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Dominant narratives of the economy, as well as policy discourses in Papua New Guinea (PNG), tend to separate the 'formal' from the 'informal' economy. Concurrently, there is a development policy emphasis on women's economic empowerment. In urban areas this has meant a policy focus on larger market places as sites where women need support for economic engagement. Within these policy discourses, one activity in urban areas usually relegated to the 'informal' economy is small home‐based market stalls, referred to in this paper as haus maket. Located at homes or on nearby roads, haus maket are prolific and available to the public, and as such provide a similar function to public market places as spaces to make money. This paper considers these public yet intimate spaces as sites where vendors, usually women, embody and lead contestations between money and moral value spheres. At a time when the policy emphasis is on the formal economy and larger market places in PNG, why do such small market places persist? The first aim of this paper is to establish the role of haus maket as a site where spheres of value intersect. Rather than being 'informal' and peripheral, I seek to foreground its centrality to the economy but also as a site where economic and social moral values conflate. The second aim of the paper is to examine the role of sharing as a form of transaction in its own right distinct from exchange as a transaction between two actors. Haus maket stalls are sites of sharing and of moral action and value where forms of value in the settlement are shaped and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although South‐East Asia's trading networks have existed for millennia, recent decades have seen markets dramatically intensify in the region's frontiers, bringing social and environmental upheaval. Within political ecology, such transitions are framed as frontier incorporation into global capitalism – a process that has been ongoing since European colonisation. This paper, however, responds to recent calls for commodity network studies to better account for specific material and social variances in "actually existing capitalism." My analysis focuses on Mondulkiri province in north‐eastern Cambodia, where a boom in cassava cultivation has produced two distinct commodity networks. The first network supplies dried cassava chips to trans‐border markets that serve bioethanol and livestock production. The second network supplies fresh cassava to Vietnamese starch and processed food factories. In order to understand why two market networks have evolved from one crop, I analyse the social, material and spatial relationships in each network. Comparative analysis shows that both networks involve land and labour commodification and respond to global demand. Yet subtle geographical variations in transport networks, migration patterns and the availability of uncleared land, support dried cassava production in some areas and fresh cassava in others. The cassava case shows that although frontier markets are propelled by globally connected processes of commodification, they ultimately take form through co‐productive networks that mould to and shape frontier landscapes. Furthermore, market networks are not only mobilised, but also can be demobilised by environmental, economic and social pressures – a point that frontier incorporation perspectives may overlook. The paper therefore argues for an understanding of frontier geographies as dynamic and constitutive in market formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of "tech gentrification" results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a "crossroads of theory", this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors' activist and empirical work, it contends that "thinking from Oakland" demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedmann and McMichael's work, through their concept of the 'food regime', has been foundational to our thinking about the relation between capitalism, the state, and agriculture. Given the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of their seminal 1989 paper in this journal (Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Decline of National Agricultures, 1870 to the Present) it seems very appropriate to commemorate this event by undertaking a reassessment of that paper. This article undertakes such a reassessment by examining and critiquing: the theoretical assumptions underlying the paper, particularly in relation to capitalism, class, and the state. This directs attention particularly to: the authors' (implicit) definition of capitalism; the relation between capitalism and the modern state; their treatment of 'class' and 'class struggle'; and their periodisation of food regimes and the dynamics underlying them, these being premised on their theoretical assumptions. The second, third, and, fourth sections occupy the bulk of the paper. The second section develops a significantly revised theoretical foundation for thinking about the dynamics underlying food regimes, while the third section deploys this as the basis for a new periodisation of food regimes. This periodisation includes a proposed Fifth, or 'Post‐Neoliberal' Food Regime, and the final section examines this in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the affective dimensions of new forms of informal entrepreneurial work carried out in spaces of unemployment. Situating the analysis within contemporary scholarship on deservingness and on affect and labour, I shed light on the forms of entrepreneurial labour that rely upon affect‐driven economies of exchange underpinned by moral judgements of deservingness, value and worth. In particular, this paper draws on a multi‐city (Melbourne, London, San Francisco) study of homeless street press sellers (The Big Issue and Street Sheet) to explore the ways in which contemporary practices of charity and care are carried out through individualized market‐place exchanges. Sellers' accounts of their work reveal how smiling and being (or looking) happy is a performative expectation that must be managed in the face of poverty and precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 20 years J K Gibson‐Graham and the Community Economies Collective have endeavoured to reveal the diversity of economic practice already operative in our so‐called capitalist world. The aim of this paper is to further this ambition by illuminating an occlusion in Gibson‐Graham's own political vision. It argues that diversity, in Gibson‐Graham's thought, is primarily conceptualised as something produced. Drawing upon the work of George Bataille, this paper conceptualises the economy as a superlative and prodigal system of energy exchange that, by definition, is over‐productive and wasteful. In this framing, diversity is not the result of positive relations but emerges from the prolific nature of the general economy. The idea is developed through a discussion of the Detroit urban farming movement. Specifically it argues that the inefficient, redundant and wasteful nature of urban farming is an appropriation of potentialities resident within the general economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information‐technologies are essential for global capitalism to function at speed across scale, space and complexity. The importance of software and algorithms in the governance of these systems is reflected in the attention of scholars to the ways digital code and materiality (re)combine to create hybrid digital/material spaces of economic activity, movement and everyday life. This paper extends this work in two key ways: first by emphasising the relational aspect of these code/spaces, and second by showing how the digital algorithms of code/spaces are hackable rather than hegemonic. Using the case study of frequent flyer programmes we demonstrate how networked knowledge‐sharing reshapes code/spaces to provide unintended opportunities such as low‐cost travel and access to spaces normally only frequented by global elites. Although this case highlights vulnerabilities in the code of global capitalism, it is primarily only those with significant lifestyle privilege who are able to fully participate in these subversions. Moreover, while much of the value captured by “airline hackers” comes from airlines’ profit margins, the relationality of code/spaces can impact citizens and consumers not directly connected to or interested in airline travel. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that in contrast to characterisations of omnipresence and hegemony, the information networks and algorithms of global capitalism contain moments of uneven porousness and selective hackability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of capitalism in Brazil have been traditionally overlooked by the literature on its developmental trajectory, either considered as an outcome of colonial exploitation or described through a broad notion of 'bourgeois revolution'. The recent discussion between the consequentialist interpretation of bourgeois revolutions and the Political Marxist critique of the bourgeois paradigm allows for a reassessment of these narratives, with a stronger emphasis on the specific disputes of early‐20th‐century Brazil. In this paper, I engage with Florestan Fernandes as the main representative of the bourgeois paradigm within Brazil. As an alternative, I present a reassessment of the 'capitalist transition' understood as a set of social property relations organised around market dependency. By tracing this form of market dependency through Brazilian historiography, I present a narrative that posits the development of capitalism in Brazil through the nonrevolutionary rise of an industrial bourgeoisie during the Old Republic and the competing strategies of declining (British) and rising (US/Germany) financial imperialism in the 1920s. Therefore, it highlights the role of (geo)political disputes by pointing towards the policy changes introduced by the Vargas regime in the 1930s as a key factor in the transition to capitalism in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical perspective from 1990 to 2018 of the functioning of the world oil market with and without OPEC. The analysis builds on a new methodology simulating counterfactual (i.e. what‐if) outcomes in the rich context of state‐of‐the‐art structural VAR models of the world oil market to empirically assess OPEC's contribution to oil markets and the global economy by quantifying the impact of OPEC's balancing role via its spare capacity cushion on the historical evolution of oil production, oil prices and price volatility, the joint evolution of the supply and demand elasticities and global welfare. A counterfactual scenario is constructed of how global oil production would have evolved if OPEC had been producing at maximum capacity, held no spare capacity and did not play any balancing role since 1990. The analysis also employs a general equilibrium approach to determine the global welfare implications of a world without OPEC spare capacity across oil‐exporting and oil‐importing regions. The welfare effects are calculated based on regional GDP gains and losses following changes in oil production patterns globally. The methodology to determine the impact on GDP is based on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework which offers a high level of detail regarding the world economy in terms of economic sectors and regional interdependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from theory on the "co-production" of science and society, this paper provides an account of trajectories in US climatology, roughly from the 1850s to 1920, the period during which climatology emerged as an organized branch of meteorology and government administration. The historical narrative traces the development of climatology both as a professional/institutional project and as a component of a larger governmental logic. Historical analysis of climatologists' scientific texts, maps, and social organization within government provides a sociological explanation for the emergent "stabilization" of climate as a geographic-statistical category. Climatic stability, defined by the view that climate is unchanging, was advanced over this period in a way that linked the interests and practices of climatologists to actors invested in facilitating and administrating commercial agriculture and trade. I position the logic of climatology and the discourse of climatic stability historically, with reference to prior concern with climate change and, in recent decades, efforts to govern global warming through geoengineering climatic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of clean energy consumption (CEC) on economic growth (EG) and CO2 emissions (CO2) within a framework of environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in a panel of BRICS countries for the period 1992–2014. The results indicated that CEC and EG have a significant positive impact on EG, while CO2 has a negative impact on it. Our results also found that EC and EG increase CO2 while CEC significantly reduces it. Further, we found that the EKC hypothesis is valid in the BRICS countries. Finally, panel causality test indicated that unidirectional causality running from EC to EG. However, we did not find a causal relationship between CEC and EG. Based on these results, some of the policy implications have proposed for these emerging market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of prosumption in the world of food. Prosumption is a combination of production and consumption: food prosumers are people who actively produce food for self‐consumption. Besides reflecting on sociological conceptualisations of prosumption, this exploratory study uses an online survey (N = 835) and semi‐structured interviews (N = 12) to examine prosumption empirically. Respondents, living in Almere, the Netherlands, have mostly personal and pragmatic reasons, such as the enjoyment of gardening and the pleasure of producing food, to engage in some form of prosumption. Respondents are hardly motivated by profound concerns about sustainability or a wish to create a 'radical' alternative food system. We argue, therefore, that a more pragmatic approach to the concept of prosumption in the field of food is more appropriate than sociological interpretations linking prosumption to such grand themes as power, capitalism and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre's displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region's increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as property, then White supremacy maps onto interlocking systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that dispossess people of colour of land and turns their bodies into devalued pollution sinks, where the less‐than‐citizen is forced to live on Tar Pits that they cannot even call "home". Since 2014, detained immigrants' activism has fuelled conversations about the punitive nature of administrative immigrant detention, racial profiling, and the city's responsibility to enforce health, safety and environmental regulations for all residents. Through the stories of detainees, deportees and their co‐conspirators, this site fight illustrates how abolition ecologies call for tearing down toxic detention centres. Beyond rejecting White supremacist logics in immigration enforcement, abolitionists make freedom as a place together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has sparked debates on the possibility of a 'great transformation' in the course of neoliberal capitalism and the global agrifood system. This paper seeks to contribute to these debates by providing a comparative institutional analysis of the BRIC(S) 'varieties of capitalism' in the current 'food regime' international reordering. Capital accumulation, social reproduction and politics are key problems of the 'agrifood question' in the BRIC(S) varieties of capitalism. My argumentation is that capitalist diversity stems largely from the historically embedded legacy of the agrarian question in each country, that the dynamics of the agrifood system influence their development trajectories in decisive ways, and that the BRIC(S)‐driven polycentric shifts in the contemporary food regime are crucial to the destiny of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticism of the EU's social deficit has become more vivid than ever following the socially regressive handling of the 2008–10 financial and debt crisis. In 2010, Fritz Scharpf famously argued that the EU 'cannot be a social market economy' owing to its institutional architecture, legal features, and collective action issues. The COVID‐19 pandemic has nevertheless led to a new agenda combining investment, social concerns, the green transition and more fiscal solidarity. However, a lot remains to be done, it is argued, to bridge the social gap. A three‐pronged model is outlined to conceive of the EU's role in enhancing national, inter‐national and transnational social cohesion. The paper furthermore points to where the EU's action must be intensified to make significant progress on the way to a competitive and social market economy. In many respects, the hard political battles remain to be fought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the transformation of the South African (former) grain cooperatives since 1994. These entities played a key role in the institutional architecture of the apartheid regime, ensuring the domination of white commercial farmers over the sector. Within the framework of the deregulation of the economy and the agricultural sector, such entities faced transformations of modern capitalism, especially the growing power of financial actors and markets. Although white commercial farmers still largely retain these inherited structures, these companies are presently being targeted more and more by private takeovers and/or private equity deals. Based on two specific empirical examples of private equity deals affecting South African grain cooperatives, this paper describes this financialization process in practice, in particular by analysing the interaction between financial and agricultural actors and the alliances on the ground that determine its "success." In doing so, it details the different trajectories of these (former) cooperatives, highlighting the resilience, mutation, and extinction of commercial agriculture in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to the recent geographical debates on the connection between dispossession and informality. Existing scholarship recognises that informality is an integral part of capitalism. Arguments reinforcing the formal–informal dichotomy dominate research on processes of dispossession. Drawing on analyses of the struggle of waste recyclers in Beijing, this paper conceptualises informal activities in relation to circuits of capital. It contends that theories of dispossession need to be extended in order to analyse processes of enclosure in the informal economy. The conclusion discusses the potential of reconceptualising dispossession as a variegated process operating both outside and within the capitalist space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyses the politics of agrarian change in Bolivia in the context of the development and expansion of the soy complex in Santa Cruz. It attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the nature and role of the state in relation to agrarian change through what is referred to here as the state–society–capital nexus. From an “agrarian” to a “productive” revolution in the countryside, this paper situates the rise of the Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS) to state power and its ability to maintain control over the state apparatus by balancing both accumulation and legitimation interests through its neo‐extractivist development strategy. As extractivist rents fall with the commodities bust and smallholders' exclusion becomes more apparent, the MAS' overextension in facilitating capital accumulation is beginning to show signs of a legitimacy crisis. The politics of agrarian change remain as contested as the dynamics within the state–society–capital nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago, Bob Jessop (1998) published a defining piece on the "rise of governance" and the "risks of failure", using the example of economic development to frame concerns with the state of capitalism at that time. This charted the rise of governance, outlined key governance practices, and offered preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of governance failure ‒ given that whilst there are already extensive literatures on market failure and state failure, governance failure required focused concern and thematic analysis. This paper, 20 years post‐Jessop on governance rise and risks, tells the tale of how governance in Britain (and England specifically) has marched on and, building on Jessop, has indeed failed, repeatedly and spectacularly. The paper reveals Jessop's governance dilemmas in action and specifically how the contradictions and crises tendencies of capitalism have both necessitated the use of, and been played out in and through, geographical space. The paper reveals an economic governance landscape of unresolved crises and contradictions, which is linked to problems of state rationality and legitimation, exhibited by the Brexit debacle in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper considers the power of abstract formalization in capitalism, via an account of the politics and geography of an equation. The equation in question lies behind the Phillips curve, which describes the relation between price inflation and unemployment or output. I examine the evolution of the equation and its relation to macroeconomics' renewed emphasis, since the late 1960s, on long‐run monetary neutrality. Considering the Phillips curve and its theoretical and technical armature as social practice, I discuss some of the political and distributional questions that arise from the mode of spatial and temporal abstraction particular to modern macroeconomic analysis and policy‐making. The paper has three parts: a brief history of the Phillips curve, an examination of its modern equation‐form, and an analysis of its part in the dialectical process of “real abstraction”, through which logical space and time prioritize and produce both the spatial “macro” and the temporal “long‐run”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality . The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henri Lefebvre talked of the 'right to the city' alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any 'informational right to the city'. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question-'How do we get rid of you?'-the paper seeks to apply post-political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, David James argues for a new understanding of the compatibility of freedom and necessity in Marx's idea of a communist society. According to James, such compatibility has less to do with anything distinctive about the nature of labour and more to do with how communist producers organize the sphere of material production. In this paper, I argue that James provides a nuanced and plausible account of one part of Marx's story of the compatibility of freedom and necessity in communist society but that his account misses another, and, in my view, more fundamental part of the story. The part I have in mind centres on Marx's claim that communist producers achieve their freedom through the performance of necessary labour-by helping others to satisfy their needs. I argue that Marx is committed to a stronger claim than James wishes to make, namely, that freedom and necessity are not merely compatible but that participation in the realm of necessity is required for human freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, pathological consumption has become a growing behavioral misbehavior. Impulsive consumption is governed by two internal behavioral mechanisms that respond fundamentally to the hedonism or Pascal effect and to the emulation or Veblen effect. Today's development of technology acts as a catalyst of consumption by increasing access and availability to products, as well as the advertisement impact. This paper presents a compartmental discrete matrix mathematical model that allows short‐term estimates of ordinary, impulsive, and pathological buyers in Spain in three different economic scenarios. The results show that impulsive and pathological buyers will increase in all the economic scenarios. Notable differences in the number of ordinary buyers are found for the group aged over 65 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper's task is to outline some foundations of a critical, Marxist‐humanist theory of communication in the age of digital capitalism. It theorises the role of communication in society, communication and alienation, communication in social struggles, social struggles for democratic communication, the contradictions of digital capitalism, and struggles for digital socialist humanism. Marxist humanism is a counter‐narrative, counter‐theory, and counter‐politics to neoliberalism, new authoritarianism, and postmodernism. A critical theory of communication can should draw on this intellectual tradition. Communication and work stand in a dialectical relationship. Communication mediates, organises and is the process of the production of sociality and therefore of the reproduction of society. Society and communication are in class and capitalist societies shaped by the antagonism between instrumental and co‐operative reason. Authoritarianism and humanism are two basic, antagonistic modes of organisation of society and communication. Instrumental reason creates and universalises alienation. Digital capitalism is a dimension of contemporary society where digital technologies such as the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, tablets, robots, and AI‐driven ("smart") technologies mediate the accumulation of capital, influence, and reputation. A Marxist‐humanist theory of communication aims to inform struggles for a good, commons‐based, public Internet in a good, commons‐based society that has a vivid, democratic public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do farmers who participate in local food systems attach greater importance to civic engagement than farmers whose livelihood is not tied to the vitality of local markets? The literature on local food as a social movement continues to paint a picture of local food systems as contributing to, and benefiting from, rich networks of civil society groups. Yet to date, few studies have directly addressed the question of whether marketing local food is actually associated with higher levels of civic engagement among farmers. In this paper, I draw on local capitalism theory to identify two different mechanisms—depth of economic reliance on local markets, and breadth of social networks related to local food sales—that might spur farmers who market local food to feel more responsible for their communities. Then, using data from a large‐scale survey of specialty crop growers, I explore whether a relationship exists between farmer involvement with local food markets and attitudes toward civic engagement. Results suggest that while farmers strongly committed to local food markets attach greater importance to civic engagement, participation in multiple categories or kinds of local food supply chains is not necessarily associated with stronger civic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical, socio‐cultural, ideological and political factors have long shaped Vietnam's formal industrial relations system. This has led to the development of a state‐centred structure in which the official trade union has a high level of formal status but little real influence in an economy whose primary employer was the state. Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the country has experienced a gradual shift towards a market economy through its policy of economic reform (doi moi). Although there is evidence of escalating divisions between workers and managers, the communist government continues to maintain a direct and dominant influence on the industrial relations system. Such influence highlights questions about the legitimacy of institutional and governmental control over formal labour representatives. In this article, we hope to offer a theory‐based explanation of this phenomenon. Key points During doi moi many labour policies have not been closely linked to the process of enhancing competitiveness, protection of political security, or social order and safety.The Vietnamese state is facing great tension between the three theory‐based anchors of this paper: accumulation (encouraging economic performance and competitiveness), pacification (maintaining social order, and defusing conflict at the workplace to keep its leadership in place) and legitimation (pursuing social equity and fostering voice at work as responses to the reality of pluralist workplace).In attempting to maintain a balance between these three functions, the Vietnamese government, compared to a democratic government, does not negotiate with any opposing party, nor deal with different opinions.The economic pressure either from international forces or from the pluralist economic system when it operates is a permanent and ongoing challenge for the government. Vietnam industrial relations has been liberalizing since doi moi but it is still far from a democratized system. Eexternal pressures in the future may well increase the probability of trade union reform, as Vietnam seeks further links with the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site‐centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists' predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post‐capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer‐to‐peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher‐order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post‐capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new class, often referred to as a "meritocracy," has arisen to manage the businesses, financial institutions, government agencies and think tanks that protect and enlarge the sway of the "one percent" that constitute the oligarchy, those at the top of our society enjoying a disproportionate share of our wealth. Working with those "nine percent," whose wealth accumulates from compensation rather than investment, allows us to see the volatility and insecurity that characterize their work lives, as the reward of wealth substitutes for stability and satisfaction from work they once more traditionally enjoyed. This paper gives examples from their work experience, going on to explore some of the consequences for the organizations in which they work as well as for society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital platforms are a nearly ubiquitous form of intermediary and infrastructure in society. By positioning platforms in the geographical political economy/ecology literature, this paper provides a critical analysis of platforms as a dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I extend this work on rent theory beyond applications to land and nature so that it also includes platforms and data. I argue that the rapid rise of the "X‐as‐a‐service" business model across nearly all sectors of the economy is creating rentier relations by another name. This model is premised on the platform latching onto and inserting itself into the production, circulation, or consumption process, thus creating opportunities to capture value. To better understand the operations and implications of platforms, I outline three key mechanisms: data extraction, digital enclosure, and capital convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the "return" of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2018, a coalition of UK trade unions and civil society organisations called a strike across the UK's fast food sector in support of a living wage, union recognition and the end to zero‐hour contracts in the sector. This paper takes the day of action—labelled the McStrike—as a starting point for an account of the place of the EU and Brexit in the campaign for fast food rights, as well as the contrasting political standpoints adopted by the different trade unions involved in the action. Brexit is used as a prism through which to analyse aspects of Britain's contemporary food politics, especially those pertaining to freedom of movement, workplace organisation, and the role of EU legislation in protecting workers' rights. In exploring the international dimensions of union organisation among the UK's fast food workers, other, more conceptual considerations regarding the changing nature of public and private food consumption and the incorporation of food‐to‐go into the gig economy are also broached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dialectical relationship between secularism and capitalism, where contradictions in this relationship are resolved on the basis of class relations, results in various state‐religion relationships in different social formations. The limitations and particularities of secularism are exaggerated in countries that arrived late at capitalism, such as Turkey. These late‐developers are subject to the dynamics of uneven and combined development. This paper borrows from Marxism, particularly the theory of uneven and combined development, in order to explore the relationship between the consolidation of the modern nation‐state and its secularisation process during the bourgeois revolution of 1923 in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation, Polanyi describes the rise and fall of liberal capitalism during the long nineteenth century. Many have realised that Polanyi has a lot to tell about the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The paper begins with an overview of Polanyi's historiography of the failure of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and his account of the four elements that helped liberal capitalism thrive, while precipitating its collapse-the idea of the self-regulating market, the gold standard, international peace and liberal constitutionalism. Thereafter, the paper describes the particular transformations that these four elements underwent in the course of European integration and after the financial crisis, with a particular focus on the case law of the Court of Justice. The paper argues that their current constellation has a destructive potential that exceeds the economic dimension of the Union and might pave the way for a much greater failure, one that might defeat Europe's greatest success: the establishment of peace. Ultimately, the paper assesses current reform proposals in light of these insights and makes a number of proposals for re-embedding the economy in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a political economy interpretation of the 'parliamentary coup' that took place in Paraguay in June 2012. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of the protracted transition to democracy between 1989 and 2008, the rural class structure of the country, the changing character of contemporary agro-extractive capitalism, and the long-standing class struggle for redistributive land reform. By examining the Paraguayan agrarian reform impasse under the short-lived government of Fernando Lugo (2008-2012) through an 'interactive state/society' framework, this paper attempts to locate the sources of current social and political conflict in the country, and the demands of rival social groups. In doing so, the paper argues that the rise and fall of Lugo occurred in the context of structural legacies from the Stroessner era (1954-1989) that have remained largely unchanged and that coexist today with an expanding agro-extractivist development model. They lead to the conceptualization of the continued 'predatory' or 'oligarchic' state in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contradictions and limits to agrarian transformation under 21st-century socialism in Venezuela. Given the historical destruction wrought by the oil-based accumulation process upon Venezuela's agricultural sector, the symbolic and social importance of an 'agrarian revolution' could be seen as a yardstick with which to measure the progress of the Bolivarian Revolution in 'sowing the oil'. Eschewing a policy focus on the role of 'food sovereignty' and 'food security', the paper analyses how the dynamics of rentier-capital accumulation have played out in the agricultural sector. The paper argues that the macroeconomic framework of the Bolivarian Revolution has diminished the possibility of expanded domestic food production and instead reduced agrarian transformation to contradictory processes of ground rent appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper opens up a novel geographical research agenda on building transitions beyond the capitalist present. It brings into conversation two previously disconnected areas of academic debate: socio-technical transition studies and more radical work on post-capitalism. The paper offers empirical evidence of real-life socio-spatial practices that build postcapitalist socio-technical transitions through a case study of the daily experiences, motives and values of residents in a community-led cohousing project in the UK. I begin by exploring definitions around post-capitalism and transition thinking, and then introduce the notion of the urban commons to point towards the geographies of post-capitalist transitions and illustrate the kinds of social and spatial relations that underpin them. The paper then provides empirical substance for a geographical agenda around post-capitalist transitions through the case study, highlighting themes of experimentation, transformation and direct democracy. The paper concludes with some strategic future reflections and makes a claim for a geographical research agenda that elaborates the possible radical geographies and place imaginaries of post-capitalist transitions in our teaching, research and policy work. Unless geographers forge direct and necessary links between transitioning and moving beyond capitalism, our ability to take decisive and meaningful action on the challenges that lie ahead will be limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how a boom in industrial cassava served as a 'gateway' to intensify capitalist relations in Cambodia's north eastern borderland. Situated on Cambodia's border with Vietnam, Mondulkiri province has experienced a rapid increase in cassava production and trade since 2006, with transformative consequences for the region's forests and farmers. Using field data from 2012 to 2014, we explore how the boom ignited and intensified over time, through a conjuncture of conditions. Alongside strong market demand for cassava, these included resource abundance (soil fertility, timber, land, labour), connectivity to markets and cross border networks, and facilitative governance conditions. Over time, the boom strengthened capitalist relations, particularly through farmer debt and the revalorisation and accumulation of land. However, unlike booms of tree crops elsewhere, we argue that it is the very impermanence of cassava that is formative here, because the crop's short-term nature and low overheads facilitate practices like land laundering and land mortgaging. Like the 'gateway drugs' that were believed to place users on a path to addiction and risk, this paper shows that gateway crops such as cassava may similarly place farmers on a trajectory of more intense competition and reduced choice in their engagements with capitalist modes of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The Changing State of Gentrification' (2001) by Jason Hackworth and the late Neil Smith is one of the most influential papers ever published in TESG. By introducing three waves, or periods, of practices and patterns of gentrification, it changed the way we think about gentrification. This Introduction to the Forum discusses the three waves introduced by Hackworth and Smith as well as fourth wave introduced by Lees et al. Finally, I will argue that during the global financial crisis we have entered fifth‐wave gentrification. Fifth‐wave gentrification is the urban materialisation of financialised or finance‐led capitalism. The state continues to play a leading role during the fifth wave, but is now supplemented – rather than displaced – by finance. It is characterised by the emergence of corporate landlords, highly leveraged housing, platform capitalism (e.g. Airbnb), transnational wealth elites using cities as a 'safe deposit box', and a further 'naturalisation' of state‐sponsored gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post‐development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post‐development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post‐development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post‐development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a corpus of unpublished sources in a first attempt to reconstruct the exile networks of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, placing his geographical and political work in the context of present‐day debates on development, anti‐development and critical development. Our main argument is twofold: first, we argue that Santos played important although poorly understood roles in the debates that shaped both Anglophone and French‐speaking critical geographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Far from being passive receivers of ideas from the Global North, Southern scholars like Santos contributed to shape worldwide concepts in critical studies on development and underdevelopment. Second, the ideas spiralling out of Santos' networks can still nourish present‐day scholars in development and critical development theories who are willing to criticise the "ideology of development" without forgetting the material existence of poverty and socio‐spatial marginalisation. Finally, Santos' biography and networks provide an example of cosmopolitan and multilingual intellectual work that can provide insights for the present‐day internationalisation of critical and radical geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent global financial crisis and related sovereign debt crises in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Puerto Rico and beyond have highlighted the pressing task of understanding how such crises reshape the spaces we live in. Geographers, most notably David Harvey, have traced the historical roots of the current crisis to the transformation of global financial capitalism since the 1970s. There has, however, been less work on understanding the nature and management of financial crises embedded in different historical geographies. This paper seeks to contribute to that task by investigating Newfoundland's sovereign debt crisis during the Great Depression and its management by the British Empire. Newfoundland, then an independent British Dominion, uniquely relinquished self‐government in return for financial aid. Managing the crisis required difficult ideological work. I argue that to reinforce an imperial geography underpinned by racial distinctions, and to preclude the possibility of default, Newfoundland was scripted as a racially degenerate place in need of metropolitan intervention. The financial crisis produced new racialised geographies that had significant effects on Newfoundland's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely known that Hegel is a proponent and defender of the market economy. But why exactly does Hegel think that the market economy is superior to other economic systems? In this paper, I argue that Hegel's answer to this question has not been sufficiently understood. Commentators, or so I want to claim, have only identified one part of Hegel's argument—but have left out the most original and surprising dimension of his view: namely, Hegel's conviction that we should embrace the market economy for its educational impact. Indeed, Hegel thinks that the market, by creating a sphere of life apart from traditional norms and expectations, teaches us something about ourselves, about others, and about the world we inhabit together—something that we could not learn anywhere else, but that we inevitably need to live well as individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Contract farming (CF) has generally been understood as, essentially, a market institution—by both (approving) “mainstream” and (critical) “radical” perspectives. Analyses of relations of production have, meanwhile, tended towards a problematic “peasantist” frame, where contracts undermine farmer “autonomy” in processes of “flexible” corporate agro‐industrial restructuring. This paper argues that a materialist analysis of CF from within capital–labour relations offers a stronger conceptual foundation for re‐synthesizing questions of market‐power. It first argues that radical notions of “peasant subsumation” conceptually mirror Marx's “formal subsumption of capital” but underplay dynamics of “real subsumption” accompanying capitalism's wider development. Drawing on the “petty commodity production” concept, it then argues that CF's “flexibility” rests in its differential content. CF's fungibility to contradictory movements of “integration” and “dispersion” enables it to emphasize different methods of surplus appropriation under shifting conditions; each corresponding to a different dominant social tendency. On the one hand, conditions of market expansion inspire integration for relative surplus appropriation through raised productivity, and CF tends to act as a “tool of proletarianization” in the wider centralization of capital. On the other, conditions of contraction motivate the dispersal of unvalorized capital, prompting efforts to raise absolute surplus appropriation, and CF tends to act as a “tool of differentiation” to concentrate agricultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toys protest political corruption in Siberia, critique ISIS worldviews in London and illustrate Greece's financial and migrant crises. Geographers disagree about whether playing with things distracts us from, or helps us to more critically engage with, questions of justice, poverty, exploitation, environment and the commodity. Art activists in the academy say that working in creative ways can enliven and enhance our practices of research, publication and impact. Drawing together these debates about art, activism and geography, this paper asks what can be learned from recreating in LEGO and posting online scenes from the tense and changing socio‐economic relationships between investigative journalists, corporate executives and garment workers making clothes for a high street fashion retailer Primark before, during and after the catastrophic Rana Plaza garment complex collapse in April 2013. It also experiments with the composition of academic outputs, in the hope that that its arguments leap up from the page. And it finishes by inviting readers to try this approach for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents the case of a less‐developed EU region—the Pomeranian region of Poland—that is, an example of the successful transformation from a command to market economy and the creation of a new knowledge‐based development path thanks to the upgrading of its innovation model. This successful transformation was based, in part, on the region's specific innovation policy and the activities of pro‐innovative institutions; however, other factors were also important such as the diversified structure of the region's economy. New knowledge‐based industries have developed in the region, while the potential of traditional industries that have gone through a restructuring, has been maintained. The factors that existed prior to the innovation model's transformation included such aspects as the high quality of human and social capital, a strong academic center, a high quality of life, and an open economy and society. Supply factors in the form of qualified personnel were crucial for the growth of employment in new industries and R&D that determined the improvement of the regional GDP per capita. Moreover, the transition to a knowledge‐based economy stimulated an increase in the concentration of population in the metropolitan area of Tri‐City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen the development of an important literature on the contradictions between neoliberal norms of corporal citizenship and the forms of consumption that market-based food systems promote. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature by exploring the relationship between these contradictions and the increased prevalence of particular eating disorders (binge eating disorder ( BED) and bulimia nervosa). Within contemporary neoliberal food systems bingeing is increasingly normalised and consumption temporally disorganised. At the same time, neoliberal public health policy, and the wider 'health' entertainment media it legitimates, focuses on the promotion of 'correct' forms of consumer agency. Individuals who fail to manage consumption 'appropriately' are stigmatised. The growth of bulimia and BED can be related to the contradictory pressures that the food system and regime of corporal governance place on individuals. The paper also seeks to explore how the increased medicalisation and biomedicalisation of eating since the 1980s fits within a broader neoliberal governance strategy. By medicalising key social problems the neoliberal state depoliticises these issues. Medicalisation and biomedicalisation obscure the role of capitalism in generating these problems and encourage a focus on individual dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and critically interprets the interrelations between religion and the Occupy movements of 2011. It presents three main arguments. First, through an examination of the Occupy Movement in the UK and USA-and in particular of the two most prominent Occupy camps (Wall Street and London Stock Exchange)-the paper traces the emergence of postsecularity evidenced in the rapprochement of religious and secular actors, discourses, and practices in the event-spaces of Occupy. Second, it examines the specific set of challenges that Occupy has posed to the Christian church in the UK and USA, arguing that religious participation in the camps served at least in part to identify wider areas of religious faith that are themselves in need of redemption. Third, the paper considers the challenges posed by religious groups to Occupy, not least in the emphasis on postmaterial values in pathways to resistance against contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes extending Urban Political Ecology's (UPE) ideas about the urbanisation of nature in order to include the geographical imprints of expanding, global metabolic flows of matter, energy and capital. It does so through the analysis of Huasco, a small agricultural village in northern Chile that has been overburdened with massive energy undertakings aimed at powering the operations of mines that supply raw materials to international markets. Like the sewage and technological networks that feed the life of cities, the paper argues that Huasco-as a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanisation-has also been hidden from view, and thus the fetishisation of urban infrastructural networks initially theorised by UPE, has been ratcheted-up to the global level by the mediating powers of neoliberalising capitalism. Just as the socio-material arrangements that facilitate the smooth functioning of the modern city and household are riddled with glitches and exclusions, the paper suggests that globally up-scaled infrastructures reveal even larger contradictions that put into jeopardy the very premises upon which the ongoing commodification of nature is grounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper identifies and examines various multiple renditions of the so-called Weber Thesis of an historical association and convergence between ascetic Protestantism, above all Calvinism, and the emergence and development of modern capitalism as an economic spirit and system. Specifically, it detects at least four different versions and formulations or interpretations, thus casting doubt in the common view of the Weber Thesis as a single and monolithic theory or hypothesis. The paper also considers the status of the multiple versions of the Weber Thesis in post-Weberian and contemporary sociology and related disciplines like economics and history. It concludes that the weaker, relaxed renditions of the Weber Thesis have attained a greater success and more endured in contemporary social science than have its stronger, stricter versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]