Workers as geographical actors

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism's spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism's geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper's purpose is to argue that understanding how social life is geographically structured can add important insights to explaining economic and political praxis. Notes 1. Harvey, Limits to Capital. 2. For examples, see: Dinius and Vergara, Company Towns; Pun and Smith, 'Dormitory Labour Regimes'. 3. Harvey, Limits to Capital, 233. 4. Interested readers can consult: Harvey, Limits to Capital; Smith, Uneven Development; Herod, Labor Geographies; and Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour. 5. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 15. 6. For example, Marx's argument that 'while capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse i.e., exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another' (Grundrisse, 539) was an exceptionally perspicacious description of how the railroad of Victorian Britain was shortening travel times between the country's major cities and thereby reducing the turnover times of capital held in the commodities transported between them. 7. Herod, 'Social Engineering through Spatial Engineering'. 8. Such landscape momentum is similar to how an oil tanker's momentum continues to take it in a particular direction long after the captain has given the order to change course. 9. By way of example, one could think of how the urban fabric of nineteenth-century cities, built around the railroad, became increasingly constraining in the twentieth century as the dominant mode of transportation changed from that of the train to that of the automobile and truck. Although from a utility point of view it would have been possible to continue using the rail network well into the twentieth century, as the demands of capital accumulation changed new urban geographies were constructed to accommodate the internal combustion engine, geographies which often entailed physically ripping out the old train tracks which had once moved people and goods around the city. 10. For Marx, the production process was one in which the value incorporated in the machinery used to manufacture commodities was gradually transferred to those commodities up to the point at which the original machinery had no additional value to transfer (i.e., until it was worn out through its normal use). As he argued (at 509) in Volume 1 of Capital: 'Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value and, as a result, transfers value to the product'. However, machinery and other fixed capital in one factory can be put out of operation prematurely (i.e., before all of the value held in it is transferred to commodities) by the development of newer, more efficient machinery or the securing of a cheaper laborforce elsewhere. In other words, machinery and plant may still have productive life left in them but are abandoned because it is more profitable to relocate production elsewhere or because a technological innovation has made previous machinery unprofitable to use, even if it is still capable of manufacturing useful commodities. Neil Smith has suggested that the former process is best described as the 'devalorization' of capital, whereas the latter represents its 'devaluation' – see Smith, 'Concepts of Devaluation'. As he puts it elsewhere (Uneven Development, 126, emphasis added), whereas devalorization represents a transfer of value from machine to commodity, devaluation is '[q]uite different from the routine devalorization of fixed capital in the production process [and] represents an absolute destruction of value'. 11. Harvey, 'Urban Process under Capitalism', 124. 12. Today it is estimated that there are over 3000 maquiladora manufacturing or export assembly plants in northern Mexico employing more than one million workers. 13. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 240. 14. Herod, Geographies of Globalization. 15. Such a sense was captured in Frank Norris's 1901 novel about California agriculture and industrialization, The Octopus. Norris explored the subjugation of San Joaquin valley wheat farmers to commodity traders in distant cities, where prices were set and transmitted via telegraph to where the grain was actually grown. As Norris (at 51) put it, because ranches were 'connected by wire with San Francisco, and through that city with Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last, and most important of all, with Liverpool [, f]luctuations in the price of the world's crop during and after the harvest thrilled straight to the [San Joaquin ranchers' offices] … At such moments [wheat farmers] no longer felt their individuality'. 16. Ellem, 'Contested Space'. 17. For more on capitalists' efforts to restructure logistics systems, and workers' efforts to adapt to them, see Bonacich and Wilson, Getting the Goods. 18. This section draws heavily upon Herod, McGrath-Champ, and Rainnie, 'Foundations'. 19. Agnew, Place and Politics. 20. Massey, Power-Geometries, 22 (emphasis in original). 21. Hudson, Producing Places, 267. 22. Storper and Walker, Capitalist Imperative, 157. 23. Soja, 'Socio-spatial Dialectic'. 24. Peet, 'Social Origins of Environmental Determinism'. Some have argued that such views are still prevalent. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians, for instance, criticized Diamond's (1997) widely read book Guns, Germs, and Steel as having adopted an environmental determinist approach to understanding global development patterns. 25. For more on this, see Barnes, 'Inventing Anglo-American Economic Geography'. 26. One of the earliest articles to argue for paying attention to the constitutive role played by geographical location was that by Massey, 'Industrial Location Theory'. Specifically, she argued (at 38–9, emphasis added) that '[s]patial development can only be seen as part of the overall development of capitalism. However it is also true that many of the emerging contradictions of the economic system both take on a specifically spatial form, and are exacerbated by the existence of the spatial dimension. To this extent, consideration of "the spatial element" is essential to all effective economic analysis'. 27. Soja, 'Socio-spatial Dialectic', 208. 28. Castells, City and the Grassroots, 311 (emphasis in original). 29. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 33–40. 30. Although in the Production of Space's English translation the term 'representational spaces' is used, Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 206, suggests that 'spaces of representation' is a better translation of the original French phrase 'les espaces de représentation'. I agree. See also Watkins, 'Representations of Space'. 31. For example, the rise of rationalist thought in the late eighteenth century is evident in the urban geography of New York City. Whereas the street pattern at the southern end of Manhattan, laid out during the earliest period of European colonization, has little symmetry to it, the grid patterns of the streets to the north that were laid out in the early nineteenth century and afterwards are a physical manifestation in the built environment of Enlightenment thinking. 32. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 190. 33. Herod, 'On Workers' Theoretical (In)visibility'. 34. Herod, 'Labor's Spatial Praxis'. 35. Southall, 'Towards a Geography of Unionization', 466. 36. Southall, 'Agitate! Agitate! Organise!'. 37. Blomley, Law, Space. 38. Wills, 'Space, Place, and Tradition'. 39. Southall, 'Towards a Geography of Unionization'. 40. Cox and Mair, 'Locality and Community'. 41. Humphrey, Erickson, and Ottensmeyer, 'Industrial Development Organizations'. 42. Herod, 'Local Political Practice'. 43. Hudson and Sadler, 'Region, Class'. 44. Johns and Vural, 'Class, Geography'. 45. Herod, 'Labour Organizing in the New Economy'. 46. Merrifield, 'Urbanization of Labor'.