Cox Reading 'Political Geography'

Cox states that capitalism means "the production of commodities with commodities." That means in a market, everything becomes a commodity, something that is bought, sold or rented. Capitalism cannot exist without labor markets. After the Cold War, the world moved towards capitalism and free markets, but this comes with problems too. Capitalism produces competition, the cheapening of the product and developing it, and wage competition.

Three preconditions exist for capitalism:

1) the separation of the immediate producers from the means of production.

This can often be forcible and violent.

2) (abolition of slavery) immediate producers must be free to work for a wage

3) there must be people with large sums of money

Forces of production:

1) skill of the worker

2) instrument of labor

3) object of labor

Socialization of production include interdependence between firms and specialization. Firms need each other to stay afloat. It includes skill development like literacy and technical know-how. Sources of tension include the inequality of power, insufficiency (wages, benefits) and insecurity (unemployment), insignificance (people replaced by machinery), the degradation of the environment, politics (monopolies, left-wing and right-wing, property rights).

Environmental degradation includes the depletion of non-renewable resources. Examples of this include over-fishing and oil. If oil is used at a rate faster than we can replace it, we will run out of resources. There are external costs involved as well which are not caused purposefully but have an equally important impact on future generations, like pollution caused by a power plant. This impacts both humans and the environment. Another factor of environmental degradation is population growth as well as growth in consumption. Not only are there more numbers of people on this earth, but each person tends to consume more.

"Moving in the direction of lower wages and less militant, more pliable labor is often a strategy for business as it attempts to elude the challenge of the labor movement" (pp. 52-53).

Businesses will always be up against labor unions. Businesses will find loopholes to cheapen the mode of production or try to replace labor with machinery, and labor unions will try to uphold their rights and improve working conditions. Cox says that the worker's movement is very geographically uneven, and I agree. The quote above illustrates that businesses will move to a place that is favorable to them, where they don't have to follow the rules. It's like a chase... the businesses will go where labor unions don't exist. That geography will then try to "cope."

Cox states that with the change of capitalism, there is a change of the home and the cityscape. Centered around the construction of a factory may be the construction of houses, schools and churches. Capitalism changes the infrastructure of an area. It can affect transportation, communication, the price of housing etc. Space has become commodified, and "conflicts between firms and employees is reflected geographically" (p. 61).

What I got from this: capitalism and politics are determined by geographical location.