| Liberalist and Marxist concepts of wealth are problematic to geographic understandings. Rather than producing integrative analyses of complex relationships, among often distant people, and between people and their worlds, wealth as conceived in these two traditions enforces the status quo, impeding understanding and change. The dissertation develops a concept of wealth that transcends Liberalist definitions based in market valuation, and Marxist understandings of wealth as arising solely through the exploitation of disempowered waged laborers. Referring to Marx's original formulation of value as based in usefulness, it asserts that wealth arises from living beings, all of whom value the usefulness of their production. That valuing is demonstrated by life's preference for increasing, rather than decreasing, useful wealth. Both of these dominant sciences of wealth are also infused with human exceptionalism in ways that dichotomize geographic analyses at the boundary of industrial production. By recognizing all lively production as self-valuing, the dissertation demonstrates that non-marketized and nonhuman wealths are considerable. Furthermore, as use values, wealths are functionally indistinguishable.; Marxist and Liberalist metaphors for self are central to their notions of wealth and relationship, and are also problematic to geographic analysis. The work asserts that living beings are not like atoms, located solely by the space bodies occupy, as Liberalists suggest. Nor are humans solely the result of processes, as Marxists imagine. It develops a metaphor for self based in "coherence," and asserts that all beings affect and are affected by processes that produce certain spatial flows and effects. Using wealths to strengthen and extend coherence into space-time is among life's primary impulsions. Wealth, self, and space form the basis of an analytic framework that allows the integration of disparate processes. The work refers to the "Asian financial crisis," begun in 1997, to demonstrate how increased forest destruction and lung disease in Indonesia, and rising global temperatures and stock market prices in the North Atlantic can be understood as manifestations of a single process. The work goes on to develop "situatedness" (social cohesion) as a moral standard, a function that subjectively valued wealth cannot provide. |
