Dialogues in Human Geography

This article offers a critical response to Simon Springer’s ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’. From a Marxist perspective, the autonomist and anarchist tactics and sentiments that have animated a great deal of political activism over the last few years (in movements like ‘Occupy’) have to be appreciated, analyzed, and supported when appropriate. To the degree that anarchists of one sort or another have raised important issues that are all too frequently ignored or dismissed as irrelevant in mainstream Marxism, dialogue—let us call it mutual aid—rather than confrontation between the two traditions is a far more fruitful way to go. Conversely, Marxism, for all its past faults, has a great deal to offer to the anti-capitalist struggle in which many anarchists are also engaged. Judging from his piece, however, Springer would want no part in such a project. He seems mainly bent on polarizing the relation between anarchism and Marxism as if they are mutually exclusive if not hostile. There is, in my view, no point in that. Honest disagreements should not be a barrier to fertile collaborations in anti-capitalist struggles. So the conclusion I reach is this: let radical geography be just that: radical geography, free of any particular ‘ism’, nothing more, nothing less.

Recent debates in radical geography seem determined to be oppositional and in so doing simplify what is at stake. We need to celebrate and maintain the openness of geography to multiple perspectives while simultaneously developing more action-oriented, hopeful ways forward. Anarchist perspectives hold plenty of promise for radical geography, but only if we critically interrogate their principles and empirics.

This essay responds to David Harvey (2017, ‘Listen, Anarchist!’ a personal response to Simon Springer’s ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’. Dialogues in Human Geography) by proposing that Karl Marx could be considered an anarchist. To make this argument, I draw on Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (2005, Cambridge: MIT Press).

David Harvey’s response to Simon Springer (2014) raises important questions about the places from which to draw ideas for a radical geography agenda. Nevertheless, Harvey ignores critical contributions that social anarchists (including social geographers) have made to understanding both the theory and practice of social transformation. We draw on studies of the anarchist movement in Spain before and during the Spanish Civil War to explore some of what social anarchism has to contribute to geography and contemporary struggles for a more equitable society.

In this commentary, I clarify and expand on anarchists’ positions on order, collectivism, organization, anti-statism, leadership, and the scale of politics. I conclude with some suggestions as to what anarchism has to offer critical geographers.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my article, ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’, I reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so, we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

This article draws heavily upon a discussion among 11 leading scholars in nature–society geography to explore the current and historical relationships between value, nature, and capitalism. Prompted by a provocation from Robertson and Wainwright (2013) that political ecologists can no longer afford to avoid engaging with the tricky topic of Marxian value theory, we address the importance of the concept of value for contemporary work within geography on the political economy of the environment, broadly defined. We argue that scholars in nature–society geography should not only tackle the tricky questions of value head-on but that value could and should come to serve as a unifying analytical framework for the subfield.

This engagement highlights the antagonism between wealth and the commodity value form posed at the heart of Marx’s work. In doing so, it considers methodological possibilities for both understanding and intervening in the fabricating of new alienated capitalist values from beyond-human natures.

As Kay and Kenney-Lazar show, the concept of value holds appeal for political ecologists who seek to demystify and politicize the socio-ecological relations underpinning capitalist productions of nature. But there are challenges to using value to understand capitalist natures. Much of nature is not priced, and no nature labours for a wage. This makes the labour theory of value, which tends to be prominent even in discussions of a broadly defined value, difficult to apply to nature. Having wrangled with this ourselves, we turn (as Kay and Kenney-Lazar do) to feminist political economists, who have long theorized the unwaged realm within capitalist social relations. We find that these feminists, while not unconcerned with value, are instead often set on understanding how some work is persistently devalued, or denigrated, seen as worthless – which leads them to centre patriarchy in their analyses. Building from this, we suggest the need to centre anthropocentrism – to historicize and denaturalize devaluations of nature – within work on value and capitalist natures.

The authors’ formulation ‘capitalist natures’ may be too quick to imply that the formal and/or real subsumption of all natures is in the process of being accomplished. I point toward liminal and dynamic cases, such as camels in pastoral production systems, to trouble the mental model of a spatialized ‘outside’ that is either simply colonized by or subsidizing capitalist relations.

The author cautions against theories of value that look to define what ‘it’ is, noting how such an approach closes off imaginaries based on alterity and difference thus unintentionally reproducing the very status quo being criticizing. A call is made for experimentation, disciplinary transgressions, and cosmopolitical critiques. Can we think about theories of value that are critical and hopeful?

Critical geography as a field has yet to reckon with a fundamental geographical blind spot: the historical-geographical patterns of capitalism as a whole. There has been a steady—and studied—reluctance to grapple with capitalism as a historical-geographical place. A geography of value relations must proceed from the unities-in-diversity of capitalism’s combined and uneven spatiality. If value relations are central to grasping the geographies of power, capital, and nature, those geographies are irreducibly world-historical. That does not mean imposed ‘from above’ in any straightforward sense. It means, as Marx and Engels perceptively observe, that value relations entwine everyday life with and within a mosaic of power and capital that operates at the scale of capitalism. Such an understanding situates value relations as unifying thread without positing linear causality or scalar primacy. Dialectical thinking about world history, after all, moves through variation—not in spite of it.

Directing attention to ‘value’ and ‘valuing’ as objects of scholarly research offers a promising platform for building a new politics of geography and of livelihoods in relation to economic activities involving the commons, nonhuman species, and environmental resources. This paper responds to Kay and Kenny-Lazar’s survey of recent debates in this regard. It makes the claim that while refocusing scholarship on the materiality of value is a welcome intervention, the challenge is to covert this attention to a new politics in the world by escaping the narrow theoretical language and framings they deploy. I refer to my own work in Aotearoa New Zealand to suggest that this may be achieved in part by extending ‘value thinking’ to ‘rent thinking’ and mobilizing both sets of ideas in enactive, applied research.

This paper is a response to commentaries on our article entitled ‘Value in capitalist natures: an emerging framework’ (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017). We argue that the responses to our initial paper served to broaden our proposed framework and to underscore the need for a unified, but diverse, approach to nature–society studies with value at its center. Extending the argument from the initial article, we continue to see potential for value to act as a bridge that can bring together diverse scholarship in nature–society geography and political ecology. After briefly addressing both the tensions and possibilities for value as a bridging concept, we focus our response primarily around three major threads that emerged across the commentaries. First, we address points raised by the respondents concerning the bounding of capitalism and its permeation into socionatures. Second, we engage with value’s inverse and its absence, captured through the concepts of ‘devaluation’ (Collard and Dempsey) and ‘disvalues’ (Sullivan). Finally, we close by engaging the possibility of a ‘liberatory valuing of nature’—one which recognizes a multiplicity of social and ecological values as a means of working toward more just and emancipatory nature–society relations beyond capitalism.