Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

As the financial system tailspins and ‘Asian Flu’ reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the “laws of motion” of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing global political-economic disorder. I discuss, more specifically, his theory of crisis and the dialectics of accumulation and circulation of “real” and “fictitious” capital as sketched out in the Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 1 and 3). I end with an exploration of the famous political prognosis from The Communist Manifesto of mass collective class struggle and the development of a “world literature”, and set all this within the context of a newly emerging workers' internationalism and social-movement unionism.

The prospects for politics at a world scale are a casualty in the polarizing discussions that too often characterize reflections on globalization. The three volumes of Marx's Capital are taken as a field in which to mine a conception of the socializing effects of what is often treated as global finance's sweeping reign. This reading is used to understand recent financial developments in an effort to return a redesigned conception of socialism to the political arena.

Globalisation has become an almost ubiquitous term in academic debates, policy circles, and popular culture. In this paper we critically consider geography's characteristic form of engagement with the multifaceted features of globalisation discourses and realities. Globalisation provides an entry point for assertions of the conceptual and empirical importance of space, place, context, and locality. However, we argue that this form of engagement subordinates the central, and conceptually problematic, historicism of globalisation to a set of more manageable disciplinary concerns. We provide a critical discussion of the historicist dimensions of globalisation discourses, and indicate some of the ways in which critical accounts can reproduce this historicism. By raising this problem, we suggest that space and spatiality are not always or automatically the most significant entry point for conceptual critique and engagement. The case of globalisation therefore indicates some of the limits of established forms of interdisciplinary dialogue between critical human geography and related fields.

In this paper I critically assess the alleged process of globalisation of the world economy. Five interrelated themes are addressed. First, I argue that the ‘real’ myth of the globalisation discourse is part of an intensifying ideological, political, socioeconomic, and cultural struggle over the organisation of society and the position of the citizen therein. Second, the ‘mythical’ resurrection of the ‘local’ or ‘regional’ scale—both in theory and in practice—is an integral part of the ‘myth’ of globalisation. Third, the preeminence of the ‘global’ in much of the literature and political rhetoric obfuscates, marginalises, and silences an intense and ongoing sociospatial struggle in which the reconfiguration of spatial scales of governance takes a central position. Fourth, the ‘rhetoric’ of globalisation is paralleled by and facilitates the emergence of more authoritarian or at least autocratic forms of governance. Fifth, the proliferation of new modes and forms of resistance to the restless process of deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation of capital requires greater attention to ‘spatial scale’ in order to assess how the emerging new ‘gestalt of scale’ could be turned into an emancipatory and empowering process.

In contemporary global financial markets, the production and investment of capital is dependent upon complex systems of risk management. In this paper I explore the ‘modern’ notion of risk within these markets. I argue that these systems are not only dependent upon institutional infrastructure and material resources but are also maintained by a specific ‘risk’ culture, an entrenched set of practices of market configuration, technological development, social-group construction, and notions of authority, expertise and creativity which combines modernity's ambition to know with the market's ambition to commodify. This form of ‘modern’ risk can be seen as deeply entrenched within and produced by broader social and economic developments, and runs counter to the critical version of risk developed by Beck. I show how risk itself is a contested concept, and how it defines different practices of dealing with the future.

The late-modern discourses of female slenderness and free-market reform share striking rhetorical similarities. Furthermore, their corporeal effects are quite similar. The historical coincidence of their deployment is no accident; rather, they represent two gestures of a (re)figured late-modern hegemonic practice that feeds, ultimately, on hunger. By juxtaposing and critically interrogating these two discursive practices, it is apparent that a familiar binary opposition—thin/fat—was substituted for an unfamiliar pair—adjusted/unadjusted. This discursive swap drew upon a long history of filtering between bodies and economies, and acted to naturalize a new disciplinary phase in late modernity. This phase is unsurprisingly profoundly gendered. It is also spatialized via connection with another binary chain: First World/Third World, North/South, West/East, developed/underdeveloped, here/there. However, the relationship of these two binary chains is contradictory, and this has given rise to a contestation of power that coalesces, literally and figuratively, around borders.