorants- inadvertently support the same violent logic used against their people in the past that could be deployed against them again in the future.

This article uses the lens of the East End of London, to examine 130 years of socialist and Marxist responses to racism and to ethnic and religious division. It looks both at how action was organised, and also at the debates of those trying to put Marxist ideas into practice, who all had to strike a balance between the pragmatic demands arising from working with ethnic minority groups, and the dangers of separatism. And it shows that, despite the difficulties, Marxism -far from neglecting divisions that cut across the basic economic categories of class, as is so often claimed – has a long history of analysing them and of arresting ethnic and racial conflict.

Published as two of geography's first open-access, online collections, Radical Theory/Critical Praxis (edited by Rob Kitchin and Duncan Fuller) and Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings (edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro) mark what is hopefully the beginning of more expansive challenge to the current political economy of academic publication. The editors note the immediate difficulties of such an experiment: copyright limitations of previously published work; desires to capitalize on the value of such collections; RAE and tenure pressures; and the “currency” of a new, alternative press.

Space, Oil and Capital contributes to the current and vibrant debate on energy resource scarcity and contestation. Conventional geopolitics and political economy focus on oil supply security, whose quantity and location are viewed in geologically deterministic terms (e.g., Klare 2001, 2004). A focus on geological limits makes competition for oil a competition for the control of the spaces in which it is located, or through which it is transported to consumers. Mazen Labban deviates from such arguments and proposes that it is not oil geology that produces geopolitical contestations, but the production of space in the process of competition that is crucial to producing the finiteness of oil. Drawing primarily from Marx, Luxemburg, Lefebvre and Harvey, Labban demonstrates that competition for oil is geared at ensuring that part of it stays out of the market in order to make its production profitable. Competition over oil, despite generally held beliefs, is not geared at ensuring supply, but at regulating supply and ensuring profit.