This paper builds upon labor geography's contributions to our understanding of the role of workers in the production of scale. In addition to examining exactly how a particular group of workers controlled the scale of their labor market, this paper theorizes the connections between that process and struggles over monopoly power. The 1890-1891 Chicago carpenters' strike, a work stoppage of significance to both the direction of labor politics within Chicago and to the broader 8 h movement in North America at the end of the nineteenth century, serves as a case study.
This paper begins to explore the historical-geographic development of the culture industry. By expanding upon David Harvey's understanding of culture as that “special” commodity which can earn monopoly rents based on its extraordinary qualities, I examine, in particular, how professional baseball became a profitable segment of the culture industry. This historical-geographic process, similar to most forms of cultural production, was fraught with contradictions that threatened its survival. In addition to the three contradictions that Harvey identifies, this paper focuses on an additional contradiction, one that is found within the labor processes of cultural production, between productive capital and commodity capital. Scrutiny over the ways in which baseball's premier professional organization—the National League—struggled to overcome this and other contradictions suggests that the culture industry depends upon the production of certain geographies.
What is, and was, South Africa? This is clearly not a question which has a single answer, nor has it ever had one. On the one hand, there is a constitutional answer. In these terms, South Africa did not exist before the creation of the Union in 1910 and since then has been the state created then, transformed into the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and transformed once again with the ending of white minority rule in 1994. On the other hand, there are innumerable answers, effectively those to be found in the minds of all South Africans, and indeed all those foreigners who have an opinion about the country. Nevertheless, these opinions are not random. Clearly, there are regularities to be found within them, such that it is possible, in principle, to describe at the very least the range of answers to this question which were held within particular groups of the population, either within the country or outside it, and also to use specific sources, emanating from a single person, or group of individuals, as exemplary of the visions held by a far wider group.
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