Producing Assets
Erik Swyngedouw, Callum Ward
Abstract
This chapter explores the notion of the social life of land under capitalism. It explains that the process of land association is central to all manner of social struggles beyond the distributional impact of the treatment of residential land as a financialised asset in the Global North. Since value grabbing is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism, social conflict unfolds over the distribution and appropriation of the flows of value that circulate in and through privatized assets. The chapter examines how the material flows of social life embedded within land become liquefied in the capital's drive for fungibility. It also highlights how pseudocommodities become central to the contemporary economy.