Jim Glassman

Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by 'extra-economic' means

David Harveys adaptation and redeployment of Marxs notion of ‘primitive accumulation’–under the heading of ‘accumulation by dispossession’–has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization.

State power beyond the `territorial trap': the internationalization of the state

Abstract In recent years, neo-liberal and neo-Weberian scholars have waged fierce debates over whether or not the capacity of the nation-states to manage economic activity has been weakened by globalization. While siding with the neo-Weberians in their assertion that states retain substantial powers, this paper argues that both neo-liberals and neo-Weberians share a problematic assumption that states are anchored exclusively in the social forces deemed to lie within their national territories. By contrast, it is argued here that capitalist development has tended to promote internationalization of capital, and with this the internationalization of the state. A theoretical approach to internationalization of the state is then outlined, showing how specific factions of capitalist classes can end up sharing concrete interests in specific state policies across national boundaries. The potential for transnational coalitions among various fractions of capital, it is argued, has helped create the current hegemony of neo-liberal approaches among many Third World state officials. Internationalization of the state thus suggests a need to rethink both the bases of Northeast and Southeast Asian economic growth and the nature of the current crisis afflicting countries in those regions. It may prove to be the case that the states which played important roles in Asian industrial development did so less as national entities than as actors within an internationalized system of class and inter-state relations which resulted from historical opportunities no longer available to most developing countries.

From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok: The Scales of Resistance to Corporate Globalization

Recent work by geographers has highlighted attempts by local groups to ‘jump scales’ in their efforts to contest the power of global capital. Sometimes such ‘scale jumping’ is also seen as part of an effort to bypass the nation-state. This paper explores a particular case of scale jumping, which illustrates some of the complexities of the process. Building on the anticorporate globalization momentum generated during the ‘battle in Seattle’ and the demonstrations during the February 2000 United Nations Commission on Trade and Development meetings in Bangkok, local antidam activists from Ubon Ratchathani province in Thailand scaled up their activities during 2000, utilizing various international connections to improve their visibility and strengthen their prospects for success. Rather than simply bypassing the nation-state, however, they have had to use both local and international resources to try to combat the policies of the nation-state, a project in which they have had real but still contested success. The case of antidam activism in Ubon Ratchathani illustrates some of the nuances of ‘globalization from below’, as well as the continuing power and relevance of the nation-state as a site of struggle.

Development geography and the third-world state

Soon after the third-world state was declared impotent, contradictory evidence pointing to the importance of state leadership in development in the Asian miracles came to the fore. This article, through a critical review of the literature, pushes this argument further and claims that geographers have much to contribute to the analysis of the state and its role in development. An appropriate framework for this kind of work is a marriage of radical political economy and certain strands of neo-Weberianism. We suggest that this conceptual union allows for broad theorizing of the capitalist state in the periphery while minding the institutional details of third-world states in particular regions and countries. This approach can help explain the differential performances of various third-world states within the confines of the world system. Thailand and Botswana are used as comparative cases to demonstrate the utility of this framework.

Recovering from Crisis: The Case of Thailand's Spatial Fix

Abstract Although the Asian economic crisis has been the subject of numerous analyses, the varied and uneven processes by which different Asian countries have recovered from the crisis have received comparatively less attention. This article focuses on the process of recovery in Thailand. While the crisis and recovery both have international dimensions that go beyond individual nation-states, the case of Thailand can be used to analyze some of the forces that are at work in both the national and international contexts. Thailand’s process of recovery can be analyzed by noting tensions and overlaps among different forms of spatial fix—those involving investment in Bangkok’ built environment, those involving the geographic decentralization of investment to lower-cost production sites, and those involving the effort to expand exports. Each of these spatial fixes involves different accumulation strategies and, therefore, political coalitions. This situation suggests the centrality of social struggles over the appropriation of surplus to both crisis and recovery.

“The Provinces Elect Governments, Bangkok Overthrows Them”: Urbanity, Class and Post-democracy in Thailand

Urban social movements are often associated with what are considered ‘progressive’ causes and most activists involved in such movements are inclined to describe themselves in such terms. The Thai coup of September 2006 poses problems for any such easy identification. Although executed by the military, on behalf of royalist interests, the coup was supported by an array of primarily Bangkok-based and middle-class groups, many of them associated with organisations such as NGOs and state enterprise unions. Although some of these groups claimed anti-neo-liberal political orientations, their support for the coup effectively placed them on the side of forces opposed to quasi-Keynesian policies and in favour of specific forms of neo-liberalism—at least for Thai villagers. This paper explores this development by focusing on the Bangkok/upcountry and urban/rural divisions in Thai politics, which, although socially constructed, have taken on political substance, in part because of their grounding in regionally differentiated class structures.

Economic Crisis in Asia: The Case of Thailand*

Abstract The economic crisis in Asia has been analyzed by neoliberal and neo-Weberian scholars as a financial crisis, with the neoliberals asserting that its causes are internal to the countries in question, the neo-Weberians asserting the causes to be external. This paper offers an alternative, Marxian explanation of the crisis, focusing on the outbreak of the crisis in Thailand. Using Harvey’s ideas about capitalist crises and capital switching, along with conceptions of crisis dynamics in peripheral societies based in the works of economic geographers and dependent development theorists, I argue that the crisis in Thailand was a fully economic crisis involving all circuits of the economy, linking domestic and international accumulation processes, and stemming in part from struggles over appropriation of the surplus. In order to demonstrate this, I analyze the crisis in Thailand at both national and international scales and show that it was rooted in declining profitability of manufacturing in a context of increased global export competition and overcapacity. This context created the strong likelihood of economic downturn throughout the region, with Thailand falling first because of its specific liabilities, and other countries being pulled into the maelstrom of devaluation through financial contagion effects.

Economic “nationalism” in a post-nationalist era

Major media discussion of the Thai Rak Thai partys electoral victory in 2001 characterized the party as a populist-nationalist party that was threatening to implement “closed-door” economic policies and “turn back the clock” on economic liberalization. While Thai Rak Thai has, since coming to power, implemented a small number of mercantilist and populist policies, its actions in no way resemble those of a nationalist regime intent on promoting closed-door economic policies. The reasons for this are evident from an examination of the partys social base. This paper analyzes this diverse social base of support for various Thai Rak Thai policies and argues that Thai Rak Thai “nationalism” is more a function of the temporary and partial convergence of the scale politics of these diverse social groups than of any commitment to serious economic nationalism. Moreover, it argues that the groups involved in supporting Thai Rak Thai “nationalism” are already internationalized in many of their activities. What therefore characterizes Thai Rak Thais project is not a unified, strong nationalism, but rather a shared reaction of opposition to global neoliberalism by different Thai social groups.

Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as Growth Poles: Regional Industrial Development in Thailand and its Implications for Urban Sustainability

This article examines the concept of urban sustainability within the context of two case studies from Thailand. The Thai state, under the auspices of its development planning agencies, identified the secondary cities of Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as growth poles in the 1970s. As such, both cities were perceived as engines of regional development in their respective regions of North and Northeast Thailand. The authors critically examine how the strategies of decentralization of industrial growth and development of secondary urban centers, ostensibly to alleviate congestion and pollution in Bangkok, have been deployed in the context of urban primacy and uneven development in Thailand. They argue that these policies have helped induce some growth in the secondary cities in question but that in doing so, they have induced new problems of sustainability in the secondary cities and their surrounding rural areas without alleviating problems of sustainability in Bangkok.

Cracking Hegemony in Thailand: Gramsci, Bourdieu and the Dialectics of Rebellion

Abstract Gramscis notion of “hegemony,” like Bourdieus concept of “habitus,” seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions of “hegemony” and “habitus” inscribe the possibility of resistance within the embodied experience of accommodation to class rule. I then elaborate a dialectical, Gramscian-Bourdieusian account of the Red Shirt movement in Thailand, showing that the seeds for the destruction of royalist hegemony in Thailand have been sown in the embodied processes of accommodation to ruling class hegemony. The breadth and depth of challenges to this hegemony, moreover, are evident not only from the activities of the Red Shirt movement and regional discontent in Northern and Northeast Thailand but from the resistance of working class women to attempts to police their sexuality and limit their consumerism. The refusal of Thai elites to accept the breadth and depth of Thailands dispositional transformation has legitimised – in their eyes – the brutal crackdown on Red Shirt protestors that resulted in the April-May 2010 massacres. Yet repression can only kill off political leaders and specific parties; it will not likely derail the growing resentment of ordinary Thais over elitist class rule.