The Political Economy of Social Upgrading

Based on a Marxist reworking of the global value chains (GVC) framework, supplemented by insights from structuralist development economics and dependency theory, the thesis investigates what role evolving class relations play in processes of social and economic upgrading in global garment value chains. Situating workers’ agency at the intersection of a horizontal axis (local capital-labor-state relations) and a vertical axis (governance and distributional dynamics of the GVC), the thesis starts out by examining the key features of the 21st century garment GVC and their implications for producer countries. It is shown how a series of interrelated processes, including the transition to neoliberalism in the North, and the phase-out of quotas in the South, combined to produce a “supplier squeeze” in the garment GVC, with a simultaneous depression of export prices and an escalation of non-price requirements. Drawing on the work of the dependentista Marini, it is argued that these distributional dynamics amount to a form of unequal exchange that incentivizes manufacturers to super-exploit workers, pushing their wages below reproduction costs and/or working them beyond exhaustion.

Through the Looking Glass: Conceptualising the Theme of Gentrification in Contemporary India

Gentrification, at high levels of granularity, reveals psycho-social, socio-economic and socio-political machinery processes that are specific to particular places. This article critically reviews existing literature to comprehend gentrification in the Indian context. Authors argue that the discord between aspirations and class relations gestates urban informality and suggests a new framework that the authors call the Triquetra of Informality. The framework proposes that interplay among urban entrepreneurialism, bourgeois mode of consumption and subaltern mobilisation are the impetus for contemporary urbanism and gentrification in India.

Rentierism and the commons: A critical contribution to Brett Christophers’ Rentier Capitalism

In recent years, we have seen an increasing number of publications that offer the term of rentierism to define the current economic system in the Global North. More recently, Brettt Christophers has produced a series of work that aims to account for the ascendancy of rentierism from a political-economy perspective, in which Marx is mostly neglected. This exchange article aims to bring the Marx and Marxist thought back into discussion to read rentierism politically. In particular, it inquiries into how rentierism relates to the nature of class relations by addressing an “open secret”, namely that rentierism rests essentially on the enclosure and expropriation of commons. It analyses rentierism as capital's counter-movement, enforcing its priorities and drives on spaces where alternative social systems emerge and develop. In the final part, a provocative conclusive remark is offered on Christophers’ “what is to be done?”.

Becoming Horse–Capitalism and the Human Identity: An Analysis of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You

The aim of the article is to dissect the phenomenon of capitalist labor in the US as depicted in Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You (2018). The primary focus of the article is the film’s rendering of the creation of horse humans which the article reads as a metaphor for class relations in the modern society. First, the article analyzes the film’s plot in the context of the cultural assumptions and beliefs connected with the figure of the horse. Next, it draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” in order to unveil the revolutionary potential possibly latent in hybridization. Finally, after commenting on the ways in which capitalism weaponizes technological development, the article inscribes the notion of hybridization into the nature-culture dichotomy.

What is Marxist geography today, or what is left of Marxist geography?

The history and geography of intellectual neglect of Marxism are the history and geography of Marxism itself. Scholars of different political persuasions and from different regions of the world, including some ‘Marxists’, have pointed to its various deficiencies ever since its origin. But is Marxism really as bad as it is made out to be? In this short article, I argue that it absolutely is not. I discuss my view of Marxism, including Marxist geography. The latter examines economy, politics, culture and nature/body from the vantage-point of space, place, scale and human transformation of nature. I also discuss what difference Marxism has made to my own agenda of abstract and concrete research. For me, Marxism fundamentally comprises ideas of Marx and Engels, and revolutionary Marxist socialists of the 20th century (Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky), and those who have critically developed their thinking. I discuss four major areas of Marxism: philosophy (dialectical and materialist views of society and nature), social theory, or historical materialism, (geographical) political economy, and theory of communist practice. Marxism treats class, including in its capitalist form, as the causally most important social relation which explains how human beings live their lives. Class relations, and capitalism, structure gender and racial oppression which in turn influence class relations at a concrete level, and which are behind the geographical organization of society. The main goal of Marxism is not to produce ideas for the sake of ideas. It is rather to arm the exploited masses with adequate ideas that describe, explain and critique the world from their standpoint, so they can engage in the fight to produce an alternative social-spatial arrangement, i.e. a democratic and classless society which is ecologically healthier and which avoids geographically uneven development intra-nationally and internationally.

Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

Production: Classes and Class Relations

This chapter sets out the structure and the dynamics of production in eighth-century Northumbria. It starts by defining the concept of ‘social class’ that will be used throughout the book. The chapter also aims to establish what the main social classes are in this context, and their relation, as well as presenting the importance of the forces of production for such an objective. The discussion of relations of production will be mainly historiographical. In order to highlight the importance of the forces of production and to contextualize them in eighth-century Northumbria, a case study will be presented: this will be the site of Sherburn, North Yorkshire.

Many Marxisms

Revolutionary projects travelling around the world in the last century under the heading of “Marxism” have always morphed into significantly different forms, depending upon precisely where, when, and how they travelled. In this think piece honoring the career of Richard Peet, I argue that Marxism has thus been less a singular and unified phenomenon than a sprawling and variegated experience of resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Nonetheless, if there is one common thread in virtually all forms of Marxist thought, it is an emphasis on class. But what conception of class? I assert the centrality of class analysis to Marxist thought, albeit versions of class analysis that flexibly address the gendering and racialization of class relations along with other factors that shape and express class in given contexts. I illustrate the argument by noting the importance of Marxist class analysis to critical studies of imperialism, racism, and gender relations.