Abstract Contemporary globalisation faces several challenges, for instance related to climate change, technological disruption and shifting geopolitics, that have repercussions for the organisation of value chains and the global division of labour. Analysing the long-term geographies of globalisation we observe how successive reconfigurations of ‘new’ and ‘newer’ global divisions of labour share an archipelagic socio-spatial structure. The paper theorizes the articulations of this archipelago spatial figure as a combination of de/bordering, dis/connecting and dis/association. We apply this framework to provide a nuanced assessment of how global capitalism might restructure when some processes that defined globalisation during the last decades kick in reverse. 

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OUP accepted manuscript

Economic rent is defined as excessive financial returns made possible by control or monopoly over a particular market. A minority of economists suggest that we live in an era of “rentier capitalism” characterized by exploitative extreme wealth. Their arguments are framed in new and powerful ways, but their focus has a long heritage, flowing back to classical economists such as Adam Smith who criticized the wealthy for reaping “where they never sowed.” While interest in rentierism is growing, other economists, including on the left, disagree that rentier gains underpin most extreme fortunes today. I introduce the concept of “ignorance pathways” to raise new points about the perceptual divide between those who “see” rent and those who do not. Mapping different ignorance pathways within modern economic thought, I theorize the reasons for why rentier returns remain “unseen”. Terminology is policy: it is harder to make a policy case for redistributing rentier returns when the contentious object of scrutiny — in this case “rent” — is believed to be something that does not exist.

Hiding the Rentier Elephant in Plain Sight: The Epistemology of Vanishing Rent

Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not only scripts the infrastructural expansion of late capitalist urbanisations, it also informs the tactics of survivability and resistance that address the spatial and social disparities generated by the latter. Behind the arrangement of makeshift infrastructural set-ups for commercial exchange, food distribution and community support, there is a form of popular logistics, interventions put in place to articulate the circulation of resources, weave nodes of solidarity and navigate the bureaucratic and territorial distances that exist across institutional scales. The paper frames the integration of these forms of counter-logistical expressions as an emerging form of municipalism. Focussing on municipal responses to the pandemic, the essay describes the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers the material and virtual adaptations that social movements, neighbourhood organisations and public agencies put in place to configure different forms of producing and distributing goods and services in the city. In a context where privatised infrastructures of distribution mediate the expressions of urban life, the paper positions the articulation of common and popular forms of logistics as a strategic dimension of municipal politics.

Counter-logistics and municipalism: Popular infrastructures during the pandemic in Rosario

There is renewed attention to the importance of rent to understanding capitalist resource geographies. In this report, I ground these discussions in Marx’s theory of “ground rent” and specifically the role of the landlord class as owners of natural forces demanding a “share” of the social surplus (as distinct from the capitalist and working classes). I review emergent literature about three key kinds of rentiers—private landowners, landlord states, and capitalist resource rentiers. I suggest the category of capitalist resource rentier confounds a Marxist class analysis centered on capitalists as the owners of the means of production.

Resource geography III: Rentier natures and the renewal of class struggle

Contesting total extractivism: Between idealism and materialism

The Turbulent Circulation of Rent: Towards a Political Economy of Property and Ownership in Supply Chain Capitalism

Brett Christophers The new enclosure: The appropriation of public land in neoliberal Britain. London: Verso. 2018, pp. 384, £20 (hardback), ISBN 9781786631589

Thomas F. Purcell

Papers

The Turbulent Circulation of Rent: Towards a Political Economy of Property and Ownership in Supply Chain Capitalism

Brett Christophers The new enclosure: The appropriation of public land in neoliberal Britain. London: Verso. 2018, pp. 384, £20 (hardback), ISBN 9781786631589