Process Of Capital Accumulation Research Articles

Political economy of the ‘agrarian–urban frontier’ in Pakistan: Agrarian transformation, social reproduction and exploitation

AbstractThe paper underscores the need to reconsider the ontological separation between processes of production and reproduction in the context of agrarian‐urban interlinkages. It synthesizes ‘value theory of inclusion’ with a notion of ‘unfair bargaining power’ to offer a new understanding of processes of agrarian change in the context of Pakistan. Expansion of the agrarian–urban frontier, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary agrarian change in Pakistan, constitutes a crucial yet undertheorized site of value extraction. The paper shows that contemporary processes of capital accumulation rely on the swift conversion of agricultural land into commercial real estate, manifested in the form of gated housing enclaves. This process, on the one hand, accelerates the devalourization of small‐farm‐based production, and on the other hand, it allows affluent residents of gated housing enclaves to extract gendered surplus labour in the form of domestic workers from the growing pool of ‘classes of labour’. In short, the expansion of agrarian–urban frontier is predicated on devalourization of agrarian livelihoods and exploitation of women's labour.

Gang Rule(s): Towards a Political Economy of Youth Gang Dynamics in Nicaragua

AbstractThis article explores the longitudinal dynamics of youth gang transformation in urban Nicaragua. On the basis of an overview of successive gang iterations that have emerged over the past 30 years in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, the article identifies key elements for the articulation of a political economy of both change and stability. In particular, drawing on Bourdieusian theory, it conceives of a gang as a “social field” rather than as a discrete organizational form. It traces how different processes of individual and collective capital accumulation underpinning the social order promulgated by distinct gang iterations emerge and interact with each other, and the consequences that this has for their evolution over time. In doing so, the article offers a better understanding of the logic of what might be termed “gang rule(s)”.

The Social Origins of Capital: Trajectories of Accumulation at the Rural–Urban Interface in Pakistani Punjab

Recent scholarship on class formation in South Asia has drawn attention to consequential processes of capital accumulation taking place in provincial towns and in the countryside. This “provincial capital” finds its genesis in the commercialisation of agriculture, is often smaller in scale than big capital, is rooted in the locality, depends more on informal than formal institutions, and holds diverse assets across the rural–urban divide. While the significance of this segment of capital is well established in the literature on India, it has hardly been investigated in Pakistan. In response to this dearth of studies, this article charts the “making of a provincial capitalist class” in two areas of the Pakistani Punjab. It traces the origins of this class in how the distinct landownership structures and caste composition of the two areas interacted with the commercialisation of agriculture in the colonial period. Yet their paths were by no means pre-determined as the exit of Hindu mercantile castes created a vacuum that was filled by peasant castes diversifying off-farm in one of these areas and large landlords and non-landed artisanal castes in the other. This highlights the widening of the social circle from which capital has emerged.

Making space for community energy: landed property as barrier and enabler of community wind projects

Abstract. Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. While politics and conflicts over accessing land for renewables are well documented, the role, conditions and potential agency of landownership have been often overlooked or oversimplified as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as a mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of wind energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetisation and value grabbing by landowners. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing and wider processes of capital accumulation through renewables. We draw on insights from the Netherlands and Scotland to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions, and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community wind energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.

The Century of the Crises, the Century of the Accumulation: Two Sides of the Same Coin

ABSTRACT The hundred-year history of capitalism in Turkey can be discussed in different contexts. This study addresses this process by focusing on economic crises. It argues that the history of capitalism in Turkey can be interpreted as a transition from one crisis to another. This paper suggests reading the crises in the context of the two main accumulation processes: the commercial capital accumulation process and crises (1929 and 1954-8) and the crises of industrial capital accumulation (1978/79, 1989, 1994, 2001, 2008, 2018/2019). The 1978/79 crisis is considered as a crisis of inward-oriented capital accumulation, 1989 as a crisis of export-oriented capital accumulation, and 1994, 2001, 2008, and 2018/2019 as the crises of capital import-oriented accumulation. This study reads these crises that have occurred in different periods as a result of the foreign exchange production and acquisition problem stemming from the peculiarities of late capitalist development.

From online to onsite: Wanghong economy as the new engine driving China’s urban development

Considering China’s ‘isolated’ digital ecosystem, this paper examines China’s ‘check-in’ activities to understand how the wanghong economy is driving China’s new rounds of urban development, with the purpose of supplementing existing research on digital economies from the Chinese context. Focusing on a representative case study area called Dongshankou in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places and an emerging commercial centre, I sought to enrich existing studies about digital economies and extend scholarship on platform urbanism from the cultural economy perspective. First, I argue that Chinese consumers’ check-in activities function as the data accumulation process, structuring Dongshankou’s digital capital through the assemblage of online posts and geotags. Therefore, Dongshankou’s urban development challenges the conventional view of creativity as the key factor in the cultural economy for urban development, given that digital capital is now the key driver for urban development in the digital age. Second, the growth of wanghong stores in Dongshankou reveals how the wanghong economy is materialised into urban cultural objects. Emotional value – a crucial selling point that these wanghong stores aim to provide to facilitate consumers’ check-in activities – illustrates how China’s highly participatory digital ecosystem extracts users’ emotions and bodily experiences into the process of capital accumulation, which structures the ‘platform urbanism’ through our daily lives. This paper broadens the horizon for an alternative theoretical agenda in platform urbanism: beyond focusing solely on platform algorithms, how digital platforms and emotions become inextricably linked in economic production should be further explored.

From ‘Territorial Peace’ to ‘Total Peace’ in Colombia: A Geopolitical Balance

ABSTRACT This forum discusses the concept of ‘total peace’ (paz total) and the notion of ‘peace regions’ (regiones de paz) recently coined by the government of Colombia to advance in the implementation of the Peace Accords signed back in 2016 with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces FARC. Broadly drawing on a radical and critical geopolitics perspective, the forum’s contributions offer a set of interpretations, exploring a wide range of different aspects, such as the relations with the previous concept of ‘territorial peace’ (paz territorial), the changing geographical dynamics of the armed conflict, the proliferation of unlawful armed structures and drug trafficking, and violent processes of capital accumulation. Moreover, specific themes such as environmental conflict, the political reintegration of the guerrillas, gender and differential approaches, and ethnic and peasant communities’ perspectives are also addressed, without losing sight of the more general question of the country’s territorial reordering.

Spatial political economy: The ideology of Nature, State–space and the oil commodity frontier

In this article, a spatial political economy approach is used to examine the development of global capitalism through an analysis of the expansionary movement of commodity frontiers. It surveys the early history of oil exploitation in Chile and offers a close analysis of Patagonia’s constitution of its oil commodity frontier as Cheap Energy. It is argued that focusing on the internal relation of space and Nature can enhance our understanding of capitalism as an emergent and dynamic totality grounded in particular places where value is extracted. The article sheds new light on the spatialities of Import Substitution Industrialisation in Latin America using the case of Chile and its development agency, Corfo, and reveals how the capitalist ideology of Nature was wrought as a state project. The political economy of scale in this context is examined by analysing the central role of state and class relations in the environment-making process of capital accumulation. The article advances a new understanding of State–space within uneven and combined capitalist development. The spatial political economy lens allows for a fresh understanding of past history, which may help us understand the current ‘green’ energy transition by means of the production of space and Nature.

Urban state venturism: On state-led venture capital investments in the urban process of capital accumulation

Research on the urban process of capital accumulation has typically examined the state and capital as separate actors. This distinction is problematized by a long-standing, increasingly prominent but largely overlooked attempt by state institutions to drive urban development through venture capital (VC) investments. Conceptualized as urban state venturism in this paper, state-driven VC investments reflect at once a riskier extension of urban entrepreneurialism (through their speculative construction of place) and a transposition of state institutions into firm-level drivers of capitalist urbanization (through their roles as profit-oriented investors). To advance research on the urban process of capital accumulation through examining these imbricated state roles, this paper presents a new research agenda that comprises three dimensions, namely (i) the rationale of urban state venturism, (ii) the distribution of profits and risks, and (iii) the extent to which urban state venturism reflects state institutions’ intrinsic commitment to a ‘developmentalist’ ideology. In turn, the agenda foregrounds the value of assessing ‘new’ state capitalism through urban state venturism.

Effect of Corruption on Human Capital in Franc Zone Countries: An Opportunity Cost Analysis

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of corruption on human capital in African Franc zone countries. Assuming that the representative agent is rational, we develop a theoretical model in which effort, the real component of the human capital accumulation process, encompasses learning time, the learner’s personal resources, and the educational public good. The learner makes a trade-off between effort and corruption according to the opportunity cost of each option. Thus, in an environment where corruption (large and small) is endemic and where there are very few sanction mechanisms, the learner considers it rational to bribe at the expense of effort. Empirical analysis shows that a drop in the corruption perception index (reflecting an increase in corruption) of one-point leads to a drop in the human capital index of 0.175 percentage points. On the other hand, the impact is positive for public spending on education, official development assistance, real GDP per capita, and the management ratio. These variables reduce the opportunity cost of the effort. A number of recommendations are put forward with a view to reducing the cost of effort and increasing the cost of corruption.

Latin America’s Renewable Energy Impact: Climate Change and Global Economic Consequences

In the context of the imperative global shift towards renewable energy to mitigate climate change, Latin America (LATAM) emerges as a region of immense untapped potential. However, there is no formal quantification of the effects of developing this potential. This study analyzes the economic and climate impacts of developing renewable energy in LATAM and the Asia–Pacific region using an integrated economic and climate assessment model (IAM). The key findings are as follows. First, exporting renewable energy from LATAM and the Asia–Pacific region yields economic benefits across all regions. However, this surge in renewable energy exacerbates rather than alleviates global warming. Second, the implementation of policy measures accompanying renewable energy exports, aimed at discouraging the use of polluting energy sources, proves effective in mitigating global warming while sustaining significant economic gains globally. Third, LATAM stands to gain substantially from this development. Fourth, due to the gradual process of capital accumulation, any delays in initiating the development of renewable energy exports not only diminish economic gains during the postponement but also in the years following the commencement of exports. These results are robust to several additional simulations and sensitivity analyses. The results align with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

How smart is a ‘smart factory’?: an organizational view

Abstract This paper investigates the game-changing paradigm in modern manufacturing, known as the “smart factory,” from an organizational perspective. Factories get smarter—or smartized—by becoming more data-intensive and more tightly integrating operations with management. We design a unique survey to measure this intangible organizational capital accumulation process for 939 Korean manufacturing plants. Observing heterogeneous levels of smartization across factories, we explore their relationship with three performance dimensions: productivity, cost efficiency, and product variety. The drivers of smartization are also identified. Our analysis uncovers a strong association between smartization and heightened productivity, with varying interactions with other performance metrics based on the specific manufacturing process (e.g., lower defect rate only in assembly line process). Importantly, we find that investments in digital technologies drive smartization only when complemented by structured incentive management and proper chief executive officer (CEO) leadership.

Police Violence as Containment of Black Bodies during Urban Renewal: A Spatial Analysis of Civilian Deaths by Police in Florida

abstract: This study presents a geospatial analysis of police killings within two areas in Florida over a twenty-year period. Fatalities were mapped against social and economic characteristics of neighborhoods to ascertain if police violence ending in civilian death was concentrated in areas with high-minority and low-income populations, and those areas in proximity to gentrifying neighborhoods. We evaluated the theory that police violence against minority residents serves as a process of containment and ultimately supports the continued generation of wealth by a specific sector of society through the process of gentrification. The cycle of destruction and renewal in the urban landscape is deeply intertwined with processes of capital accumulation, class differentiation, and racial subordination. Both the West Florida and Southeast Florida areas contained a significantly higher proportion of fatal encounters occurring within tracts that were eligible to gentrify than in tracts that were in the process of gentrifying. Fort Lauderdale in particular had little overlap despite containing concentrated hotspots of incidents in combination with high-minority and low–NSES tracts. This same pattern is apparent in the Lakeland area in west Florida. Our findings are consistent with Laniyonu's observation that police interactions tend to increase in tracts just outside of gentrified areas, but seldom within them.

Trees made out of fintech: Valuing carbon and accumulating capital in China’s Ant Forest

With China’s increasing international environmental leadership, its emerging models for pursuing environmental goals matter. This article examines one such model, the application of financial technology (“fintech”) to solve environmental problems, through the case of Ant Forest. This highly popular app-based project run by Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group transforms individuals’ green, low-carbon actions into afforestation projects. The article investigates processes of capital accumulation in this project, and finds that Ant Forest’s main innovation, in harnessing fintech, is a techno-epistemological one that defines “green” activities according to political-economic relationships that generate corporate profit but compromise environmental benefit. In models like Ant’s, fintech also shifts processes of value creation, especially in articulation with carbon markets, where nature becomes financialized. This involves multiple linked processes and diverse forms of work to create and realize value. Ant Forest’s entanglements with state power draw attention to the role of the state in sustainability fintech and suggest that fintech capital always works through the state, though in evolving ways.

Dynamics of coastal tourism: drivers of spatial change in South‐East Asia

Coastal tourism has grown significantly across South‐East Asia from the 1960s, particularly in three key destinations hosting large tourist numbers: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. It encompasses different scales from basic backpacker accommodation in budget enclaves to large scale capital‐intensive luxury resort enclaves. Coastal tourism studies typically range from descriptive analyses of destinations’ evolutionary dynamics and resort morphology to more granular ethnographic inspections of socio‐economic patterns of transformation and resource conflicts. More recent critical research theorizes the spatial reorganization of coastal tourism in relation to economic restructuring processes. Although national tourism policy and economic development is often analysed, forces shaping coastal tourism development have been little examined and research typically focusses on impact case studies without analysing the underlying political economy. This paper interrogates the political‐economic drivers of the historical‐geographical and spatial organization of coastal tourism in these three major destinations and demonstrates how processes of tourism capital accumulation are experienced/contested via intensified commodification leading to increasingly complex and diversified coastal tourism political economies.

Transformation of the state-capital relationship over public land in Turkey

This article analyses the state’s contemporary role in capital accumulation in the development of public land. In the literature, it is argued that the state goes beyond a regulatory role and participates in the capital-accumulation process as the owner of land or financial assets derived from land-based revenue, thus transforming from an external to an internal actor. It is argued that, in this way, the state governs urban development and the distribution of the land rent. This article argues that in the privatisation of land before development, the state is involved as the regulator and landowner, as suggested in the literature; however, when the state participates in the development of public land through public-private partnerships led by entrepreneurial state agencies and state-owned companies, it is also involved in production, trade and finance. In the latter case, the state manipulates the distribution, and its revenue consists not only of land rent but also of profit. Based on Marx’s analysis of the total circuit of capital, which does not include the forms of state involvement, the article attempts to elucidate contemporary transformations in the state-capital relationship in the development of public land. It claims that the new government strategies aim to address problems of capital accumulation and state finance through land development. The article is based on an analysis of official data on the practices and revenue of three state agencies engaged in land privatisation and development in Turkey.

“Talk to strangers!” Omegle and the political economy of technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation

This article examines how technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation has flourished within the laissez faire regulatory frameworks of neoliberalism, and argues that political economy should play a more central role in theorising about child sexual abuse. Drawing on the case study of Omegle, a livestreaming website that matches strangers via webcam, the paper illustrates how deregulatory trends have produced an alignment between the sexual interests of child sexual abusers and the economic interests of some online service providers. The paper suggests that intersecting political ideologies and economic structures have increased opportunities for child sexual exploitation and decreased formal and informal controls, while recruiting paedophilic desires and exploitative subjectivities within processes of capital accumulation. The paper explores the implications of political economy for theories of child sex offending, which have typically focused on the psychological, social and legal dimensions of child sexual abuse while overlooking the role of capitalist structures and imperatives.

Revisiting neoliberalism and new developmentalism: lessons from Turkey and Argentina

This article contributes to ongoing efforts to clarify and differentiate between neoliberal and new developmentalist strategies pursued in the early twenty-first century by shifting the focus of analysis away from the ‘degree’ to the ‘form’ of state activism. Relying on a case-based strategy of enquiry, it compares the development strategies pursued in Argentina and Turkey in the aftermath of the devastating economic crises that erupted in both in 2001. It argues that while both neoliberal and new developmentalist strategies rely on state interventionism, they differ in the role they assign to the state (1) in distributing the social costs linked to the processes of capital accumulation and wealth creation, and (2) in incorporating labouring classes into structures of governance.

“Our People Can’t Hold the Line!”

A protracted movement emerged in Kashipur in Southern Odisha in 1993 that stalled a bauxite mining project for over 18 years. It went through fragmentations and eventually petered out by the early 2010s. This paper aims to understand how and why the processes of capital accumulation through dispossession cause fragmentation of social movements and their eventual petering out. I analyse the collective strikes that the villagers engaged in during 2008–2010, paralyzing the company’s incipient construction work over a tumultuous nine months. Critically engaging with David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD) and Kalyan Sanyal’s concept of “jobless growth”, I argue that ABD processes entail protracted interaction of extractive capital, bureaucratic structures, ecology, and the movements of subaltern communities with existing divisions. Dispossession processes generate new fissures in which ownership of land or lack of it due to land acquisition becomes the central axis of cleavage, shaping the politics and outcomes of dispossession. I further reveal that ‘jobless growth’ is unachievable for a company that can push ahead only through the provision of precarious employment and such promises...

Connecting place and placing power: a multiscalar approach to mobilities, migrant services and the migration industry

This paper historically situates and explores the strengths of multiscalar analysis, at a moment when the term ‘multiscalar’ has been adopted by researchers within the intersecting scholarships of migration, mobilities, and urban studies. Developed by critical geographers to speak about the intersection of processes of capital accumulation, governance, and urban regeneration, the meaning of multiscalar has become diffuse and conflated with terms such as entwined networks, multisited ethnography and assemblage. Countering these trends, this paper develops as a ‘multisighted’ explanatory framework. A multisighted analysis begins with individual local actors, their motivations and emplacements, and explicates the dynamics of power that extend across multiple units of governance and contribute to processes of capital accumulation. To illustrate the strengths of this approach, the paper draws from a study of the provision of migrant services, which local interlocutors in a relatively impoverished east German city label ‘the integration business’. The arrival of Ukrainian migrants in 2022 is shown to have further enmeshed multiple interrelated individuals, migrant-serving projects, charities, foundations and governmental institutions into networks that supported migrant settlement and became intertwined in a globe-spanning migration industry.