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Introduction - Enclosures and discontents: primitive accumulation and resistance under globalised capital
Abstract
Book synopsis: The contributions in this volume all revisit and reformulate Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation from diverse empirical contexts in the present global age. The chapters present research drawn from Gaza, Syria, Greece, the Philippines, DR Congo, and the Yucatan; global locations that have in common the ongoing, varied, and often repetitive occurrence of dispossession forced by violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, and corporate expansion. Each chapter also examines changing forms of resistance from across the political spectrum; responses which in themselves serve to demonstrate the deeply embedded, historically specific, class, race and gendered relations implicit in contemporary capitalist expansion. This collection of original work also pushes us to reconsider the old distinct mappings of urban and rural by comparing dispossession and resistance to it inside and outside of the city and within sites which call for a reconstituted understanding of ‘the urban’. Overall, the scholars included use rich and detailed research to variously correct and adjust Marx from their sites of study and through engagements with theoretical reformulations ranging from modernity/coloniality, through to autonomous Marxism. The chapters originally published as a special issue in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action.
... References to law also feature in more recent articulations of primitive accumulation under neoliberalism, including in David Harvey's (2005) notion of 'accumulation by dispossession' (hereinafter: AbD). However, even works that acknowledge the role of law in facilitating primitive accumulation (Harvey, 2005;Glassman, 2006;Levien, 2011;Hall, 2012;Adnan, 2013;AlShehabi and Suroor, 2016;Tilley et al., 2017) pay little conceptual attention to concrete legal and judicial mechanisms. Thus Hall's (2012Hall's ( : 1190 sweeping complaint that 'while capitalism requires an institutional and legal framework, the literature has almost nothing to say about this framework's relationship to primitive accumulation' remains largely valid. ...
Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?
In this article I argue that cities in the global South constitute a distinctive ‘type’ of human settlement. I begin by critiquing Brenner and Schmid’s concept of planetary urbanization which erases difference among cities and locates the essence of urbanity in the global North. I echo their criticism of postcolonial urbanism, however, which has struggled to articulate precisely how Southern cities differ from their Northern counterparts. I then propose three tendencies that, when taken together, serve as the basis of an emergent paradigm of Southern urbanism. First, I assert that cities in the South tend to exhibit a persistent disconnect between capital and labor. Second, I demonstrate that their metabolic configurations are discontinuous, dynamic, and contested. Finally I argue that political economy is not the overriding context within which urban processes unfold, but rather it is always already co-constituted with the materiality of Southern cities. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of characteristics exhibited uniformly by all cities in the global South. Instead, I hope that it serves as a starting point for city-centric scholarship that can account for very real differences between/among cities without constructing cities in the South as pathological and in need of development interventions
New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on the urban question continue to proliferate and intensify within the social sciences, the planning and design disciplines, and in everyday political struggles. Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology of the urban: through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood? After surveying some of the major contemporary mainstream and critical responses to this question, we argue for a radical rethinking of inherited epistemological assumptions regarding the urban and urbanization. Building upon reflexive approaches to critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, we present a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses. This epistemological framework is intended to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary debates on the urban question and to offer an analytical basis for deciphering the rapidly changing geographies of urbanization and urban struggle under early 21st-century capitalism. Our arguments are intended to ignite and advance further debate on the epistemological foundations for critical urban theory and practice today.
I could feel the knife in my hand, still slippery with perspiration. A Slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus—erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover . . .
. . .
I pulled the knife free of him somehow, raised it, and brought it down again into his back.
This time he only grunted. He collapsed across me, somehow still alive, still holding my arm.
. . .
Something harder and stronger than Rufus's hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving.
Something . . . paint, plaster, wood—a wall. The wall of my living room. I was back home—in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—or growing into it. . . . I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. I was the exact spot Rufus's finger had grasped.
I pulled my arm toward me, pulled hard.
And suddenly, there was an avalanche of pain, red impossible agony! And I screamed and screamed.
Houses are unsettling hybrid structures. A house is, in all its figurings, always thing, domain, and meaning—home, dwelling, and property; shelter, lodging, and equity; roof, protection, and aspiration—oikos, that is, house, household, and home. A house is a juridical-economic-moral entity that, as property, has material (as asset), political (as dominium), and symbolic (as shelter) value. Houses, as such, refer to the three main axes of modern thought: the economic, the juridical, and the ethical, which are, as one would expect, the registers of the modern subject. It is, in fact, impossible to exaggerate the significance of individual (private) property in representations of modernity. No wonder, in Kindred, Octavia Butler chose to signal the end of Dana's incomprehensible task—her travels to antebellum Maryland to save her white ancestor, Rufus, whenever his life was in danger—with her losing part of her arm (at the "exact spot Rufus's fingers had grasped") stuck in the wall of her house. A "red impossible agony" marked the end of her forced journeys, reminding Dana that whenever summoned by Rufus she could either kill him or let him die. Since her charge was to keep him alive, the only choice she ever had was never hers to make. Having made the choice, she finally realized that, as his descendant, she had a debt to Rufus, expressed as the obligation to keep him alive. Failing to meet this obligation, killing him or letting him die, tantamount to refusing the debt, and with it the relationship, as it did, would result in punishment of the worst kind for Dana.
Failing to pay a mortgage, the notorious subprime loan, charged interest rates far in excess of those offered to "prime borrowers," "high-risk borrowers," like Dana, also owe a debt that exceeds the legitimacy of both the law (contract) and morality (obligation). References to law and morality, expectedly, prevail in condemnations of those served with "subprime" loans, who are construed as intellectually (illiterate) and morally (greedy) unfit if measured against any existing descriptors of the modern economic subject: the (liberal) rational self-interested, the (historical-materialist) productive-creative laborer, and the (neoliberal) obligation-bound debtor/creditor. The "immanent risk of foreclosure" and ultimately loss of home for millions in the United States overwhelmingly affected Black and Latino/a borrowers and communities. Lacking property and stocks passed down through generations and burdened by greater reliance on consumer credit, Black and Latino/a borrowers were less able to weather the sudden decline in home values. Foregrounding their predicament, the incomprehensible task of affording the consequences of not-paying what the lenders knew were unpayable debts allows questions that challenge the assumption that the failure to meet an obligation should necessarily lead to punishment when the lender's profits are secured by betting and spreading the...
Urban constellations is an unusual and intellectually stimulating book. It is composed of 37 short 3-6 pages texts written by geographers, architects, sociologists, anthropologists, artists and film scholars. It is organised in 5 different sections: 'urban lexicons', 'crises and perturbations', 'places and spaces', 'projections', with in the middle of the volume a gallery of urban photographs and art works entitled 'excursions'. The title and the form of the volume are inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Together with their predecessor Georg Simmel, these founders of urban sociology developed during the early years of the 20 th century a sensorial analysis of urbanism based on the observation of particular features of the city in a series of generally brief vignettes (Frisby, 1988; Füzeserry and Simay, 2008). 1 The texts assembled by Matthew Gandy follow the same principle: they focus on specific aspects of the urban – from the return of bedbugs in London to the disappearance of plywood cutouts from the streets of Chennai – as symptoms of wider urban phenomena. The challenge of the book is to leave the reader with a set of constellations or figures delineated by the connection of these fragments and producing a synthetic understanding of the contemporary city. In this brief review essay I reflect on the achievements of the book, how it revisits the project of early urban sociology and to what extent it manages to draw such urban constellations.
Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large-scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of "civilization" and "savagery", and its inherently whitening logics, re-appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies.
Existing theoretical perspectives, whether Marx's primitive accumulation or Harvey's accumulation by dispossession, are not adequate for understanding the political economy of land dispossession under capitalism-in India or elsewhere. This paper advances the concept of "regimes of dispossession" as a better way of understanding how dispossession is politically organised in different socio-historical contexts to serve different class interests with variable economic effects and political "success." The land-grabs of the neo-liberal period in India represent the emergence of a new regime of redistributing landed wealth upwards, one that is demonstrably less "developmental" than its Nehruvian predecessor-and certainly more politically tenuous. The paper shows how the concept of regimes of dispossession aids in a better understanding of (i) the relationship between land-grabs and specific historical phases of capitalism, and (ii) India's contemporary land question.
Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under British Rule. The first book of its kind to present a comparative history of New and Old Delhi. Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses. Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings. Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life.
Singapore is at a critical juncture. Riots in 2013 brought simmering cultural, class and ethnic tensions to the surface: Lee Kuan Yew's death in March 2015 has caused the nation to pause and reflect on its past and future. A cultural war has seen progressive and conservative societal factions battling over ideological and material space. Parallels can be drawn to resurgent activism witnessed around the world, from ‘Occupy’ and the ‘Arab Spring’ to current movements in Asian cities. Authors have been revisiting and reconceptualizing urban social and political movements, with ‘cultural activism’ and ‘creative resistance’ gaining traction in literature. Increasingly, such literature is expanding to include non-Western cities and differing political contexts. However, Singapore's unique context invites (and requires) a closer reading of what the ‘new’ geographies of activism look like in a quasi-authoritarian context, and the make-up and characteristics of activist coalitions and alliances deserve a revisiting in such a setting. This paper uses empirical examples from Singapore to show that urban social movements (USMs) may not be as easily demarcated or identifiable as they are sometimes represented. ‘Right’ and ‘left’, ‘State’ and ‘society’, and ‘activist’ and ‘non-activist’ overlap and interact in complex ways unique to Singapore's ‘illiberal pragmatic’ structure. Therefore, this paper addresses the transferability of ‘cultural activism’ conceptualizations to less-democratic settings or city-state scales, presenting the activist spaces as somewhat ambivalent and ambiguous, within a wider cultural war. Findings are presented through the cases of Bukit Brown and Singapore's ‘digital sphere’, illustrating where possibilities and impossibilities for ‘spaces of hope’ might be found, and exploring the tensions intrinsic to Singapore's cultural landscape.
Where is the planet in much of the work on ‘planetary urbanisation’? Largely off-stage, it has to be said. The planet, then, has to be brought on stage and, so to speak, earthed. This instalment indicates some of the gaps, distortions and silences in the academic field of ‘planetary urbanisation’, and provides, developing a multidimensional, transdisciplinary (rather than interdisciplinary) approach, some necessary infilling and new/old orientations, ones that can contribute to the reclamation of the already over-urbanised planet.
One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot lead to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalized and naturalized forms and processes of late capitalist urbanization, normalized by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a ‘planetary future’. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum – hence the rise of assemblage theory - and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of ‘extra-scientific’ resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience (‘the university of the streets’), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations.This episode continues a recontextualisation of that agenda in the light, particularly of the occupation this summer of Gezi Park in Istanbul and Guattari's notion of ‘three ecologies’ in relation to praxis - that is, an interacting and critical mutuality of theorized practice and practised theory.
The Arab spring and the simultaneous Greek struggles and now the Turkish and Egyptian struggles of 2013 have been presented in ‘the West’ largely as opportunities for the ‘the East’ to catch up with modern, secular democratic society. But could it be the other way round? Could it be that Egypt, for example, in challenging the pieties and self-assurance of the West's positive characterization of itself has, as Nasser Abourahme claims in this issue, changed their relative positions, that the West is being in effect relocated behind Egypt? This episode in the series ‘Towards the Great Transition’ considers that claim in the light of that possible and long overdue transition, particularly in the context of the discussion of planetary urbanization, continuing to consider whether urban studies and the socio-spatial sciences have the tools to do justice to what is happening. In so doing it draws on another debate on this issue, on Telescopic Urbanism, as introduced by Ash Amin, and particularly as discussed by Ananya Roy with particular reference to India.
Where is the planet in much of the work on ‘planetary urbanisation’? Largely off-stage, it has to be said. This instalment seeks - drawing from some of the material introduced in this series, notably Patrick Keiller's film, Robinson in Ruins and David Abram's book, Becoming Animal, as well as from Adrian Atkinson's contribution in this issue, ‘Readjusting to reality 2 Transition?’, Andy Merrifield's recent book, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban theory and protest under planetary urbanisation, and pointing towards Marx's late agrarian-inclined work—to indicate some of the gaps and silences in the academic field, and to provide some necessary infilling and new/old orientations, developing a transdisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, approach
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
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ROY A. The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory, Regional Studies. This paper calls for 'new geographies' of imagination and epistemology in the production of urban and regional theory. It argues that the dominant theorizations of global city-regions are rooted in the EuroAmerican experience and are thus unable to analyse multiple forms of metropolitan modernities. By drawing on the urban experience of the global South, the paper presents new conceptual vectors for understanding the worlding of cities, the production of space, and the dynamics of exurbanity. It makes the case that such area-based knowledge deepens recent theoretical attempts to articulate a relational study of space and place.
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