I must say that radical political economy has been very much 
'capital-centric'  in the sense that it almost always neglects that 
there is a world outside the orbit of capitalist _production_ 
relations (it is also capital-centric in the sense Herod has been 
discussing for years now  -- that it has ignored class struggle and 
its role in the production of geographies). Think of the vast 
peasantry and the semi-proletarians in Africa, South Asia etc.

The exchange-oriented view of capital is amenable to spatial 
treatment and hence geographers have fallen for dependency type 
formulations. But I have not seen many interesting geographical works 
on non/pre-capitalism in the periphery as it exists now: the 
articulation of modes of production (Rey, Wolpe etc), on peripheral 
capitalism (Hamza Alavi, Banaji), and so on. If you know of any 
geographical work (does not have to be by geographers), please let me 
know. (Rey, Wolpe etc wrote long ago).

We cannot understand natural hazards, poverty, state responses to 
these or  whatever in the periphery, if we assume that: the periphery 
and the core are the same in terms of the class structure (and are 
just different in terms of _consequences_ of the class structure -- 
i.e. economic development), that the law of value operates in the 
periphery without any hindrance, that capitalism is the only mode of 
production that exists there. See how little there is on the 
periphery in major marxist works: Smith's  Uneven development or 
Harvey's Limits to Capital. 

It's very easy to see the importance of trade and its geographical 
expressions (transport routes etc) and even MNC investment but not 
what happens at the production sites, it is not easy to see the logic 
behind production. By just seeing a man digging the soil you cannot 
tell anything about the mode of production: the person may be a petty 
commodity producer, a wage labourer or a peasant working as a 
tenant or even a slave.  Even MNC investment by itself does not mean 
capitalism at all (they may be using coerced labour in which there 
would be no relative surplus value). We must ask questions about the 
double freedom of labour, about the forms of surplus value (absolute 
or relative; and correspondingly, formal vs real subsumption of 
labour), etc.

I am not arguing for a peripheralist or Third Worldist position at 
al. I am arguing against capital-centrism which is indicative of 
geography' s theoretical parochialism. How many geographers are aware 
of the modes of production debates in the different parts of the less 
developed world, for example? Ditto about the nature of the 
peripheral capitalist state debates (not to be confused with 
developmental state debates).

A starting point for understanding of any concrete issue such as 
poverty or whatever in the less developed countries 
must be an investigation of the nature of its capitalism (e.g. formal 
or real subsumption of labour), its connection to non/pre-capitalism 
and the relations between the state and different classes. I have 
been working on these issues for a few years now and I know how 
scanty the literature is on this. Sometimes, I feel a bit annoyed 
that I don't have any geographical work to refer to.  I therefore ask 
what am I doing in Geography? Let's change the status of radical 
political economy and make it less capital-centric (in both the 
senses I have referred to).

Raju


Raju J Das
Department of Geography
University of Dundee
Dundee DD1 4HN
United Kingdom
Phone 01382 348073 work
      01382 737097 home


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