Dynamics Of Capital Accumulation Research Articles

Systemic cycles of accumulation and chaos in the world capitalist system: a missing link

Abstract We re-examine the systemic cycles of accumulation (SCA) of Arrighi (2010) and Arrighi and Silver (1999) which provide a framework for the analysis of the cyclical patterns of geographical expansion of trade and production and the related shifts of hegemonic power within the world capitalist system. Within the SCA framework, the last stage of a hegemonic cycle is characterized by what is called ‘systemic chaos’. However, the drivers of these dynamics have not been explicitly analyzed. This article fills this gap by providing a link between the accumulation process and systemic chaos. Introducing the logistic map into the SCA analysis, our approach provides the missing detailed understanding of how systemic chaos is an outcome of the contradictory socioeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation itself while being based on the key insights of the SCA framework of hegemonic cycles.

Touristification and urban extractivism in Latin American destinations: Heritage and conflicts in Antigua Guatemala (Guatemala) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)

ABSTRACT Tourism is linked to new dynamics of capital accumulation in a wide variety of destinations worldwide, boosting the attraction of real estate investments. In Latin America, the state promoted tourism, advocating for the commodification of urban land leading to the regeneration of different historical centers, and then to displacement and segregation of the local population. Heritage recognition policies were a necessary part of triggering this trend, articulated with other urban dynamics, such as gentrification. Visual dimension of built environment understood as an urban landscape is a key in tourist and residential practices, as well as in investment strategies. Following an instrumental multiple study case strategy based on primary and secondary sources, and by fieldwork including interviews and photographic record, this article analyzes touristification in Antigua Guatemala (Guatemala) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), drawing on the theoretical concept of urban extractivism, and its relation with heritagization and gentrification processes. Both cities were founded during the colonial period, went through a heritagization process and are now consolidated as international tourist destinations. As a conclusion, touristification is considered as an expression of urban extractivism based on the reification of the built environment, in turn rooted on heritage recognition policies, overlapped with gentrification.

Polycrisis and the metamorphosis of tourism capitalism

While the disruption caused by the COVID19 pandemic has receded, tourism capitalism continues to be imbricated in multiple and intersecting crises. This paper argues that the roots of such crises and the manner of their unfolding do not merely ‘impact’ tourism but have been incubated within and shaped by the structural dynamics of tourism capital accumulation itself. This paper draws on a historical materialist epistemology and critical theorization of capitalism to challenge orthodox framings of tourism crises and their deep-rooted structural drivers. The paper reflects on the nature of crises in relation to the mutations of Spanish tourism capitalism and the continual efforts to resolve the crisis-prone nature of tourism.

Policrisis y metamorfosis del capitalismo turístico

While the disruption caused by the pandemic has receded, tourism capitalism continues to be im‐ bricated in multiple and intersecting crises. This paper argues that the roots of such crises and the manner of their unfolding do not merely ‘impact’ tourism but have been incubated within and shaped by the structur‐ al dynamics of tourism capital accumulation itself. This paper draws on a historical materialist epistemology and critical theorization of capitalism to challenge orthodox framings of tourism crises and their deep‐rooted structural drivers. Finally, the paper reflects on the nature of crises in relation to the mutations of Spanish tourism capitalism and the continual efforts to resolve the crisis‐prone nature of tourism.

Environmental struggles and insularity: The right to nature in Mallorca and Tenerife

Islands worldwide experience commodification of land and natural resources that is closely related to touristic activity and urbanization. Islands represent the epitome of commodified represented spaces, power, and territorialization, and in this regard, focusing on islands may shed light on how the production of socio-natures shapes the dynamics of capital accumulation, dispossession, and resistance. We explore the contestation of urban-tourist development in Majorca and Tenerife. Both have experienced an intense expansion of artificial land uses since the touristic boom in the mid-20th century, which has intensified with neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of everyday life elements. Environmental struggles in both islands have facilitated greater mobilization than other claims. An empirical survey of the spatio-temporal evolution of these two islands illustrates and helps to deepen the conceptual development of the right to the island and nature. The idea of the right to nature consists of the right to influence and rule the processes by which nature–society relationships are (re)shaped by urbanization and capitalism. The notion of the right to the island relies on the political action to foster a sustainable island future.

How are personal wealth and trust correlated? A social capital–based cross‐sectional study from Latvia

AbstractThe relation between social capital and socio‐economic wealth is a highly debated topic in development studies. This article aims at investigating the relationship between personal wealth and trust. It combines social capital with social categorization theory through a structural equation model based on a data set of over 1000 observations collected in the Republic of Latvia, on the basis of stratified sampling, in 2010, in the wake of a deep financial and economic crisis. Main results suggest evidence of an indirect relationship between wealth and interpersonal trust, with institutional trust and social engagement as mediating factors. This evidence is tested for residence place dimensions, ethno‐linguistic affiliation, education and income. Main results hold for poorer, less educated and rural respondents, whereas significant discrepancies arise for urban respondents. Finally, results highlight the interplay of socio‐economic dimensions and social and cultural identity. This suggests the existence of different dynamics of social capital accumulation at play, depending on various socio‐demographic and socio‐economic dimensions.

Semiotics of a Covid landscape

Abstract This paper brings together urban planning and linguistic perspectives to examine the semiotic landscape of a Washington, DC ‘streatery’ in the context of the intersecting public health- and place-based economic crises unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from Garay-Huamán and Irazábal-Zurita’s (2021) work on neoliberal Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA), we examine how different layers of Adams Morgan’s emergent Covid landscape are rooted in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation through urban placemaking strategies. We focus on signs put up by the Business Improvement District (BID) that explain the public health regulations applicable to the area through discourse that playfully encourages people to social distance and wear masks. These signs utilize three linguistic or semiotic discourses: hygiene, humor and play, and anti-Trump politics. The signs serve as a bona fide effort to both halt the spread of the coronavirus and take a political stance. At the same time as the signs promote public health, their commodified aestheticization of hygiene and politics also serves commercial interests.

Testing Marx: Capital Accumulation, Income Inequality, and Socialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract We study the dynamics of capital accumulation, income inequality, capital concentration, and voting up to 1914. Based on new panel data for Prussian regions, we re-evaluate the famous Revisionism Debate between orthodox Marxists and their critics. We show that changes in capital accumulation led to a rise in the capital share and income inequality, as predicted by orthodox Marxists. But against their predictions, this did neither lead to further capital concentration nor to more votes for the socialists. Instead, trade unions and strike activity limited income inequality and fostered political support for socialism, as argued by the Revisionists.

Ten theses on the new state capitalism and its futures

Global capitalism is currently experiencing a turbulent and polymorphous (geo)political reordering, encompassing multiple transformations in the landscapes of state intervention, and a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world economy. Can the concept of state capitalism aid us in grasping these transformations conceptually? My answer is yes, with the proviso that state capitalism is neither conceptualised as a national (or regional) variety of capitalism, nor as a new regime of accumulation, but as a flexible means of problematising this historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention. Based on this approach, I offer in this essay ten theses on the new state capitalism, its roots in the dynamics of capital accumulation, its relations to broader material conflicts and its potential futures.

Canadian Real Estate and Financial Geographies

This article is about new governments for financial recovery after the financial crisis. The focus on tracing the creation of an active class derived from the security of rental income for detached houses has become rent. The study strategically combines conceptual agendas, and is discussed separately. Market formation theories rooted in scientific and technical studies provide information on the analytical method to pay attention to the work of realizing markets, the role of computer devices in market formation and the conditional and conditional aspects of markets. This analysis shows that renting families in an active class is a practical achievement. However, a broader framework rooted in the political economy is needed to address the broader meaning of the working class in terms of power, politics and the dynamics of capital accumulation. The article focuses in particular on the historical and geographical events that make it possible to invent a large-scale SFR market, the work of state and capital market players to reformulate single-family homes restored as rental properties, and the role of accounting practices in this process, and the strategies of issuers and credit rating agencies to develop a new asset class for institutional investors. The working-class points to the fundamental role for housing in the ideology of capital, and talks about new implications of financial role players and domestic life, as financial accumulation adapts to the context after the crisis. In addition to the financial financing of housing after the crisis, the article also shows how economic geographers can carefully integrate the theoretical perspectives to critically examine the conditions of market formation and the social, spatial and political consequences of markets.
 

El marxismo en los estudios urbanos

This article offers a review of the contribution of Marxist theory to urban studies. It focuses on four central themes in this field of research: first, the dynamics of capital accumulation and the organization of the built environment; second, the uneven geographical development in relation to the study of urbanization processes in peripheral regions of the planet; third, the processes of spatial segregation and related problems, such as ghettoization, displacement or gentrification; and fourth, urban social conflict. The current influence of Marxism in these fields is unequal. Marxist perspectives are most prominent in studies focussing on the role of space in the circulation and reproduction of capital. In the other fields, it has not achieved hegemony or has been displaced by poststructuralist or liberal approaches. After a period of academic consolidation of Marxist urban studies in the 1970s, these positions have been losing popularity, even within the academic niche of critical studies. Nevertheless, Marxism remains a driving force in current debates within urban studies and, in the authors' view, indispensable in addressing current urban processes from a materialist perspective.

Unclosure: The international law of seabed mining and the systemic cycles of capital accumulation

Abstract The growing electric vehicle industry is heavily reliant on minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. As corporations scramble to access vast deposits of those minerals lying in the ocean floor, the international law of seabed mining has come under scrutiny. This article situates negotiations concerning that law, which took place between 1973 and 1994, within Giovanni Arrighi’s historiographical framework of the systemic cycles of capital accumulation. It argues that the legal regime in question was shaped by the Reagan administration, as part of a strategy to solve a profitability crisis affecting US nationals. While temporarily diverting wealth towards American financial markets, however, the legal arrangements that the United States imposed could not affect the dynamics of capital accumulation on a global scale.

Bovine meat, authoritarian populism, and state contradictions in Modi's India

AbstractWhile authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to “state contradictions,” we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro‐industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize, have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of “double victimization.”

Turkey’s public–private partnership experience: a political economy perspective

ABSTRACT Public–private partnerships (PPP) are the contractual arrangements between public and private parties to deliver infrastructure and services in which costs, risks, and benefits are shared. Good governance of PPPs, traditionally associated with an effective regulatory and institutional framework, appropriate risk-sharing, competitive and transparent procurement have recently been broadened to include citizens’ perspectives. Turkey uses PPPs to deliver public infrastructures such as airports, energy plants, highways, bridges, and hospitals. Our first section into Turkey’s PPP experience explores how the partnership between state and capital is instituted. We reveal nine crucial governance problems: Complexities of megaprojects, fragmented legal and regulatory framework, weak institutional capacity, risk-sharing discrepancies, poor value for money, non-affordable public services, lack of transparency, limited accountability, and disregard for environmental sustainability. We maintain that a deeper understanding of PPPs requires complementing this governance analysis with insights from critical political economy. Accordingly, we draw a critical political economy framework to explain why, when, and how PPPs in Turkey are utilized in our second section. We underline the neoliberal transformation and financialized capital accumulation dynamics. We argue that PPP projects have fuelled the construction-led economic growth model, distributed resources to pro-government capital groups, and reproduced political power in Turkey.

Sovereign debt, fiscal policy, and macroeconomic instability

We study the relation between capital accumulation, fiscal policy, and sovereign debt dynamics in a small open economy. The government maximizes spending, facing borrowing constraints and a conditionality requirement. Debt dynamics are forward looking, being driven by the endogenous borrowing constraint. Current debt is determined by expectations about the government's ability to finance itself in the future, opening the room for indeterminacy. If the government believes it may issue more debt next period, the borrowing constraint relaxes, and current debt increases. The government invests more in productive activities, generating a boom which increases tax revenues. However, as this increase does not repay the additional debt, the government will issue more debt next period, confirming initial expectations. To exclude explosive trajectories, tax revenues must increase enough to repay the outstanding debt and reduce future debt emission. This is possible only with a sufficiently procyclical tax rate. In this case, if productive externalities are large enough, the economy exhibits local and global indeterminacy, as steady-state multiplicity is also obtained. Avoiding sufficiently procyclical tax rates, the government can prevent local and global fluctuations driven by self-fulfilling volatile expectations. This differs from the general wisdom that procyclical tax rates should be used for stabilization.

“The vision of these monstrous deformities”: Rurality, Peripheral Capitalism, and Narrative Voice in Brazilian Fiction

The article debates the relationship between rurality, modernity, and the the dynamics of capital accumulation, with a particular focus on the Brazilian author Graciliano Ramosʼs novel São Bernardo. The main interest of this study is in exploring what happens when the narrative device of the voluble, domineering first-person narrator that various critics – such as Roberto Schwarz, Franco Moretti, or the members of the WReC – have identified as a frequent device in peripheral literary works – is transposed to Brazil’s own peripheries, its rural hinterlands.

Geoporn: spectacular reproduction in Olympic Rio de Janeiro

This article proposes geoporn as an analytic lens to examine the ways in which the processes and effects of representing urban landscapes have remained remarkably consistent over several centuries. The analysis begins with the exploration of the differences and similarities between geoporn and ecoporn, suggesting that the latter lens is too narrowly focused on ecology and “nature” to examine the violences, exclusions, and power imbalances embedded in representations of place. By examining the ways in which representations of Rio de Janeiro create cascading power dynamics that range in scale from the landscape to the human body, this article proposes geoporn as an entrenched practice, an analytic frame, and a heuristic. The analysis begins with landscape paintings in Brazil’s colonial period and works through the dynamics of capital accumulation that reshaped Rio de Janeiro during a decade of hosting sports mega-events.

Marxism and the logics of dis/integration

Marxism is a large and diverse body of thought that has weathered many storms over the last 150 years. While its explanatory and political relevance to today's world is enormous, Marxism lacks mass appeal and largely resides in universities (notably, the social sciences and humanities). While this is, in one sense, a sign of defeat, in another sense it's been productive insofar as it's offered exponents space and time to make sense of capitalism's ever-changing configurations. This article homes-in on classical Marxism and its enduring importance as a tool of analysis and political thinking. It focuses on the author's attempts to understand how the biophysical world is entrained in the dynamics of capital accumulation, especially during the period of neoliberal political economy that began around 35 years ago. Marxist geographers continue to offer important insights into capitalism in a more-than-capitalist world that is, nonetheless, utterly dominated by the contradictory logics of growth, economic competition, endless technological innovation, uneven development, accumulation by dispossession and crisis. For me, classical Marxism's attention to capitalism as an expansive ‘totality’ is critical, obliging us to attend to how different places, people and political projects are brought into a single, if exceedingly complex, universe. The article reflects on how the embrace of classical Marxism necessarily folds the professional into the personal, though in ways that inevitably highlight some of the contradictions that Marx and Engels identified. It's to be hoped that a new and talented generation of Marxist geographers will continue the work initiated 50 years ago by David Harvey and others. The article suggests that a key research frontier for Marxist geography is normative: what sorts of political visions and proposals will gain traction in a variegated yet tightly connected world where capitalism is so manifestly dangerous for people and planet?

Understanding West Africa’s informal workers as working class

ABSTRACT Informal workers in Africa are very often portrayed as primarily self-employed entrepreneurs and unemployed individuals largely excluded from capitalism, and thus insulated from class analysis and class dynamics. Drawing on a case study of informal workers in Sierra Leone, the article challenges this dominant understanding, arguing that informal workers experience the reality of class relations and that their material lives are shaped by, and help to shape, broader dynamics of capital accumulation. The research applies a holistic class analysis rooted in Marxist and feminist thought, arguing for an understanding of informal workers, including even small-scale ‘self-employed’ individuals, as workers exploited by, and opposed to the interests of, capital. In so doing, it challenges the simple understandings of working class as existing only and exclusively through formalised wage work, in favour of a more complex and inductive understanding of the reality of global capitalism, highlighting the relevance of class, value and exploitation to the lived reality of informal workers in Africa.

A statistical field approach to capital accumulation

This paper presents a model of capital accumulation for a large number of heterogeneous producer–consumer agents in an exchange space in which interactions depend on agents’ positions. Agents in the exchange space are subject to both attractive and repulsive forces: exchanges drive agents closer, but crowd out more distant agents. The formalism used in this paper was developed earlier by the authors and is based on statistical field theory. It allows the analytical treatment of economic models with an arbitrary number of agents, while preserving the system’s interactions and microeconomic features of the individual level. Our results show that the dynamics of capital accumulation and the agents’ positions in the exchange space are correlated. Interactions in the exchange space induce phases within the system that depend on the relative strength of the repulsive force. When the repulsive force is strong, the system is in a phase of regulated exchanges. An initial central position both favours and fastens capital accumulation in average, and high levels of initial capital drive agents towards the centre. Yet, this phase displays mild competition and a broad-based although slow improvement in exchange terms. In this phase, random shocks can redistribute capital and initiate a virtuous circle of capital accumulation. When the repulsive force is low, a phase of deregulated exchanges emerges, in which capital distribution is less homogeneous and competition among agents harshens. Increased mobility accelerates capital accumulation for high initial capital producers, whereas low initial capital producers are now evicted from the exchange space as their prices and revenues deteriorate. Thus, a threshold effect appears. Above a certain level of initial capital, agents benefit from and remain in a central position. Below this level, they remain at the periphery of the exchange space.