Nature, and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?

Aaron Kappeler Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; [email protected] Patrick Bigger Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA; [email protected]

Abstract: The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi-national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved—land, labor and —and the always-uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.

Keywords: housing crisis, accumulation by dispossession, nature, Polanyi, capital

...this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class, but because it has affected the petty-bourgeoisie also...(Friedrich Engels 1995 [1871], The Housing Question). If there is a message in the madness, it’s this: the market is looking elsewhere for a “solution” to the broad mess that started in housing and will presumably end with housing, albeit with some big victims along the way (David Ader, US Government Bond Strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital, quoted in Wessel 2008). The housing crisis in the USA continues to have far reaching effects woven through a complex spatial tapestry spanning from the most material spaces of social reproduction (the home) to the most abstract outposts of (the subprime market). What follows is an attempt to understand this set of economic events through Harvey’s (2003) concept of “accumulation by dispossession” and the Antipode Vol. 43 No. 4 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 986–1011 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00757.x C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 987 implications of what increasingly appears to be a failed attempt to cure overaccumulation by commodifying nature. While it is tempting to dwell on the complex acronyms, institutional actors and staggering amounts of money involved, it is also important to explore the basic commodities in question. These commodities are the labor reproduced in the structure of the house, the land on which it is built, and the unit of its transferability, money. These commodities, which Polanyi (1944) argued are the natural bases of society, are also elements constituting the toxic debt now threatening to destabilize world markets and “the real economy”. In a tense and constantly fluctuating relationship with capital, these natural bases form the space of social reproduction of the home, whose abstract commodification under neoliberalism has led to the current crisis of realization. We argue these commodities constitute the basis of a possible countermovement, strengthened through a matrix of naturalization, emphasizing the social origins of the market and the ecological foundations of the claim to “right to the city”. By bringing the politics of dispossession into dialog with urban ecology, we hope to contribute to debates on the role of natural spaces in capital and the countermovements engendered by the confluence of fictitious commodities and the market. Although this paper is concerned with the complex political economy of the home and the structured debt markets that arose in the 1990s, this period is not our sole focus. The economic and monetary restructuring under Greenspan’s chairmanship of the Federal Reserve corresponds rather neatly to the “roll-out” phase of neoliberalism delimited by Peck and Tickell (2002) and is worth study on that basis alone.1 But to give an account centered on the technocratic pronouncements of the Federal Reserve would ignore the peopled processes contributing to naturalization of the market, aggressive predatory lending practices foisting adjustable rate mortgages onto millions of homeowners, and active deregulation of financial instruments that created the liquid capital evaporating in the crisis. This explicit re-insertion of “the social” into economic processes may seem obvious to critical social scientists, but it is very much against the econometric logic pervading writing on the topic. Part of the corrosive logic of neoliberalism, this gaze ignores the spaces and subjects produced within that mode of accumulation and the effect they have on the operation of capital and the market. The subsumption of nature by capital is a central factor in human agency as a reservoir of value needed for production (Marx 1844). But bourgeois ideologies separate nature from society, masking the inherent dangers of capital’s efforts to commodify space. The social-economic and ecological rationalities contributing to the boom in foreclosures are embodied in a range of subjectivities that have a distinctly neoliberal flavor. Such subjectivities range from the hyper-individual “rogue

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 988 Antipode trader” like former Societe´ Generale employee Jerome´ Kerviel who purportedly lost more than €7 billion in unsecured collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), to the lower-middle class homeowner who may think of the home as a speculative tool, rather than a dwelling, a particularly neoliberal subject according to Harvey (2008) (see also, Brown 2006; Robertson 2006; Traub-Werner 2007). The rise of housing commodities and abstract debt instruments in the current crisis was grounded in the neoliberal notion of the market as a mechanism that arises spontaneously and sidesteps social-ecological ties as “artificial” impediments to its operation. The realization crisis now affecting borrowers, lenders and manufacturers and the economic rationalities deployed to rescue accumulation have the potential to undermine social reproduction. Subprime loan recipients are disciplined to accept foreclosure and capital flight, and, in a bitter twist, the dispossession of homes does not necessarily result in any systematic accumulation at any level. The first step towards building a countermovement against foreclosure is to understand how bringing the home fully into the market is an example of the contradiction of capital (see O’Connor 1998). The blind spots in the logic of neoliberalism disguise capital’s ties to nature and begin to destroy both.

Ideology of Nature: The Home First appearing in modern English in the 1600s, the word “neighborhood” derives from the West Germanic word nhgbar,which refers to the bond established between actors through a common affinity with nature (eg farmers and herders, “blood and soil”). This sociospatiality was a relation constituted as space, and space constituted as a social relation (Lefebvre, 1991 [1979]). The modern home, similarly, can be understood as natural if we recognize there is tangible work in the creation of nature. The chief difficulty in mobilizing the produced nature concept, Castree (1995) notes, is maintaining a realist ontology with an epistemology that is constructivist. The produced nature concept does not imply that capitalism “determines how trees grow” (Castree 1995:23), but it recognizes that “nature separate from society has no meaning” (Smith 1984:17). We seek to unpack the elements constituting the home as a produced nature whose exposure to naturalized markets under neoliberalism, justified by a capitalist ideology of nature, is the basis of crisis. The ethos of rising capitalism, bourgeois utilitarianism, Smith (1984) argues, reined nature in from a point outside society into the sphere of production. This project of resource-intensive private property regimes, urbanization and industrialization operated a dialectic of nature as known quantity (requisite for the economy) and Other (beyond the social) shaping capitalism’s ambivalent attitude toward the

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 989 domination of nature. A structural necessity for the capitalist mode of production, domination of nature also undermines social reproduction and accumulation—which mainstream environmental movements often fail to address. Private spaces in western society have operated a similar dialectic of feminization, including a tendency toward the natural. Naturalization of the home has often been a tool of subjugation feminist2 work demonstrating privacy and isolation of the home space for unsurveiled violence. But through the matrix of naturalization the home can also be a site of resistance. In City of Flows, Maria Kaika (2005) argues there is material continuity between the city, nature and the home, but that these elements are systematically estranged in the representational space of modernity. Differentiating modernity with its finished programmatic quality from modernization as the messy process of enacting the program (see also Latour 1993), Kaika seeks to appreciate how alienating and alienated spaces disguise the natural foundations of home and the city. The private space of the home associated with reprieve from disquieting elements is particularly tension-filled because its affective associations are constituted by its relation with those same forces. The modern bourgeois home is “scripted as the other of nature and society” (Kaika 2005:12), and by excluding certain socio-natural processes from the dwelling the home is able to host associations that are basically anti- modern, even as it is assimilated to the wider modernist project of sequestering the uncontrolled, unsanitary and unfamiliar. In Walter Benjamin’s sense of the word, the home is the “uncanny” of urban and natural space: elements like dirt and sounds of the street, encountered outside scripted parameters, evoke anxiety and fear at loss of sheltered spaces. The home imposes patterns of everyday relations3 constituting the larger spatial packet—civil society. Epitomizing the rights of citizenship, the primary function of the home in relation to the public sphere is to separate authorized spaces of social conflict from sequestered freedom. This situates the home in a depoliticized space, but civil society has not always been so conceived. In Plato’s writings, the agora and oikos are sites of politics. In Gramsci (1971 [1929–1935]), subalterns gather strength in civil society before their war of maneuver for the state. And no less a figure than Marx (Marx and Engels 1974 [1845]) argued the proletariat must negate civil society in its practice to reach communism. A cursory examination of public improvement schemes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals critical differences in elite attitudes toward working class housing. It is debatable the degree to which the working class home has ever occupied civil society in quite the same way as the bourgeois home. Diagnosed as health hazards, political powder kegs and slums, gentrification has been used to neutralize such spaces

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 990 Antipode at least since Haussman’s Paris. In this sense, the working class home has always been “politicized”. Thoroughly penetrated by capital, the modern home as a rarefied environment depends on the ability of its owners to successfully negotiate the market,4 bringing that space to the edge of the public sphere in crisis and calling into question the neutrality of neoliberal practices and ideologies. That the home is a confluence of land, labor and money central to social reproduction suggests the potential to unleash a countermovement that calls the very foundations of economy and civil society into question.

A Produced Nature Money As we make the claim that homes are natural and naturalizable spaces, markets in homes, debt and structured investment vehicles (SIVs) should be explored. If the home is understood as an extension of nature that is commodified and brought to market, the recent actions of the Federal Reserve have been instructive exercises in seeing how central banks seek to correct the limits of the money commodity. According to Marx in Capital Vol 1 (1967 [1867]), money is the most abstract expression of value, which is not a commodity per se, but the fungible unit of exchange that makes capitalism possible. Some of the key actions of the Reserve are as follows: collusion with European central banks to inject massive amounts of short-term liquidity into the global capital market at strategic intervals in the accounting calendar; cutting of the Federal funds rate to near historic lows (which, at the time of writing, sits at 0–0.25 following a rapid series of reductions over the last 18 months); and introduction of more regular and in-depth reporting vehicles, presumably both to calm the waves of speculation, which sweep the market in anticipation of further economic deterioration, and to answer calls to make the process of determining key economic actions more transparent. Another regulatory activity we see as key is new “mark to market” regulations, which require banks to reappraise the worth of debts on their balance sheets more regularly. This call for transparency is critical in terms of understanding both neoliberal governance strategies and the political possibilities, where a discourse on “good governance” and accountability can be brought to bear. These sudden rate decreases to stabilize the banking sector as well as massive cash injections and waves of bailouts and nationalizations have shown marginal success at the cost of devastating social consequences. One is the jump in staple food prices. In the first quarter of 2008, the price of rice futures on global commodity exchanges increased threefold, a positively alarming event for the bulk of the global population, which

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 991 has led even major US retailers to start rationing rice (Reuters 2008). This increase in the price of food would likely be impossible without the weakness of the dollar against other currencies, particularly the Euro, and the sudden rush of surviving subprime capital into global futures markets. It seems that, even while attempting to stimulate large-scale economic activity, stagflation looms, as energy prices continue to rise. This is an area where critical and historical political economists should be directing urgent attention (Harvey 2008). The Federal funds rate reached historic lows during the 1950s postwar boom when industrial competitors were flat and American business was almost guaranteed returns, in what seemed like an unending, export- driven expansion. Wages and consumption were up, and productivity increased as technology transfers from the military made their way into civilian use. In this perhaps overly secure environment, financial institutions increased liquidity to spur investment in a final vindication of Keynesian economic theory and the Fordist social compact.5 But this capital bonanza proved to be capital’s undoing. As industrial competitors like Germany and Japan came back on line, the near immediate accessibility of capital contributed to inflation, which, with later spikes in energy prices, made the late 1960s and 1970s rocky. Today, the USA faces a similar, though perhaps bleaker, financial picture: a weak dollar cannot increase exports amid outsourcing and manufacturing’s ongoing decline (swaths of the rust belt have been reclaimed by grass and trees in a literal manifestation of Ecology Against Capitalism (Foster 2002), productivity has stagnated, the tech-boom has waned and stock market capital has been tainted by the subprime debacle. Capital, as Harvey (1982) notes, has a tendency to move into built environments preceding crises, a propensity he attributes to overaccumulation staving off crisis or at least mitigating its effects. Nowhere, perhaps, can this be seen more starkly than the rise of roll- back neoliberalism in the US in the 1980s and the crisis of Black Monday (1987). Without rehashing the content of that short-lived recession, through banking deregulation, massive inflows of speculative capital, and a wave of “wild-west cowboy” capitalism, savings and loan institutions were allowed to far overextend their collateral base, and began defaulting en masse on short-term capital futures, a now familiar scenario. So what in particular is neoliberal about this set of social relations and economic structures? Three6 striking aspects resonate with the novel practices of neoliberalism setting it apart from earlier phases of capitalist production and heralding a sea change in capitalism’s techniques manifest through previously un-utterable neo-Keynesian “rescue packages”. The practices are predicated on previous subject

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 992 Antipode building related to racialized and gendered access to spaces, as well as naturalization. Thus the move to naturalize the home is not new, but something that speculative finance capital seems blind to. The classic example is Levittown, NY,the first mass-produced generic suburb on the East Coast, built through finance capital with uniform spaces implicitly designed to foster community homogenization. First is the deterritorialized and, in some cases, denationalized patterns of capital circulation made possible by financial deregulation in the US and other North Atlantic economies exported to other markets under multi-lateral trade agreements. While these markets do not just spring into existence, once they are constituted, it becomes possible to create a range of financial instruments that work their way into the portfolios of institutional investors, aggressive hedge fund managers, and individual investor 401k’s. To marketize debt obligations, it is necessary for banks to cluster similar types of mortgage debt into neat bundles that can be classified according to their risk of default. This is strikingly similar to the way in which the Chicago Commodity Exchange abstracted grains in the late 1800s, creating new markets in future deliveries of specified commodities through homogenization from different sources via categorization schemes (Cronon 1991). The home, however, is fundamentally different from grain, or any other commodity for that matter, given its centrality as a space of social reproduction. This is not just physical space, but the social space through which metabolic relations flow, and a space that refuses to be fixed on a scale between physical and social, but rather uncomfortably straddles a number of other conceptual spaces. Although there exist complex sets of rules designed to prevent banking institutions from investing in the most risky of these debt packets, technocratic pronouncements have a tendency to be bent to the will of the authors who stand to gain the most in terms of capital growth or future regulatory power (see Hayden 2001; Mansfield 2004; Traub- Werner 2007). As debt markets became more and more capitalized through the growth of adjustable rate mortgages, it became increasingly possible for domestic mortgages to be purchased by mainstream investment groups, despite increasing risk of default. And despite the fact that a range of commentators, both scholarly and popular (Brenner 2004; Case and Shiller 2003; The Economist 2003; Shiller 2007), were warning of the decreased stability of global capital markets from the flood of unsecured debt from housing, lenders continued to make loans that were in practice unsustainable, even for the first 5 years of note. The fundamental opacity of those capitalized markets, the second aspect, created a situation where banks are unable to trust each other’s solvency for short-term lending purposes. No bank can be sure what uncovered positions another holds, in addition to questions

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 993 about the quality of collateral offered for these cash infusions. While “creative accounting” is certainly not confined to neoliberalism,7 or even capitalism, the sheer quantity of logical leaps necessary to regard investment vehicles such as collateralized debt obligations as firmly locked to a physical commodity could be unprecedented. To think through the trail of dispossession of homes, we can think of a miniature value chain of mortgages and see its many dead ends and continuities. For simplicity, we will start with the linkage between existing mortgage capital and homes, and end at some of the highest order (in terms of abstraction) financial products. Initially, a prospective homeowner applies for an adjustable rate mortgage. As we know, the rates are set artificially low for the short term, lulling the loan recipient into a sense that the loan is manageable. The home is offered as the collateral on the loan, and once the debt is incurred to the bank or adjustable rate lender, they are entitled to sell the rights to that debt. So far, the money train is easy to follow. Now there are several paths the debt promise can take, each path a highly or entirely monetized transaction, which rarely involves a straight purchase agreement but relies on magnifying debt. The debt is magnified through offering debt at each lower level of transaction as the collateral on the newly incurred debt. Thus when an individual homeowner defaults, there are compounding ripples that flow through the transactions chain. While global financial structures are more than equipped to deal with the normal volume of foreclosures, when a particularly large volume of adjustable rate mortgages become un-amortizable, such that net inflow of compounding debt payments cannot offset losses brought to a balance sheet, assets from other income sources start to be wiped out, while the entities formed to handle adjustable rate mortgages go into bankruptcy. Mike Whitney (2008) offers a good summation: It all sounds more complicated than it really is. Imagine a 200ft. conveyor belt with two burly workers and a mountain-sized pile of money on one end, and a towering bonfire on the other. Every time a home goes into foreclosure, the two workers stack the money that was lost on the transaction, plus all the cash that was leveraged on the home via “securitization” and derivatives, onto the conveyor-belt where it is fed into the fire. Finally, there is a constellation of brutal techniques deployed on individual home owners, disciplined for and by overextending their financial obligations. Among the strategies are the permeation of credit scores as part of one’s identity, the ever growing number of homes repossessed, and the constant mitigation of public expectations by politicians hoping to save face as the policies they introduced systematically destroy the economic security of their constituents. These

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 994 Antipode techniques are made operable through commodifying the home-as- nature. Nature and natural spaces must be brought into the realm of mutability through human means. This, of course, is not a new process. It is intrinsically tethered to European colonialism and the birth of capitalism, positivist science, and modernity (Foucault 2003 [1975]; Marx 1967 [1867]). It is far from coincidental that, during initial rounds of enclosure, capitalists were able to deploy massive resources to seek out and exploit colonial investment opportunities, enriching not only national coffers but also individual mercantilists. While there was a boom in long-range migration, colonial-imperial institution building, and technological innovation, influenced by the growth of mercantile capital, there was also an attendant reconceptualization of nature and wealth. In mercantile capitalism, gold is the ultimate commodity; labor and nature were inseparable in forging a dominant capitalist logic of exploration. These logics created a new set of epistemic realities. Numerous recent works have shown the punitive aspects of neoliberal social policy, from the growth of prison populations with attendant growth of the prison construction and management industries, to closely related practices of urban renewal/gentrification that often involve displacing long-time residents through extra-economic means, such as eminent domain8 (Hackworth and Moriah 2006; Herbert and Brown 2006). These processes are especially evident in urban space: increasingly restricted access to suburban spaces for urban dwellers, dispersal of poor populations in high-density areas, decreased provision of services, and obedience to the market in macro social policy and responsibilization of individuals affected for its hardships (Harvey 2005; Herbert 2005; Jessop 2002). Although focusing on capitalism’s master discourse can obscure a genealogy of subject-making practices, such discourses are able to be rapidly embedded in the social.9 The continual reformulation of capitalism can therefore be understood as economic techniques paired with continuous rounds of refining social expectations and social space.

Labor As early as 1875 Marx was upbraiding his social democratic contemporaries for the sin of Prometheanism. “Labor”, he argued, “is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values....as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature” (1875: 2, original emphasis). From this statement, it might seem that Marx supports Polanyi’s “fictitious commodity” designation, something that cannot be produced for exchange. But this resemblance diminishes as Marx’s ideas about labor are examined in greater depth. The transformation of the natural world is a reflexive activity, for Marx,

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 995 which acts back upon the subject. The laborer is sustained by making nature the object of labor, and in so doing, perpetually remakes the self. Under capitalism, the market mediates this reflexivity such that the conditions of social reproduction are continually brought into it and made available for capital, a process Marx calls “subsumption” (1967). One does not have to seek recourse to evolutionary biology (Levins and Lewontin 1985) to make the claim that labor is natural, or that the value of labor has its origin in nature. The relationship between society and nature is mediated through the labor process. So to understand how nature is constituted in any historical conjuncture, it is first necessary to understand labor, the form of value it creates, and its product: the wider social formation. The complex interfacing of social and natural forces under capital is a vexing subject that continues to be a subject of debate in political economy and Marxism (see Burkett 1999; Resnick and Wolff 1987; Sheasby 1999), but to aid in grasping the home as a natural space, we can settle for a basic understanding of labor theory and value. According to Ricardo, the quantity of labor used in production determines a commodity’s value. But this account runs into difficulties when the cost of labor diverges from the magnitude of value in the commodity (as in monopoly markets) or if “the labor cost of labor” is queried (Marx 1967 [1867]). Political economy is forced to include values other than the cost of production to explain the value of the commodity. The total cost of reproducing the laborer, which varies under historical conditions, becomes the logical place to look for the missing value. But to account for the total missing value entails an exchange of equivalents—a translation from labor to price—which does not explain where the profit for the capitalist emerges. The confusion, Marx argues, arises from thinking the capitalist simply buys labor, when in fact it is the labor power of the worker, which is purchased, with its value paid in relation to continued or future availability (ie by the hour)—not after its tasked completion, as in precapitalist societies. Marx’s political economy (1847; 1904 [1859]; 1967 [1867]) incorporates a temporal dimension, which resolves the issue and reveals the exploitation inherent in the wage relation. The worker mortgages future labor, as labor power, or the ability to operate the means of production for a definite period, generating maximum value for the capitalist.10 The cost of reproducing labor power includes not only machines and the factors of production, but costs which ensure reproduction of the worker—the material spaces of reproduction that “propagate the working class in required numbers” (Engels 1975 [1891]:4). The protective structure of the home that shelters humans from the elements is thus a cost of labor power under capitalism: one required to employ another natural element, labor, in that specific form.11 “[L]abor

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 996 Antipode power has grown up with [the worker’s] person and is inseparable from it. Its cost of production, therefore, coincides with his [sic] own cost of production; what the economists call the cost of production of labor is really the cost of production of the laborer and therewith of his [sic] labor-power” (Engels 1975 [1891]:4, our emphasis). The home is thus doubly natural from the standpoint of labor: it is a physical structure that is composed of raw materials produced by natural activity and a shelter for the biological being from natural elements. But these essential or natural qualities in labor have scarcely prevented capital from defrauding workers out of homes, or from finessing them into private property to accomplish the same. In The Housing Question (1995 [1871]), Engels expressed skepticism that romantic appeals to “hearth and home” could form the basis for a more equitable social order. Workers would only be saddled, he argued, with heavy mortgages that chained them to the employer. Already present in the nineteenth century, the tendency toward suburbanization was, Engels recognized a dangerous illusion for the working class. The “petty-bourgeois utopia” of home ownership in his words, “would give each worker the ownership of his own dwelling, and ... chain him [sic] in semi-feudal fashion to his [sic] own particular capitalist” (1995 [1871]:234). In lieu of the socialization of housing more generally, workers owning their own homes would only stave off unrest, leaving capital intact, setting the stage for the later expropriation of the workers’ property. Utopian socialists like Proudhon who proposed this “privatization” as a transitional arrangement to giving workers “the full proceeds of their labor” would have justice prevail and oppression disappear while capital continued to operate by less visible means. Crucial to Engel’s argument about the absurdity of this “socialism” is the fact that it fails to abolish ground rent, or the ability of landed capitalists to derive increased profit from value accrued in land (in many instances industrialists did not own the land on which their factories stood). Even if such a utopia were possible, Engels cautioned, the elimination of ground rent would not end the appropriation of surplus value or stop capital accumulation. He concluded, ultimately, that the resolution of the housing question must be linked to the expropriation of expropriators and “abolition of the antithesis of town and country” as the basis of real and imagined divisions between society and nature—leading us to land.

Land Writing against the “starkly utopian” project of liberalism and self- regulation, Polanyi argued “land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s [sic] institutions” and that “to isolate it and form amarket...was perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings” (1944:187).

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However odd, commodifying land was essential to the development of capitalism as a form of social reproduction synthesizing natures. Contra Polanyi’s assertion that “land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man [sic]” (1944:75, our emphasis), Marx demonstrates how land is integrated into human institutions and produced through labor. In spite of its name, Marx’s trinity formula provides an anti- metaphysical account of the production of nature. Like its labor and capital counterparts landed property is a historically determined social relation. Existing natural elements such as land are common to all modes of production and thus have no inherent social form, but as society establishes particular relationships with nature through labor, land begins to take on a social dimension that is increasingly expressed through capital. Marx understood, for example, that exchange value is necessarily embedded in use value. Yet as market relations become the dominant logic of productive activity, the use value of a commodity—at least from the standpoint of the capitalist—becomes exchange, and the coproducts of labor and nature are drawn ever more closely into capital. Nature produces use values, which according to Marx have nothing to do with value’s social form; that is, land does not create value in the same way as labor power. But, through commodification, first natures (raw materials, the reservoir of value, original ecology, etc) influence productive arrangements such that their transformation takes on a reflexive social character as “produced means of production” (1967 [1867]). Yet capital, Marx cautioned, is not simply the totality of these produced or material factors of production; rather, it is those elements transformed into a relation “[C]apital is not a thing, but a definite social production relation” (1967 [1867]:256), suggesting that natural resources, the environment and land can only be metabolized if they, like labor, are translated into this system of coherence (see Robertson 2006). Establishing the capital relation is the means by which the market achieves its victory over society and nature. But the sites and resources around which these spheres coalesce depend, in large part, on collective social agency and nature’s subjects allowed to undergo this transformation. For Marx, the capitalist is little more than the personified agent of an abstraction: capital is a quality whose interests are represented in the social arena by the capitalist. The basic impulse of the bourgeois individual, as a subject, is to commodify and bring to the market as many use values as possible, irrespective of the social consequences. Thus domination in capitalist society is not, in its most basic essence, a question of individuals or even of classes,12 but of abstract forces dominating the social13 (Postone 1993). As the embodiment of labor in Marx’s trinity formula, producers’ sociospatialities are continually

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 998 Antipode subsumed and dispersed by capital, severing the solidarities forged among producers and with their environment. It is only by developing class consciousness that workers come to target the embodiments of these abstractions, which threaten their being. In the present housing crisis, it is not difficult to see how a variety of abstractions govern the lives of actors and their intimate spaces. The struggle for home is not at all “abstract”, however, as it maintains material dimensions, which like land represent a struggle for surplus as social space. Without recapitulating the vast literature on agrarian studies and social movements, it is sufficient to mention that land has figured prominently in subaltern politics, and attempts to prevent commodification have fused with notions of place and social belonging. Non-capitalized relationships have been defended in a variety of ways, including through modes of social organization that prevent the penetration of capital into producer communities. In his classic essay on the closed corporate peasant community, Wolf (1957) described the formation of social redoubts in rural Latin America (and elsewhere) in response to threats from the market and its atomizing forces—not, as enduring pre-colonial traditions, as had been assumed. Dominant groups confronting such countermeasures to protect spaces of social reproduction from the market have often been denigrated producers for living in a “state of nature”, or for having a natural economy, hindering progress. Indigenous peasants’ moves to protect their communities from capital have been so frequently and pejoratively labeled “natural” that it begs the question as to whether dispossessed urbanites should be precluded from establishing some similar corporate relationship with the space of habitation and why the inalienable “right to the city” should not be mobilized against twenty-first century improvers (we return to this issue in our conclusion; Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 1968).

Dispossession without Accumulation? The capitalist market did not arise spontaneously from the “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another” as Smith asserts in The Wealth of Nations (1776); it was the product, Marx argues, of a violent dispossession. In presupposing its own conditions, separation of labor from capital, exchange of equivalents, and so on, bourgeois attributes virtue to the capitalist for having “saved” (Read 2002). “Primitive accumulation”, Marx wrote, “[p]lays in Political Economy the same role as original sin in theology” (1967 [1867]:899– 900), downplaying the fall for a greater salvation: freeing peasants from “the shackles of feudalism”. This liberation epic “written in letters of blood and fire” forced continents together in triangular trade, sanctioned “the commercial

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 999 hunting of black skins” and partitioned the world, but faded from view as capitalist society allegedly replaced overt forms of coercion with the “silent compulsion of economic relations” (1967 [1867]). Marx acknowledged “the history of this expropriation, in different countries ... runs through its ... phases in different orders of succession...” (1967 [1867]:857). However, he focused primarily on proletarianization in Europe and North America and believed that industrialization and enclosure would eliminate sharp distinctions between town and country, abjection before nature, and the parochial attitude of small producers, paving the way for universal subjects and socialism, a fact that consigned the periphery to colonialism (although Marx was ambivalent on this point14). Primitive accumulation eradicated the “pigmy property” hindering the free development of the productive forces and application of the forces of nature by society (Marx 1967 [1867]);15 thus capitalism represented, for Marx, the first society with the requisites for scientific control of nature, but not one, crucially, which allowed for symbiosis. Primitive accumulation altered the foundational relationship between society and environment, but left alienation from species-being and estrangement of the worker from means of production, labor’s product, and other workers, in its wake. Any wide-scale enclosure can be seen, to renegotiate not only the metabolism between nature and society, but also the relation of subjects to their own nature. But in what way might the housing crisis, as a modern enclosure, renegotiate these relations, if it is part of a “different historical succession”? The literature on capitalist development is divided on primitive accumulation as a historical moment of transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1963; Lenin 1899; Sweezy 1976), the transfer of value from peripheries to centers (Amin 1974; Wallerstein 1979) or separation of producers from the means of subsistence by the articulation of different modes of production (Meillasoux 1973; Wolpe 1971). Moving beyond Smith and Ricardo, Marx viewed capital as a form of wealth sui generis, which presupposes particular social relations and exploitation. Capital reacts against opponents, yet as a concrete abstraction, it melts into air without the work of agents. The subjects who enact the capital relation, are guided by their own estranged activity; but can this be considered primitive accumulation? According to de Angelis (2001 [1990]), “separation” is an ontological condition for capitalist production, characterizing simple and primitive accumulation. What differentiates the two is the means by which the separation is effected. Producers are separated from the means of production ex novo (ie at the first moment of capital’s creation) in primitive accumulation, and estranged labor raises alienation to a “higher power” (Marx 1981 [1894]:354). But primary accumulation is not confined to a specific historical period in this reading: any

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 1000 Antipode instance where social actors wrest subsistence from others is “primitive accumulation”. For Zarembka (2002) it makes little sense to speak of “primitive accumulation” as a continual process, when simple accumulation already involves separation, violence and coercion. The regular workings of capital imply enclosure, destruction of communal property, and dispossession. Harvey (2003) has renewed interest in this particular take (eg Dalla Costa 2004; Glassman 2006) under the rubric of “accumulation by dispossession” describing diverse struggles in the global north and south. “Privatization”, Harvey (2003:157) argues, is “the cutting edge” of this process, with public utilities and housing targeted as salient spaces for capitalization. Many resources threatened with such seizure today, including low-income housing in the USA, are in private hands however. How can an analytic of dispossession be reconciled with a neoliberal process that is not privatization? Harvey (2003) argues that although dispossession has replaced expanded reproduction as the dominant form of realizing value under The New Imperialism, finance capital and credit backed by the state system bind the two together. In his interpretation, accumulation is circular: dispossession facilitates expanded reproduction and expanded reproduction spurs further dislocation, with finance capital mediating the inconsistencies. This echoes Luxemburg’s (2003) framework where primary accumulation in the periphery is the condition for simple accumulation at the center—a perspective instructive for the north/south divide, and uneven development within states (see also Frank 1978). Where markets are saturated, the built environment refuses to unfix value, or precapitalist, non-capitalist, or “less than capitalist” relations impede accumulation, leverage is required to overcome the market’s inability to redistribute value. Whether that attempt at redistribution (often by the state through public debt, the finance system, or violence) succeeds, depends in large part on resistance. As Brenner (1977) has suggested, the amount of capital accumulated can be tied to the level of class struggle, with “the silent compulsion of economic relations” in fact representing the conditions of hegemonic subordination. Without taking up a position on Brenner’s historiography, or suggesting that the subprime mortgage is a response to resistance, we only mean to point out that accumulation is part of the capital relation and that the groups/spaces targeted have social meaning and ability to “push back”. In other words, we should not assume that prevailing strategies of accumulation “work”, even in purely economic terms, or that crises of overaccumulation are in anyway assured resolution by implementing any particular strategy. Following Marx, theories of dispossession have tended to emphasize proletarianization as a determined outcome, even for the global north where the working class has largely been constituted and post-Fordist, flexible accumulation encourages lumpenization.16 Butmoreatissue

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 1001 is the definition of means of production, and what is understood by separating producers from them. Few sources in the primitive accumulation debate have considered spatial means of production, and as a result have reduced proletarianization to separation from the tactile factors of production, neglecting the centrality of space to capitalism. In his article on “accumulation by extra economic means” Glassman (2006) draws out the spatial implications of Marx’s critique of French peasants in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1951 [1852]) and his skepticism that “scattered, independent producers” could develop a cohesive class project (611). Yet Glassman does not explicitly link space to the means of production. If not homes, at least urban space can be considered means of production, constituting the field of labor and producers’ sociospatialities (which Marx viewed as necessarily disjunctive under capitalism). And while Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) was probably overstated in his assertion that “the urban” has become a discrete spatial prerequisite for capital accumulation (see Harvey 1973; Smith 2003), space in general and urban space in particular, in this context, represent the means of power’s reproduction and thus are terrain for social antagonism. The relationship between accumulation and the political is a question of imposing spatial fixes, and if successfully imposed, whether those fixes can overcome present and future obstacles. As Harvey points out in The Limits to Capital (1982), the instruments that open up the possibility for accumulation are the same ones that put capital on the path to crisis and that later stand in the way of spatial fix. In the case of the housing crisis, recovering value locked in the built environment has required sourcing external capital from hedge funds to prop up lenders, until foreclosures can be capitalized: a more or less agentive search for solutions. In adjusting the rate of exploitation, often through in-house “cost to profit ratios”, lenders sought to shore up returns, if not consciously to seize property, in a gamble, which left banks saddled with loans that could not be amortized. The crisis and its risks have been displaced thus to more abstract levels of finance in the sale of junk bonds and securitized debt, purchased mainly by firms like CitiGroup and JP Morgan Chase from bankrupt lenders like Bear Sterns, effecting, it was hoped, a “market” bailout. To date, bonds have proven worth far less than federal ratings agencies had suggested due to falling house prices, implicating state institutions in the insolvency slowly working its way through the economy. Securitized debt associated with house foreclosures as of late March 2008 represented somewhere between $11 and 12 trillion, which at last year’s figures, stood for nearly 90% of the US GDP (CBC News March 2008). As US housing prices continue to fall, instability in the financial system spreads as more untenable debt positions are revealed, and firms of all sizes drastically reduce the size of their workforce.

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Whether or not this market insecurity proves to be a depression is uncertain, but its origins lie with a central spatial contradiction in capitalism that has been overcome time and again “by other than economic means”. The ongoing recession/crisis has provided us with an opportunity to unpack dispossession, a steady feature of capitalism and an intensely contradictory process that does not always result in successful accumulation, but does potentially create new opportunities and spaces in which struggles can take place. Reframing the distinction of fixed versus , which originated with Ricardo, Marx argued that the categories represent proximate descriptions of the rate at which capitals can be translated into other forms, rather than absolute terms. The temporal dimension of capital implied by this understanding also flags spatiality, with various capitals forming a continuum of possible expression from the nearly static (ie landscapes, factories and highways) to more mobile concentrations such as stocks, bonds and money, which require particular social relations to enable movement.17 This revision suggests that struggles against dispossession are themselves about the movement of capital through space—spaces that are structured and protected as the redoubts of certain social groups. Thus the notion of a purely “economic” or market enclosure is a convenient fiction that belies the profoundly subjective nature of spatial practice forming, targeting and shaping particular geographies for accumulation/dispossession. The circulation of capital is always about social conflict, and struggle for the means of production is a struggle for making social space (Lefebvre 1991 [1979]). This, to paraphrase Hermann Rebel, makes certain victims spatially necessary (1985).

The Countermovement The capitalist revolution for Marx entailed two great ruptures: the separation of laborers from the means of production and the dissolution of the community of labor; that is, the breaking up of sociospatialities, which forged a common sense of interest among producers. In the Grundrisse Marx (1973a [1857]) argues that the destruction of “the bonds of feudal fraternity” were as much a prerequisite for the exploitation of labor power as the wresting away of land and natural resources.18 And while the “cash nexus” replacing those ties, denounced in the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1998 [1848]), may be more aphoristic than empirical, in this way the historiography of bourgeois society is complicated considerably by Marx’s inchoate spatial politics. As Thompson’s (1971) Whigs and Hunters illuminates, the enclosure of crown lands and other commons in early industrial Britain were not always linked to profit, and were as often the vacation estates of

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 1003 newly affluent merchants rather than enterprises used to build wealth. And although one could also dismiss the peasantization that often accompanied enclosure, these “aberrations” are sufficient to reconceive dispossession as a multivalent process generating relations that stabilize the exploitation of labor power, metabolic rifts, and the rule of the bourgeoisie—elements that are overdetermined by accumulation, but do not one-sidedly reflect it. If extra economic coercion is a stable feature of capitalist production, it is logical to assume that the uprooting of any “organic or institutionalized relation between proletarians ...and the powers of the earth” would recur as well (Midnight Notes Collective 2001 [1990]:4). The destruction of middle and working class communities in this crisis can be seen as structural impetuses of the US economy requiring spatial fixes that destroy the community of labor and nature. However undesirable to argue there is conspiracy to break up “an energy well of proletarian power” (2001 [1990]:10), it is logical to argue the inverse: that the recovery and defense of those spaces could form the basis of a countermovement against neoliberalism that rearticulates nature with society, and that brings together ecological and urban concerns. Marx argued that the decisive leverage point against the capitalist system was in the sphere of production. This assessment has been taken to mean that the key point of application for politics is the factory or workers’ organizations.19 This aspatial reading of production runs into serious practical (and theoretical) difficulties, which make it ill suited for the politics of dispossession. Trade unions have been able fighters for better working conditions, stopping speed-ups, shortening the workday etc, but have proven unequal to monitoring the appropriation of relative surplus value (G Smith, personal communication, 2008). Production analyzed as the dominant forms of economic activity leads us to few desirable options. Under flexible accumulation where industrial manufacturing and working class consciousness are at near all time lows, workerist politics hailing the Keynesian welfare state to return or agitating for productivist socialism seems fruitless. Although it may seem paradoxical in the context of homes to argue production, if we take production to mean practices contributing to the realization of the capital relation, or to the totality of produced social relations and natures, we begin to open up the possibility for a more nuanced strategy.20 The countermovement is not always a pretty thing, however. It is not always led by proletarians rising in defense of their homes. Michael Watts (2005) has argued that Al-Qaeda represents the backlash of global civil society against the state. Although somewhat confusing for disentangling civil society/market/the state, there is a certain truth to this statement.21 Reactionary elements have already criticized the laissez-faire response to the housing crisis, espousing hyper-nationalist, xenophobic and (tacitly) anti-Semitic agendas.22 But obscurantism from

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 1004 Antipode below is not the only complex aspect of countermovements. There are multiple class and ideological interests at play. As Glassman (2006) notes, in some instances workers fight to establish stable proletarian wage jobs and in effect, fight for commodification of labor power23. Contemporary and historical enclosures have seen a variety of rationalities crop up with groups seeking to slow down, speed up, or take advantage of the transition. As Polanyi (1944) noted, groups attempting to slow the rate of change often do so not out of altruism, but to preserve stability. Appeals to “lessen the pain” evince that at least one sector of the ruling class has not forgotten “the elementary truths of political science and statecraft”: social dislocation should be slowed to protect the welfare of the community (1944:34). But when such ersatz allies enter in on the side of community or homeowner, it should be clear that those categories are not unproblematic units that can be taken as givens; civil society too is traversed by inequality. What are the specific responses necessitated by such a nuanced catastrophe for homeowners that is now resonating through global capital markets, and spells even greater hardship for the most marginalized populations who typically bear the brunt of globalized economic recession or depression? One key task would seem to be reconceptualizing the Federal Reserve. For one, it is a difficult institution to target through mass action because of the opacity under which it operates. The other difficulty lies in its nebulous position vis-a-vis` key state institutions. The chairman of the Bank serves at the pleasure of the President, and all pronouncements of Congress in relation to the Bank can be said “to have a merely advisory quality” (Grider 1987). The Fed is interesting institutionally, as it straddles a line between state, civil society, and economy, and indeed is a critical nexus that supports the spheres. Robertson (2006) discusses the role of bureaucrats in mediating different knowledge sets in post-modernity in terms of natural scientists working toward wetlands restoration and economists attempting to value restored wetlands, with the Environmental Protection Agency moderating (see Harvey 1989). The Federal Reserve Bank is positioned to fulfill a similar function in so far as it acts as mediator between congressional (political) dictates, the world of high finance, and the complex actions required to satisfy political expediency (in response to social movements to reembed market functions) and abstract capital. While commodity price increases are being targeted by affected communities (especially truck drivers in relation to the price of oil, and riots that have swept urban areas of the global south), access to mortgage capital has been pared back with little unified outcry, not to mention a cohesive social movement to counter foreclosure and eviction. One problem preventing the growth of these movements is that any movement against enclosure is anticapitalist at its core. Truck

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 1005 drivers arguing for Keynesian price controls on the price of diesel is different than dispossessed homeowners coalescing in a movement against renewed rounds of enclosure, enclosures that form the basis of one of capital’s most familiar methods of accumulation. A coalition of the recently homeless and foreclosed and anti- neoliberal globalization activists would represent a major fissure in the political society–civil society nexus. However unlikely this movement may seem in the short term, the seeds are being sown as the broader economy continues its tailspin with attendant job losses, decreased purchasing power, and mounting debt. As we have shown, the home is a particularly salient space where a non-capitalist logic can prevail in its centrality to a humanist ontology (Gibson-Graham 2006) mobilizing these nascent solidarities. One hurdle is the way in which modern governance seeks to decouple economy from polity. This is the same mechanism by which the Federal Reserve Bank operates across spheres, as mentioned above. In this case, it serves to blunt political movements from questioning the fundamental relationship between accumulation on the one hand, and the lived experience of dispossession on the other. Another quandary lies in how to link up existing anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal globalization movements with the recently foreclosed. It could be exceedingly difficult to rally around such abstract issues as currency weakness, which are typically handled in the formal political sphere (Ruggero 2006). That said, there are several moves that make such a movement possible. Of particular interest are the calls of predatory institutions, like Bretton Woods, to enhance accountability, transparency and democratic governance. These are of course some of the very criticisms leveled at the purveyors of “roll-out” neoliberalism and on which antiglobalization and other political movements base themselves (see Peck and Tickell 2002). In mobilizing these shared premises, the anxieties of capital’s representatives can be exploited to denaturalize the market and expose its “social” origins. While exposing the Federal Reserve Bank and Department of the Treasury to wider scrutiny, we must bolster the neighborhood as a platform to agitate for the collective right to the city, one that is natural and inviolable, not for an individual “right to title” (Engels 1995 [1871]), which would atomize the working class and drive it back into alienated spaces. In this way, perhaps, we can begin to take ever-longer strides toward an urban ecology movement, which takes as its slogan: “let us have a capital that nature can see” (Robertson 2006). Government actions often have far-reaching and unintended consequences. Any time the government intervenes in the market, it must do so with clear purpose and great care. Many recently proposed sweeping solutions involving an expanded role for the government

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 1006 Antipode would only serve to make a complicated problem even worse, and would end up hurting far more Americans than they would help (President George W Bush, March 2008, addressing the housing crisis). This formula appears to take for granted the essence of purely economic progress, which is to achieve improvement at the price of social dislocation. But it also hints at the tragic necessity by which the poor man clings to his hovel doomed by the rich man’s desire for public improvement, which profits him privately (Polanyi 1944:37, “Habitation versus improvement”). To make the earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step toward making oneself an object of huckstering (Engels 1844, “Outlines of a critique of political economy”). Acknowledgements The authors thank Scott Prudham, Morgan Robertson, and Victor Kappeler for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. They also profited greatly from a presentation by David Harvey at the World Without Borders Conference hosted at Eastern Kentucky University’s College of Justice and Safety. Thanks to Harvey for his illuminating comments on the housing crisis and to the organizers of that conference. Three anonymous reviewers helped transform this paper, improving the concision, clarity and cohesiveness of the argument. All remaining errors are the authors’ alone.

Endnotes 1 While we will deal with certain issues of deregulation, systematic treatment of “roll back” and “roll out” are available elsewhere (see especially, Gilbert 2005; Mansfield 2005; Tickell and Peck 2003; Weller 2007). 2 Simone de Beauvoir details the feminization of nature in The Second Sex (1989 [1949]). 3 For a discussion of the psychosocial aspects of the bourgeois interior, see Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (2006 [1965]). 4 This is often articulated with “” as Robbins’s (2007) dystopic study of suburban lawn care shows. 5 For a discussion of the contradictions in the interpretation of the “Fordist compromise”, see Marcus (2005). 6 We have chosen three components that are most salient for our analysis at hand. There are certainly many more facets of neoliberalism that merit discussion. 7 Harvey (2008) reminds us that forms of bond derivatives existed at least as early as Haussman’s reconstruction of Napoleonic France. 8 It is important to note that most, if not all, of these practices have historical precedent— for example, the remaking of central city Edinburgh at the turn of the eighteenth century (see Philo 1999) or Foucault’s (1991 [1977]) detailed work on prisons in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere. 9 Thus making it possible for Richard Nixon to proclaim “We are all Keynesians now” in 1971, to Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no alternative’ to neoliberalism in the early 1980s. 10 This led Marx to assert that the worker only labors for himself/herself “half-the working day”, while the rest of the value generated—ie surplus value—goes to the capitalist. This temporal dimension to capitalism is not insignificant. It points to the time

C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods 1007 dependency of capital realization expanded upon by Harvey (1982) as the eradication of space by time and spatio-temporal compression. For discussions of labor power and time in Marx’s theory, see Postone (1993) and Thompson (1963). 11 The feudal serf does not have labor power. Modes of production in which surplus is appropriated in the form of the commodity after the work period mobilize labor, not labor power. It is only with modern means of production, a class of subjects who have only labor to sell and an established market for the sale of these factors that labor power comes into existence. 12 The intersections with Polanyi’s thought are clear enough, but for Marx the market is not the problem; it is merely capital’s mode of distribution. It is interesting to note twentieth century Marxists and liberals alike often equated state planning with socialism and the market with capitalism, albeit with different evaluative stances. 13 Primary among those forces being value. 14 See Marx’s writings on India (1977) and criticism by Said in Culture and Imperialism (1995). 15 It should be noted the phrase “application of forces” indicates nature continues to exert an influence, even as it is harnessed. Nature is not “dominated” but directed, guided and shaped (cf Baudrillard 1975; Schmidt 1971). 16 See Ricardo Antunes (1995). 17 In Beyond Capital, Lebowitz (1992) describes Marx’s plan for a six-volume capital, which included an entire book on class struggle’s relation to capital accumulation. It was never completed. This suggests Marx was not as economistic in his later thinking, as some have alleged. He in fact realized capital and its movements could be altered through resistance, a point that gives general support to Brenner’s argument. 18 This of course influenced thought on the moral economy; see Scott (1977) and Thompson (1971). 19 Again, this myopic concentration on industrial workers was what Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) was trying to trouble with increased attention to urban space. 20 We move away from the primitivist/economist dichotomy (see, Lenin 1961 [1902]) and highlight intersections that are productive of actionable cleavages. 21 E P Thompson (1963) wrote about a variety of movements against early capitalism with less than socialist agendas: luddites, levelers, diggers and millenarians, which Hobsbawm (1959) would likely refer to as “primitive rebels”. 22 The Zeitgeist series offers thinly veiled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, journalist Alex Jones continues to offer much the same, and CNN’s Lou Dobbs espouses a classically fascist blend of anti-immigrant, anti-communist, pro-military, anti-big capital rhetoric. 23 This accords with Thompson’s (1963) thesis that the working class makes itself and is involved with its own proletarianization.

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