[lbo-talk] Walker and geography

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Fri Oct 15 14:07:47 PDT 2010


Below is an excerpt from a paper by Richard Walker, Teaching (Political) Economic Geography, Some Personal Reflections:

http://www-geography.berkeley.edu/peoplehistory/faculty/R_Walker/Walker_81.pdf

Thanks to Dennis Claxton for posting Walker in the first place. I've had some dealings with this department over the years and never really grasp what kind of a field it was.

My first contact was with a guy who taught Geography as an adjunct back in mid-70s. He taught me and friend the basics of rock climbing, and we spent long hours discussing wilderness management at the state and federal level, Sierra Club politics, and much discussion of what should be done---a lot turned on how to deal with traffic and over use of Yosemite. The National Park Service was involved in a master plan that was, what I would now call neoliberal bullshit. The basic design was to elimenate the large family camping areas, concentrate development on Camp Curry and Yosemite Lodge and set up tour bus contracts. If you think about what is the motivation for such a plan, it amounts to turning the park into a theme park to milk the tourist trade. Meanwhile the Sierra Club was turning away from its origina as an wilderness protection and perservation into a national lobby...

The other contact was through my son who took a California Geography course to satisfy his Cal History requirement (early 90s), loved this class and brought his some of his books (Cadillac Desert was one) and maps over to my place for a weekend dinners to escape dorm food. It was by going over these maps that much of what I already knew through unreflected impression, came together as a larger conceptual frame of what agriculture was in California. This little odd but unlinked set of thoughts, really got a boost when I realized that most of the plants studied at Koshland were food crops. i.e. critical to GM food.

Among all the other things on the To Do list, is to revivalize Cal public education curriculum to incorporate many of the ideas and concepts-topic Walker writes about into primary and secondary education. There used to be some form of this geography taught in LA public schools (40s-50s). You could actually take something called Agriculture in the secondary grades (7-9). This amounted to planting and growing a flower and or vegetable gardin. I grew radishes and spinach. The carrots didn't come out.

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Breaking Down Economics

The first problem in getting a grip on economic geography is to get around the elephant of neo-classical economics standing in the doorway. How to clear the way for a sensible approach to economics? This is not so much a political prejudice as a scientific one: neoclassicism is a species of Orthodox faith that impairs the study of the world more than it helps, thanks to teleological faith in market equilibrium, dogmatic axioms about human behavior, shallow empiricism in the deployment of data, and misleading use of mathematics as a substitute for theory.

Our first responsibility as teachers of economic geography is to provide our students with a manageable picture of the modern economy, one they can get their heads around. That does not start with markets and trade, allocation and optimization; nor does it begin with giant corporations, national development and technology policy. The heart of the matter is providing a clear idea of the system of production and circulation of goods (commodities) that undergirds everything else.

I start with the five steps in the life of the commodity, or segments of the commodity chain: resources, manufacture, distribution, retail and consumption. It may be simple in outline, but it opens up the various dimensions of economy and geography in a straightforward way. From there, one can build up the model in more complex ways.

Resources. By this is meant the provision of natural inputs to the industrial system, including minerals, energy and water. There are three geographic dimensions to resource supply: sites of extraction, processing sites and supply lines (normally called 'infrastructure'). Because classical location theory made natural endowments overdeterminant, modern economic geographers have shied away from the study of resource supplies but, as repeated wars over oil show, they do so at some peril. This is a natural subject for geographers concerned with nature and the environment.

Manufacture. Manufacturing is the pivot of production, dominated by the modern factory system. Automobile assembly plants and steel mills were long the focus of economic geography, but that day has passed. We need to cover such new products as cell phones and video games, as well as older ones with new twists, such as meatpacking and pharmaceuticals. Moreover, as factory size has diminished, divisions of labor expanded and supply chains lengthened, the emphasis has shifted to clusters of establishments (industrial districts) and to global production systems, in arrangements of nodes and networks.

Distribution. Distribution (also called circulation) includes the mercantile functions of wholesaling, warehousing and brokerage, upstream and downstream from manufacturing. The treatment of distribution in classic location theory was reduced to ports, transport modes and distance costs, rather than a field of business in its own right. The dullness of that approach put off the New Industrial Geographers, who paid it no more attention. The 430 subject was relegated to transportation geography, preserving an antique and debilitating schism. Fortunately, the field is enjoying a renaissance, given the logistics revolution in commodity flows in a global system.

Retail. Retail is the act of selling commodities, either through brick-and-mortar stores or at a distance by catalogues or websites. Retail geography also became isolated from the mainstream, reduced to mapping of market areas in the fashion of Central Place theory- long after industrial geographers had abandoned Christaller-Lo¨sch models. Retailing is a ready hook for students in the Age of Wal-Mart, and it has come in for much more serious scrutiny recently-though mostly from cultural geographers. Retail geography is more than consumer access: it entails the capitalist sales imperative, publicity and presentation, and the supply lines running backward from sellers to producers.

Consumption. Consumption is not the same as shopping, nor is it chiefly a symbolic activity. Its material facts are strewn over the landscape, both as residential areas and as gathering points of pleasure like theme parks, convention centers and malls. In terms of sheer size, these occupy more space in the American cities my students know than production, distribution and retail functions combined. This kind of commodity chain and segment breakdown is good up to a point but more is required to flesh out the capitalist economy for our students. To begin with, every production system is book-ended by two critical functions pertaining to the whole, as well as the parts. On one side lie auxiliary inputs into extraction, manufacture, distribution and sales, such as design, engineering and research. On the other flank, commodity production systems are embedded in business organizations and subject to modern management.

Auxiliary inputs. These include the work that must be done before anything else happens, such as product design, building construction, system engineering and marketing studies. The high-end, skilled labour in these areas usually requires a creative (and expensive) milieu of research, education and interaction. But these inputs are the principal conduits of technical innovation and market shifts, and are deeply interactive with investment, learning and adaptation within the core of the production system. At the same time, there are masses of labor, and myriad firms, at work in humble support of the glamorous activities, doing such things as repair, cleaning and landscaping. While there has been a good deal of study on R&D, design has only recently come under the scholarly eye; but we often have to go over to labour studies to find anyone looking hard at janitorial services.

Organization and management. Management refers, first of all, to control and command of the enterprise (firm, corporation) and its labour force. Organization pertains to systems of business integration, the social division of labour and the orchestration of social labour (who does what, where and how). Herein lie some of the most important aspects of economy and geography. They used to be comprised under the heading of 'corporate geography' but things are much more complicated today, with the rise (revival?) of such immense supply chains as The Gap's vast network of 700 þ subcontractors feeding thousands of retail outlets or Dell's path-breaking system of web-based orders for computers, from final customer all the way to component makers in Asia.

Most of what is known as 'business services', a large and growing segment of the economy, consists in the provision of these book-end functions. Big cities' centres, in particular, are replete with accountants, lawyers, consulting engineers, designers and advertisers, among others. Most such work is outsourced today, but it still must plug carefully into the basic chains of production. The size of this sector has been enhanced by 431 the immense scale of modern corporations and production systems, as well as by the increased sophistication of management.

Finally, all production and circulation of commodities is animated by human labour, the living foundation of the economy, and set in play by capital, the guiding light of enterprise and the world market. Labour. Human action, effort and creativity are still essential to all economic activity, despite fantasies of fully robotic production and management systems. So is the surplus value that derives from the exploitation of labour. In any discussion of industry location economic geographers must pay attention to the way labor markets operate spatially and to such things as the skill mix, prevailing wages and the supply of workers. And they cannot gloss over the facts of exploitation and class struggle, especially given union-busting in the North and government repression in the global South.

With the global reach of capital, the search for cheaper labour has become a point of contention in all economic debates. While new labour forces-particularly female-have ever been at the cutting edge of capitalist expansion, the relative cost of labor depends on productivity, abundance and militancy, as well as on wage rates. And new supplies of labor are mustered continuously in the rich nations through immigration, enhancing brainpower, hyperexploitation and national competitiveness. Where exploitation, competition among workforces, and immigration are concerned, race, nationality and gender are never far from the surface, and the debates get ugly very quickly.

Capital. At the same time as capital feeds off labour, it drives economic production and circulation by its eagerness to invest, thirst for profit and urgency to move goods to market. Capital flows in and out of every pore of the economy, triggering growth or decline. It moves in waves of anticipation of gain, and sometimes inundations of speculative fervor, into new lines of business, new technologies, new industrial spaces, newly developing countries and new epochs of industrialization. This mad rushing about all too often makes fools of those who predict geographies of the future based on trends of the past and present.



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