Territory itself has no substance and what motivate people are interest which are, by

definition, substantive in carácter: the refer to things, perhaps symbols, that people wants.

There is something that I will call the social process that is separate from the capitalism. But
capitalism is the energizing moment of that process and continually strives to mobilize those
other conditions for its own purposes.

Pensar la “gentrificación” en la villa 11-14 de retiro.

Países desarrollados/subdesarrollados  Por favoooooorrr!

Nevertheless, the relation between the state on the one hand, and power in society on the
other, including power over geography, is not straightforward.

Government with the intent of harmonizing the activities of different people one with another
has been an omnipresent feature of all social life: the household, kinship, and the various
norms accompanying the, for example. And indeed today these regulatory mechanisms
continue to play a role alongside more historically recent ones like the market. But what is
characteristic of the present era is the role of the state as, in effect, the regulator of regulators:
as the ultimate guarantor –and limiter- through the law, of the social power of others, whether
that of capitalists, husbands, and parents, or that of money in the abstract. In other words,
there can be government without states; but states always entail government.

La tesis es que una soberanía con altos niveles de concentración y unidad del poder tiene
mayor capacidad de resolución de conflictos, en la medida en que su interés es más
homogéneo en un territorio dado. Por el contrario, un poder soberano fragmentario, varios
poderes, que convivan en un mismo territorio, presentarían una disputa de intereses mayor
que impediría la resolución de conflictos (por ejemplo, los ambientales). PATRAÑAS

The position of this book, therefore, is that the logic of capitalist development, its attempt to
subordinate everything else to its purposes and logics, including culture and the state, is
central to understanding the political geography of the contemporary world. It is around these
attempts that struggles over space, over the territorial, ultimately resolve. It may not always
appear that way. It may, rather, seem that struggles around (e.g.) the symbolic character of
particular spaces have an autonomy. But that autonomy is always limited. It has to be
consistent with the logic of making money to make more money. Spaces can be set aside as
(e.g.) Arctic Wildlife Refuges or National Parks. But if there is a sense that oil lurks underneath
then nothing will be sacred.

No discussion of geography and political economy that aspires to coherence and

comprehensiveness can afford to ignore one crucial fact about the times in which we live: the
dominant role of capitalism as a way or organizing production. It has proved itself to be the
great motor of development.  la tiene con el “desarrollo”
A first precondition for capitalism making its historic entry, therefore, is the separation of
immediate producers from the means of production. As we will see, this separation is often of
a forcible, violent kind.

People have become more productive  esto es un enorme supuesto. La gente se volvió
más productiva respecto a qué y en función de qué? Cuando quizá se haya perdido la
capacidad de garantizar la subsistencia individual.

And so far, of all the different property relations through which production has been
organized by far the most successful in developing the forces of production has been
capitalism. This is typically attributed to the way in which it enforces a regime of competition
between firms that stimulates the development of worker productivity.

While stupendously productive, and while developing great social powers, the capitalist
form of development is also one that is deeply problematic. […] Obvious here are the
tensions and contestations between employers and employees around pay and work
conditions. Buy equally there are those that have in the past led to imperialism and
colonialism and, by so doing, generated still more tension and conflict and violence.

…there is also a more complex political geography in which class effects are refracted
by issues of territory. This is a political geography which is only partially captured by
geographies of voting. Two interrelated processes are at work here and both have their
geographic expressions.
The first of these involves a dialectic of action and reaction between the opposing forces
of the worker´s movement on the one hand and the business on the other. Workers seek
to organize themselves collectively so as to enhance their bargaining power with
employers.