The Dictionary of Human Geography (17 page)

camp
?The hidden matrix ... of the political space in which we are living? (Agamben, 1998, p. 166). Agamben?s controversial thesis focuses on the juridico political structure (or nomos) that produced the concentration camp. These camps were introduced by European colonial regimes in Cuba and South Africa at the close of the nineteenth century, but Agamben is most interested in those estab lished by the Nazis during the Second World War. Unlike many writers, Agamben does not see these as aberrations from the project of modernity paroxysmal spaces but, rather, as paradigmatic spaces. What took place in them was made possible, so Agamben claims, because the camps were materializations of the space of exception (see exception, space of) in which the state withdrew legal protec tions from particular groups of people (Jews, gays and Romanies among them). By this means, millions of victims of fascism could be reduced to bare life (cf. Agamben, 1999). But the camp is neither peculiar to fascism (NEW PARAGRAPH) nor limited to an enclosed space. For Agamben, ?the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule?, and he insists that ?we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created? (Agamben, 1988, p. 174). Seen thus, it is by no means absent from liberal democratic societies. Hence Agamben draws formal par allels between concentration camps and the sites where states now hold illegal immigrants or refugees (cf. Perera, 2002), and he claims that the juridico political structure through which prisoners taken during the ?war on terror' are held confirms that the global generalization of the state of exception is intensifying (cf. Gregory, 2006b, 2007). ?The normative aspect of law can be thus be obliterated and contradicted with impun ity,' he continues, through a constellation of sovereign power and state violence that ?nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.? In such a circumstance, he concludes, the camp has become ?the new biopolitical nomos of the planet? (see biopolitics) and ?the juridico political system [has trans formed] itself into a killing machine? (Agamben, 1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH) That Agamben's thesis is concerned with the metaphysics of power and the logic of juridico political structures needs emphasis. Bernstein (2004) objects that what then becomes lost from view is the complex of insti tutions, practices and people through which these reductions to bare life are attempted: in the case of Auschwitz, for example, the gas chambers, the guards, the huts, the watch towers, the railways, the police, the round ups in short, the whole apparatus of violence that produced the holocaust. But this is precisely Agamben's point: ?Instead of deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took place there, we will ask: What is a camp, what is its juridico political structure, that such events could take place there?? In his view, the urgent political task is to disclose ?the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime' (1998, pp. 166, 171). Even so, it is not at all clear that Agamben is much interested in the details of those other ?deployments of power? or the spaces that are produced through them, and nor does he register the ways in which resistance to the production and proliferation of camps is mobilized. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben (1998, pp. 166 76); Minca (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
capital
In everyday parlance, capital is an asset to be mobilized by a group, individual or institution as wealth. This economic sense of capital has, according to Raymond Williams (1983 [1976], p. 51), been present in English since the seventeenth century and in a fully developed form since the eighteenth derived from its general sense of ?head? or ?chief?. Capital in this sense might be a stock of money (invested to secure a rate of return), a pension fund or a piece of property. In the broadest sense often deployed as such by conventional forms of economics capital is an asset of whatever kind capable of yielding a source of income for its owner (which is typically, depending on the asset and the legal rights to it, a claim on interest, on rent or on profits). In classical economics, capital was assumed to be one of a trio of factors of production (land and labour being the others), distinguished by the fact that it was produced (contra land), could not be used up in the course of produc tion as might a resource and could be used in the production of other goods. Both Adam Smith and David Ricardo referred to a distinc tion between fixed and circulating forms of capital. Capital goods are already produced durable goods, available for use as a factor of production. In this classical (and indeed neo classical) sense, capital was a stock, in contradistinction to investment over time (a flow). Implicit in all of these definitions is a twofold sense of capital being trans historical (it applies to every society) and it posits the fact of inanimate objects (land) being genera tive (of income). Over the past half century there have been many efforts to classify capital beyond its narrow economic meaning. The list is now very long (see Putnam, 2001; Bourdieu, 2002): human capital (skills, com petences, education), cultural capital (the symbolic and hermeneutic class powers deployed in the political and economic realm), social capital (the social networks and social agencies deployed in economic development), political capital (political resources deployed within different domains of politics for example, the state, the family) and finance capital (originally developed a century ago by Hilferding to address the increasing integra tion of industrial and banking enterprises). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The Marxist conception of capital stands in sharp contradistinction to these sorts of claims and to all conventional definitions. Capital is first a social form that pre dates capitalism but dominates in, and is generic to, capitalism as a system of generalized commodity produc tion. Capital is not a thing, but is a ?social relation? that appears in the form of things (money, means of production). Capital does indeed entail making money or creating wealth but, as Marx (1967) pointed out, what matters are the relations by which some have money and others do not, how money is put to work, and how the property relations that engender such a social world are reproduced. Capital, said Marx, ?is a definite social production rela tion belonging to a definite historical forma tion of society which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character' (Marx, 1967, vol. III, p. 48). Under capital ism, capital is ?value in motion?; that is to say, it is an expansionary social value that drives, and arises from, the production process. The process multifaceted and unstable by which money is converted into labour, raw materials, capital goods, commodities and back into money again is what Marx called ?the general formula of capital'. Capital arises from the social labour organized for general ized commodity production that is to say, a competitive system in which commodities pro duce commodities. The enormous complexity of the category is bound up with the ways in which the meaning of the word ?capital? shifts and transforms itself in Marx's work, leading some to note that a word such as capital is bat like: one can see in it both birds and mice. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Capital comes to dominate in a capitalist mode of production. Capitalist societies are marked by the fact that capital is socially owned and organized in particular ways by a capitalist class. Contemporary forms of cap italism have, however, vastly complicated this class map, not least by the ways in which shareholder capital (pension funds, individual shareholders and government ownership of stock) has refigured the cartography of the ownership of capital. Geographers have largely focused on the ways in which capital as a social relation has spatial and ecological expressions for example, the geography of accumulation or industrial districts, and the relations between value in motion and global climate change and on the prismatic ways in which capital attaches natural charac teristics to things that are socially produced (see Harvey, 1999 [1982]; Smith, 1982; RETORT, 2005). mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
capitalism
As a word denoting a distinc tive economic system, ?capitalism' began to appear, according to Raymond Williams (1983 [1976], p. 50) in English, French and German from the early nineteenth century (although the Oxford English Dictionary cites its first use by Thackeray in 1854). ?Capitalist? as a key actor in a capitalist system has a longer semantic history, dating back a half century earlier, but this term too was clearly being used to describe an economic system sketched by Adam Smith and the Scottish political econo mists among others for which the word cap italism had not yet been invented. Capital and capitalist, says Williams, were technical terms in any economic system but gradually became deployed to account for a particular stage of historical development, and out of this shift in meaning crystallized the term capitalism. Marx, who did not use the term until the 1870s, was the central figure in distinguishing capitaL as an economic category from capital ism as a specific social form in which ownership of the means of production was centralized (through a capitalist cLass), and that depended upon a system of wage labour in which a class had been ?freed? from property. Capitalism in this sense, again as Williams observed, was ??a product of a developing bourgeois society' (1976, p. 51). The term gained some traction in the 1880s in the German socialist movement and was then extended to non socialist writing, though its first extensive English and French usages seem to not have been until the early twentieth century. In the wake of 1917, and most especially after the Second World War, capitalism was rarely used as a descriptor by its promoters, and was deliberately replaced by such terms as free or private enterprise and, more recently still, the market or free market system (as part of the neo liberal discourse of the 1980s and 1990s). (NEW PARAGRAPH) What, then, are the defining qualities of capitalism, understood as a distinctive mode of production? It is a historically specific form of economic and social organization and in its industrial variant can be roughly dated to mid eighteenth century Britain, but the theor ization of its conditions of possibility and its internal dynamics have necessarily been an object of intense debate. Classical political economy Adam Smith and David Ricardo and its Marxian critique both accepted that capitalism was a class system, that labour and capital were central to its operations, and that capitalism as a system was expansive, dynamic and unstable. These accounts fasten upon the economy or, more properly, the political economy and the centrality of property relations, the market commodity nexus, the separation of the workers from the means of production and the centralization of capitalist control under the figure of the capitalist entrepreneur. These claims to the extent that they reflect some common ground are sub sequently elaborated in radically different ways. Some cling to a narrow definition of economy (theorized in different ways) as central to the intellectual enterprise; others seek to link economy, cuLture, politics and society into a more elaborated sense what Max Weber called a ?cosmos? of a capitalist system. In general, the development and institutionalization of the critical social sci ences has seen a massive proliferation of opinion and of conceptual apparatuses for the examination of actually existing capitalist systems. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Some of this diversity of opinion can be appreciated by a consideration of a quartet of theorists. Adam Smith, like other classical political economists, was concerned with the distribution and accumulation of economic surplus and the problems of wage, price and employment determination. Writing at the birth of industrial manufacture, the key to the Wealth of nations (see Smith, 2003) is the concept of an autonomous self regulating market economy described as civiL society. Smith?s genius was to have seen the possibility of an autonomous civil society, its capacity for self regulation if left unhindered and its cap acity for maximizing welfare independent of state action. Smith located capitalism at the intersection of the division of Labour and the growth of markets. Furthermore, in this system self interested individuals indirectly and inadvertently promoted collective interest through the functions of self regulating mar kets. The growth of commerce and the growth of liberty reinforce one another under capital ism. In its neo classical variant, labour mar kets are seen as no different than any commodity market and capitalist markets are assumed, if unimpeded by the state or other distortions, to function to produce a general equilibrium. Friedrich von Hayek?s (1944) account of liberal capitalism took this reason ing to its limit. Capitalism was conceived of as a unity of liberty, science and the spontaneous orders that co evolved to form modern society (the ?Great Society?, as he termed it). It is a defence of the liberal (unplanned) market order from which the preconditions of civiliza tion competition and experimentation had emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this modern world as an iron cage constituted by imperson ality, a loss of community, individualism and personal responsibility. But, contra Weber, these structures, properly understood, were the very expressions of liberty. From the vantage point of the 1940s this (classical) lib eral project was, as Hayek saw it, under threat. Indeed, what passed for liberal capitalism was a travesty, a distorted body of ideas warped by constructivist rationalism, as opposed to what he called ?evolutionary rationalism?. Milton Friedman (2002 [1962]), in the realm of eco nomic theory, waged this battle from the 1960s onwards. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For Max Weber, the capitalist cosmos was guided by systems of calculability and ration ality this is what gave Western capitalism its specificity which grew in part as an unin tended consequence of Protestantism (see Weber, 2001 [1904 5]). Formal rationality produced a capitalist society characterized by large scale industrial production, centralized bureaucratic administration and the ?iron cage? of capitalism that shapes individuals? lives with ?irresistible force?. Contra Smith?s roseate vision of capitalism though always wary of the costs of class oppression, in his view dished out by corrupt government Weber?s vision of capitalism was ultimately bleak, always operating in the shadow of the ?totally administered society?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic historian and socialist, who believed that the nineteenth century liberal capitalist order had died, never to be revived (see Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). By 1940, every vestige of the inter national liberal order had disappeared, the product of the necessary adoption of measures designed to hold off the ravages of the self regulating market; that is, ?market despotism?. It was the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life that made some form of collectivism or planning inevitable. The liberal market order was, contra Hayek, not ?spontaneous? but a planned development, and its demise was the product of the market order itself. A market order could just as well produce the freedom to exploit as the freedom to associate. The grave danger, in Polanyi?s view, was that liberal utopianism might return in the idea of freedom as nothing more than the advocacy of free enterprise, in which planning is ?the denial of freedom?, and the justice and liberty offered by regulation or control just ?a camouflage of slavery?. liberalism on this account will always degenerate, ultimately compromised by an authoritarianism that will be invoked as a counterweight to the threat of mass democ racy. Modern capitalism, he said, contained the famous ?double movement? in which markets were serially and coextensively disem bedded from, and re embedded in, social institutions and relations. In particular, the possibility of a counter hegemony to the self regulating market resided in the resistance to (and reaction against) the commodification of the three fictitious commodities land, labour and money that represented the spontaneous defence of society. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marx's account identifies a fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism a contradiction between two great classes (workers and owners of capital) that is funda mentally an exploitative relation shaped by the appropriation of surplus. Unlike feudalism, in which surplus appropriation is transparent (in the forms of taxes and levies made by land owners and lords, backed by the power of the church and Crown), surplus value is obscured in the capitalist labour process. Marx (1967) argues that labour is the only source of value and value is the embodiment of a quantum of socially necessary labour. It is the difference between the sale of a worker's labour power and the amount of labour necessary to repro duce it that is the source of surplus value. The means by which capital extracts this surplus value under capitalism through the working day, labour intensification and enhancing labour productivity coupled to the changing relations between variable and constant capital determine, in Marx's view, the extent, degree and forms of exploitation. In the first volume of Capital, Marx identifies the origins of sur plus value in the organization of production (the social relations of production so called). In volume II, Marx explains how exploitation affects the circulation of capital, and in volume III he traces the division of the total product of exploitation among its beneficiaries and the contradiction so created. In Marxist theory two kinds of material interests inter ests securing material welfare and interests enhancing economic power are linked through exploitation (exploiters simultan eously obtain greater economic welfare and greater economic power by retaining control over the social allocation of surplus through investments). Members of a class, in short, hold a common set of interests and therefore have common interests with respect to the process of exploitation (see also marxism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the wake of Marx's work, the central debates over capitalist exploitation have turned on (i) whether the labour theory of value is a necessary condition for any truth claim about exploitation, (ii) whether exploitation can be made congruent with the complex forms of class differentiation associated with modern industrial society, and (iii) whether there are non Marxist accounts of exploitation. In neo classical economics, for example, exploit ation under capitalism is seen as ?the failure to pay labour its marginal product' (Brewer, 1987, p. 86). Exploitation in this view is micro level and organizational. That is to say, using micro economic theory exploitation is a type of market failure due to the existence of monopoly or monopsony. In more developed versions of this organizational view, exploit ation can be rooted in extra market forces; for example, free riding or asymmetric information (the so called principal agent problem). A more structural account of exploitation from a liberal vantage point would be the ideas of Henry George or John Maynard Keynes, for whom land owners or rentier classes (non working owners of finan cial wealth) produce not exploitation in the Marxist sense, but exploitation as waste and inefficiency due to ?special interests'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the Marxian tradition, there has been in general an abandonment of the labour theory of value away from the view of Elster (1986) that ?workers are exploited if they work longer hours than the number of hours employed in the goods they consume' (1986, p. 121) towards John Roemer's notion that a group is exploited if it has ??some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off? (Roemer, 1986a, p. 136). Perhaps the central figure in developing these argu ments is Erik Olin Wright (1985), who sought to account for the contradictory class location of the ?middle classes' (in that they are simul taneously exploiters and exploited). Building on the work of Roemer, Wright distinguishes four types of assets, the unequal control or ownership of which constitute four distinct forms of exploitation under capitalism: labour power assets (feudal exploitation), capital assets (capitalist exploitation), organization assets (statist exploitation) and skill assets (socialist exploitation). While pure modes of production can be identified with single forms of exploitation, ?actually existing capitalism' consists of all four, opening up the possibility of the simultaneous operation of exploiter/ exploitee relations (e.g. managers are capital istically exploited but are organizational exploiters). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A long line of Marx inspired theorizing has attempted to grasp the relations between (European or transatlantic) capitalism, empire and the non capitalist (or developing) world. This is the heart of theories of imperialism (Lenin, 1916), whether as the coercive extrac tion of surplus through colonial states (Fanon, 1967 [1961]), through unequal exchange (Arrighi and Pearce, 1972), or through the imperial operation of transnational banks and multilateral development institutions (the World Bank and the internationaL monetary fund). The so called ?anti gLobaLization' movement (especially focusing on institutions such as the World Trade Organization) and the ?sweatshop movements' (focusing on transnational firms such as Nike) are contem porary exemplars of a politics of exploitation linking advanced capitalist state and trans nationaL corporations with the poverty and immiseration of the global south against a backdrop of neo LiberaLism and free trade (Harvey, 2005; Starr, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is axiomatic that there has been enormous controversy over the operations, the merits and the costs of the capitalist system since the nineteenth century. Much ink has also been spilled attempting to provide periodi zation or classifications of actually existing capitalisms and the origins of capitalism in the transformation from feudalism. The plur alization of the word capitalism capitalisms highlights enormous geographical, temporal, institutional and cultural diversity of what is now a global and integral form of political economy. The originary question hinges in large measure on engaging with Marx's account of primitive accumuLations and the British encLosures, and the extent to which the feudal system was transformed by the cor rosive effects of the markets and/or urban based merchants, by demography or by internal contradictions within the feudal sys tem (reflections in class and other struggles between tenants, lords, the Church and mer chants). The periodization of capitalism turns on similar theoretical tensions: Was ?early' capitalism characterized by expansionary trade and the dominance