INTRODUCTION

An analysis of capital-spatial relations is ultimately an attempt to understand how the modern world has come to be as well as the processes through which it propels itself forward in the endless circulation of accumulation for accumulation’s sake.  The driving mechanism(s) within these relations or processes have been argued to be not just economic but also racial, gendered, and sexualized.  Where then are the roots of geographical differentiation?  Is there is a primacy to be given to one of these systems in the capital-spatial relation?  A more orthodox/economic reading of capital-spatial relations is concerned with the ways in which the owners of the means of production transform natural space within the larger production of commodities.  A less orthodox/economic reading of capital-spatial relations incorporates other social relations and the ways through which they not only set up the ‘pre-conditions of capitalist production’ but also through the ways in which capitalist logics bend or submit to the logics of another mode of social production.  The differences between more and less orthodox/economic readings of capital-spatial relations appear subtle but reveal a chasm in the understanding of the conditions that shape the positionality of racialized laborers.  

NEIL SMITH’S “UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT”

In Uneven Development, Neil Smith (2008) presents a theory of how geographical space is generated by the universalizing tendency of capital.  Uneven development, according to Smith, refers to “the geography of capitalism but also the uneven rates of growth between different sectors of the capitalist economy” (2008:134).    Capitalism, as an economic system, sets the conditions for a global market via the production of relative space.  Relative space refers to the moveable dimension of absolute/natural space determined by its position to bodies, while absolute space, is inherited natural space.  The accumulation of capital then seeks emancipation from natural space and thereby necessitates the production of relative space (Smith 2008:115).  Extending this analysis further, Smith makes reference to absolute and relative location in geographical space.  For Smith, absolute location is a special case of relative location due to natural differentiation of space (certain natural resources are found in certain environments – e.g. you don’t grow cotton in the arctic).  Through capitalist modes of production, the natural world is transformed by the processes involving the movement of people and commodities.  

Smith argues that in his discussion of labor, Marx points to the spatial relations as an attribute of use-value.  Use-value has spatial properties and the ways in which the usefulness of one things in relation to an event, activity, or another object is part of the production of space.  Through this understanding of space and capital, Smith theorizes the concept of uneven distribution.  Smith argues that the overall patterns of geographical space are the consequence of contradictory tendencies.  Smith sees the production of space as the consequence of the dynamics of the conquering of natural space and the move from the production of nature to the production of space.  The transportation of commodities is a spatial change that transforms the location of the use-value of the commodity and ultimately increasing the exchange-value relative to labor required for the change in use-value.  This change is one in space and time (movement/motion), where the amount of time required to transport commodities between locations is reduced, a pre-condition for a global capitalist market.

FRANTZ FANON’S “COLONIAL COMPARTMENTALIZATION”

Value has to be realized in order for it to be converted into capital.  Use-value is shaped by the specific usefulness that an object has in relation to activities, events, and other objects.  In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues that race/ism (the process that generates colonial hostilities) realizes the value of particular spaces, places, and thus laborers.  Fanon frames capital-spatial relations first through the colonial divisions of space via the native and colonist sectors.  Capitalism in this sense, colludes with colonialism.  Fanon then continues this analysis discussing where the resources are located and the ways in which space that natives navigate as being restricted by colonists.  Fanon sees zoological compartmentalization as the mediator of capital-spatial relations (race/ism is the central logic).  The reduction of the colonized to the state of an animal for Fanon is shaped by the restriction of the colonized to native sectors which are defined by a lack fo resources and deplorable conditions.  The policing of space serves a specialized purpose in capital-spatial relations for Fanon because it generates the possibility for resources to be extracted, defining the local colony’s relative place in the larger geographical capital-spatial relations.  Following Fanon’s framing of capital-spatial relations as driven by “speciation” reveals that capital-spatial relations generate types.  “The colonized subject is a man pinned in…” (Fanon 2004:15).  It’s the immobility of the colonized subject that has to be challenged according to Fanon.  The capital-spatial relation for Fanon is then shaped by the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in a struggle over space.  This struggle to overcome the fixivity of compartmentalized colonial space can only be transformed through the violent anti-colonial resistance which is repeatedly stymied by reformism.

POINT OF DISAGREEMENT

The point of disagreement between these two readings is the primacy of race/ism in shaping capital-spatial relations.  While Smith frames colonialism as the pre-conditions for the accumulation of capital; as a historical stage in capitalist development; Fanon sees race/ism (colonialism speaking) as central to shaping the spatial relations that generate uneven development.  For Fanon, this begins with the native and colonist sectors, the colony and the metropole, the first and the third worlds.  Smith sees uneven development as generated by the contradictory tendencies of capitalism towards equalization and differentiation.  Fanon’s analysis in The Wretched of the Earth is a bit of a departure from Smith’s understanding of capital-spatial relations.  Fanon argues, “The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich” (1994:5).  Colonialism’s zoological compartmentalization is what generates the uneven flow of power and resources between people and space.  

This point of disagreement is possible due to Smith’s primary treatment of colonialism as a stage of history that capitalism has already passed, it is thus solidified in the past processes of pre-accumulation.  For Fanon, colonialism is not a historical event, it’s a system, a historical process, just like that of decolonization.  Fanon’s analysis begs Smith’s theory of uneven development to dig deeper into the taken for granted characteristics defining the category of “nature” as well as that of “people”.  Capitalism is a set of relations generated by the outcome of the contestation over who gets the right to be considered human/people/persons and who is actively reduced to chattel (partus sequitur ventrum).  Colonial compartmentalization also then shapes the geography of capitalism and contributes to the processes of uneven development.  

These two different analytical viewpoints present different understandings of the wage-laborer relation.  Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and spatial relations required to generate capital under such a system reveals that Smith’s theory of uneven development doesn’t fully account for the absence of the double freedom of wage labor in the case of colonized peoples, especially that of chattel slaves.  Even in post-emancipation and post-colonial times racialized bodies are still immobilized and pinned in.  Smith argues that “the universality of the wage-labor relation under capitalism forces not only the working class but also capital from any inherent tie to absolute space” (2008:115).  But racialization constrains/fixes bodies to natural space.  It is clear then that there is also an uneven-ness in emancipation from natural space.  

The strengths and weaknesses of both Smith’s theory of uneven development and Fanon’s notion of colonial compartmentalization when placed in the context of one another present the opportunity to ask more interesting questions about capital-spatial relations.  Smith makes a crucial point that is somewhat treated as a backdrop in Fanon’s analysis (a point that W.E.B. Du Bois makes in his analysis of the white worker and the Black worker in Black Reconstruction in America).  Colonization is part of the larger universalization of abstract labor in the form of value.  Zoological compartmentalization (speciation: the production of races) is then a typology of laborers that fixes certain kinds of bodies to natural spaces (relative to other kinds of bodies).  This process makes some human and some savage, some modern while others traditional, some settlers while others indigenous, some citizens while others are transnational someplace-else(s).  Marx’s point on capitalism’s dragging of laborers to a common level is then not completely true, given that differential and equalization processes of individual capital centralizes capital to specific groups at the expense of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies.  Differential racialization places some at higher relative expendability.  This expendability is manifested spatially in the differentiation of geographic space in patterns of racial residential segregation in the United States.  

Smith’s analysis of capital-spatial relations reveals that the role of capitalism in Fanon’s analysis is that of a less significant character in comparison to colonialism.  Fanon’s analysis collapses capitalism into colonialism to some extents at the expense of interrogating the contingent happenings fueling social contestation even amongst Europeans.  This collapse is done at the expense of the historical context of that of ‘speciation’ and fails to adequately deconstruct the relations between colonialism and race.  In many ways, the point of disagreement in these readings of capital-spatial relations reveal that what is missing can be found in the approaches of each of these scholars’ framing of what shapes the dynamic generation of geographical space.  

REFERENCES

Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press.

Fanon, Frantz and Richard Philcox. 2004. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.