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of the WTO to the boardrooms of the World Bank, from intellectual property laws to
labor legislation in developing countries, from the laboratories of US universities
to the fi eld mapping of genetic materials in Mexico and Costa Rica - that produce a
territory for the 'law' of value to operate on, and where profi t-oriented economic
rationalities can both occur and moreover, contribute to the 'decoding' of the social-
ecological assemblage defi ned by these networks. To the extent that networks are
constituted in such a manner, then an analysis of capitalism, its institutions and its
imperatives is clearly on the table. And to the extent that these 'hold together', then
Harvey is entirely correct to call attention to how the drive for profi t can draw new
places and new ecologies in relation, and how capitalism can 'reterritorialize' the earth
(Braun, 2006, p. 217).
Braun has, then, treated two problems, that of Marxism's capital-centred produc-
tion of nature and that of a pre-given capital logic capable of making the world a
refl ection of itself. He proposes, via Deleuze, Guattari, and others in the immanentist
tradition of thought that the 'plane of immanence' is the way to handle these two
problems. The plane of immanence requires we pose once again the question of an
outside to capital. (Although we do this differently than O'Connor: Braun would
seem to disagree with O'Connor that conditions of capitalist production are not
produced by capital, as if the dividing line could be drawn easily.) Why? Because
we refuse to see capital as a reality 'underlying' other entities or as self-organising
according to a predetermined law. The plane of immanence also places 'man' in the
same domain of action as non-human entities. That which appears to be a human
accomplishment is merely an effect, a joint accomplishment of humans and non-
humans alike: an accomplishment that occurs without sublation, even while the
opposite seems to be the case.
8
(See Box 17.5.)
The advantage of the plane of immanence as deployed by Braun - see Box 17.5
for comparisons with the 'Second contradiction of capitalism' and 'production of
nature' approaches - is its refusal to accept natural orders that not only constrain
unnecessarily our notions of who and how humans and non-humans might 'become',
but that have been all too useful in the exploitation of humans and non-humans
alike. At the same time the plane of immanence does not suggest that all things are
possible at all times - it understands the, let us say, stickiness of assemblages. Some
Marxists worry that these post-structural approaches lose the specifi city of capital-
ism by dissolving it into its context or argue that Marx already went some way in
accounting for them (e.g., Kirsch and Mitchell, 2004). But even these scholars, many
of them at least, appreciate that Marx left themes undeveloped and that it is ulti-
mately to the good to keep to a range of sources and ideas. Whether Marxism is
amenable to Braun's read of capitalism also depends on how we read Marx. Doubt-
less, by the time he wrote
Capital
Marx was primarily interested in theorising capi-
talism as such, whilst also holding to the notion that given capitalist formations
were rarely
only
capitalistic. This put him in a jam. It is by no means easy to capture
the relationality he wished to convey, a capitalism that was expanding, yet mutually
defi ned in specifi c circumstances by the forces with which it contended. So, that
capitalism
here
differs from
there;
that different factions of capital (money capital
versus productive capital versus commodity capital) have variable spatial and tem-
poral mobility; that these mobilities have to be locally established, and heteroge-
neously so, to use Braun's term - these are realities that geographers are well
positioned to appreciate. Braun's critique taps into another enduring theme of
Marxist geography. Geographical Marxists have, as a group, always been leery of
