Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: contradictions in the political ecology of historical capitalism

The political aesthetic of the British city‐state: Class formation through the global city

“…My intention here is to get others to think through what they observe via the conceptualizations I have attempted to formulate in this piece. By giving too much empirical detail and offering too much content either to the concepts or the assemblage itself, this aim can easily become obscured and distracted by objections potentially aroused by those empirical exempla (for some empirical examples, see Welsh, ).…”

“…Elsewhere (Welsh, ), I have argued that global cities have emerged, in the long‐term conjoncture alluded to above, as strategic post‐disciplinary devices in the accumulation dynamic of the world system. By placing global cities into the chronic contradictions of accumulation in world ecology, we can begin to see how rapid planetary urbanization is connected with the disparate phenomena of globalization in a way that begins to clarify how global cities such as London are implicated in the emplacement of global oligarchy as a strategic reaction to persistent and drawn out accumulation crisis across the core states of the world system.…”

Service Labor, Freedom, and the Technique of Tipping

“…In this increasingly zero-sum political economy, the strategies of accumulation-by-dispossession and redistributive dispossession have become more and more idiomatic of the dominant regime of political economy (Andreucci et al, 2017;Bin, 2018;Harvey, 2004Harvey, , 2005Hudson, 2011;Lapavitsas, 2013;Lazzarato, 2012). As exploitation from expanding rounds of production has become more problematic in the regime of accumulation, the role of appropriation has become more predominant, with techniques of direct dispossession proliferating both inside and outside of immediate processes of production (Harvey, 2010a(Harvey, , 2015Moore, 2018;Welsh, 2017aWelsh, , 2020aWelsh, , 2020bWelsh, , 2021c. In this paradigm of accumulation, capital is not reinvested in production, but is eaten up and redistributed as rents.…”

“…On the other hand, there is the problem of government. The neoliberal regime has emerged from a crisis of subjectivity opened up by the disintegration of the institutions and modalities of the disciplinary society (Deleuze, 1992(Deleuze, , 1995Lazzarato, 2014: 7-8;Welsh, 2017bWelsh, , 2018 and it is in terms of this latter that we should understand how subjectivity becomes 'a key site of political struggle in the contexts of neoliberalization and neoliberal governmentality' (Ball, 2016(Ball, : 1129; see also Ball and Olmedo, 2013). Instead of the formation of habits, we have the mobilization of energies (Rancière, 2012: 32), and instead of the armatures of disciplinary power, from the factory to the asylum and the school room (Foucault, 1991(Foucault, , 2006, we have the affective regime of mobilization (Lordon, 2014;Welsh, 2021b).…”

Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

“…Extended by Harvey (2002, 2010, 2015), Hudson (2012), Smith (1996, 2007) and Lapavitsas (2013a, 2013b), among others, the growing tendency towards ‘rent-seeking’ identified in the core of the world-system has been schematised in a particularly striking way by Jason Moore’s ecological exposition of the ‘inversion’ of the frontier of capitalisation in the world-system to the core states. This frontier inversion is driven by new accumulation imperatives, which have arisen as capital accumulation experiences increasingly acute world-ecological contradictions (Moore 2015, 2017, 2018; Welsh 2017a, 2019d, 2020; see also Felli 2014). This inversion has stimulated an intensification of what are actually perennial techniques of primitive accumulation through surplus appropriation across the core states (see Bin 2019; Bonefeld 2001; De Angelis 2001; Glassman 2006: 615; Harvey 2004; Perelman 2000), which were previously experienced mainly by the colonised ‘other’ of the global periphery throughout modernity (Federici 2004; Luxemburg 2003; Mies 1986), but which now have returned to the core states with a vengeance.…”