Spatial Political Economy: Uneven Development and the Production of Nature in Chile

Abstract

This thesis offers a threefold argument about the production of space in peripheral capitalist societies with a focus on Chile. It is based on a cross-cutting analysis of the production of Patagonian space in different moments of capitalist deployment via the constitution of commodity frontiers. First, drawing on the ongoing process of primitive accumulation and the constitution of commodity frontiers in Indigenous space, it argues that the organisation and making of Cheap socio-nature is central to the production of capitalist space. Second, it argues that, along with the production of Cheap socio-nature, capitalism produces its own space to dialectically construct national and subnational scales. Finally, it argues that the capitalist production of socio-nature for surplus extraction is backed, enhanced, and directed by state power based on its spatial strategic selectivity across scales.

The originality of the thesis lies in three aspects. First, the analysis advances spatial political economy (SPE) by centring a theorisation of the production of space as a critical component in uneven development. It understands space as part and parcel of capital's emergent totality which needs to be dialectically analysed through relational geography to understand the seesaw of uneven development. Accordingly, the thesis advances scholarship in SPE by focusing on and integrating Indigenous struggles over the production of absolute space as second nature. Second, this research develops the relevance of subnational scales for the organisation of capitalist development at the national scale. It rejects methodological nationalism as the primary approach to understanding spatial divisions of labour. Finally, in discussing the role of state agencies leading the ISI strategies in Latin America, it addresses a debate gap about development agencies and their role as agents in 'hothousing' for development.