Yet key components within capitalism, Appadurai’s financescapes, tend toward an
abstract logic (Carrier and Miller, 1998) that, precisely because they are so abstract and
mobile, have a powerful effect on more grounded kinds of capital and other flows.
Dimensionless finance capital moves almost instantaneously and with few barriers (of
course, a goal of neoliberalism is to reduce all those barriers except those needed to
regulate ownership and other ‘rules of the game’ enabling flows). Since dimensionless
finance allows for instantaneous numerical comparison across space, such capital has an
enormous advantage in terms of taking the initiative (that is, in causation) over other
potentially mobile categories, such as working people, natural resources that can become
commodities, etc. The cost comparison between badly paid labor in Mexico and worse
paid labor in China is easy to make, causing the shift of light manufacturing from one
to the other, whereas Mexican workers cannot meaningfully compare their lives and
move to China. To take another Mexican example, similar workers can and do ‘choose’
locations, by moving to the United States, but even there they adapt their choice of
locations to follow previous locational decisions by capitalists such as large meatpacking
firms after a period of refinance and restructuring (Stull et al., 1995).
This is not to say that finance capitalism is all determining. Ideas can move quite
quickly on the infrastructure provided by capitalism, and although some are rather
obviously orchestrated by marketing capitalists and nation-states, what people communicate
and what they envision of the world is not so easily determined or controlled.
Appadurai points to the dimension of imagination as standing out in a distinct fashion
among cultural flows. And we can come up with a number of other, parallel instances
of non-determinism for other scapes. Without denying these points about the incompleteness
of causal coherence – with which we agree – we are simply arguing, from the
perspective of a flexible Marxism, for a partial hierarchy in the mutual interactions of
mobile elements, centered on the peculiar powers of dimensionless capital. And we offer
this less to vindicate academic Marxism than to demonstrate that we need to go beyond
the rhetoric of disjuncture or irony. Simply taking the flows apart into a kaleidoscope of
categories and suggesting that they intersect in unpredictable ways is energizing, but in
the long run analytically unsatisfactory.4We should seek, rather, painstakingly to specify
relationships among processes in grounded places and times.