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CHAPTER 7 Bounding the Mekong Summing Capital in the GMS When using the term “capital” throughout my analysis of GMS projects, I have most frequently focused literally on capitalists, sometimes petty capitalists or entrepreneurial petty commodity producers, including their allies within state agencies. But “capital,” in Marx’s sense of the term, is neither a thing (e.g., money) nor a specific social group (e.g., capitalists)—rather, it is a social relation. That relation is most fundamentally the relationship between capitalists and workers, but also the relationship between various social actors and the “precapitalist” producers whose dispossession makes possible the original (“primitive”) accumulation of surplus by capitalists. In addition to capitalists—acting within or beyond the state—I have noted here as well some of these relationships between capital and labor, including the various acts of dispossession that make labor available in ways conducive to greater accumulation and appropriation of surplus. To summarize some of these relations, I want to borrow and reconfigure a concept from community ecology. “Competitive exclusion” refers to processes by which one species establishes itself within a given niche to the exclusion of competitors . The latter of which, if they do not become extinct, may leave or migrate elsewhere to avoid deadly conflict. I do not wish to use this concept as a model for sociospatial development in the GMS; social processes are too complex, and the dangers of “naturalization” too great, to engage in such modeling of human behavior on ecological concepts—not to mention the crucial point that human constructions of “nature” typically import our understandings of the social relations around us into the realm of the nonhuman, enabling us to understand the latter at the expense of making it appear more like former. Conceptually modeling social relations on what given groups of humans claim to see in nature thus may involve little more than reading back out of “natural” processes what our social biases have led us to read in at the outset (see, e. g., Marx 1977, 526). Indeed, competitive exclusion as a model poses just this risk, since it is based on the notion of competition within a closed system limited by finite and scarce resources (see, e.g., Gause 1934; Hardin 160 cHAPTER 7 1960)—a construction popular with neoclassical economists since it rationalizes their particular view of competition as an inevitable driving force in human affairs. I intend to do something different with the concept of competitive exclusion , recognizing that the concept itself has origins in the social biases of particular ecologists. Competition among other species is regularly used to naturalize and legitimize economic competition, making the latter seem little more than the extension into the human realm of the former (Mirowski 1994). In particular, a competitive struggle over scarce resources is the conceptual cornerstone of neoclassical economics, a perspective I have been implicitly and explicitly critiquing throughout. In the neoclassical worldview, this competition is especially exemplified by the competition between different businesses—ideally petty commodity producers—for market share. This neglects the fact that a major feature of capitalist economic development is the struggle between capital and labor, not only over shares of the surplus but over the general process by which labor becomes subordinated to capital. Yet, as is obvious from my discussions of the marketplace-battlefield, I do not reject the notion that marketplace competition between capitalists is a major force in capitalist development. What I want to do here, therefore, is expand the notion of competition: I include within the general concept of competitive social struggle both the struggle between various types of capitalists over market share and the varied struggles between capitalists and workers—as well as capitalists and various “noncapitalists”—over shares of the surplus. Both struggles are in fact struggles over appropriation of the surplus, albeit different forms of that struggle, and both are thus class and class-relevant struggles. Using this expanded conception of competition, I draw on the geographic dimensions of the notion of “competitive exclusion”—specifically the notion that species attempt to establish control over a given area to the exclusion of competitors , or in other words monopolies. The monopolistic behavior of capitalists I have highlighted conforms to this basic image. But as I have also noted, capitalism is marked more by attempts at monopoly—usually achieved only imperfectly—than actual monopolies. In this sense, even dominant capitalist groups are rarely—and never permanently—able to fully exclude competition. Rather, they simply utilize whatever “extra-economic” means are...

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