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

Afterword to the Third Edition

239 Afterword to the Third Edition in the quarter century since Uneven Development was written, capitalism and its geography have changed dramatically. Globalization , the computerization of everyday life for many, the implosion of state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, reassertion of religion in world politics, the unprecedented industrial revolution in East Asia and the accompanying capitalization of China, the anti-globalization and world social justice movements, global warming, the generalization of gentrification as global urban policy, the rise of biotechnology, the neoliberal state, U.S.-led war for global hegemony under the guise of a war on terror: these and many other developments have fundamentally altered the face of twenty-first-century capitalism. Apart from anything else, the comparatively stable postwar division between a First, Second, 240 Afterword to the Third Edition and Third World, already suspect by the 1980s, not only lacks any coherence today but seems quaint, so 1970s. By the same token, in a world now 50 percent urbanized any clear distinction between rural and urban is suspect, as is any gulf between city center and suburb in the age of gentri- fied centers and corporate, edge city peripheries. On multiple fronts, the unevenness of capitalist development seems more striated than ever. On this list of momentous shifts, many would include the 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the United States, and there is little doubt that these events will be sieved into history, indeed already are, as some kind of global political watershed, much like the World Wars of the twentieth century. But it was not the events of September 11, 2001, themselves which changed the world, no matter how much a U.S. president might insist to the contrary. Certainly these events were brutally calculated and were colossal in symbolic terms, but they were relatively minor in the annals of humanity’s violence against itself. Rather, it was the reaction to these events—brutal and calculated on a far wider scale—that marked a watershed, if one is to be found. The events were coldly appropriated to the purpose of cementing a long desired, episodic, but ultimately chimerical global hegemony on the part of a U.S.-centered ruling class. Without in any way denying or devaluing shifts that have occurred at other scales and in other registers, this project of imperial power on behalf of an international but U.S.-focused ruling class, and responses to that project (including 9/11), have to be seen as the overarching political, cultural, and economic reality of the last quarter century. Uneven development today, at all scales from the household to the trans-planetary, is bottom-up as much as top-down, but an analytical appreciation of this global ambition is vital if we are to understand where and how these differently scaled processes meet. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, many of us in the heart of the beast—geographically defined as Europe, North America, Japan, Oceania, yet excluding Harlem and the Paris banlieus and just as surely including “subaltern” centers of class power from Mexico City and Mumbai to Shanghai and Cairo—we are gripped by a serious lack of Afterword to the Third Edition 241 political imagination, memory, or even affect. We have in fact become witting or unwitting exponents of Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum, that “there is no alternative” (“tina”) to capitalism. Many in the left establishment , who in the 1980s abhorred Thatcher and her dictum, have become converts in the twenty-first century and the most agile proponents of ”tina,” with the idealist refusal to even recognize capitalism as a coherent category. As ruling classes titrate capitalism into broader, more diverse, yet also purer forms—the state today transforms into a bottomline entrepreneur, and economists increasingly claim the prerogative of environmental, social, and cultural engineers. Such converts deny the existence of capitalism at all. For capitalism-deniers, there is no coherent target of political opposition, only the balm of a devout and eclectic liberal morality. The invisibility of the alternative is calibrated according to the invisibility of the target. Indeed, the national liberation struggles of the 1970s—Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, among others—have largely faded or were defeated; many of the postcolonial regimes of central and west Africa, divided and conquered before hard-fought sovereignty was bequeathed to them, have converted the polite barbarism of...