From value as theoretical object to rent as political project

From value as theoretical object to rent as political project

Kay and Kenny-Lazar do an excellent job of bringing to a wider audience a debate about value in relation to the capitalization of nature hosted at the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They demonstrate the generative potential of debates among geographers at symposia, conferences, and public venues and how these might be captured to practice public geography. As geography struggles to fashion contemporary relevance, Kay and Kenny-Lazar illustrate its rare capability to mobilize its collective and generate insights that deepen knowledge at the intersection of multiple theoretical and political agendas that cross disciplinary, generational, and other boundaries. While the authors do not ultimately assemble the insights of the provocateurs in the debate into a distinctive interpretation and intellectual contribution of their own, presenting the potentially agenda-setting debate and bringing it to a wider audience is a powerful contribution in itself. That they illustrate geographers to be very good at their staple work is a fine bonus.

The paper is especially helpful for those geographers engaged with applied research projects in which various publics and political constituencies are contesting resource-based development initiatives (see Castree et al., 2014). It should offer a powerful antidote for those who might opt in those settings to reduce questions of value to competing social values when addressing political contests over resource development and social and environmental justice (Castree, 2015). The paper has led me, for example, to think more sharply about property rights and rents in relation to my own current research on blue economy initiatives in New Zealand. In New Zealand’s marine spaces, indigenous groups and community users of marine natures make livelihoods in contexts where property rights are far from fully privatized (Le Heron et al., 2016). The commons are held in trust by different publics from the community to Iwi (Maori tribal groups) and the nation state. Capitalism is everywhere, but capital is brought to these commons and in discrete initiatives where relations among value, values, and natures are heavily contested.

In this context, the concept of liberatory valuing introduced by Kay and Kenny-Lazar in the paper (albeit with less elaboration than I would like to have seen) seems to have potential, theoretical, and political purchase. So too, does Braun’s reflection, quoted from the AAG session, that ‘if we think the commons as consisting of living labour and inventive nature, and capital as parasitic on, rather than source of both, we can begin to imagine how this potentiality can be realized in other, non-capitalist forms’. Both reflections direct attention to specific contests, the distinction between profits and rent (Hudson, 2011; Sayer, 2015), and the distribution of the latter in different constitutions of the public. I will return to this point below to elaborate on where the intervention takes my own thinking and what I think the paper may offer more widely, but first I need three particular bugbears to rest.

The first is the way the opening consideration of nature in the theory of value unnecessarily positions the paper within an inward-looking debate about value theory, when it could so easily have opened up the notion of value more widely. While a crucial context setting moment for the paper and an interesting intellectual exercise, the question of whether nature can create value independently of labor loses purchase in efforts to think the question of value into the world. It points helpfully to what Walker is cited in the paper as having termed the ‘dialectically intertwined relations’ between labor and nature but closes down a discussion of the politics that might ensue. There is no outside to capitalism in this framing, which is both depoliticizing and insufficient theoretically. It also sucks some of the vitality from knowledge making about human engagement with nature and all its own wild and unpredictable vitality. As the authors quote Eric Swyngedouw to have observed, if theoretical questioning of value ‘is not directly articulated within a struggle to take back to the collective who produces this surplus’, then it lacks purpose and a nuanced conception of the relation between value and power. There is more to this comment than the authors recognize when using to refer to make reference to the importance of ‘normative dimensions’ of value.

The second is that the language adopted saw value referred to as a concept, a material social relation, an abstract relation, and an ontologically stable object, and, in one or other of these guises, as a subject that brings social practice of one sort or another into being. This is not the same thing as values meaning different things to different people or the treatment of value as social values, which the authors critique convincingly. Rather it is a slippage that emerges from a value theory framing. Perhaps the point the authors make is that value is all of these things, which might have made for a fascinating discussion. But without such a discussion, the slippage distracted attention from the provocations in the later sections of the paper. My point is to emphasize just how politically and intellectually disabling it can be to close thought and analysis into predetermined theoretical language. As Annemarie Mol stresses ‘the art is not to build a stronghold, but to adapt the theoretical repertoire to every new case’ (Mol, 2010: 256). One consequence is that the authors tied their own intellectual contribution to an internally self-referential debate about how certain geographers interpret Marx, rather than addressing the work that the insights they assembled might perform in a whole host of other intellectual and political contexts.

The third is that the authors do not subject their research object (the AAG debate) to a sufficient critical contextual analysis. They might have asked what projects of knowledge production were being played out, how are the panelists related, who was not on the panel, how was it affected by the spirit of revivalism that I recall from it really present, and so on. This does weaken the paper and prevents the authors from making more of the insights identified later in the paper. These include the potential of value as a framework for various political projects, liberatory valuing, Braun’s point about the politics of the commons, and McCarthy’s observation that ‘value’ carries a double meaning as the transformation that both generates social wealth and establishes the claims made to it. The narrow and effectively depoliticized framing of the paper gives the authors little scope with which to work in developing their own synthesis of the insights or exploring how and why their authors work with them.

In short, then, I remain unsure as to what the authors ultimately conclude about how we might direct the different values of value as an object of inquiry, a methodology, or a political program. Yet, they do bring to attention several of those values. It is to three of them that I want to turn briefly in relation to my current work, guided not by the author’s framing of the paper but in a more open way by their interest in dialectical labor–nature relations. This greater openness begins by understanding value to be generated by the economy in which those dialectical relations are brought into being and materialized, where ‘economy’ is understood as ideas and practices that steward resources to generate livelihoods (Mitchell, 2008). I do so to elaborate upon what I think to be the contribution of the paper.

The first is the notion of ‘liberatory valuing’, which brings together two very helpful framings of the potential to confront the capitalization of nature derived from a focus on value. The first of these lies in the turn to process, incompleteness, emergence, and ongoing engagement implied in the use of the present participle. Liberatory valuing positions value explicitly within a political process of claims making that is broader than a debate about whether nature overwhelms a labor theory of value on the one hand or contests over the ‘social values’ somehow possessed by social groups on the other. Instead, it positions value into a realm of actual political contest and material nature–culture relations in which the economic and the so-called ‘extra-economic’ are co-constitutive.

This is a helpful prompt for my own work with groups who seek to capture ‘extra-economic’ values within a framework that will settle political contests over economic value by negotiating a priori social licenses to appropriate nature’s values. The idea of ‘liberatory valuing’ points instead to a reconsideration of economic rent, especially in the context of New Zealand commons. A ‘social license’ to exploit and pollute under particular terms is a long way short of returning to the commons, and those publics and natures that have a stake in them, the rents that they might generate via sustainable forms of economy. ‘Liberatory valuing’ points instead to some form of social dividend or restorative work on/with nature. Projects as diverse as the ‘Foundational Economy’ (Bentham et al., 2013) take back the economy (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013), Sayer’s (2015) ‘Why we can’t afford the rich’ and James Ferguson’s invitation to ‘Give a man a fish’ all demonstrate that it is rent that must be struggled over. Struggle might take place over the conditions of its production, realization, and circulation. It might take the relatively mundane form, for example, of seeking to overturn individual transferable quotas (ITQ) policies and return ‘ownership’ of fish and fisheries to the national or regional commons (Bromley, 2017). Such struggle will open up sites as diverse as the community garden, the global finance house, the corporate mine, the recreational fishing boat, and the family farm for a consistent and disruptive critical scrutiny that might be enactive as much as dismissive (Lewis et al., 2016).

The other two ‘values of value’ that I’d like to pick up briefly derive from, and elaborate upon, this reflection. First, the potential of confronting rent with liberatory valuing is hammered home by Braun’s observation that ‘capital is parasitic on, rather than source of, labour or nature value’. Rent is unearned income (Sayer, 2015), not a profit earned by the successful application of capital through innovation. It is an appropriation by capital of the work of people and nature—the premium derived from place, understood as the interplay of nature (wild or prelabored) and labor of particular qualities (living or embodied in social or physical infrastructure). A focus on rent as a return to place offers a conceptual bridge to a politics of parasitic cleansing, to play with Braun’s words. We might even begin to see rent as a platform for thinking about sustainable development in place, stripped of destructive economic and environmental practice, and the unjust outcomes of profit seeking. Generating rents might be regarded as a positive outcome. The framework allows us to make nature explicit, highlight rent, and position noncapitalist economy in the same frame. It adds conceptual force to the politics of making explicit the distinction between profit and rent for a popular audience long denied exposure to the very idea of rent let alone its creative potential. It offers a platform for a coherent value politics across multiple sites, and one that transcends both the language of value theory and the easy escape of social values.

Second, the authors attribute to James McMcarthy the observation that value is ‘both the name that we give to transformation of bits of the world into forms that people find more useful—social wealth, if you will—and a claim to that wealth’. If this is the case, then ‘value’ offers a pathway to political work in actualized worlds. As McCarthy suggests, it sets up a series of political relationships, including the questions of how, why, where, when, and in what ways interventions might be made (Lewis and Rosin, 2013), as well those to do with the distribution of goods and bads. This offers a way of approaching the work that nature performs in generating value (and rents), by reversing into the economic through the political.

To end, I think the paper leaves us with a crucial question, and one that ideally will remain open. In their words, ‘explicitly setting out to conduct research with value at its center could potentially allow nature-society geographers to forge new and exciting connections with other geographical subfields…as well as with one another’. The reflection appropriately steers clear of attempting to define what this geography actually is or define a distinctive space for ‘capitalist natures’ within it. However, it does point helpfully to a set of potentially agenda-setting debates that might be had and generative connections that might be forged within (and transcending) the discipline. It also gestures to the continued integrative value of two formative traditions within the contemporary discipline: Marxian political economy and society–environment interactions. This is a valuable intervention at a time when geography is called upon with an ever-increasing frequency to renarrate its value(s) and to renegotiate its institutional positions, often in relation to environmental sciences and a-theoretical and a-critical social sciences.

As an undergraduate geography student, I was taught about rent and value and how they articulate nature–society interactions. As I now think forward to using the idea of rent platforms (Lewis et al., 2013) to explore the political potential of a blue economy (Winder and Le Heron, 2017) in a mission-led government-funded project, the call for a value-based research focus is a welcome one. Kay and Kenny-Lazar highlight geography’s diverse critical thinking in this space. The challenge is to convert this critique into political effect and a disciplinary contribution that leads scholarship in the field. The paper is an important resource in each of these respects.