Marxist theory

The secondary literature on Dialectic of Enlightenment is vast but most contributions focus on one isolated aspect or chapter of the book. Much of it is meta-theoretical and often sidesteps detailed textual analysis. There is a general tendency to overstate the extent to which Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes a turning point in Critical Theory. Schmid Noerr, one of the most authoritative commentators in the German-language literature, asserts that in his writings from the 1930s Horkheimer had seemed more optimistic about the possibility that Critical Theory could be articulated with critical empirical scholarship as well as radical political action than Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests (Schmid Noerr, 1987: 437). He also points out, though, that several projects that involved empirical research, and which were begun in parallel with and completed after Dialectic of Enlightenment, closely followed the programme of Critical Theory as formulated by Horkheimer in the 1930s, including proposals for reform of the education system meant to prevent the emergence of the ‘authoritarian character’ prone to fascist mobilization (Schmid Noerr, 1987: 448). Observations like these suggest that there are multiple shifts in emphasis between the many different texts that comprise the canon of Critical Theory but no definitive and central shift of perspective. This chapter is based on a close reading and examination of key passages of the text and concludes that the idea that there was a ‘negative turn’ of which Dialectic of Enlightenment was the avatar is simplistic and unconvincing.

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.

What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more ‘creative’ than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies.

Through its close analysis of key issues - such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realisation, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce ‘good work’ - Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the 21st century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.

Contents:
1. Introduction: can creative labour be good work?
1.1 Good and bad work in the cultural industries
1.2 Creativity as doctrine
1.3 The critical backlash, the debate and our own approach
1.4 Definitions and boundaries
1.5 Research design: selection of industries and cases
1.6 Methods: interviews and participant observation
1.7 Outline of the book

Part 1
2. A model of good and bad work
2.1 Marx on work and alienation
2.2 A sociological concept of alienation
2.3 Towards a model of good and bad work beyond alienation
2.4 Good products as good work
2.5 Autonomy as a feature of good work?
2.5.1 Two accounts of workplace autonomy
2.6 Self-realisation as a feature of good work?
2.7 Post-structuralist critique of work and the problem of values
2.7.1 Good work: critique of a critique
2.8 Subjective experience

3. The specificity of creative labour
3.1 Outline of the chapter
3.2 Three approaches to cultural production
3.3 General neglect of labour in studies of cultural production and possible reasons
3.4 Political economy and the specificity of creative labour
3.5 Raymond Williams on the specificity of creative labour: The communication of experience
3.6 A critical conception of creative autonomy and its two variants
3.6.1 Variant 1: Aesthetic autonomy
3.6.2 Variant 2: Professional autonomy
3.7 Creative work and social class
3.8 Cultural studies on creative labour: Subjectivity and self-exploitation
3.9 The debate about creative work

Part 2
4. The management of autonomy, creativity and commerce
4.1 Creativity, commerce and organisations
4.2 The creative management function
4.3 Managing creative autonomy: Magazines
4.4 Managing creative autonomy: The case of music recording
4.5 Pressures of Autonomy (1): Marketisation in broadcasting
4.5.1 Television documentary and factual television
4.5.2 Television drama
4.6 Pressures on autonomy (2): The rising power of marketing
4.7 Anxieties about autonomy
4.8 Pressures on autonomy (3): The obligation to network
4.9 Conclusions

5. Pay, hours, security, involvement, esteem and freedom
5.1 Quality of working life in the cultural industries
5.2 Pay, working hours and unions
5.2.1 Pay
5.2.2 Working hours
5.2.3 Unions
5.3 Security and risk
5.4 Esteem and self-esteem
5.4.1 Self-doubt
5.4.2 Cool and glamorous
5.5 Challenge, interest and involvement
5.5.1 Pleasurable absorption
5.6 The experience of autonomy
5.7 Ambivalent experiences

6. Creative careers, self-realisation and sociality
6.1 Decline of the career?
6.2 Finding the right creative occupation
6.3 The fragility of creative careers
6.4 Defining yourself too much through creative work
6.5 Teamwork, socialising, networking
6.6 Isolation
6.7 Self-realisation and sociality: Ambivalent features of modern creative labour

7. Emotional and affective labour
7.1 Immaterial labour, affective labour and ‘precarity’
7.2 Emotional labour
7.3 Media labour and symbolic power
7.4 The talent show: Budget, commissioners and independents
7.5 Emotional labour and the anxieties of star-making
7.6 Pleasure and sociality on the production team
7.7 Affective labour and immanent co-operation?
7.8 Conclusions

8. Creative products, good and bad
8.1 Questions of quality
8.2 Pleasures and satisfactions of making good cultural products
8.3 Conceptions of good texts
8.4 Bad texts: Frustration and disappointment
8.5 Conceptions and explanations of poor quality work
8.6 Negative and positive experiences of quality

9. Audiences, quality and the meaning of creative work
9.1 Creative workers thinking about what audiences think
9.2 Magazines: is the reader everything
9.3 Music: a communicative thing or a private thing?
9.4 What can audiences handle?
9.5 Television and audience size: ratings tyranny?
9.6 Audiences, ambivalence and projection

10. The politics of good and bad work
10.1 The hardest way to make an easy living?
10.2 Unions and the struggle for good creative work
10.3 Work and life: choosing not to self-exploit?
10.4 Spreading good and bad work: how intractable is the social division of labour?

Bibliography
Appendix: The Interviews


Author Bio:
David Hesmondhalgh teaches in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, where he is Professor of Media and Music Industries, Director of Research, and Head of the Media Industries Research Centre (MIRC). His publications include The Cultural Industries (2nd edition, 2007).

Sarah Baker is Lecturer in Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Australia. She has previously held research fellowships at The Open University and University of Leeds, UK, and the University of South Australia.

"A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called ""intellectual property,"" gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

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.

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.

""According to Sohn-Rethel there is a “secret identity” between commodity form and thought form. Commodity exchange is a real abstraction – embodied in money – and constitutes a social a priori which reflects itself in the conceptual abstraction, i.e., in the abstract thought typical of commodity-producing societies: philosophy (in ancient Greece) and modern science (in capitalism). However, the theory of Sohn-Rethel has a fundamental flaw: its exclusive identification of the real abstraction with the sphere of circulation results in the ontologisation of labour which, on the contrary, is a capitalist specificity and the original source of the abstraction in this society.   

Keywords: Sohn-Rethel, real abstraction, commodity form, thought form
""

This paper provides an external account of the demise of the ‘old’ Marxist educational theory flowing from social reproductionism/ resistance theory. Five developments are explored in terms of how they have undercut the ‘old’ educational Marxism: hyper‐academicism; dislocations/disjunctions between theory and practice; the postmodern challenge; the new liberal ‘Left’ challenge; and, the ‘death of Marxism’ syndrome. The first two elements form the basis of some important ‘lessons’ for the revitalisation of Marxist perspectives on education. It is also argued that, although the five trends and developments have posed a serious challenge for the ‘old’ Marxist educational theory, nevertheless, it will probably circulate for some time‐‐given revivals, revisits, and as a source of easy criticism for anti‐Marxists. Finally, there has been a recent flowering of new approaches to theorising education from a Marxist perspective, which this paper maps out.

Constitution-making is a ubiquitous but poorly understood phenomenon. There is much speculation but relatively little evidence about the impact of different design processes on constitutional outcomes. Much of the debate reduces to the question of who is involved in the process and when. We consider two central issues in this regard. The first is the problem of institutional self-dealing, or whether governmental organs that have something to gain from the constitutional outcome should be involved in the process. The second has to do with the merits of public involvement in the process. Both of these concerns have clear normative implications and both are amenable to straightforward social scientific analysis. This article surveys the relevant research on constitution-making, describes the conceptual issues involved in understanding constitution-making, reviews the various claims regarding variation in constitution-making processes, and presents a set of baseline empirical results from a new set of data on the content and process of constitution-making. 201 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2009.5:201-223. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY -Law Library (Chicago Campus) on 11/09/10. For personal use only.

In this essay I develop the notion of 'minor theory* following the work of Gillcs Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka's 'minor literature 1 as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography. I will explore the politics of producing theory that is, for example, interstitial with empirical research and social location; of scholarship that sclf-rcflcxtvcly interpolates the theories and practices of everyday historical subjects-including, but not restricted to, scholars; and of work that reworks marginality by decomposing the major. I will discuss the ways that by consciously refusing 'mastery* in both the academy and its research practices, 'minor* research strives to change theory and practice simultaneously, and I will suggest that these practices can be conjoined with the critical and transformative concerns of Marxism, feminism, antiracism, and queer theory to pry apart conventional geographies and produce renegade cartographies of change.

In short, this essay does for the concept of the assemblage what Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben did for Foucault in their essays on the dispositif: it extracts from a large body of work the core formal features of its operative methodology or logic.

This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduring Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West nevertheless its tendency towards “Eurofetishism” – by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency – leads it into a “critical Eurocentrism”. While this Eurofetishism plays out differently across the spectrum of CIRT, nevertheless all too often the West is treated as distinct from the non-West such that a fully relationalist conception of the West – one in which the non-West shapes, tracks and inflects the West as much as vice versa – is either downplayed or dismissed altogether. Our antidote to this problem is to advance such a relationalist approach that brings non-Western agency back in while simultaneously recognizing that such agency is usually subjected to structural constraints. This gives rise to two core objectives: first, that non-Western agency needs to be taken seriously as an ontologically significant process in world politics and second, that it needs to be explored in its complex, manifold dimensions. Here we seek to move beyond the colonial binaries of non-Western “silence vs. defiance” and an “all-powerful West vs. powerless non-West”. For in-between these polarities lies a spectrum of instantiations of non-Western agency, running from the refusal to be known and categorized by colonial epistemes to mundane moments of everyday agency to the embrace of indigenous cosmologies through to modes of developmental- and global-agency. Sometimes these speak back to the West and at other times they occur for reasons Other-wise. Ultimately we call for a relationalist sociology of global interconnectivities that problematizes CIRT’s Eurofetishization of the West as a separate, self-generating, self-directed and hyper-autonomous entity.

Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a 'project', which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism’s stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end-state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas–such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship–that are long past their expiration date.

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.

This intervention contributes to recent work in urban geography that integrates the conceptual frameworks of assemblages and actor-network theory by highlighting two additional directions that require a more rigorous and detailed theorization. The first direction concerns the relationship between contingency and necessity in urban assemblages and actor-networks and this paper delineates four specific propositions as a starting point for further reflection. The second direction suggests that urban assemblages and actor-networks require a more explicit vocabulary for thinking about competition and cooperation within and between cities. To this end, the paper introduces a new concept – delayed asymmetric counterforces – that can foster a better understanding of competition-induced urban change and destabilization. The novel concept is developed in conjunction with a typology of delays in competitive urban dynamics, which helps illuminate how delayed asymmetric counterforces are both a cause and an effect of the complexity inherent in the urban realm.

This article examines the role of Enron, an American corporation, in its promotion of the electric power sector in the Dabhol Power Project in India. Under the new economic regime in India, policy changes were followed by nine fast-track private electric power projects in different parts of the country with foreign companies as primary promoters or major collaborators. The new, privately promoted power projects brought into focus the power of foreign capital and neoliberal discourse. Neoliberalism is not about free markets, nor about freedom, nor development of the global South or postsocialist economies but rather a form of power that creates congenial spaces for the extraction of revenue by corporations in countries that were, until recently, relatively less accessible to capitalist exploitation. The research is based on interviews with key informants and archival data. Este artículo examina el papel de Enron, una corporación norteamericana, en la promoción del sector de energía eléctrica del Proyecto Dabhol de Energía, en la India. Bajo el nuevo régimen económico de ese país, sobrevinieron cambios de política en nueve proyectos energéticos privados, en diferentes partes del país, en los que compañías extranjeras figuran como promotores primarios o colaboradores principales. Los nuevos proyectos energéticos promovidos desde el sector privado colocó en primer plano el poder del capital foráneo y el discurso neoliberal. El neoliberalismo no se refiere a mercados libres, ni es acerca de la libertad, ni del desarrollo del Sur global o de las economías possocialistas; en vez de eso es una forma de poder que crea espacios congeniales para que las compañías obtengan ingresos en países que hasta hace poco tiempo eran relativamente poco accesibles a la explotación capitalista. La investigación se basó en entrevistas con informantes claves y datos de archivos.

Debates around the concept of social capital are often also debates about the level at which social capital can be abstracted for analytical use. Yet while many theorists and commentators involved in these debates implicitly discuss the issue of abstraction it is rarely done explicitly. In this article I attempt to overcome this missing link in the social capital literature by theoretically examining the 'social' in 'social capital' through interconnected levels of abstraction. In particular, and at a high level of abstraction, I argue that social capital is underpinned by a contradictory relationship associated with what I term as 'isolated reciprocity'. At lower levels of abstraction I show how isolated reciprocity poses problems for the establishment of 'good' social capital in the UK.

This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the spatialization of "race" in Italy. Neoliberal globalization expands the spatial mediation of historically layered racialized anxieties. In the context of African in-migration, "black" is emerging as a prominent marker of difference. The state has largely proscribed immigration from impoverished African nations, effecting a shadow economy of undocumented workers. Corporate interests have seized on the presence of these workers and hyper-exploited them. Meanwhile, trade union and feminist organizations are consciously blind to the "race" question, providing inadequate relief to those most in need. In discussing the empirical and geographical realities of racialization, I refine Marx's understanding of disposable surplus labor. In particular, I argue that the racialization of surplus populations must be understood in the context of the regional and global inequalities that have compelled post-colonial populations to migrate.

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also from various other forms of peasant politics that have been theorized in the social sciences. It illustrates how the process of land dispossession itself shapes the targets, strategy and tactics, organization, social composition, goals, and ideologies of anti-dispossession struggles. It concludes with reflections on why land conflicts are less easily institutionalized than labor conflicts and may therefore constitute a significantly disruptive force in the emerging centers of global capitalism for the foreseeable future.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the relationship between Marxist theory and the anthropology of Native North America. This includes a brief history of the origins, development, and application of Marxist theory in the anthropology and ethnohistory of Native North America, as well as a discussion of the theoretical and ideological tensions between Marxism, postmodernism, and indigenism in this regional context. That builds to a discussion of Rata's (2000) concept of neotribal capitalism as an application of and innovation on Marxist theory to settler-colonial situations, and its superiority over postmodern/indigenist-derived theory and analysis in actually understanding and explaining the processes (re)shaping Native North America. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for Marxist theory and analysis for properly understanding contemporary situations within Native North American societies.

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'.

The article addresses the challenge of conceptualizing agency within a non-dichotomous, dialectical approach that gives full credit to the social roots of agency and does justice to it being an achievement of togetherness possible only in a communal world shared with others. Critical steps in this direction are undertaken by the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS) approach advanced by this article’s author and further developed and applied to various topics by scholars from many parts of the world. This approach is firmly rooted in cultural-historical activity theory yet also moves beyond it in overcoming some of its impasses. The core elements of TAS are discussed to reveal how they coalesce on the nexus of social practices of self- and world-making. Agency is the process that enacts this nexus of ongoing, ceaseless social-individual transformations whereby people simultaneously, in one process, co-create their world and themselves so that each individual person makes a difference and matters in the totality of social practices. Ethical-political entailments of TAS are discussed to combat the legacy of passivity and inequality still permeating psychology and neighboring fields.

Two independent technical developments have transformed the metal mining industry in considerable ways: the increasing share of waste materials in the feedstock of metallurgical operations has partially transformed metal extraction into a recycling industry, and the employment of microorganisms in the extraction of metals from mineral ores has rendered metals mining a biologically based industry. Increasing industrial interest and research activity in the application of biotechnologies to the extraction of metals from waste, particularly electronic waste, intimate a potential intersection of those two processes, destabilizing further the analytical distinctions between extraction and manufacturing, biologically based and nonbiologically based production, waste and resources. This combined deterritorialization of metal extraction requires a theoretical deterritorialization: rethinking extraction beyond extractive industry narrowly defined and the role that nonhuman forms of life play in the production of value in nonbiologically based (extractive) industries. This article is a first step toward outlining the effects of such developments on understanding extraction. It begins by reflecting on the effects of recycling on the spatiality and materiality of the mine and then it proceeds to examine the productive role of microorganisms in mining, the limits of biomining, and the biotechnologies that have developed to transcend those limits. The conclusion draws out theoretical implications of those ongoing lines of deterritorialization and their combination on understanding the spatiotemporality of extraction and the active involvement of nonhuman nature in the production of value.


两项独立的技术发展, 大幅改变了金属採矿业: 冶金作业原料中逐渐增加的废弃物质比例, 已将部分的金属萃取转变成回收产业, 从矿种萃取金属的过程中运用微生物, 则使得金属採矿成为以生物学为基础的产业。对于将生物科技应用至从废弃物、特别是电子废弃物中萃取出金属, 有着逐渐增加的产业兴趣及研究活动, 提示了上述两个过程的互动潜力, 并进一步挑战了萃取与製造、根据生物与非生物的生产, 以及废弃物与资源之间的分析区别。此般金属萃取的联合去领域化, 同时需要理论的去领域化: 在狭隘定义的冶金工业之外重新思考冶金, 以及非人类的生命形式在以非生物为基础的 (冶金) 工业的价值生产中所扮演的角色。本文是迈向概论此般发展对于理解冶金之影响的第一步。本文首先反思回收对于矿场的物质性及空间性的影响, 接着检视微生物在採矿中的生产性角色、生物採矿的限制, 以及克服上述限制的生物科技发展。研究结论部分, 从上述持续进行中的去领域化路径与路径的结合中汲取理论意涵, 以理解冶金的时空性和积极参与至价值生产的非人类本质 。


La industria minera de metales ha sido transformada de manera considerable por dos desarrollos técnicos independientes: la proporción en aumento de elementos de desecho en los materiales con los que se alimentan las operaciones metalúrgicas ha transformado parcialmente la extracción de metales en una industria de reciclaje, y el empleo de microorganismos en la extracción de metales de rocas que albergan el mineral ha convertido la minería de metales en una industria apoyada biológicamente. El creciente interés industrial y la actividad investigativa para la aplicación de biotecnologías en la extracción de los metales contenidos en desechos, en particular en la basura electrónica, permiten entrever una interacción potencial de los dos procesos, desestabilizando aun más las distinciones analíticas entre los procesos de extracción y manufactura, la producción de base biológica y la abiótica, residuos y recursos. Esta desterritorialización combinada de extracción de metales demanda una desterritorialización teórica: repensar la extracción más allá de la industria extractiva definida con estrechez y el papel que juegan formas de vida no humana en la producción de valor en industrias (extractivas) que no están biológicamente basadas. El presente artículo es un paso inicial hacia el enunciado de los efectos de tales desarrollos en el entendimiento de la extracción. El artículo empieza con una reflexión sobre los efectos del reciclaje sobre la espacialidad y materialidad de la mina y luego se procede a examinar el papel productivo de los microorganismos en minería, los límites de biominería y las biotecnologías que han sido desarrolladas para trascender aquellos límites. La conclusión extrae implicaciones teóricas de aquella líneas de desterritorialización y su combinación para tratar de entender la espacio-temporalidad de la extracción y la activa participación de la naturaleza no humana en la producción de valor.

Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values, and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement. The use/exchange value binary no longer as useful an analytic as it once was, geographers need to better understand UA's contradictory relations to capital, particularly in the neoliberal Sustainable City. To this end, I bring together feminist theorizations of social reproduction, Bourdieu's " species of capital " , and critical geographies of race to help demystify UA's entanglement in processes of eco-gentrification. In this primarily theoretical contribution, I argue that concrete labor embedded in household-scale UA—a socially reproductive practice—becomes cultural capital that a Sustainable City's growth coalition in turn valorizes as symbolic sustainability capital used to extract rent and burnish the city's brand at larger scales. The valorization of UA occurs, by necessity, in a variegated manner; spatial agglomerations of UA and the eco-habitus required for its misrecognition as sustainability capital arise as a function of the interplay between rent gaps and racialized othering. I assert that eco-gentrification is not only a contradiction emerging from an urban sustainability fix, but is central to how racial capitalism functions through green urbanization. Like its contribution to eco-gentrification, I conclude, UA's emancipatory potential is also spatially variegated.

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.

The subject of 'population' is undergoing a renaissance in geography; this is seen, for example, in the voluminous studies addressing 'marginalized' populations, including but not limited to refugees, internally displaced persons, and children. In short, scholarship has focused on those lives rendered 'wasted', 'precarious', or 'superfluous'. Population geographers have made substantial contributions; however, more can be done. In this and the next two progress reports, I suggest that population geographers reflect more deeply on the spatiality and survivability of vulnerable populations. More specifically, population geographers should consider the politics of fertility, mortality, and mobility from the standpoint of a layered demographic question: within any given place, who lives, who dies, and who decides? In this first report, I resituate the concept 'surplus population' within the broader domain of population geography. In subsequent reports, I consider more closely population geography's association with related subject areas (i.e. biopolitics and necropolitics). I maintain that, by addressing vulnerability and survivability, we join others in geography and allied fields who are writing about 'populations' not as biological, pre-given entities, but instead as political subjects at risk of premature death.

Öz
Kürt kadınlarının, modernleşmenin/demokratikleşmenin bir tezahürü olarak gösterilmesi hem
aile, hem din/dindarlık hem de çocuk yetiştirilme tarzına uygun bir sosyolojik yapıyı
barındırmaz. Çünkü Kürtlerin kadim tarihinden beri İslamiyet ile olan alakaları bilinmesi ile
Kürt annelerinin başlarının örtülü olmasına ve hemen her evde bir Kur’an-ı Kerim bulunmasına
rağmen şu an tarih tersinden işletilmektedir. Farklı sosyalist ve seküler merkezlerden alınan
komutlarla kadınların siyasileştirilmesi şimdi olmasa dahi ileriki dönemlerde olumludan çok
olumsuz bir etki yaratacak gibidir. Din anlamında yaşanan dezenformasyonun Kürt gençliği –
(YDG-H gençliği bunun en bariz örneğidir)- üzerinde yaratacağı tahribatlar ise Kürt siyaseti ve
ülkemiz açısından da önlenemeyecek aşamalara gelebilir. İşte bu makale de bizim üzerinde
duracağımız konu Kürt kadınlarının siyasileştirilmesi ve bu siyasileştirmenin Kürt ailesine ve
de dindarlığa verdiği tahribat ve Kürt aile geleneğinin geleceği konusunda duyduğumuz
endişeyi dile getirmek amacı taşıyacaktır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Annelik, Aile, Kürt Siyaseti, Çocuk, Sekülerleşme.


Abstract
Kurdish women as a manifestation of modernization/democratization, does not have a
sociological structure that is suitable for family, religion/religiosity and child-rearing style.
Because; despite the fact that the Kurds have been familiar with Islam since immemorial times
and that, the heads of Kurdish mothers have been covered and a Qur'an has been found in
almost every house, the history is now reversed. The politicization of women with the
commands taken from different socialist and secular centers is likely to have very negative
impact on future periods, even if not today. The destructive effects of the disinformation
regarding religion on the Kurdish youth (YDG-H youth is the most obvious example of this)
(YDG-H: Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement Turkish: Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik Hareketi) may
come at a stage that cannot be prevented for Kurdish politics and our country. Moreover, in this
article, we will aim to express our concerns about the politicization of Kurdish women, its
destruction of the Kurdish family structure and religiosity, and the future of the Kurdish family
tradition.
Keywords: Maternity, Family, Kurdish Politics, Secularization, Child.


Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better under- stood as a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alter- native to the dominant forms of political modernity.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.

Why does scholarship on transnational labor regulation
(TLR) consistently fail to search for improvements in
working conditions, and instead devotes itself to relentless
efforts for identifying administrative processes, semantics,
and amalgamations of stakeholders? This article critiques
TLR from a pro-worker perspective, through the philosophical
work of Georg Lukács, and the concepts of reification
and commodification. A set of theoretically grounded criteria
is developed and these are applied against selected
contemporary cases of TLR. In the totality that is capitalism,
reification of social relations of production conceals
completely the experiences of workers. In TLR, managerialist
and process-oriented scholarship is dominant, verifiable
outcomes and positive improvements in conditions of
employment are not sought, and worse, meaningless
procedures are celebrated as positive achievements.

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of 'posthegemony'. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony-'temporal, 'foundational and 'expansive'-characterized by different understandings of the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their 'pre-Gramscianism', their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe's formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization.

This paper investigates the contemporary economic crisis, and explores crisis theories developed by Marx and Marxists alongside discourses surrounding human geography and the urban condition. Two positions currently dominate Marxist crisis theory: realization/overproduction and Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Within human geography, however, scholars rarely discuss crisis theory in and of itself, and when they do, they tend to rely solely on the realization/overproduction approach popularized by David Harvey. This paper argues that both approaches aid a conceptualization of the current crisis while deepening our understanding of changing urban policies and landscapes. This paper also claims-in contrast to Keynesians' calls-that crises are "solved" by destruction and devaluation of capital, not an increase in effective demand. These debates, as of yet not thoroughly discussed in human geography, can provide us with new knowledge concerning the current crisis and contemporary urban policies.

This article highlights the continued significance of pre-capitalist formations in shaping the trajectory of economic transition in peripheral regions, even in an era of neo-liberal
globalisation. There is a tendency for Marxist scholars to assume the inevitable “dominance” of capitalism over older modes of production. Using a case study from Nepal’s far eastern Tarai, this paper seeks to understand the reproduction of feudal social relations in a region which is both accessible and integrated into regional and global markets. The paper traces the early subordination of indigenous groups to feudalism from the eighteenth century onwards, and the  political and ideological processes through which these social relations were reinforced. Through examining the historical role of feudal-colonial alliances, however, the paper notes that pre-capitalist reproduction in Nepal is a dynamic process, actively negotiated and reinforced by the external imperatives of capitalist expansion itself as well as through the entrenched political power of landed classes. Today feudal and capitalist formations co-exist and articulate, with surplus divided between landlords and non-farm employers. Understanding the complex dynamics of feudal or “semi-feudal” reproduction
in an era of globalisation is crucial if one is to identify avenues for collective mobilisation against inequitable pre-capitalist and capitalist class relations.

Based on reflections on how economic crises under capitalism have been typically " solved " , particularly by examining processes of creative destruction and spatial fixes, this paper argues for the need to rethink the duality between austerity, and Keynesian crisis management , given the nature of the current economic crisis. Austerity is a key policy instrument of neolib-eralism. Keynesianism is regarded as neoliberalism's antithesis. Conventionally understood, continued austerity would mean more post-Fordist and neolib-eral geographies, while a Keynesian approach would mean more demand management. This paper argues that such a conclusion is over-simplistic, indeed incorrect. Crisis management inspired by Keynes is less concerned with the destructive parts of crises and seldom challenges the power of capital. Therefore, Keynesian crisis management risks reproducing neoliberal spaces and neoliberal urban and regional policies. This paper questions whether Keynesian crisis management — i.e. boosting aggregate demand during slumps — is a " solution " to the current crisis. The paper questions Keynesianism in its belief, for example, that climate change can be stopped within a framework that still perpetuates, and advocates for, compound economic growth. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to see beyond Keynesianism, and explores what a Marxist approach to spatial fix and creative destruction might mean.

The rising prominence of “comparative political theory” has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods employed in the subfield of comparative politics, because, they argue, applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that, I argue, offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that all political thinkers always occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, are apt to offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.