Li Shule: Four Dimensions of Foreign Left-wing Scholars' Spatial Critique of 21st-Century Capitalism
By consciously constructing its own space, capitalism reproduces an abstract space that sustains its own development, ultimately concealing the "space of order" within the "order of space." This is not only the foundation upon which capitalism establishes its spatial dominance but also a significant reason for its survival. In response, scholars such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, and Manuel Castells have taken the production of space as a central axis, using social space as the research starting point for a spatial critique of capitalism. In the transition from the 20th-century production of capitalist space to the 21st-century global production of space, social spaces that were previously clearly layered have begun to manifest in complex states of interpenetration, combination, and superposition. Consequently, the scalar characteristics of social space hidden within capitalist spatial forms have become increasingly apparent. Although Lefebvre attended to the issue of scale—from local politics to the state and even the global—the scalar characteristics of capitalist social space had not yet fully exposed themselves at that time. Since the 1990s, scholars like Harvey, Neil Smith, and Doreen Massey began preliminary explorations into the political-economic significance of spatial scale; entering the 21st century, foreign Leftist scholars have formed a new perspective on the spatial critique of capitalism by revealing the production mechanisms and internal correlations of different spatial scales under new forms of capitalism. Harvey and Smith, in particular, regard the "production of spatial scale" as the key to understanding the 21st-century capitalist world.
Past production of space was based on the reality of generalized urbanization; however, with the development of dynamic modes of global capital accumulation, capital has become increasingly concentrated in specific urban spaces. Through the reorganization of urban spatial scales, capitalism has formed the "global city" as a unique territorial form. To maintain the stability of global cities, capitalism utilizes the transmutation of state spatial scales to form "new state spaces" that consolidate the spatio-temporal relations of capital accumulation. For the sake of continuous capital accumulation, capitalism extends from the reorganization of urban scales and the transmutation of state scales to the reconfiguration of global spatial scales, elevating original micro-level spatio-temporal relations into a macro-level and asymmetrical spatial order, thereby constructing a "new world system." To make the global spatial scale serve capital accumulation, capitalism must obtain new modes of value production by creating hierarchical differences in the scale of the body space, using these to adjust the global deployment of capital. It is precisely based on these new changes and characteristics of 21st-century capitalism—from generalized urbanization to global cities, from state space to new state space, from the world system to the new world system, and from the disciplined body to the production of the scaled body—that foreign Leftist scholars have formed a fourfold dimension of critique: the global city critique, the new state space critique, the new world system critique, and the body space critique.
I. The Dimension of Global City Critique
Entering the 21st century, regional metropolises based on "Fordist-Keynesian" mass production have gradually transformed into strategic nodes of global and European financial networks. Capitalism has integrated metropolitan cities into the cycles of global capital accumulation, making them the economic engines of national prosperity. As urban problems evolve into problems of scale, the city and its region have become strategic sites for regulatory experimentation, institutional innovation, and socio-political struggle. "Scale is no longer synonymous with a uniform social function... but is increasingly seen as the concrete expression of diverse and overlapping political-economic processes." The concept of the "global city" proposed by Saskia Sassen points out that capitalist spatial production has formed a mode that is spatially dispersed but organizationally integrated, while new forms of capital flow and concentration have turned a small number of global cities into transnational economic spaces, specialized technological spaces, and highly specialized workspaces for the operation of domestic and foreign firms. The global city itself possesses a unique spatial configuration, internal dynamics, and social structure; in essence, it is a unit of capital space driven bidirectionally by internal and external forces, with New York, London, and Tokyo as its archetypal cities. The 2008 global financial crisis precisely revealed that the "global city" has become the most important site for the intensification and eruption of spatial contradictions. It is evident that 21st-century capitalism, using the global city as a source, has shaped new scalar spaces from the outside in, further exacerbating spatial differentiation and the exploitation of urban dwellers. Therefore, foreign Leftist scholars take the critique of the global city as a vital dimension of the 21st-century spatial critique of capitalism, analyzing and examining it from two aspects: the global city landscape and the geographic network of power of global cities.
1. Critique of the Global City Landscape
The urban landscape is a microcosm of social relations in time and space, and the production of the global city landscape highlights the trend of fusion between local and global scales. Oriented toward global city competition, capitalism uses the production and consumption of landscapes as a means to maintain economic vitality. Whether they are traditional spaces like residential or administrative districts, or new spaces like (ethnic or racial) enclaves [1] and slums, all have become tools for capital segregation and class differentiation. As a new scalar space and order, the global city landscape represents the highest stage of 21st-century capitalism’s planning of all urban spaces in accordance with its own interests. Foreign Leftist scholars aim to reveal the constantly changing global city landscape and thereby critique the various modes of exploitation within it.
Capital, government, media, and consumer tastes jointly drive the renewal and reconfiguration of the urban landscape, giving rise to "the urban dweller’s longing for authentic origins." Sharon Zukin pioneeringly redefined "authenticity" as the cultural right of all people to live and work in the city, using it as a powerful weapon in the struggle against capital’s power to control urban space. However, capitalism has seized the power to define "authenticity," reducing it to a carefully selected lifestyle or performance. The ecosystem of "local shopping streets" as sites for the construction of authenticity is gradually destroyed by "gentrification" and "hipsterfication" [2] during the construction of global cities, causing low-income locals, transnational immigrants, and ethnic minorities to progressively lose their sense of spatial belonging. Thus, the spatial contradictions between nations, between races, and between the Global North and South within the global city—as well as the contradiction between globalized super-diversity and the authenticity and spatial belonging of local socio-ecological structures—are the results of the violent seizure of human spatial rights by the power of capital. The global city has become a "hidden site" for the exploitation of cultural and emotional value.
Capitalism continuously carries out "creative destruction" within global cities, while simultaneously updating the urban landscape based on consumption and desire. Marshall Berman, through his analysis of a century of development in New York’s Times Square, pointed out that the signs, culture, and ideology spawned by the logic of consumption and desire—with the aid of modern information technology—manifest as diversified urban landscapes of consumption. This transcends distance in the geographic sense and achieves a permanent presence in Times Square, ultimately abstracting the process of fusion between global and local scales of social space. Berman calls on people to actively participate in the construction of the urban landscape through the "right to the city," resisting the global urbanization and spatial production of capital to reproduce a more vibrant modern city.
Furthermore, the new round of "glocalization" [3] strategies and scalar reorganizations spawned by the global city landscape further intensify the differentiation and territorial imbalance of core nodes within the urban network system. Based on Sassen’s definition of the new features of global cities, Mike Davis, in discussing the birth and polarization of the slum landscape, pointed out that the emergence of "slum cities" is an expression of the failure of modern urbanization, with the global city as a whole exhibiting characteristics of inequality and instability. From Rio de Janeiro to Mumbai, slums have become the "new normal" of the global city spatial order. The extreme expansion of the poverty landscape in 21st-century global cities has led to severe economic, social, political, and environmental consequences; therefore, it is necessary to launch resistance movements against the capitalist production of space with the slum as the core, which will become an emerging force against the capitalist global city landscape. This conclusion aligns with Smith’s "revanchist city" [4] and Harvey’s "opening up cities for anti-capitalist struggle."
2. Critique of the Geographic Network of Power of Global Cities
Global cities are the technological, specialized, and transnational financial spaces of capital; their internal industrial structures and spatial forms indicate that "these cities need to be fed." As the "internal space" of capital, the global city is the core of the system of spatial production and consumption, extending trade and production networks to the peripheral non-metropolitan world through its influence. Through this, First World cities engage in asymmetrical exchange, exploitation, and domination of Third World cities and rural areas, while the non-metropolitan world feeds the global cities—the key organizational nodes in the network of global economic life—and is forced to rely on such unequal relationships and complex global city networks to solve its own sustainability issues. Along with the continuous concentration of the political economy of global cities, they have reconfigured previous patterns of geopolitics and power, gradually becoming the "engine" of global spatial production.
With the global city at its core, 21st-century capitalism has shaped a new round of global spatial order from the inside out. The primary function of global cities is to promote the economic development of surrounding areas or nations through "competitive attachment" within the "space of flows." In other words, global cities achieve the adhesion of their own "pan-regions" to the macro global scale from the inside. Sassen not only analyzed the basic characteristics and operation of global cities from the perspective of capital accumulation but also emphasized that the economic power possessed by global cities in banking, finance, and professional services determines their dominance over the global city network. Massey developed Sassen’s argument, understanding the global city as the center of a geographic network of extensive social power relations. "The key 'command points' in the network are today’s 'global cities,' and these cities 'rule the world.'" Through asymmetrical exchanges of wealth and power, capitalism increasingly concentrates within global cities, thereby shaping a highly hierarchical geographic network of capital power. However, such a geographic network of power is not static; "each city tries to climb up its own hierarchical network or the direction most suitable for its future development." For this reason, competition among regions, nations, and cities for developmental capital has become sharper, increasingly manifesting as "excessive" urbanization construction worldwide, which ultimately results in worldwide "deterritorialization" and the "de-agriculturalization" of national policies. Therefore, as an important mirror of new means of spatial exploitation and spatial dominance, the geographic network of power of global cities has become a core issue in the 21st-century spatial critique of capitalism.
II. The Dimension of New State Space Critique
The production of global city space and the global city system constructed with it as the core are precisely what drive spatial changes in the form of the state through globalization. In this process, the state becomes globalized even as it fragments. Lefebvre pointed out in his theory of the production of state space that one should not assume a unidirectional relationship between the economic base and the superstructure, but should instead understand the spatial characteristics of the state through the dialectical relationship between different scales—local, regional, national, and global. In response, Neil Brenner further pointed out that "Lefebvre’s analysis of the state mode of production can be widely applied to analyze the 'neoliberal' form of state reconfiguration that unfolded on a global scale in the last two decades of the 20th century." Based on this, Brenner proposed that the production of new state space is the interactive transmutation of new boundaries and new scales within the old model of state spatial layering. In the 21st century, "one of the most important geographical impacts of capital globalization is that accumulation, urbanization, and state regulation are no longer concentrated at the national scale, but are rising in new sub-national and supra-national territorial spaces." Based on the dimension of new state space critique, foreign Leftist scholars have not only pointed out the fact of geopolitical critique triggered by the reorganization of state space but have also revealed changes in the scale of new state space.
1. Geopolitical Critique Triggered by the Reorganization of State Space
The state is no longer a fixed, pre-given "container," but a dynamic, multidimensional spatial form. It is constantly reconstructed through regulatory strategies and socio-political struggles across different spheres and scales, attempting to construct a new state space by moving beyond the territorial logic and sovereign analysis methods of traditional state space. If the past accumulation of capital, urbanization, state-building, and even globalization were centered on the scale of the state space, then the new state space of 21st-century capitalism will no longer possess a spatial scale that holds a privileged status. Regarding this new state space, it is undergoing a dynamic "internal-external" deformation: namely, the fierce geopolitical conflicts brought about by its external borders and the socio-political power struggles stimulated within.
The political boundaries of capitalist state space are undergoing a profound reconstruction, specifically manifesting as the "territorial state re-replicating external boundaries in the form of 'internal borders'" and reproducing new spatial boundaries. However, this process is essentially a spatial representation of the outward expansion of capital power. On the one hand, capitalism has partially opened state borders to absorb migrant workers to meet the practical needs of capital production; on the other hand, it reintroduces old colonial legacies into political space, promoting the "re-colonization of migrants," which includes spatial segregation, discriminatory institutional violence, nationalistic ideological violence, and the pursuit of undocumented immigrants. In this regard, Étienne Balibar points out that the capitalist state vacillates between old and new spatial architectures, causing the relationship between exclusion and inclusion to become extremely strained. Such a community is not only unable to achieve true totalization but is also "the massive negation of the very idea of a community of citizens... state and citizenship contradict each other more than ever. This is not just a question of a general and almost fictional opposition." [5] Consequently, the question of borders is no longer a marginal issue of politics; it "affects all dimensions of the civic space: not only the geographical space where civic life unfolds but also the symbolic and institutional spaces"—the social space of human existence and life. This necessitates the construction of truly "democratized borders" to overcome the complex geopolitical contradictions triggered by capitalist state space.
Differing from Balibar’s view, Neil Davidson emphasizes that unlike the traditional territorial state, the unique function of the new state space lies in maintaining "the most basic link in the competitive accumulation of commodities," while simultaneously "regulating competing capitals to prevent market relations from degenerating into a 'war of all against all.'" Therefore, the capitalist state must have clear boundaries. This boundary is essentially a spatial limit of accumulation, determined by the "structural coherence of production and consumption in a specific space." In this way, he unifies the competition upon which capitalism depends for survival with the geopolitical competition of the state, arriving at the conclusion that "the trajectory of geo-economic competition ultimately ends in geopolitical competition."
2. Critique of the scale of the new state space
On the basis of Harvey’s spatial theory, Bob Jessop initiated a critique of the scale of the new state space of the 21st century by introducing the two concepts of "spatio-temporal positioning" and "spatial scale." In his view, capitalism "naturally possesses a necessary temporal structure... involving a recurrent cyclical dynamic equilibrium between self-stabilization, continuous self-transformation, reconstruction induced by occasional crises, and other forms of change. These factors are often linked to new patterns of time-space distantiation and time-space compression, as well as shifts in dominant spatio-temporal perspectives and dominant spaces of accumulation." New time-space distantiation and time-space compression have destroyed the spatial order previously centered on the state spatial scale. Regarding "which spatial scale will become primary, which scale will serve as the mediator for articulating other scales, and so on," a continuous struggle will unfold regarding the future of capitalism.
Building on this, Brenner analyzes the dilemma of the general imbalance between capital accumulation, state governance, urbanization, and socio-political struggle faced by capitalism at the scale of state space. He points out that although capitalism can respond to these crises through three strategies—re-territorialization of the state, re-bordering of the state, and rescaling of the state—the first two strategies find it difficult to fundamentally resolve the internal contradictions of capitalist state space. Only through rescaling can capitalism adjust the relational structure of social spatial forms and achieve a dynamic balance between the scaling of social processes, rescale reorganization, and highly asymmetrical social power relations. Thus, the new state space of capitalism is a social space that "deploys state apparatuses to regulate social relations and influence their locational forms in ways that are territorial, local, and scale-specific." On the one hand, the new state space accelerates the circulation of capital and achieves the reproduction of labor in specific regions; on the other hand, it "creates a geography and structure of inclusion/exclusion and dominance/subordination." In this way, it modifies the relational structure of specific social spatial forms and prescribes their relative positions within the global capitalist system of uneven spatial development. However, 21st-century capitalism cannot limitlessly conduct "scalar fixes" to shape new state spatial forms, because any concrete spatial order and spatial regulation cannot escape dependency on existing paths. This process is not a "simple transition from one stable regulatory framework to another; they are path-dependent processes of layering." This indicates that the socio-political struggle of the proletariat triggered by the critique of the scale of the new state space will become the practical path for shaping the socialist space of difference.
III. The Critical Dimension of the New World System
With the adjustment of spatial production strategies within capitalism, sub-national and supra-national scales have seized the ability of the individual state to construct world order. This is because the traditional state-centric system is gradually being replaced by a more decentralized, networked power structure; this power is no longer restricted by national borders but unfolds through a global network of social spaces. The new power structure blurs the boundaries of sovereign radiation, producing "a world defined by a new, complex regime of difference, homogeneity, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization," which heralds the vista of a new world system. As Soja states, the three-dimensional supra-national global political-economic distinction, along with its internal power-geographic structure, is replacing the old international division of labor of the First, Second, and Third Worlds, as well as the popular metaphors of core and periphery: the North-South divide. The new world system is neither the "state scale–world system" proposed by Immanuel M. Wallerstein, nor the "global scale–world system" understood by scholars such as Kenichi Ohmae, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Rather, it is "a multi-scalar reconfiguration of the capitalist social architecture, coupled with a reorganization of entrenched scalar hierarchies, which leads to a brand-new geography of capital accumulation, state regulation, and uneven development." Therefore, the characteristics of the new world system must be grasped through the dual tension between the global scale and the state scale.
1. Critique of uneven geographical environments
When capital diffuses from closed territorial states into global space, the logic of capital necessarily drives the logic of territory to achieve a dual expansion of capital power space and production space. Harvey points out that the leap of capitalism from the state scale to the global scale "inevitably arises from the molecular process of capital accumulation in time and space." Thus, one cannot ignore the impact of uneven geographical environments on the world system. This is because "uneven geographical environments are not merely caused by the uneven distribution of resource endowments and the advantages or disadvantages of geographical location; more importantly, they are caused by the increasing concentration of wealth and power in certain regions through asymmetrical exchange." On this basis, Harvey emphasizes that the core of the new world system lies in exploiting uneven geographical environments and utilizing the "asymmetrical" relationships necessarily generated by spatial exchange to conduct capital accumulation, including "accumulation by dispossession," "spatio-temporal fixes," and the "reconstruction of geographical landscapes" across global space. Building on Harvey, Smith emphasizes that through the production of space, capitalism integrates many external geographical spaces into spaces for capital production and accumulation, seeking means of production, exploiting cheap labor, and developing new materials therein. Through this type of spatial exploitation, capitalism produces spaces of "'underdeveloped development' at the heart of uneven development" and establishes a global spatial order by relying on its own "spatial advantage." Therefore, the new world system of capitalism is the connection of uneven geographical environmental differences across various scales through the global spatial scale, constructing a new power architecture of global space.
Building a new world system under rescaling is an inevitable product of global spatial production, as well as a product of the internal contradictions and crises of capitalism. Taking the 2008 financial crisis as a dividing line, neoliberalism failed to successfully overcome the contradictions that led to the collapse of long-term prosperity and the subsequent persistent crisis. The transnational capitalist class no longer regards the "Washington Consensus" as a common ideology, turning instead to localism to oppose globalization and to populism to resist the global flow of people. The anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements in late-developing or peripheral countries have severely impacted the global spatial order under the new world system. In response, Alex Callinicos, based on geographical "uneven and combined development," points out that "economically integrated complexes of spatial concentration generated by capitalist development create very powerful centrifugal forces that will strongly maintain the political division of the world into territorial states." However, due to uneven development in geographical space, the new world system possesses the essential characteristic of a "globally uneven distribution of the relative power of states." Under the background of the relative decline of U.S. economic strength, this distribution pattern may be constrained by diversified spatial forces within the capitalist system, and may also face challenges from the resistance of late-developing countries against the global spatial order dominated by the logic of capital.
2. Critique of New Imperialism
Admittedly, capitalism has broken away from the state scale, but "the infinite accumulation of capital must be based on the infinite accumulation of power... the process of infinite capital accumulation requires the political structure to possess a 'process of infinite power accumulation' to protect ever-growing wealth through the power to maintain growth." The result is that the new world system inevitably gives rise to a global form of new imperialism. On the basis of Giovanni Arrighi’s dichotomy of the logic of capital and the logic of territory, Harvey points out that "new imperialism" is the product of combining "the politics of state and empire" with the "molecular process of capital accumulation in time and space." Callinicos further emphasizes, "I prefer to conceptualize capitalist imperialism as the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition." This not only reveals the fact that capitalism competes for dominant positions on a global spatial scale but also deepens the dialectical relationship between the logic of capital and the logic of territory. Furthermore, slightly different from Harvey is Ellen Meiksins Wood. In her view, for transnational capital to achieve the leap from the state scale to the global scale in the context of globalization, it must construct a "global system of multiple local states" in geographical space. This emerging political power architecture is centered on safeguarding the interests of the "Empire of Capital": on the one hand, it promotes the globalization of market laws through spatial units such as sovereign states and supra-national organizations, constructing a global order dominated by economic power; on the other hand, it establishes forms of hegemonic expression through the mode of "infinite war." Essentially, this new imperialist model, which Wood calls "capitalist imperialism," is formed within the dual tension between the state spatial scale and the global spatial scale. The long-term turmoil and instability of the new world system are precisely profound manifestations of the contradictory and irrational nature of capital’s spatial domination of the world.
However, this mode of analysis has met with criticism from Neil Davidson. He argues that [Giovanni] Arrighi, [David] Harvey, and [Alex] Callinicos "all start from different territorial and economic logics to arrive at very similar conclusions... this is a more realistic perspective... but this analytical path does not allow for any deeper internal relations." In response, if one does not view this issue from the theoretical perspective of the "production of scale," it is easy to become trapped in the cage of Davidson’s critique. It must be clarified that the new world system of capitalism is neither a "completely balanced and smooth space" nor a simple reversion to old-style national spatial configurations. In essence, the new world system is a spatio-temporal framework capable of accommodating plural spatial forms and multi-layered spatial scales. Within this framework, the tension between the logic of capital and the logic of territory reflects a complex process of reorganization and reconfiguration of national spatial scales and global spatial scales, while "new imperialism" encapsulates the spatial order and power logic that capitalism attempts to create during this process. Therefore, the analytical approach of capital logic and territorial logic, far from dissolving the deep-seated internal logic of the new world system, further activates the theoretical vitality of spatial critique. Based on this, Theotonio Dos Santos, after conducting a systematic analysis of imperialism and dependency, pointed out that the "antagonisms within imperialism, its external antagonisms with the proletariat and the socialist system representing it, and the high degree of concentration already reached in international relations within capitalism" are precisely the fundamental reasons for the constant geopolitical conflicts in the contemporary world system.
IV. The Dimension of the Critique of Body-Space
Capitalism creates a spatial pattern of uneven development through the production of different spatial scales, using this to consolidate the spatio-temporal circulatory mechanism of global capital accumulation. This process not only reflects how capitalism exacerbates spatial contradictions across three scales—the reorganization of urban spatial scales, the transmutation of national spatial scales, and the reconfiguration of global spatial scales—but also ultimately grounds these contradictions in the ultimate logic of global spatial exploitation: the exploitation of body-space. The scalarization of the spatio-temporal structure of global capital accumulation causes the human body-space to exhibit distinct scalar characteristics. The bodies of workers are differentially embedded into the multiple spatial scales of global capital circulation, whereby the contradiction between labor and capital gradually becomes spatialized. To further seize space for the accumulation of greater surplus value, capitalism even integrates biopolitical mechanisms into its logic of exploitation, ultimately achieving all-around control from body-space to the production of life itself. Addressing this issue, foreign leftist scholars have opened a new dimension of capitalism's spatial critique based on [Henri] Lefebvre’s assertion that "the production of space begins with the production of the body." They emphasize that the history of body-space is a history of continuous vertical differentiation and re-differentiation, eventually forming a highly hierarchical network of social space. In the 21st century, capitalism, through the production of body-space scales, intensifies scalar control while extracting surplus value by manufacturing hierarchical differences in body-space. Furthermore, capital co-opts plural subjects through the internal space of the "Crystal Palace" [11] and creates a new "immunity dilemma" [12] at the cost of marginalized groups. Its mechanism of exploitation has transcended the control of passive body-space by traditional biopolitics and spatial discipline, turning instead toward the "communal exploitation" of discrete and plural spatial subjects.
- The Critique of the Political Economy of Body-Space
Precisely because the spatial production of the body constitutes the original starting point of all spatial production activities, "total (social) space begins with the body... the roots of (spatial) order can only be explained according to... the order of the body." Through the production of spatial scales, 21st-century capitalism connects the most microscopic body-space with the macroscopic space of "globalization." This not only leads to space's "forgetting" of the body but also triggers a radical rupture between space and the body, even ultimately dissolving the existential value of the body. Building on Lefebvre’s discourse on body-space, Harvey further points out: "The body cannot be understood theoretically or empirically without an understanding of globalization." The spatial logic of capitalist globalization draws the bodies of individuals, originally on different spatial scales, into complex spatial reorganizations and scalar reconfigurations. "Those who sell their labor power... the uneven development of their bodily practices and sensibilities becomes one of the defining features of the class struggle initiated by both capital and labor." This spatial difference internalized within the individual body not only determines the relative position of the laborer in the global circulation of capital but also causes them to suffer varying degrees of exploitation during the "production-exchange-consumption" cycle of variable capital. More crucially, capitalism, through "unemployment resulting from downsizing, the redefinition of skills and skill-based remuneration, the intensification of the labor process and despotic surveillance systems, the increasingly despotic nature of the detailed division of labor, the involvement of migrants... has facilitated the uneven geographical value of the individual laborer." From this perspective, capitalism creates value differentials of workers' bodies across different geographical environments through the production of space. This not only constitutes the basis for the spatial division of labor under capitalism but has been developed into an important strategy for dividing the working class. Thus, Harvey emphasizes that 21st-century capitalism is no longer satisfied with exploiting individual bodies in fixed time and space; rather, it has constructed a "body-scale" system to measure value differentials, thereby achieving communal exploitation of discrete and plural spatial subjects.
Building on Harvey’s theoretical lineage, [Neil] Smith further deepened the internal connection between the production of spatial scale and the unevenness of capitalist development, clearly stating: "The construction of scale is essentially a social process; it both arises from social activity and is in turn shaped by the structure of geo-social interaction... the field of the production of scale often hides intense political struggle." Among many spatial scales, the scale of body-space plays a foundational role; it is the key link connecting all spatial scales. This means that capitalism’s manipulation of body-space has a dual aspect: it is both an intensification of the boundaries of various spatial scales and a core strategy for driving spatial differentiation. The capitalist system constructs the body by producing discourses such as gender, race, and identity, and employs highly spatialized strategies to implement control and discipline over bodily boundaries. This logic of control not only permeates microscopic spatial scales such as the family and the community but also extends into the realm of public space, imposing closed spatial configurations and bodily-based exclusion mechanisms upon what should be open public spaces. Taking the phenomenon of "the homeless occupying public space" as an example, Smith reveals the spatial exclusion mechanism whereby their visibility is continuously erased by alien forces, and they are systematically moved to shelters, outside buildings and parks, to impoverished neighborhoods, urban fringes, and other marginal spaces. Through this analysis, Smith profoundly elucidates how, once body-space is incorporated into the capitalist system of scalar production, holistic domination is achieved, ranging from the microscopic scale of body-space to the macroscopic scale of global space.
- The Critique of the Vital Ontology of Body-Space
On the basis of Lefebvre’s meta-theory of body-space, in addition to the political-economic critique of body-space by Harvey and Smith, there exists a more "hidden" path of critique—the critique of vital ontology. In Lefebvre’s view, although space is often regarded as an objective existence relative to the subject, this does not mean the subjective dimension is absent from space. "Each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space... before it exerts an influence on the material field, before it produces itself by drawing nourishment from that field, and before it reproduces itself by producing other bodies." Here, life is regarded as the true ontology of body-space; the life of the subject and space are directly identical. P[eter] Sloterdijk, through a series of imaginative spatial metaphors such as "bubbles," "spheres," and "foam," developed and constituted a dimension of vital ontological critique regarding body-space.
Sloterdijk reinterprets the "body-space" relationship from the perspective of vital ontology. He places the body truly at the core of human spatial relations, revealing how humans continuously produce, expand, and reconstruct their own existence within microscopic and macroscopic spatial configurations. Based on the spatial imagery of "bubbles-spheres-foam," he points out that globalization is not only the globalization of the macroscopic sphere but also the infinite proliferation of microscopic bubbles. "The distinctive sign that globality has been established is the compulsion to become neighbors with countless accidental co-existents." The encounters of bubbles cause the foam to gradually "brew a state of existence most suitable for living organisms, a tranquil state similar to that of a living organism in the womb." The paradigm of this space is the "Crystal Palace"—it is the concentrated manifestation of capital's internal space. The Crystal Palace is a giant bubble where all commodities, money, symbols, and images converge. This "indulgent" space (Verwöhnungsraum) [13] inevitably creates an opposing, darker, and more dangerous external space; those subjects and spaces cast outside the internal space of capital can only survive and live in risk. This is precisely a denigration of the authentic vital logic of human spatial production. "Exclusivity is a property inherent to projects like the Crystal Palace... the expression 'globalized world' refers only to the mobile facilities that serve as the 'life-world' for that group of people among humanity who possess purchasing power." As for the "othered" spaces outside the mainstream (such as Third World countries and slums), they are isolated in the periphery.
V. Conclusion
The research shift of foreign leftist scholars from the "production of space" to the "production of spatial scale" is not intended to negate the basic theoretical paradigms of the critique of capitalist space established by scholars like Lefebvre. Rather, it is to reflect the new morphological characteristics of multi-scale interconnectedness and spatial coexistence presented by 21st-century capitalism. In terms of theoretical lineage, they have both inherited the methodological traditions of 20th-century spatial critique—especially Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism—and responded to contemporary issues such as spatial reorganization and the lack of spatial justice under the background of neoliberal globalization. The four dimensions of the foreign leftist scholars’ critique of 21st-century capitalist space constitute an interlocking logical whole: the dimension of the critique of global cities views global cities as the source of global spatial production, constituting the logical starting point; the dimension of the critique of new national space reveals the spatial differentiation triggered by global cities, causing capitalist regulatory mechanisms to break through the limitations of traditional national spatial scales, constituting a logical extension of the global city critique; the dimension of the critique of the new world system focuses on the new power structure formed by the multi-scalar dispersal of power within national space, constituting a logical deepening of the new national space critique; and the dimension of the critique of body-space focuses on the communal exploitation suffered by discrete and plural spatial subjects, constituting the logical aim of spatial critique. The spatial critique of 21st-century capitalism by foreign leftist scholars provides important theoretical contributions. It not only reveals the holistic essence and operational mechanisms of capitalist spatial domination across macroscopic and microscopic scales but also deeply analyzes the deep-seated roots of the dilemma surrounding the turnover of capitalist political alliances and regional economic-political groups. Clearly, the leftist movement can only establish its political demands and guide the future direction of radical politics if it responds to these dilemmas at the level of spatial scale. However, there are also points open to debate in the foreign leftist scholars’ spatial critique of 21st-century capitalism: first, they fail to fully grasp the internal tension between the "production of spatial scale" and the "production of space," leaving their theories prone to the trap of "scalar-centrism"; second, they have weakened the core position of the Marxist class analysis method, which diminishes the theoretical force of their spatial critique; third, their theories lack an effective intermediary to connect spatial critique with revolutionary practice, ultimately limiting the ability to transform theory into reality. These problems precisely reflect the dilemmas and limitations existing in the theoretical development and innovation of foreign leftist scholars' spatial critique of 21st-century capitalism.
(Affiliation: School of Marxism, Guangzhou University) Source: World Philosophy, Issue 3, 2025 Web Editor: Zhang Jian