Neil Smith

Disastrous Accumulation

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:30:49 +0000

In the United States during the spring and summer of 2005, long-simmering debates over “intelligent design” came to a boiling point. Long a favorite of the Christian Right, which had never reconciled itself to some of the causal and temporal implications of modern biology and geology, intelligent design represents a revamped creationism, the antievolution belief that the world is too complicated to have been created in any way other than by the actions of a divine intelligent being. With court challenges looming, which if successful would potentially mandate that Kansas and Pennsylvania school districts teach supernatural doctrine in science classes; with President George W. Bush declaring in August 2005 that intelligent design ought to be taught; and with scientists mobilizing against such unwarranted political and religious intrusion into the science curriculum, this and the socalled avian u looked like the hot-button issues of the fall political season. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal showdown over intelligent design. By the time the court cases were duly convened in December 2005 and Christian fundamentalist challenges scathingly rebuffed, the issue had faded considerably from public view. The opposition had successfully highlighted the insanity of teaching god on a par with natural process, but it received unanticipated, overwhelming, and crucial support from a wholly unscripted and unwanted source: Hurricane Katrina. If the intelligent design doctrine had any merit at all, it was diffcult to escape the conclusion that Katrina, which struck on August 29, and the consequent devastation of New Orleans and the north Gulf Coast at the cost of an estimated 1,570 lives must represent some kind of “intelligent meteorology.” The Indian Ocean tsunami of eight months earlier, with an estimated death toll of about 226,000, was still raw in the public imagination, and five weeks after Katrina the Pakistan and Kashmir earthquake killed 74,000. In the meantime, Hurricane Stan, though now largely blanked from memory in the United States, killed more people in Guatemala than Katrina did across the Gulf Coast. Intelligent design began to look less than intelligent and any design manifestly cruel. Cagier Christians backed away from embracing such a patent absurdity.

The appeal to divine intervention was not entirely abandoned, however. A story circulated in the wake of Katrina concerning the Christian fundamentalist, global capitalist, and televangelist Pat Robertson, who was a 1988 Republican presidential candidate and who more recently called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez—a recommendation that qualifies him as a potential terrorist under Britain’s new antiterrorist laws. Whether this multimillionaire and White House habitué really does believe that Hurricane Katrina expressed “God’s wrath” on the hometown of lesbian television celebrity Ellen DeGeneres is unclear, although such invocations of intelligent meteorology are a signature of Robertson’s modus operandi. About the comments of U.S. Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge there is no doubt, however. Stunning as it seems, this elected Louisiana offcial actually rejoiced at the death of working-class, usually aged African Americans in the oodwaters of Katrina: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” Baker commented as bloated bodies oated through New Orleans streets. “We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

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[Image: "HURRICANE KATRINA" by au_tiger01]

The Imperial Present: Liberalism has Always been Conservative

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:15:57 +0000

The orthodox wisdom of the last century holds that empire is a deeply conservative project of economic expansion, power and control bound up with a social civilisational mission. Certainly, the recrudescence of US imperial ambition in the early years of the twenty-first century is widely associated with the rise of neoconservatism, whereas the ubiquitous postcolonial sentiment of recent decades since the middle of last century is seen as a symptom of progressive liberalism standing against empire. But as Uday Mehta2 has reminded us in his review of nineteenth-century British imperial thought, empire is equally if not predominantly an economic and civilisational project of liberal capitalism, and so it is no accident that the present imperial phase is associated with neoliberalism as much as neoconservatism. Thus, in pursuit of inspiration, lineage, and historical support, George Bush attempted to vindicate his warring in Iraq and Afghanistan by harking back again and again to the great liberal icon, Woodrow Wilson. How, therefore, are we to explain this anomaly of an apparently conservative project of empire performed in terms of the best liberal tradition?

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[Image: "Burj Dubai, Emirates" by fatboyke]

Neo-Critical Geography, Or, The Flat Pluralist World of Business Class

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:10:36 +0000

When Tony Blair was re-elected in 2001, he promised to continue the moral crusade of ‘‘New Labour’’ as a force for political and moral regeneration in Britain and the world. Workers, women, immigrants, Asian and Caribbean Britons, many in the middle class, all caught the wave. The nightmare of Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s was still visceral in many people’s minds, and a sweeping majority still thought Blair the best of a motley crew. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, to a wide swath of people including disaffected members of his own party and eventually cabinet, that Blair was not the answer to Thatcher but was in many ways continuing her neo-liberal policies. Not only did he not roll back Thatcher’s travesties but he sought to complete various ambitions of the Thatcher government in a way that neither the Iron Lady nor her successor John Major could ever have hoped for. Blair’s second term in office consummated many of these goals, further shambolizing a Thatcherized National Health Care system and initiating university privatisation with student fees.

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[Image: "IMG_5801" by benmatthewreyes]

IMG_5801

New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:08:29 +0000

This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.

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Another revolution is possible: Foucault, ethics, and politics

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:03:40 +0000

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It is time to think about revolution again. After the failures of the Russian revolution signaled by Stalin’s defensive slogan, “socialism in one country” (every bit as oxymoronic as “capitalism in one firm”), the 1960s reawakened a sense of revolution from some- thing of a slumber. New Year’s eve in Havana, 1959, brought the Cuban revolution and over the next two decades an extraordinary series of events put revolution squarely back on the agenda: successful anticolonial struggles and preemptive declarations of independence in Africa and Asia (prefigured in the Asian subcontinent in 1947), Vietnamese opposition to imperialism, antiwar uprisings in various continents, the feminist revolt, the global crescendo of 1968, working-class rebellion from Santiago to London, antiracist and civil rights movements, the demise of fascism in Spain and Portugal, environmental and queer rebellions, Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, a workers’ revolt turned clerical clampdown in Iran.

Whatever the very real successes of these movements, they did not remain revolu- tionary and with only a few exceptions – foremost Cuba, perhaps – they did not dislodge the integument of capitalist social relations. On the contrary, the response to many of these challenges was the opposite: a forceful, often military, counterrevolution, often with US support, which eventually strengthened local capitalism under the banners of an emergent globalization and neoliberalism, injecting capitalist social relations deeper and deeper into the marrow of daily life. The reprise of capital after the mid-1970s therefore hastened another political retreat from revolution, and by the 1990s those who continued to think in terms of revolution or even speak its possibility seemed archaic, out of touch, hopelessly unrealistic (for an exploration, see Berlant, 1995). The truth today in the so-called advanced industrial world is that our stunted imaginations have largely lost the ability to think what a society other than capitalism – with all its repressive and oppressive aspects, and spanning the gamut of social relations – might look like.

Marx was carefully attuned to the inevitability and power of revolution in larger historical perspective. Revolution is no external implant, he reasoned, but comes from within. Whatever the brutality of capitalism, it is simultaneously the most revolutionary mode of production. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production”, reads The Communist Manifesto. This is a theme to which much of Capital is devoted, but Marx also insists that the bourgeoisie cannot survive without creating an ever larger and more extensive proletariat, its own revolution from within.

Surprisingly perhaps, because in the English-speaking world he is often and much too easily read as an abrupt counterpoint to Marx, Michel Foucault not only gives voice to this same revolutionary impulse but if anything universalizes it beyond Marx’s specific, historically bounded, analysis of capitalism. His support for the 1979 Iranian revolution in its earliest months has recently come under sustained attack for his presumed naivete concerning a revolt that was already turning fundamentalist in its religious reaction [see Afary and Anderson (2004; 2005) and the debates that ensued]. But the reproach of Foucault largely elides the most interesting aspect of his argument. “Revolts belong to history”, Foucault (2000) wrote about the Iranian revolution, but “in a certain way they escape from it. The impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, `I will no longer obey’, and throws the risk of their life in the face of an authority they consider unjust seems to me to be some- thing irreducible … . People do revolt; that is a fact, and that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it.” The very title of Foucault’s piece, “Useless to revolt?” could hardly be clearer: he was challenging quite forcefully the post-1960s sense of the uselessness of social revolt, and it is not without irony that the controversy surrounding his qualified support for the Iranian revolution came amidst and in the wake of immigrant uprisings in Paris in 2005, spreading to other cities in western Europe. In painting him as a naive dupe, his critics have also, willy nilly, striven to reinstate the sense that revolt is useless.
But Foucault must be defended. He was writing only months after Iranian oil workers sparked the revolution by going on strike and at a time when the hijacking of the revolt by a theocratic elite was far from certain. For him, in the spring of 1979, the “Iranian movement” still defied “that `law’ of revolutions” whereby “the tyranny lurking within them” comes to the surface. Yet the controversy over Foucault’s revolu- tionism has largely sidestepped a central and symptomatic dilemma in Foucault’s forceful defense of revolution, and here he may be on less secure ground. Insofar as the penchant for revolt is, as he suggests, universal, this sits very awkwardly with the “subjectivity” of revolution to which he is just as equally attuned. To span the breach between universality and irreducibility on the one side and subjectivity on the other Foucault proposes a “theoretical ethics”. This theoretical ethics is opposite to, and for Foucault replaces, any strategic politics; it is explicitly “antistrategic”, he says. Potential tyranny lurks not only in revolt, he implies, but equally in a strategic politics. As an intellectual, he feels that his role therefore is to “keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it.”

Foucault’s breach is philosophically familiar, of course, even if it is not a purely philosophical question. The tension between structured social position and the agential possibility of changing both social structure and social process is common to all with an ambition for social transformation, revolutionary or otherwise. But Foucault’s version of this dilemma, juxtaposing universality and inevitability with subjectivity, widens the breach significantly. Marx bridged precisely this breach with a historically specific and situated analysis of capitalism and its discontents and the consequent identification of its grave diggersöthe working class. “Theoretical ethics”, by contrast, invites a confusion between ethics and politics, even a substitution of the former for the latter, and a consequent demobilization of politics. Foucault obviously did not go so far; rather this is a dilemma he kept struggling with. There can be a politics to ethics, then, and ethics is inevitably bound up with politics, but politics is a lot more than, and sometimes less than, ethics, and an ethics unhinged from politics runs the danger of nestling inside a status quo of which it may yet be superbly critical. This is precisely the dilemma of a social liberalism which properly abhors all of the deleterious effects of capitalism without mobilizing that ethical revulsion toward a practical confrontation with causes. Marx’s analytical choice of the working class as the revolutionary class surely involves an anti-exploitation ethicsöan ethics built into the analytical category of surplus valueöbut it equally involves an analytical calculation about which social groups can and which cannot be expected to revolt, and why. It in no way excludes other revolutionary possibilities, nor does it assume a narrow definition of the working class as somehow unchanging, industrially defined, or devoid of gendered, racial, national, or sexual identification. Even less does it suggest a one-dimensional future for a socialist society. Quite the opposite. The dismantling of economic difference should presumably unleash unbridled social difference, long brutually repressed by poverty, one-dimensional consumerism, socially coerced identities, and what Herbert Marcuse called repressive tolerance.

The antiglobalization and social justice movements are currently morphing in part into anticapitalist movements and have adopted the slogan, “another world is possible”. Another revolution is possible tooöas a means to that world. Indeed, with Foucault, we can say that revolution is a future fact: revolts belong to the history of the future as much as the history of the past. Not to anticipate this future fact is as much an act of elaborate self-delusion as the assumption that revolutions are always just round the corner. If, as Gramsci once put it, one can predict the future to the extent that one is practically involved in making it happen, the prudent course would seem to be to diagnose the kind of revolutionary change one thinks necessary and to find a way of making it happenö making it happen under conditions which are, as much as possible, those of our own choosing. This in no way precludes incremental political change, but especially today when a globally connected ruling class has felt empowered to effect its own revolution in the conditions of capitalist social and political economy, not to mention a certain dis- cursive economyöidentifiable under the most generalized label, neoliberalismöand when the majority of ethically driven progressive forms have been swept aside, it does suggest that a commitment to incremental change which does not at the same time have an ambitious political eye on the `irreducibility’ of revolution, is itself unrealistic.

Revolutions are by definition about discontinuities, and this inevitably provokes fear in those with something to lose: “however bad things are now they could be worse.” But they also embody certain continuities. The road to revolution is not magically erased in the world that follows; rather it brings its traces into that world, warts and all, and so the revolutionary intent has to prefigure in practice, as best it can, the kind of world desired. It is in this sense that Foucault’s “theoretical ethics”ö let me broaden this to “social ethics”öis vital for generative political change. But by the same token, our prerevolutionary political imagination, shackled by the prison house of capitalism, cannot be allowed to straightjacket “the poetry of the future”, as Marx once put it. To take just one example, this is the lesson of the extraordinary if unpredictable political and cultural creativity that followed the Russian revolution, short-lived as that creativity was before snuffed out.

But, however vital, an ethics is insufficient to a revolutionary politics. It does, indeed, as Foucault suggests, remain “a bit behind politics” (indicating, it is worth pointing out, that for Foucault there was no fuzzy confusion of ethics with politics). Foucault’s antistrategic impulse may well have represented a recoil against Stalinism, more than a trace of which still remained in a `reformed’ postwar French communist party, but that is far from the only political alternative to capitalism. A politics without strategy is inconceivable and a `theoretical ethics’ that holds itself separate from politics to preserve a well-reasoned `antistrategic’ impulse is in the end destined to be spectator more than Gramscian participant in world-historic political transformation.

References
Afary J, Anderson K, 2004, “The seductions of Islamism” New Politics 10(1) 113 ^ 122
Afary J, Anderson K, 2005 Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL)
Berlant L, 1995, “68, or the revolution of little queers”, in Feminism Beside Itself Ed. D Elam,
R Wiegman (Routledge, New York) pp 297 ^ 311
Foucault M, 2000, “Useless to revolt?”, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954 ^ 1984,Volume 3:
Power Ed. J D Faubion (New Press, New York) pp 449 ^ 453

Nature As Accumulation Strategy

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:59:04 +0000

A commodity, according to the classical political economists, comprises and combines a use value and an exchange value. Value, they recognized, was the product of human labour; for Marx it was measured by socially necessary labour time. Capital, he argued, was ‘value in motion’, and capital accumulation was the process by which capitalist societies multiplied social value through the exploitation of labour. Capitalism has always employed labour power to invest value in use values harvested from nature, and so what could it mean to suggest, as the title of this paper does, that nature has become an accumulation strategy? It is increasingly evident, I want to argue, that in the past three decades, a new dimension of the capitalist production of nature has considerably transformed the social relationship with the natural world.

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Toxic Capitalism

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:14:01 +0000

We are all now familiar with the story of the rise of neoliberalism – Friedrich von
Hayek and the Mont Pe´le`rin Society, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys,
Pinochet’s Chile – as simultaneously testing ground and template for a whole
new phase of capitalism. In intellectual historical terms, neoliberalism marked a
return to a Smithean economy based on private property, competition and selfinterest,
and to a Lockean politics vaunting the expression of self-interest as the
best-for-all pinnacle of bourgeois democracy. But it may be Russia nearly two
decades later that marks the most emblematic expression of this ruthless killand-
grab politics. By 1991, the forensic global violence of neoliberalism had
been visited on various countries in Latin America, Thatcher’s Britain,
Reagan’s America, IMF targets of ‘structural readjustment’ (from the Caribbean
to Africa), New York City, Poland. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of
lives had already been sacrificed either to direct state violence or war, unemployment
or starvation, the want of water or health care. The wars in Iraq, the Balkans,
and various locales in central Africa were still to come. Having already won the
Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was the
toast of the capitalist world for ‘liberalising’ Russia’s social and political institutions,
in effect crying ‘uncle’ on the Cold War. Liberalising the economy was
next on the agenda, but rather than supporting a process already underway,
Western governments put ‘Gorby’ in a vice, requiring the most far-reaching economic
‘reforms’. Fresh from his organised destruction of the Bolivian and Polish
economies in the name of market liberalisation, Jeffrey Sachs played henchman
economist of Western capital, and the next two or three years turned the Soviet
economy into a whole new frontier of capital accumulation and dispossession,
looting the state’s coffers and the people’s everyday living. Egged on by
Western governments under the vogue sentiment that ‘greed is good’, the new
Russia suspended any meaningful democracy, put down a popular revolt…

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After Geopolitics? (w Deborah Cowen)

admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:29:42 +0000

by Deborah Cowen
Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada;
deb.cowen@utoronto.ca

and
Neil Smith
Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY,
USA; University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK;
NSmith@gc.cuny.edu
Abstract: This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a “geopolitical social”, which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic.We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in “critical geopolitics” nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.

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