Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space

SIX: Conclusion: The Restructuring of Capital?

206 chapter six Conclusion The Restructuring of Capital? uneven development is both the product and the geographical premise of capitalist development. As product, the pattern is highly visible in landscapes of capitalism as the difference between developed and underdeveloped spaces at different scales: the developed and the underdeveloped world, developed regions and declining regions, suburbs and the inner city. As the premise of further capitalist expansion, uneven development can be comprehended only by means of a theoretical analysis of the capitalist production of nature and space. Uneven development is social inequality blazoned into the geographical landscape, and it is simultaneously the exploitation of that geographical unevenness for certain socially determined ends. What I have attempted to do in this work is to abstract from the empirically messy historical conditions Conclusion 207 upon which capitalism seizes, and in part produces, and to examine the tendencies toward increasingly systematic unevenness which come more and more to dominate capitalist development. Here lie both the strengths and the weaknesses of the analysis. If it succeeds in linking the two traditions, geographical and political, and in weaving some of the existing ropes connecting these traditions into more of a rope bridge, however rickety, then it will have served its purpose. If in the process it creates more gaps than were hitherto thought to be there, so much the better. But the limitations are equally clear. In the first place the analysis is essentially confined to treating what Marx referred to as the “ideal moments” of the process. Thus while it sketches the logic of uneven development and the roughest outlines of its actual historical progression, the present analysis can in no way claim to be a precise historical account of the complexity of uneven development. The intent was not to reduce the reality to a mere concept but rather, by developing the theoretical concept, to illuminate the reality of uneven development. In its abstractness, this analysis can very quickly be rendered obsolete as soon as empirical investigations treat uneven development not simply as a “gap” between more developed and less developed regions or as a universal phenomenon, but as the systematic product of previous capitalist development and the fundamental premise of the future of capitalism. Clearly, also, I have not dealt with the multiplicity of issues involved in the so-called “articulation of modes of production.” There is no doubt that this question is historically prior to the question of uneven development under capitalism and the question of articulation is emerging as a substantial focus for historical research into uneven development. But equally there is little doubt that the logic of uneven development is theoretically prior to the problematic of articulation of modes of production. Merchant capital, after all, was historically prior to industrial capital, but it was the latter which Marx analyzed in order to understand the capitalist mode of production. The point is that today the “articulation of modes of production” is a product of the development and limits of 208 Chapter Six capital, not vice versa. More concretely, it is the logic of uneven development which structures the context for this articulation. Thus a theoretical understanding of uneven development can contribute significantly to the comprehension of some specific articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production, but the specific cases of articulation can contribute little toward identifying the general outlines of uneven development theory. Where, in such cases, the seesaw of capital simply does not happen, the real question is “why?” If at other scales and in other contexts, capital attempts to replicate the “perpetual motion machine” and constantly shift around the globe like a plague of locusts, why in some places as part of a larger imperialism do capital and its attendant social relations remain rigidly fixed? The answer to this certainly requires concrete historical analysis, but the theory of uneven development offers important signposts about what to analyze and how to interpret the findings. Of far more urgent importance, I would argue, is the question of the present crisis of the world capitalist system. It is a gruesome dictum of twentieth-century geography that the fortunes of the discipline tend to increase during war. And while this is undoubtedly true it may not be war alone that puts geographical space on the agenda. For with the onslaught of crisis, after the speculative waves, one generally sees paper money—debt of every conceivable sort...