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Determination Labor’s Geography LANDSCAPES ARE PRODUCED. To state the obvious, they are produced by people working , or more accurately, by working people, working classes. Of course, all kinds of diverse labor goes into any production process, whether the finite production of a specific commodity or the ongoing production of a landscape—labor ranging from the work of planning and managing to the work (in agriculture) of planting and harvesting—but only the physical transformation of matter is primary. All the planning in the world makes no difference at all if there are not physical laborers to put that plan into action; all the work of getting laborers to the point of production in roughly appropriate numbers at roughly the right price for roughly the right duration is for naught if the workers do not set themselves to work; all the amassing of capital, all the amassing of machines (at the edge of a field or on the shop floor) is for naught, if working people are not there to operate the machines and turn the capital into a commodity. No doubt the work of labor contractors (like Rene Cardenas), capitalist farmers (like Joseph DiGiorgio or his nephew Robert), and government bureaucrats (like Edward Hayes) is necessary (in capitalism), but not only is it insufficient for producing a profitable landscape, it is dependent on the primary labor of the working classes. Working people literally, physically, make the worlds, the geographies, within which they live. They do so under specific, struggled over, and determinant conditions. The worlds—the landscapes—they make in turn comprise a significant part of those determinant conditions. They establish the grounds (again literally, physically) upon which struggle can take place. To not at all coin a phrase, working people make their own geographies, but not necessarily under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions—these determinations —as Raymond Williams made so clear, are best understood as “pressures” or “limits” rather than dictates or iron laws; they have the force to shape, but not to totally decide.1 Determinations themselves are historically, socially, and geographically determined as Williams also made clear when describing the scope of change experienced in nineteenth-century rural Britain, a description that also indicates the limits of people’s ability to make their own histories and geographies: Labor’s Geography • 167 In many villages, community only became a reality when economic and political rights were fought for and partially gained, in the recognition of unions, in the extension of the franchise, and in the possibility of entry into new representative and democratic institutions. In many thousands of cases, there is more community in the modern village, as a result of this process of new legal and democratic rights, than at any point in the recorded or imagined past. This is active community , and it must be distinguished from another version, which is sometimes the mutuality of the oppressed, and other times the mutuality of people living at the edges or in the margins of a generally oppressive system. Rural workers in Britain “fought for and partially gained” a set of rights and recognitions, reworked the determinations governing their lives, and, in the processes created, if only partially and in a struggle that never ended, a new geographical basis for what Williams called their “lived lives.”2 The recognition that workers, in the act of living and working, produce the world (or more narrowly, the morphological and social landscape) has had a transformative effect on the way geographers conceptualize the spatiality of the political economy. David Harvey (especially, but not singularly) showed that any social system had to produce the material basis of its existence, and that in capitalism, there was a crucial, contradictory logic to the production of space. As we have seen, Harvey’s central insight was that for capital to circulate—and this is obviously a historical necessity—some capital had to be fixed in place, ossified as a “not-value” necessary to the production of new value. The sunk costs that are the built landscape thus enable the development and expansion of capitalist production, but they also constrain it: they pressure and limit. They give capitalist production and reproduction a trajectory; or, in other words, there is a “path-dependency” to the future precisely because the future must contend with what is already there, already built. To transform or remake the landscape can be an expensive if (frequently) necessary business. Yet, the strong arguments of Harvey, focusing so forcefully on the...

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