Capital Dynamics Research Articles

Accumulation at the point of extraction: understanding contemporary capitalist dynamics in large-scale extraction illustrated by iron ore mining in Northern Quebec

This paper examines how the latest iron ore mining cycle evolved and impacted Quebec’s mining industry and communities. Our research aims to explain how globally integrated mining corporations take advantage of and generate disruptive boom and bust dynamics, leading to specific forms of restructuring at the local level. Our main argument is that overcapacity and overproduction can enhance capital accumulation rather than undermine it, given the monopolistic nature of the contemporary mining sector.

The dialectics of capital: learning from Gran Chaco

The critical impact of humans on the biosphere has led scientists to coin the term Anthropocene. The global environmental changes associated with it are happening under the aegis of capitalism. A transition towards sustainability requires a critical scrutiny of capitalism. The social–ecological system (SES) approach conceptualises the relationship between the socio-economic subsystem and the biosphere. However, in its various operationalisations it either treats the former as a black box or it fails to capture dynamic aspects. We address these limits and develop a Dialectical Socio-Ecological System (D-SES) framework, which combines process ecology with historical materialism, to describe the emergence and persistence of capitalist dynamics. We draw on data collected through fieldwork and desk research and deploy our framework to study capital-intensive agriculture in the Chaco Salteño, an important agricultural frontier in South America, obtaining some general insights. We open up the socio-economic subsystem and break it down into a lower-level material/economic sphere and an upper-level cultural/institutional sphere. Capitalist dynamics emerge out of the peculiar relationships occurring both within and between these spheres. This configuration shows the typical signs of autocatalysis. It attracts resources and capital to expand itself (centripetality). It becomes more complex and organised over time, fine-tuning production modes, cultures, and institutions (directionality). It is subject to the laws of competition and profit maximisation, which emerge independently from the individual actors and processes making up the system (autonomy). Finally, it engenders frictions, reflecting class antagonism between the direct producers and the appropriators of wealth. These frictions can become leverage points for a system’s transformation.

Of Space and Alienation: South African stories of unfree life under racial capitalism

ABSTRACT This article explores how to make sense of the feeling of unfreedom in South Africa today and how this unfreedom, charged with local and historical legacies, can be connected to global capitalist dynamics. Paralleling excerpts of the oral histories of Khumo who moved to Johannesburg in 1976, and Kagiso, who moved in 2015, this piece discusses how dispossession characterises unfreedom. Bringing literature on racial capitalism back to South Africa, its place of origin, and grounding it in the narratives of Khumo and Kagiso, the piece discusses the history and development of global dynamics of spatial exclusion and subjective, material, and productive-creative alienation. Furthermore, it discusses how Khumo and Kagiso perceive dispossession as historical thus racialised and manufactured, and contest it by negating racialisation and the idea of freedom. The article thus contributes to wider debates about neoliberalism in Africa, and (global) racial capitalism, showing how dispossession remains the main expression of unfreedom under capitalism; and how unfree life is reproduced every day in and through cities, and is lived as alienation.

Marx’s fictitious capital: a misrepresented category revisited

AbstractIn this paper, we provide an interpretation of Marx’s category of fictitious capital by analysing its main attributes and pointing out its role in understanding the capitalist dynamics from a value-form approach. We criticise the widespread notion that fictitious capital is a category related to the degree of detachment between its capital value and the value of the real capital that it might eventually represent. We argue that fictitious capital should be defined by three key attributes: the future flow of income, the secondary market and its ‘real nonexistence’. Fictitious capital is therefore presented as the genetic development of interest-bearing capital, a process in which any expected money income is converted into a capital value in the present and transformed into a commodity. In this perspective, the importance of fictitious capital for the understanding of contemporary capitalism is analysed, particularly with respect to the process of the distribution of social labour.

The locally managed agrarian transition in China: Land shareholding cooperatives and the agricultural co-management system in Chongzhou, Sichuan

ABSTRACT China is undergoing a rapid agrarian transition from dispersed household farming to large-scale, mechanized, and commercialized agricultural production, while retaining collective rural land ownership. Reforms have encouraged transfers of rural land to new subjects of agriculture including agribusinesses, family farmers, and cooperatives, leading to capitalist dynamics in agriculture both from above and from below. Central-state pressure to scale up and modernize agriculture has led local governments to engage in creative experimentation with new institutional forms. This article investigates one such innovation, which has been widely lauded as an important model: the creation of an “agricultural co-management system” in Chongzhou City, Sichuan province, which combines land shareholding cooperatives (LSCs), the hiring of new professional farm managers for the LSCs, and state-provided agricultural services aimed at modernization. We demonstrate that the Chongzhou government’s experimentation arose from political economic incentives to capitalize and modernize agriculture as well as the locally specific circumstances of the failure of a dragonhead enterprise. Examining the three components of the agricultural co-management system in depth, we argue that it has deepened rural differentiation through a process of state-led accumulation, and that the continued scaling up of LSCs in the context of a new modern agricultural functional zone threatens to further erode shareholder control. These LSCs, set within the agricultural co-management system, are a new subject of agriculture that combine elements of capitalization from above and below.

Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport

This article introduces a virtual special issue that carries the same title. We open our editorial by observing that the contemporary transport debate continues to find strong inspiration in the notion of “sustainable” development, which strongly resonates among academics and practitioners alike. While placing important environmental issues on the agenda, sustainable approaches to urban transport exhibit a number of serious limitations, as, as it has insufficiently engaged with diverse social, political and economic dynamics that shape how transport is planned, regulated, organised, practiced and contested in urban contexts. To respond to this gap, we propose to develop an emerging “critical” perspective on urban transport, which considers it it to be socially constructed and contested, underpinned by structural power dynamics, class relations, gender and patriarchy, ethnicity and race. Building on critical urban theory, we argue that being critical about urban transport involves approaching it as a phenomenon that reproduces complex social and spatial processes, and acts as a crucial component of capitalism. On the one hand, this means analysing transport policy, practice and infrastructure through the lens of capitalist dynamics observed in particular urban contexts. On the other, it entails exploring the complexity of processes, institutions and interests that make up a city through its transport. While critical research on transport and mobility may be on the rise, it still constitutes a rather marginal research area. Therefore, the objective of the virtual special issue is to advance the critical agenda of transport research. The diverse contributions to this virtual special issue offer a number of avenues for thinking critically with and through urban transport as part and parcel of capitalism. Our authors discuss theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying transport, and offer empirical analyses of specific policies and practices, inquiring into their socio-spatial impact, political-economic embeddedness and the power relations and regulatory frameworks by which they are shaped. What emerges from this anthology is that there is no singular or universal way of being critical about urban transport. Unravelling and analysing power and ideology underpinned and reproduced by transport in urban settings is by no means an exercise that hinges on a particular theoretical lens or focuses on a specific social group or factor. As this endavour is far from complete, we outline several directions for further critical research. Notably, we suggest to diversify spaces and scales of analysis by exploring long-distance travel, to diversify research objects by analysing freight and logistics. We also note that future research could consider diversifying social theories and epistemologies through which transport is perceived, to contribute to a decolonial turn in transport studies.

Confronting global infrastructural capitalism: the triple logic of the 'vanguard' and its inevitable spatial and class contradictions in China's high-speed rail program

ABSTRACT We take infrastructure as a ‘keyword’ in foregrounding the production and the reproduction of contemporary capitalism as well as its complexities and contradictions. To tease out the capitalist dynamics of the contemporary moment as infrastructural capitalism, this paper moves beyond a dichotomous constellation of the logic of capital and the territorial logic of power, to argue how a triple logic- capital, power, and culture informs the cultural politics, attempting to simultaneously resolve the economic crisis and glorify China’s fast-speed capitalism. As the vanguard of Chinese infrastructural politics, the high-speed rail spearheads the Chinese spatial economic system towards one that is not an alternative to capitalism but, at best, a variegated form of moving capitalism, which we call infrastructural capitalism. Illuminating the political role of the infrastructural projects in creating invisible social contradictions, this article highlights a wide array of affected working-class masses who take individual and collective actions that result in the reversion of ‘the vanguard’, dissolving the condensation of the materiality of infrastructural capitalism into the global assemblage of unpredictable but inescapable contradictions driving China into global imperial rivalries and class conflicts. (178 words)

State Capitalism and Spanish port development along the Maritime Silk Road

With the rise of ‘new’ state capitalisms, control over transport infrastructure has returned to the forefront of competition in the global economy. This article investigates how different state capitalisms interact to enable economic developments in ports. It tracks the relationship between state-owned firms in the shipping and ports sectors through a case study of the port of Valencia in Spain and COSCO shipping group. The article identifies state capitalisms as variegated and relational to analyze the ways in which qualitatively different state capitalist dynamics interact at different scales. The article identifies two state capitalist dynamics which have been dominant in determining relations between Spanish and Chinese state capitalisms: 1) A commercial dynamic of maximizing Spanish ports profits by establishing new relationships with Chinese firms; and 2) an expansionary dynamic of increasing market share of Chinese state-owned firms in European shipping markets. These two dynamics are synergistic and have contributed to the competitiveness of Spanish ports and Chinese shipping firms by providing new capital to the port of Valencia and expanding the port's profile as a hub in the eastern Mediterranean, while also further solidifying COSCO's position in European shipping markets and its internalization and vertical integration strategy.

An Evolutionary Perspective on the Endogenous Instability of Capitalist Dynamics

AbstractThis article is a theoretical and conceptual exploration into the study of the dynamics of financial innovations and their consequences in market economies. Drawing upon the works of Schumpeter and Minsky in an institutionalist and evolutionary tradition, the article puts forward the monetary and financial features of the 21st century economies and the recurrent systemic financial instabilities generated within the context of the financialization process. It then calls for alternative regulatory reforms capable of leading to sustainable economic development. The originality of the analysis lies in the fact that the micro-dynamics of innovations may result in both creative and destructive outcomes since there are some crucial differences between entrepreneurial innovations à la Schumpeter as the positive force in economic development, and financial innovations à la Minsky as the source of instabilities. The article then focuses on the weaknesses and inconsistencies of loosely regulated financial markets and suggests a few principles for relevant financial regulation in an endogenously unstable economy. The main contribution of the article is that financial stability must be regarded as a public good to be provided by an economy-wide regulatory framework under the supervision of a visible public hand. The study of the conditions of financial stability proves to be a matter of a specific social dilemma—opposition between private and public interests—that concerns the organisation and management of financial markets at the macroeconomic level. Such a dilemma leads to the ultimate regulatory issue of spurring the innovation dynamics of financial markets while ensuring systemic stability and sustainability through an appropriate regulatory and supervisory environment.

Conceptualizing China's tea history in the 19th century: Incorporation into the capitalist world‐economy

AbstractRecent accounts of China's tea history in the 19th century have been presented without adequate attention to global capitalism's dynamics, despite the fact that researchers have explicitly or implicitly accepted the idea that China experienced a massive and unprecedented change in tea cultivation during this period, prompted by the penetration of capitalist logics. By analysing China's capitalist incorporation process, I show why and how tea‐growing areas in southern China drove an export‐oriented process of tea cultivation, increasing the number of seasonal workers—including Chinese tea growers migrating to British India's tea plantations—and contributing to ecological degradation and economic underdevelopment. In addition, analysis of China's incorporation process helps to investigate the relationship between China's tea industry and its early industrialization. By allowing us to examine China's tea history and the dynamics of the capitalist world‐economy in the long 19th century in tandem, the concept of China's incorporation process elicits macrolevel, global, and historical narratives of the 19th century Chinese tea history.

Building Out the Edges: Reading Racial Capitalism Into Jean Anyon’s Political Economy of Urban Education

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

ENTREPRENEURIAT INNOVANT AU MAROC : MENACES &OPPORTUNITES

Entrepreneurship is the spearhead of market economies (OECD, 1998) whose actor is considered as a maker of projects (according to Cantillon 1755), or even an engine of capitalist dynamics (according to Schumpeter 1911). He is also an opportunity finder who, despite the uncertainty and risk, enthusiastically spots profitability activities. It is clear that entrepreneurship represents a boon for developing countries by injecting new impetus into economic growth. He promises to limit poverty without limiting wealth (Victor Hugo) and to reduce the social and economic gap. Morocco has made significant progress in a perspective that aims to mark the ground for a better valuation of the entrepreneurial act. However, the effectiveness of these efforts appears to be limited by a lack of financial motivation among researchers and the absence of a risk culture of our financial institutions. Also, the economic valuation of knowledge remains far behind compared to the immediate concerns of national university researchers who invest their time and knowledge in basic research. In Morocco, entrepreneurs suffer from the lack or the inadequacy with their aspirations of the means and actions mobilized that do not benefit from fundingup to the requirements of the project carried, a sine qua non conditions for the creation of innovative companies, meeting their ambitions. Is the Moroccan entrepreneurial context well thought in order to help develop and enhance the innovation potential of the country? Is it able to attract and enable innovative entrepreneurs? Our aim is to explore both the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the different interactions it can have,in the Moroccan context,with an innovative entrepreneurial approach, while paying particular attention to the bottlenecks in the process of creating a business, that may underminetake-off opportunities for entrepreneurial activity.

Marx as a guide for a critical geographer

This paper provides an account of my intellectual journey. Beginning with an un-theorised concern with inequality, this journey has taken me through jousts with statistical models of social systems to theoretical and empirical investigations of primitive accumulation, capitalist dynamics and human–nature interactions. Marx has played an essential role in this intellectual journey, though increasingly his insights have been supplemented by other traditions of social scientific thought, including feminism, physical geography and ecology. For me, as (seemingly) for most on the left, it has proved a frustrating task to reconcile the core insights of Marx about capitalist dynamics with the knowledge provided by these other traditions – a task that remains incomplete.

Late Neoclassical Economics as Neoliberal Neurosis

This commentary reflects on the potential of Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics for comprehending neoliberalism. Extending Madra's work, it presents an ideology critique of late neoclassical economics (LNE) as articulating a social fantasy of harmonious market order that enables neoliberal proponents to structure their reality against the Real of Capital. Madra's exposition of LNE's orientation around the theoretical problematic of neoclassical humanism enables consideration of neoliberalism as informed by an obsessional neurotic logic, whereby subjects postpone encountering the Real via repeated ideological modifications to preserve their fantasy against traumatic incursions. Exploring the conditions of possibility for functioning markets, LNE reinforces the fantasy of market order through theoretical innovations rationalizing increasingly intensive measures to realize it. Thus, symptoms bleeding through gaps between the Symbolic reality of neolibealism and the Real of Capital are disavowed as market and cognitive failures, foreclosing critical engagement with capitalist dynamics. This is illustrated through examining the new institutional economics of development as disavowing the violence of capitalism.

Rethinking rural‐urban linkages: Villages and agribusiness in the Ecuadorian Highlands

AbstractThis article addresses current linkages between rural villages and agribusiness in two rural territories in the Ecuadorian highlands. It seeks to analyse rural space endogenously or “from the inside” in order to highlight the socio‐economic changes that have been generated in rural villages embedded in territories dominated by agribusiness. These changes correspond not only to the capitalist dynamics generated by these agribusinesses but also to the responses of local actors. Far from disappearing from the rural scene, these villages have adapted to different degrees to the new conditions and opportunities within the territory. In no way, they can be considered as passive recipients of the capitalist dynamics implemented over the last three decades. On the contrary, to the extent that they have managed to reactivate their productive functions in a diversified manner, they have laid the social and material bases for their continued territorial relevance and permanence.

Capitalism and Political Strategy in Post-Marxist Discourse Theory. Reply to Jacobs

In this paper, I provide a short reply to Jacobs’s critical appraisal of my previous article, “Ernesto Laclau’s Oblivion of Political Economy,” published in this journal, volume 32, number 2 (2020). There, I had argued that Laclau’s post-Marxism suffered from a marked incapacity to theorize the extent to which capitalist dynamics affect ongoing hegemonic struggles. In this regard, Jacobs argues that I implicitly resort to an ontological dualism at odds with post-Marxism’s ontological stance, from which an essentialist account of capitalist dynamics ensues. I argue that, while remaining firmly within post-Marxism's core ontological assumptions, further theoretical integration of political economy approaches is a promising path for enhancing post-Marxism’s usefulness for strategic reflection, as both of us ultimately aim to do.

The Abstract Grid of Distribution

The necessity of immediate transition from fossil fuels has made painfully conspicuous the fact that energy sources such as solar and wind do not have the same material properties as coal and oil, and has attracted critical attention to the ways in which the social values and political-economic possibilities of the last century and a half have depended on a fossil regime. This essay takes up the notion of solar economy to ask what such a perspective may reveal that goes beyond a petro-analytic framework centered on the material properties of fuel. Drawing on Marx, Bataille, and Deleuze and Guattari, I emphasize the interrelated themes of the distribution of excess, the socius or virtual body of the social, and the reproduction of form. Taking as an example California’s recent struggles to make good on what some have viewed as the revolutionary potential of solar, this essay argues that capitalist dynamics can survive a material influx of the solar energy if more is not done to elaborate a transversal and molecular distribution of excess that solarity as a general condition invites. This discussion provides a starting point for a broad assessment of the nature and status of subjectivity in relation to questions of energy, infrastructure, and capitalism today.

Real Estate Development Through Land Grabs: Predatory Accumulation and Precarity in Palestine

ABSTRACT This paper examines the repurposing of Palestinian rural lands for real estate investment. Focusing on Rawabi, the celebrated first Palestinian planned city, this study unsettles the city’s narrative of triumphant urban development within an empty rural landscape by centering the experiences of the three villages on whose land this real estate scheme was built. Arguing that this project constitutes a neoliberal mode of capitalist accumulation that is based on seizing the assets of marginalized communities and classes, the paper analyzes how these processes are exposing communities to further precarity. Examining the land grab upon which this city is based, we detail the repercussions of the asset stripping for the peasant communities in question and shed new light on how predatory accumulation is transforming rural spaces, life and class relations in Palestine. In doing so, this paper situates global capitalist dynamics within the settler colonial realities in Palestine and begins to examine their implications for Palestinians struggling to remain on their land.

Screening For Colorectal Cancer in the Age of Simulation Models: A Historical Lens

Screening For Colorectal Cancer in the Age of Simulation Models: A Historical Lens

Le aspettative finzionali: una nuova analisi della dinamica del capitalismo

The article presents Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics by economic sociologist Jens Beckert and the main concepts he proposes, particularly that of “Fictional Expectation”, as well as the path followed for coming to its definition. The book focuses on the issue of the temporal nature of social and economic action, and the connected fundamental problem of uncertainty of the future. Dealing with these issues is a challenge for economic sociology and for economics, as well as for all the social sciences. The author addresses the challenge through an interdisciplinary approach, that also resorts to literature and narrative theory in order to deal with the fictional nature of expectations. Beckert’s book has not been translated into Italian but it has been widely read and appreciated overseas (some reviewers say it could become a “modern classic” of economic sociology). The article also addresses some of the issues that have emerged from the debate that followed the publishing of the book.