Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity” [Marx, 1967 Capital, Volume 1 first paragraph (International Publishers, New York)]. As Marx moves beyond the first paragraph of Capital, he famously argues that value makes the commodity a ‘hieroglyphic’. But his own opening is also a sort of hieroglyphic: it rings true for bourgeois economy as it does for his critique of that economy, but for entirely different reasons. The purpose of Capital is to obliterate this apparent corroboration, yet a hieroglyphic quality is maintained throughout, as Marx subjects his own successive claims to iterative, immanent critique. This chain cannot be said to be indefinite for Marx, but neither is it complete. Here, I hark back to Marx's opening gambit to ask: in capitalist society, what else accumulates besides commodities proper? The paper proceeds iteratively, offering a series of revised opening claims that mimic yet spiral away from Marx's original. I argue specifically that, although devaluation (decommodification) inheres in the production and circulation of value, it has its own accumulation logic. The example is of food banking. I explore this activity as simultaneously material, representational, and political, and examine the constitutive force of each of these modalities. I treat food banking, therefore, as a form of commodity afterlife, through which devaluation becomes (imperfectly) a positivity.

In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britain's top supermarkets to undertake ‘ethical’ reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the ‘ethical complex’ of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popular media. More broadly, it complicates assumptions about the demise of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ at a time when massive corporations control both the media and the food supply. Three case studies of NGO campaigns illustrate this point. At the same time, however, they point to tensions between the international scope of certain NGO campaigns for supermarket ‘ethical reform’ and the more localized concerns of their constituencies.

In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product certifying agencies. These standards are found to embed contradictions between inclusiveness and transparency that lead to difficulties in field-level implementation: in essence, practices required to make organic production legible to transnational certifiers often have the opposite effect of making certification unintelligible at the village level. Second, I show how field-level certification inspectors, working under contract to certifying agencies, cooperate with village organic extension agents to make certification legible both to villagers and to transnational certifiers (thereby helping to ensure its success). A corollary methodological argument is made to the effect that the importance of field-level work becomes evident when inspectors are viewed—through the optic of labor-process ethnography—as ‘interactive service employees’. This work thus points to a need to understand with greater clarity how standards are enacted in local contexts and support the efforts of field-level workers with the often-difficult task of making standards legible.

In this paper I critically assess the World Bank's adoption of discourses of corporate social responsibility in Latin America. I argue that the turn to private-sector associations as ‘agents of development’ or ‘corporate citizens’ is a logical extension of the neoliberal policy repertoire, allowing capital to position itself as the key actor within the arena of civil society and permitting the World Bank to resolve some of its internal debates around the role of institutions in development more broadly. At the same time, through a case study of the Guatemalan sugar industry, I argue that these initiatives are constructed in differentiated ways that are rooted in particular class trajectories and geographies of production and social reproduction. Looking at these so-called ‘strategic development alliances’ as arising at least in part from specific geographies of work may allow us to see where possibilities exist to push for more inclusive social and political participation.

In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-dependent effects that have carried over into the post-cold-war era of ‘globalization’. Although recent changes in the relationships between US capitalists and US labor unions have undermined the US ‘labor accord’ that reigned during the cold war, the new, ascendant transnational neoliberal hegemony has not as yet completely transformed the relationships of labor unions in the United States to those elsewhere in the world, which poses ongoing challenges for international labor solidarity, even in a context of new possibilities.

Reflecting on findings from research conducted in the United Kingdom, we consider some implications for an understanding of economic geographies of the emergence of local currency systems (LCSs) within developed economies. LCSs are founded on the creation of local currencies and driven by local—but contested—circuits of consumption, exchange, and production. In this paper we are concerned with three interrelated sets of issues: the intersections of social and material relations and practices in the construction of economic geographies; the possibilities—constrained by these intersections—of creating alternative economic geographies; and the consequent possibilities of contributing to economic proliferation. We distinguish between three main forms of LCS—LETSystems, LETS schemes, and Time Dollars—differentiated along a range of institutional, organisational, ethical, and moral dimensions. These LCSs reflect and illustrate the diversity of meanings, understandings, and intentions brought to bear upon economic geographies. The existence—even if only temporary—of LCSs is testament to the (limited) possibilities of local economic self-determination and organisation; but their material ineffectiveness, decline, and uneven geographical spread reflect their formative links with mainstream practices and social relations and their internal contradictions and barriers. These characteristics illustrate the vulnerabilities inherent in all economic geographies and not just in those that are locally constructed.

This paper extends the literature in cultural festivals and urban methods to consider a case where the objectives of local government in holding a cultural festival exceeded economic development. In the city of Gwangju in South Korea, authorities initiated the Biennale exhibition to replace the troubling image of its political history with the new image of a city of art. This attempted transformation faced resistance from citizens who wanted to protect and develop Gwangju's own political identity and image. From 1995 to 2002, four Biennales were held. The Biennale, initiated to remove the controversial political image of Gwangju, became a place where Gwangju's history could be reinterpreted and its identity could be negotiated and defined by its own civil society.