Suppose you have a friendly community of initiate volunteers. Perhaps, on the smallest scale, your community mimics the “clusters” of James Porter, who proposes that like-minded businesses — despite the apparent realities of capitalist competition — tend to gather in geographically close aggregations.
Wall Street. Pittsburgh. Silicon Valley. Detroit.
Maybe you’re not the only economist in Saigon, or the only lawyer in Pittsburgh. Maybe your work, your daily labor, can be explained in terms that do not incorporate the notion of competition.
Is your work — your production — then a portion or component of the economy? Of the capitalist economy? Of the global capitalist economy? Of the neoliberal global capitalist economy?
What if we push it further: do you teach at a college or university? In what ways does your work serve the global neoliberal capitalist economy — and in what ways does it serve other economies and philosophies?
Now: to what extent does this involve geography — or, to put it more broadly — context? John might not ask: when does ideology transcend — or fail to transcend — context?
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