Editorial: A geology of Marx?

Abstract

Not many would have heard of Neduvasal, a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu where, since February 2017, farmers and environmental activists have been protesting against the Central Government's decision to award contracts for development and extraction of hydrocarbons to 31 sites across the country, a vaguely defined 10 km2 of land in Neduvasal being one of them. While the government has maintained that the protestors are ill-informed about the nature of the project, given the history of the national oil conglomerate, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) extracting hydrocarbons in this fertile delta region for decades, fears of oil exploration and production taking over farmers’ fields, livelihoods and future is not unfounded. Against a context of broad rural distress, this particular area has retained a comfortable agrarian economy, but has been fighting environmental threats (mostly around groundwater pollution) from crude oil leaks and abandoned oil wells for a while. The particular proposal that triggered agitations early this year comes out of the Discovered Small Fields initiative, part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship energy policy (within the much trumpeted ‘Make in India’ enterprise) to reduce the country's dependence on oil imports by 10% by 2022. Within a 100 km distance of Neduvasal there are around 600 wells with only 200 in production. The remaining, barring a few that are used as injection wells are abandoned, resulting in the desiccation of nearly 2000 acres of fertile land (based on an estimate of roughly 5 acres per well), which have now been overrun by the invasive species Prosopis Juniflora, one that has triggered a parallel controversy around the ecology and economy of wastelands in India.

‘London Calling’—Banksy's graffiti on the entrance to the Jungle (Source: Oli Mould).

For development studies scholars this might be a familiar narrative, where the need for an affordable stream of raw materials, energy and food dictates an exploitative extraction economy. Increasingly, there is an acknowledgement that these resource geographies are closely intertwined with the unfolding processes of extended urbanization involving new dynamics of terrritorialisation, one that scholars drawing on Lefebvre describe as planetary urbanization (Arboleda 2016). Even as the latter evolves and unfolds as a discourse, we need to ensure that we go beyond a morphological preoccupation with this new epistemology of the urban for a more rigorously framed understanding of this latest version of capitalist urbanization. This requires a careful reconsideration of the appropriateness of analytical tools at hand and their ability to explain fully what is happening around us, one that is more than a classic or even a new economic geography of capitalism. Such reservations are not without good reason, given the way planetary urbanization debates can be susceptible to an overtly literal Marxist framing. Thus, as Wilson and Bayón (2016) in an earlier issue in this journal have argued there is an urgent need to contribute to the impossible representation of capital by looking awry at the phenomenon of planetary urbanization.¹² In metaphorically reimagining planetary urbanization as blackhole capitalism, they seek to redress the inadequacy in current literature to grasp the material and ideational dimensions of planetary urbanization restrained by an economic rationale.

It is in this spirit that the special feature in this double issue Enclosure and discontents: Primitive accumulation and resistance under globalised capital revisits Marx's primitive accumulation thesis to understand new and reworked forms of dispossession and enclosure being forced in the global present. Rejecting a sedate or obsequious employment of primitive accumulation, it boldly asks if such a concept has continued analytical purchase in the present, not in a vain sense of playing devil's advocate, but to subject it to scrupulous scrutiny and necessary adjustments, which its contributors do by applying additional filters of race/indigenous subjectivity, feminist and other critical postcolonial approaches. They rely on the authenticity of local narratives to generate an analytical theory of primitive accumulation, not in the least deterred by the specificity of concrete historisations. They also show how such dispossessions can kindle new and reworked forms of resistance, from marronage and secret cultivation by plantation labourers to other forms of communing as colonial-capitalist refusal, akin to what Arboleda (2016: 107) sees as the ‘emancipatory promise of planetary urbanization’.

It is not sheer coincidence that over the last year two prominent scholars have undertaken an exhaustive engagement with Marx and Marxist ideology. Against Gareth Stedman Jones’ (2016) biographical approach that seeks to put Marx back in its nineteenth-century surroundings restraining its contemporary usefulness and subsequent canonization as an orthodoxy in the 1920s, Harvey (2017) is convinced that now is as good a moment as any to review Marx. Amidst valid concerns of univeralising particularisms, we need to be careful about dismissing the applicability of broader conceptualisations simply on the basis that capital lodges itself in diverse sites across the globe in a multitude of ways and cannot be reduced to a singular interpretation. Instead of an outright rejection we need to discuss the limitations inhibiting the effective use of these concepts. Thus, while there is no dearth of scholarship that has considered (and dismissed) the usefulness of primitive accumulation in various localized contexts and have even come up with their own versions of it, most notably Harvey's (2004) accumulation by dispossession, we need to remind ourselves that we are still trying to make sense of the logic of capitalism. If for this reason alone, it would be too dangerous to reduce Marx or Marxism to a spectre.

Coda

In addition to the special feature there are nine original articles, several of which might seem to have more modest ambitions in terms of meta-narratives, and yet, they go beyond a simple placing in perspective of a specific discourse. They are inter-disciplinary provocations that are not simply content to beg or borrow concepts from other fields/subjects. Many resort to a quotidian lens to make sense of controversial issues such as Oli Mould's The Calais Jungle or Bialasiewicz's That which is not a mosque where she tackles rising Islamophobia across Europe, not just through race and migration but via a more mundane interrogation of presence/absence and inclusion/exclusion in the urban public realm. This tactic is employed by other authors as well including Pearsons who considers The imaginative struggles of Europe by looking at recent public art projects to evaluate a distinctly European public sphere in the wake of the Brexit vote. Not dissimilar to the aspirations of the special feature, these articles (Chambers and Andrews; Cardulo) lay their emphasis on uncovering resistance (not just from below), setting up new centralities and constructive encounters.

Acknowledgements

This double issue has benefited from the diligent editorial work of my collaborative issue editor, Hillary Angelo.

Notes

1 Recently published new material from the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) archives (Baksi 2001) reveal that Marx had engaged in an intensive study of geology as he expressed dissatisfaction with the way “the science of history” only casually allows for the sciences of nature. His comparison between the geological and historical order of formations, especially in the way he built his theory of social formations directly upon geology has been little picked up by Marxist scholars, barring a few such as John Bellamy Foster (2000) who argued that geology and geography are key elements in Marx's development of his historical materialism thesis. This takes greater significance in the current context of the Anthropocene debate where the distinction between nature and society is rendered obsolete by recognizing humanity as a geological force, forcing the reconceptualization of the relations between natural and social sciences. While the interactions between the two is not new, it requires transdisciplinary reconfigurations transcending subject boundaries to initiate new imaginations in knowledge production. This is something that the journal has been pursuing for a while now, testing and stretching the possibilities of a more open-ended epistemology. In the coming issues, Bob Catterall and others will also be exploring these issues in a new series, The Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Beyond.

2 In their endnote to the article, Wilson and Bayon (2016) consider in greater detail City journal's engagement with this debate. See their bibliography for a good timeline overview.