Abstract
Keywords
Bernard Cohn, an anthropologist among historians, in his work Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relationship to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society (2004) identifies the regions as cultural, historical and linguistic. Chris Hesketh, the author of the book under review, manoeuvring his interests between the disciplines, does a similar thing for a different purpose and objective. The book Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance, Mexico and the Global Political Economy identifies the formation of regions based on capital and resistance. The author skilfully brings capital and resistance together to describe the indigenous struggles led by the people of Chiapas and Oaxaca. This stands out particularly when much of the work focuses on the formation of capital and its processes known as ‘capitalcentric’. By doing this, Hesketh avoids focusing on resistance or capitalcentric politics. Hesketh also bridges the gaps between the disciplines such as geography, historical sociology and economic anthropology while still being within the Marxist tradition.
The book has five chapters – the first three prepare the ground for the next two by dwelling on the theoretical level. The fourth and fifth chapters deal with the political economy and the historical geographical sociology of Oaxaca and Chiapas from where the core content of the book comes. The book can thus be divided into two parts. In the first three chapters, the author deals with the abstract and meso theories, particularly in the Introduction and the first chapter. Hesketh sketches out two important ideas integral to Marxist political economy – class struggle and mode of production. What is interesting about his effort is the way he has manoeuvred the material relations of social production through the ideas of production of space and class struggles amidst the emergence of state within the capitalist development, geopolitical devaluation, passive revolution and issues surrounding the production of spatial scales.
More important, the first chapter critically engages with debates surrounding the production of space under the capitalist social relations of production. The aim here appears to be to construct a theoretical framework whereby changes in the geography of the global economy and resistance to those changes can be understood simultaneously. The book has pitched at a multi-scalar level. Instead of focusing disjointedly on global, national or local changes, Hesketh prefers to look at them in a spiracle scalar level.
The book in its entirety situates South America–Mexico, and identifies the peculiarities in the socio-spatial, cultural practices, political ideologies, and even in the historical antecedents. Though it focuses on the 1990s rupture that occurred due to the aggressive neoliberal policies across the globe, particularly in South America through NATO and with such other policies, it does present (especially in the third chapter) the historicity of the region and the way the colonisation has taken over North America and captures the way the continent fought to revert to its native roots.
It is here that Hesketh brings in the Samuel Huntington thesis (not totally as clash of civilisations, but reading as a clash between spatial class projects which were culturally loaded) and frames a similar thesis of clash of civilisations by using Guillermo Bonfil Batala, who argued in his book that the last 500 years of Mexican history can be best understood as a clash of civilisations between a native Mesoamerican culture on the one hand, and the exogenous western culture on the other. According to him, from the time of colonisation, Mexico has been organised on the ‘norms, aspirations, and goals of western civilisation’. The alternative is to return Mexico to its basis in Mesoamerican culture (it sounds like Hindu nationalist fundamentalist argument, but consciously the author accepts that the Batala thesis is reactionary rather than revolutionary).
The central argument of the book explains the negotiations between the two ideological approaches –capital and resistance. While explaining the negotiations between these two ideologies, Hesketh attempts to understand the nexus between capitalist social relations and the production of space and explain the counter-spaces produced in the course of oppositional forces. In the process of doing that he realises – and makes us realise – that the role of space is imminent. Theoretically, the book draws heavily from Antonio Gramsci, Neil Brenner, and the latter’s approach – abstract, meso and concrete – to understand the content and the contemporary trends. Hesketh, also diligently following the Lefebvre approach on space, says that ‘it cannot be simply imagined into being or exists independently of social action. Rather, spaces are created and transformed through material activity. Mental spaces and social practice, according to this conception, can thus not be divorced’ (O Tuathail, 1996, cited in Hesketh, p. 23). By saying that, Hesketh makes a point that space is not static, but a site of ongoing production, a production of space and production of resistance. The book, in a way, attempts to unpack the power relations at various levels by following the spatial relations carefully. The ultimate effort is to understand how social relations were organised in a particular type of production process and in return how they are going to affect the spatial relations.
While deploying Brenner’s approach, Hesketh attempts to critically analyse the role of capital and the role of subsistence at three levels: first, at the global level, second, at the Latin American level and third, focusing on the two field sites. He provides the rationale for using this approach by saying that abstract involves key systemic features of a system and outlining a theoretical framework within which we can operate in order to conduct our empirical investigation, whereas the meso, which is concerned with broad periodisation of institutional configurations, falls within broad time and space by underpinning dominant ideas about and practices of development; and the third one is about the concrete, which is concerned with wider forces unfolding within specific contexts either at the national or the international level. In fact, the fourth and fifth chapters completely use the concrete level of analysis to discover the historical experiences and the novel practices in Oaxaca and Chiapas. Also, these chapters present how spatial configurations have come about, and reflect on how these two states integrated within the global political economy and the changing accumulation strategies of the national state. Not only that, they also present how the movements in Latin America are more territorially rooted while frequently seeking autonomy from the state and political parties (Zibechi, 2012).
While explaining the neoliberal reforms that took place under Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) these chapters explore the shift from one mode of production to another, reason out the alterations of the production of space, while at the same time examining how pre-capitalist spaces and social relations alter the topography of capitalism as they unfolded in symbiosis. The important outcome is the way the author tries to correct the previous studies that either focused on the national or sought to alter local dynamics without focusing on the national and global scales.
Hesketh skilfully uses these three approaches to explain the process of modern state formation in Latin America, specifically Oaxaca and Chiapas. While doing that he deploys Gramsci’s concepts –hegemony and passive revolution – to show us how spatial and scalar configurations have been historically produced in Mexico. The way Hesketh has deployed these two conceptual terms to understand the different forms of resistance and different forms of capital in the field sites and also at the global and meso level is remarkable. Hesketh attaches new meaning to the concept of hegemony by saying that it has the intellectual and moral leadership that the dominant class is able to exercise over society as a whole. However, interestingly, Hesketh places a burden on the dominant class by adding to his definition that to be able to retain their power or secure their consent, the dominant class should grant the concessions to the subaltern classes.
He argues that documenting does not necessarily help in understanding the problem. Much of the research on capitalism and its adverse effects on various forms of life are studied without bringing into the account the various levels of resistance that took place against the entrenchment of capitalism. One of the important contributions of this book is to bring together these two opposite stories and create an umbilical connection to the problem. This is an important takeaway from Hesketh’s work for scholars working in the domains of gender, caste or region.
At the end, the book underscores the contestations involved in the production of space and looks towards the potential for alternative geographical projects based upon the epistemologies of the excluded (de Sousa Santos, 2006; Merrifield, 2013) but argues (Silver, 2003) that the key intellectual task is to identify subaltern responses to capitalist development, emphasising that the re-composition of capital on a global scale also leads to the re-composition of labour.
This book, while reaffirming the importance of class struggle within the global political economy, argues, through its focus on indigenous resistance, that class struggle must be widened in regard to resistance at the point of production. This is primarily because for many decades the indigenous communities were largely excluded from the major debates of development in Latin America. In short, this book promotes the indigenous resistance to the capitalist social relations of production and also to the traditional leftist thought.