The Seventeen Contradictions is an x-ray of tensions, trends and tendencies in capital and capitalism that empowers us to look forward. Taking the still ongoing 2008 economic crisis as a starting point, Harvey investigates how the capitalist economy that produces such crises is embedded in contradictions. Seventeen of these are discussed throughout the book.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci's thought consists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci's theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The 'Gramscian moment' argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a 'philosophy of praxis' as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway’– this was a popular saying in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. There was more than one inflection to the phrase. Amsterdam was, in the first instance, built atop a subterranean forest of Norwegian origin. But southern Norway was also a vital resource zone, subordinated to Amsterdam-based capital. This paper follows the movement of strategic commodity frontiers within early modern Europe from the standpoint of capitalism as world-ecology, joining in dialectical unity the production of capital and the production of nature. Our geographical focus is trained upon the emergence of the Global North Atlantic, that zone providing the strategic raw materials and food supplies indispensable to the consolidation of capitalism – timber, naval stores, metals, cereals, fish and whales. I argue for a broader geographical perspective on these movements, one capable of revealing the dialectical interplay of frontiers on all sides of the Atlantic. From its command posts in Amsterdam, Dutch capital deployed American silver in the creation of successive frontiers within Europe, transforming Scandinavian and Baltic regions. The frontier character of these transformations was decisive, premised on drawing readily exploitable supplies of land and labour power into the orbit of capital. We see in northern Europe precisely what we see in the Americas – a pattern of commodity-centred environmental transformation, and thence relative ecological exhaustion, from which the only escape was renewed global conquest and ever-wider cycles of combined and uneven development.

The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected, and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually-constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation, and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political
economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism.

Keywords: housing, political economy, capital, circulation, ideology, social relations

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This essay pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking, and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread – and reasonable – sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized – but inadequately internalized – understanding that humans are part of nature.

Does the present socio-ecological impasse – captured in popular discussions of the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil – represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of capitalist development has been paved with ‘cheap’ food. Beginning in the long sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions, yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism, possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that views capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, joining together the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.

Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry in communal life and especially the community's theology, which equated economic prosperity with Christian virtue. This essay reframes our understanding of the political economy of the Oneida Community, with specific attention to their last decade, and the social tensions stoked by their reliance upon market capitalism and waged labour. While acknowledging the internal dissent that accompanied the structural demise of the commune, the present study asks how such discord arose from business-centred theology within the social environment of competition and a prolonged economic depression. The Community's dependence upon the surrounding capitalist economy challenged their self-described 'Bible communism' and precipitated its demise.

While practice theories and diverse economy approaches are widely employed by human geographers, the two literatures have developed in parallel, rather than in dialogue. This article argues that this has constrained understandings of postcapitalist social change and traces an emerging theoretical conversation between these traditions. It outlines the potential of scholarly engagement with what we term 'diverse practices', especially when discussing the scalar possibilities and constraints of community activism. By grounding diverse economic scholarship in practice-theoretical conceptions of power, politics, and scale, the article proposes a materialisation of postcapitalist possibility and explores the barriers and facilitators of transformative geographies.

Thinking through Jakarta, this paper explores the possibility of decentering understandings of conditions of possibility for economic transformation across the post-colony, by shifting the optic away from European-style Capitalism. Colonialism, racism and slavery enabled the hegemony of European-style Capitalism, characterized by nation-states and the rule of law. The bulk of the theorizing within geographical political economy elides alternative possibilities because it views the world from this perspective. Conceptualizing capitalism’s raggedy fringes (informality, state actions, and the more-than-human world) as more-than-Capitalist practices with the capacity to unravel Capitalist norms, positional conjunctural analysis can provide the methodological space to think beyond the North Atlantic, creating space for envisioning alternatives. Operationalizing these claims, I argue that Indonesia’s political economy exceeds variegated European-style capitalism, and that urban land transformations within Jakarta are deeply shaped by its raggedy fringes of elite and grassroots informality and more-than-human hydrological processes of flooding and water management.

The conversation between economic geographers and political economists has not made much progress. The former focus on exchange, markets and efficiency, as can be seen in work on urban economies. We want the field to pay more attention to two processes crucial to the growth of cities often lying outside market exchange and agglomeration economies: how resources are managed across time and space and how the urban environment creates challenges demanding collective responses. We first make the case for the two processes using historical examples and then argue for the importance of similar processes today. We do not propose to make a definitive argument, but rather to challenge economic geographers with an expanded research agenda for the future. The Journal of Economic Geography (JEG) was founded with the aim of encouraging discussion and exchange of ideas among economists and geographers who are concerned with issues of economic development and change. Or, as the mission statement puts it, 'The Journal of Economic Geography seeks to redefine and reinvigorate the links between the disciplines of economics and geography.' Everyone agrees that progress has been hard due to deep epistemological and ontological divides. Each side thinks the other gets it wrong and each tends to stay within its comfort zone (Garretson and Martin, 2011). While there has been progress since the JEG was founded, we think it is important to continue to push the boundaries of debate outward. In particular, we note that economic geographers and economists alike focus overwhelmingly on exchange, markets and efficiency. We suggest that this blinkers the field of economic geography/geographical economics in crucial ways. This limitation can be seen in one of the most important contemporary fields of economic geography, urban economics, and its reliance on the theory of agglomeration economies. The model, in brief, is this: people cluster together to reduce the cost of searches and transactions, to share infrastructure and intermediate suppliers, and to facilitate matching of labor and employers (a more productive division of labor, and productivity is further enhanced because cities attract skilled workers and unskilled workers learn

Anthropogenic lead (Pb) is widespread in urban soils given its widespread deposition over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries via a range of point- and non-point sources, including industrial waste and pollution, leaded paint, and automobile exhaust. While soil scientists and urban ecologists have documented soil Pb contamination in cities around the world, such analyses rarely move beyond proximal mechanisms to focus on more distal factors, notably the social processes mediating Pb accumulation in particular places. In this paper, I articulate a critical physical geography of urban soil Pb contamination that considers the dialectical co-production of soil and social processes. Using soil Pb contamination in the flatlands of Oakland, California as an empirical case, I integrate conventional quantitative geochemical mapping with theory and qualitative methods regularly employed in urban political ecology to explain the various spatio-temporal processes that bifurcated the city into flatlands and hills, a topography that is as much physical as social, and one that is fundamental to differentiated soil Pb concentrations and the disproportionate impact on low-income people of color. I demonstrate how understanding soil contamination through the lens of social metabolism – with particular attention to the materiality of the socio-natural hybrids emerging from processes of capitalist urbanization – can complement conventional analyses, while contributing to a "material politics of place" to support struggles for environmental justice.

Mexican society has experienced three costly finance-related crises in 1982, 1994-95, and 2008-09. In each case the continuity of capitalist development depended in large part on state authorities drawing the worst financial risks into the state apparatus, that is, on socialization. While most understandings of socialization remain at a largely technical understanding, I argue that the socialization of financial risk in Mexico rests on distinctively class-based material and institutional processes. The processes of socialization have been historically constitutive of neoliberalism and the current phase of financial accumulation in Mexico.

Blockchain technologies are reconfiguring the global economy, though often in contradictory ways. Blockchain technologies are disrupting key economic and financial sectors. Some block-chain applications allow for democratization of finance, services, agriculture, and governance, yet they may also deepen inequality and weaken democracy. We need new understandings of the countervailing tendencies of blockchain technologies and the contingencies that shape their deployment.

This paper contributes to a growing scholarship examining the ways in which dispossession in neoliberal India is reinforcing and reconfiguring agrarian social hierarchies. Existing studies have focussed on the differential successes of villagers in Special Economic Zone (SEZ)‐generated real estate markets, incorporation of land losers into stratified labour markets and the caste‐based politics of dispossession. Few studies, however, have systematically explored the long‐term implications of state‐orchestrated dispossession on agrarian credit and debt relations. Based on long‐term fieldwork on a village partially expropriated for a SEZ in the South Indian state of Telangana, this study shows how dispossession has led to a sharp rise of over‐indebtedness within the land losing population. Dispossession deprived villagers of land and livestock; low compensation was inadequate to obtain replacement assets; and labour inside the SEZ was insufficient to ensure the reproduction of most households. The result was a cascading process of indebtedness for consumption smoothing that was generalized but the greatest among former untouchables (Scheduled Castes, SCs) and Lambadas (Scheduled Tribes, STs). Since dispossession precluded these historically marginalized groups from access to institutional credit, their reliance on largely upper caste moneylenders—whose land was spared expropriation—was deepened. Thus, I show how dispossession for neoliberal projects has reinforced this traditional caste‐based form of exploitation.

Contemporary geographical thought is constrained by a political economic imagination rooted in binarism, which is exemplified in debates surrounding neoliberalism. Neoliberal proponents call for decentralization and increased capital flows, while Marxists respond by pairing centralization with capitalism’s abrogation. The latter view considers hierarchy necessary, a position that promotes authority and regards horizontal politics as propitious to neoliberalism. Anarchism’s coupling of decentralization with anti-capitalism is dismissed because Marxism cannot accommodate the processuality of prefigurative politics. Marxism demands a revolution with a masterplan, considering horizontality a future objective. Such a temporality ignores the insurrectionary possibilities of the present and implies a politics of waiting. The spatial implications of centralized hierarchy are also questionable, employing a vertical ontology, wherein horizontal organization is deemed inappropriate when ‘jumping scales’. Yet scale represents both a theoretical dis-traction from grounded everyday particularities and a ‘master-signifier’ by providing a point de capiton, or anchoring point, that rests on the exclusion of unconsciousness–the knowledge that is not known¬. Thus the point de capiton is the (Archimedean) point at which an essentialist illusion of fixed meaning is created, as scale is unconscious of geography’s ‘hidden enfolded immensities’. The discourse of scale accordingly dismisses the openness of rhizomic politics by predetermining the political as an arborescent register. Yet the inevitable terra incognita that scalar hierarchies produce becomes a powerful resource for the oppressed, which is why anarchist direct action often proceeds outside of authority’s view. A flat ontology has significant resonance with anarchism, imparting that politics should operate horizontally rather than vertically. This ontological shift suggests that we need not wait for the emergence of a ‘greater’ class-consciousness, as one can immediately disengage capitalism by reorienting economic landscapes in alternative ways. Consequently, a human geography without hierarchy gains significant traction when we reject scale and embrace an anarchist flat ontology.

The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning theory and its relation to the political economy, and (3) the current political economic context (not least defined by the diabolic crisis). Where previous Marxist approaches to planning were very strong on analysing the political economy, I argue there is currently a need—with old hegemonies losing ground, communicative approaches losing support, and neoliberalism in the political economy losing legitimacy—to also discuss establishing alternatives.

Relations between nature and capital have been a longstanding concern in the social sciences. Going beyond antinomies of posthumanist and political economic enquiry, this paper advances a set of relational analytics for incorporating liveliness into critical analyses of capital. Firstly, developing the concept of animal work, it shows how metabolic, ecological and affective labour become a productive economic force. Secondly, animating the commodity, it demonstrates how lively forces influence commodification and exchange, enabling or hindering accumulation. Thirdly, tracking animal circulation, it examines the logics of rendition that transform nonhuman life into capital. In conclusion, the paper develops a relational grammar for anatomizing the nature-capital dynamic, one that reorients the economic to be co-constituted by the ecological from the outset.

With the recent development of the Occupy Movement, public criticism of neoliberalism has climaxed since the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. The mobilization of protesters in cities throughout the world was preceded by much speculation in the media and blogosphere over the past few years, where commentators have been quick to suggest that the end of neoliberalism is upon us. The validity of postneoliberalism, however, remains tenuous, as its advocates continue to treat neoliberalism as a monolithic, static, and undifferentiated end-state. Despite the desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is an undeniable continuity to neoliberalism that must be appreciated if we ever hope to leave this unforgiving version of capitalism truly in the past.

My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, 'Notes on Capital and Peasantry', published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capitalism worked in the produce trades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third section proposes a wider taxonomy, where the differences between commercial and industrial capital and their respective forms of domination of the countryside are laid out. The key category here is vertical integration as a form/strategy of accumulation chiefly characteristic of the latter. The fourth section suggests that we need to take merchant capitalism more seriously as a historical category as well as one of theory, rejecting the idea that merchant's capital 'exclusively inhabits the circulation sphere'.

This essay stages a theoretical intervention in the growing literature on “global land grabs.” The triple crisis of finance, food, and energy in 2008 has prompted powerful transnational actors to acquire massive expanses of farmland in the Global South. Recent critical analyses of this process have variously invoked global capitalism and neocolonialism to account for this trend. One line of inquiry approaches land grabs as instances of “primitive accumulation of capital” whereby lands in the Global South are “enclosed” and brought within the ambit of global capitalism. Another perspective invokes the history of Anglo-American colonialism for critiquing the developmentalist discourse that depicts Africa as the “last frontier” to be tamed by the techno-industrial civilization of the North. This essay integrates these two perspectives by elaborating capitalism as an irreducibly colonial formation with global inceptions. I begin with a discussion of “primitive accumulation” and, counter to many, question the suitability of “enclosure” for interpreting land grabs. The second section delves into the theoretical origins of primitive accumulation, proposing to situate it in a global and colonial genealogy of capitalism. A final section charts the theoretical and historical contours of this global genealogy and arrives at a more capacious reconceptualization of primitive accumulation. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of contemporary land grabs for in situ displacement, the fungibility of land, and new enclosures in the contemporary reconfiguration of global value chains.

Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics, and international organisations have focussed on so-called “climate refugees”. This paper examines the turn from a discourse of “climate refugees”, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of “climate migration”, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of “migration management”. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of “climate migration” should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of “climate migration” as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states’ sovereignty through governance.

This article suggests some new lines of research in the field of the political economy of punishment and some possible new directions for a critical approach to contemporary social control strategies. The starting point is the transition from a Fordist economy to what can be defined as a post-Fordist system of production.

Continuing injustices and denial of rights of indigenous peoples are part of the long legacy of colonialism. Parallel processes of exploitation and injustice can be identified in relation to non-human species and/or aspects of the natural environment. International law can address some extreme examples of the crimes and harms of colonialism through the idea and legal definition of genocide, but the intimately related notion of ecocide that applies to nature and the environment is not yet formally accepted within the body of international law. In the context of this special issue reflecting on the development of green criminology, the article argues that the concept of ecocide provides a powerful tool. To illustrate this, the article explores connections between ecocide, genocide, capitalism and colonialism and discusses impacts on indigenous peoples and on local and global (glocal) ecosystems.

The objective of this essay is to rejuvenate interest in Marxian rent theory in urban political economy by identifying and deepening discussion of an important aspect of the contemporary neoliberal city: class monopoly rent. First introduced by David Harvey, the concept of class monopoly rent has curiously evaded in-depth scholarly inquiry and has never been substantively elaborated or examined. But the conditions through which class monopoly rents are extracted from property have since evolved. Yet, we know little about the relation between this standard institutional practice and contemporary urban landscapes, modes of governance, and processes of urban restructuring. The essay first reviews and identifies the concept of class monopoly rent as an important aspect of the urban process and discusses its limited scholarly engagement over the past four decades. It then discusses the implications of class monopoly rent in the context of current urban redevelopment policies and practices in Chicago, Illinois. It is suggested that a deeper examination of this concept could build a more robust and intricate understanding of the contemporary neoliberal city, particularly in the context of the post-2007 economic recession.

David Harvey argued there to be an animating tension at the heart of the geographical dynamics of capital: a simultaneous need for both spatial fixity and perpetual motion. I adapt this frame for an era of financial globalization, arguing that fixity has been overcome through a 'quaternary circuit' of credit-mediated capital switching which undermines the distinct roles of the three circuits Harvey identified. However, rather than resolving the fixity/motion contradiction this has instead given it intensified form as capital liquidity versus spatial fixity. I explore this through the Port of Liverpool's innovative 'Whole Business Securitization', tracing out the logic of leverage underpinning financial capital switching and how such practices transform the spatio-temporality of circulation while fostering the conditions for greater crises. By theorizing financial globalization from a capital switching perspective, this article combines Minskian and relational approaches to understanding investment chains in a way that reprises geographical political economy's critique of the territoriality of capitalist crisis.

Cities in the global South are often considered to be in the midst of infrastructural breakdown, and characterized as either lacking networked services or as suffering from ongoing disruption and sometimes failure. This article focuses on the electricity network of Accra to examine the series of socio-natural processes that produce this ongoing disruption and to explore the power relations of networked systems in the city. It focuses on the production of disruption through the analytical lens of urban political ecology, in order to show how such a framework can be utilized to interrogate energy geographies. The article begins by describing what happens when the lights go out and the flow of electricity is interrupted across Accra in order to connect a series of socio-natural processes that contribute to the ongoing network disruption and interruption. The article establishes the effect of historical infrastructural governance, greenhouse gas emissions, flows of international capital, water and drought in northern Ghana, as well as urban sprawl, slum urbanism and rising energy demand in the city, to illustrate the fundamentally unequal and politicized socio-natures of these disrupted infrastructural processes.

The central role that infrastructures of circulation and connectivity -logistical, financial, and digital- have come to perform in the reproduction of agro-food systems calls for an expanded conception of agriculture that integrates dialectically the production of economic value and its subsequent realization in the sphere of exchange. Through the case of Walmart's expansion in Chile, and on the basis of a critical theorization of the circulation of capital, this paper proposes an agrarian question of circulation in which the apparently distinct realms of food production, transport, storage, and consumption are brought together into a contradictory and yet unitary whole. The case of Walmart Chile is illustrative of how the reconfiguration of spaces of urban mass consumption and the organizational restructuring of agro-industrial hinterlands constitute each other in intricate ways. An agrarian question of circulation, the paper concludes , bears important political implications for rethinking the scope and extent of contemporary discussions on agrarian reform being put forward by transnational rural organizations.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

This article revisits Marx's philosophy of history with respect to technological change, outlining some elements for the elaboration of a research agenda for materialist studies of science and technology. I argue that dominant thinking on the subject has been insufficiently attentive to relations of production and to the constitutive role of practical, transformative activity. The article suggests that a focus on class relations not only foregrounds the eminently open and contested nature of technology but also renders into view the multiplicity of actors and agencies involved in the making of natures. I draw from a subterranean strand of Marxist theorists of technology to develop a more-than-human approach to political agency through an interrogation of the complex interactions between human and machine in the everyday, experiential practicalities of the labor process. On this basis, the article contends that foregrounding the class preconditions for an alternative scientific praxis should assert itself as the starting point and horizon of a materialist Science and Technology Studies.

This article aims to contribute to the literature on Marx's systematic-dialectical method through a critical reading and discussion of the significance and presentational 'architecture' of the section on commodity fetishism in the dialectical sequence of form-determinations in Capital. In order to undertake this task, the paper firstly explores the content and expositional structure of the first three sections of Chapter 1 of Capital. This sets the stage for a methodologically-minded close examination of Marx's presentation of the fetish character of the commodity, which shows that there is a precise systematic sequence which gives unity to the flow of his argument within the section on 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret'. The conclusion is that only through a proper grasp of the dialectical method can the full systematic significance and implications of Marx's account of commodity fetishism be uncovered. Keywords commodity fetishism – systematic-dialectical method – subjectivity – value-form

This article considers how migrant deaths -particularly in the borderlands of Europe and the United States -relate to the speed at which migrants travel. It argues that the most dangerous boundaries for migrants, and the most difficult ones to traverse, are those which embody the sharpest divides in energy consumption, divides reflected in the vulnerability of migrants who typically move at relatively slow speeds and have insufficient access to safe modes of travel. Thus, migrant deaths and the boundaries that produce them embody the injustices associated with grossly unequal levels of access to, control over, and consumption of environmental resources.

As environmental degradation becomes a rising concern, this article argues that the development of international law on climate change expresses the deep social contradictions between accumulation and reproduction under capitalism. These contradictions are translated into the creation of a form of public property over the right to emit greenhouse gases (and not the ‘privatisation’ of the atmosphere). This public property is unequally distributed amongst states in an imperialist manner. The distribution of these rights at the domestic level amount to the distribution of rights to the climate rent. Contrary to popular accounts of the ‘commodification’ of nature, I argue that emission rights are not ‘commodities’, and emissions trading and carbon markets are not ‘accumulation strategies’. These are merely depoliticised forms in which the climate rent is extracted and circulates to preclude political debates about the goals of production.

Forthcoming in Globalizations.
This century has not been kind to mainstream economics. It has failed to notice the planet is afire. Anti-ecological, it ignores natural limits. Its ‘peak prometheanism’ arrived in the 1980s, but how far back does the rot go? Some ecological economists locate the wrong turn in the nineteenth century. Before that was physiocracy (meaning ‘rule of nature’). The physiocrats were the first to call themselves ‘economists,’ and to formalise political economy as an objective science tasked to anatomise general economic laws. Were they the pioneers of a genuinely ‘ecological’ tradition of economics? In this essay I subject physiocracy to critical analysis, focussing on agrarian capitalism and laissez-faire economics, as well as class, colonialism, environmentalism and the growth paradigm. I ask whether physiocracy was science masquerading as mysticism or the reverse. Finally, I reflect on the ideology of economics and the limits of ‘image-focused’ alternatives such as Kate Raworth’s ‘doughnut economics.’

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

Monetary incentives such as nature-based tourism and payment for ecosystem service (PES) mechanisms have become increasingly promoted as a means for protecting the environment. Critical scholars are interpreting these developments as forms of accumulation based upon the commodification of nature, prosumption and institutional power that make labour progressively irrelevant in the production of value. Drawing on the case of two Senegalese villages and on Marx's concepts of commodity and value, this paper suggests that such perspectives are inaccurate and that they serve to silence workers' experiences of exploitation in these contexts. The paper proposes to go beyond generalising conceptualisations of the green economy such as " accumulation by conservation " and to be specific about the ways in which production and therefore working conditions relate to capital accumulation. It distinguishes between nature-based tourism and PES mechanisms: the former a profit-driven commodity production process, the latter a means for depoliticising environmental problems associated to capitalist commodity production through the payment of an environmental or climate rent that does not generate any value. Through this perspective it shows how in rural Senegal villagers' working day needs to be long, intense and poorly rewarded to reduce PES project costs and facilitate the extraction of surplus value by owners of nature-based tourism businesses as well as how labour hierarchies go hand in hand with relations of exploitation between workers. Capitalists, donors and local intermediaries' ability to take advantage of workers' labour is facilitated by the agrarian crises that capital has generated in these Senegalese villages, but it is also contested as workers rise up against exploitation. Capital's ability to survive to its own ecological contradictions therefore rests upon workers' shoulders and not exclusively on the formation of class hegemonies. La centralidad de la explotación laboral en las economías emergentes capitalistas verdes: la producción de servicios ambientales y productos

Since the 1990s, globalization theorists have published a neverending litany of books and articles about the crisis of the nationstate, the eclipse of the state, the retreat of the state, and even the end of the nation-state. Globalization theory has, on a regular basis, dismissed the nation-state as irrelevant to understanding contemporary political and economic development. However, this paper reexamines the relationship between globalization theory and state theory to argue that nation-states are the principal agents of globalization, as well as the guarantors of the political and material conditions necessary for global capital accumulation. Globalization theorists have constructed a false antinomy that rests largely on having misconstrued international relations (IR) theory, while ignoring significant developments in neo-Marxist state theory.

The role of urban regions in action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become increasingly central to global urban governance over the past 20 years and particularly after new promises and agreements made at COP21. Despite some attention across urban studies, the need to interrogate how new forms of urban carbon governance are transforming infrastructure space remains pressing. This paper examines the low-carbon restructuring of the waste system in Mbale, Uganda, a town struggling to address its socio-ecological futures. The paper asserts that a UPE approach to how urban carbon governance is materialised advances three particular concerns; the governing of urban circulation, carbon capital and socio-material relations. Through examining these, the paper shows how global actors are increasingly involved in low-carbon transformation, use places such as Mbale as spaces of experimentation and dominate the governing of this restructuring. Yet out of such unjust processes new forms of contestation and low-carbon politics may emerge.