Tourism,capital,and the commodification of place

I Introduction

It is difficult to overstate the economic and social importance of tourism. In 2017, the tourism industries (i.e. the accommodation, recreation, transportation, and other related sectors) were estimated to account for 10.4 per cent of global GDP ($US 8.3 trillion) and 9.9 per cent of total global employment (313.2 million jobs) (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2018: 3). Travel and tourism global GDP is forecast to expand at 3.8 per cent (annually compounding) for the next decade, significantly outstripping the 2.3 per cent forecast by the World Bank for the global economy in general (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2018: 4). What demands attention from geographers is not just the sheer scale of this branch of capital – although its current and forecast prominence are clearly unprecedented – but the transformative power of the tourism industries to reconfigure space and place. The most spectacular of these examples include international theme park attractions such as Walt Disney Parks (with annual attendance of over 150 million people), mega casino developments such as Macau and Las Vegas, the conversion of major cities such as Barcelona and Venice into tourist spectacles, and the redevelopment and transformation of post-industrial landscapes into vast financialised real estate investments targeting a mobile set of affluent consumers.

The production of leisure spaces as vehicles for the accumulation of capital is both highly contested and deeply contradictory. As a form of ‘second nature’ (Smith, 2008), tourism production is frequently described as destroying both nature and culture. Similarly, the subordination of peoples and places as servants of exchange value displaces locals, raises rents, and reduces the quality of life through increased congestion and overcrowding. For Lefebvre (1976), these contradictions necessarily emerge from the dual function of leisure spaces in the reproduction of capital. On one hand, the creation of designated spaces for the recreation of the working classes helps assuage the tensions associated with the exploitative labour relations necessary to the production of value and surplus value. Here tourist consumption ameliorates the ‘universal alienation’ produced by the capitalist system (Harvey, 2014). On the other, leisure is directly commodified as a social relation between capital and labour ‘projected on the ground’ through the ‘large-scale commercialisation of specialised spaces’ that are central to the expansion of capital as an explicitly spatial project (Lefebvre, 1976: 84). Commercial leisure spaces are thus central to the continued expansion of capital because they simultaneously manage the contradictions both of production (i.e. the reproduction labour power through access to leisure space) and of consumption (i.e. the reproduction of capitalist social relations through the social division of labour outside of the production process). For Lefebvre, the very ‘survival of capitalism’ depends on this dialectic relation between spaces of production and spaces of leisure.

Lefebvre’s analysis can be taken further by interrogating the economic bases of tourist spaces themselves. The contradictions that characterise leisure spaces as sites of simultaneous production and consumption are not just a consequence of their importance to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Rather, tourist spaces internalise a fundamental contradiction between the production and realisation of value within the circuit of industrial capital more generally. While value and surplus value are only ever generated in a production process, things can be bought and sold in markets without necessarily bearing value. As Marx puts it (1976 [1867]: 197):

Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc. can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value…the imaginary price-form may also conceal a real value-relation or one derived from it, as for instance the price of uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labour is objectified in it.

The observation that ‘things’ may assume a price but bear no value is fundamentally important. Leisure spaces, even when geared directly to the production and realisation of exchange values, may not, in fact, be productive of value in the Marxian sense. They may, for example, be based largely on the appropriation of the ‘free gifts’ of nature and culture, reliant on expropriation rather than exploitation to extract value. If spaces of consumption do not actually produce value, then what appears to constitute the world’s biggest industry may be entirely ‘fictitious’ in the sense that it is based on claims to value produced elsewhere in the economy rather than on value production proper (Marx, 1981 [1894]: 600). This raises the question of whether spaces of consumption are actually productive of value, or if these are instead great redistributive juggernauts of fictitious capital, allotting revenues from those consumers affluent enough to travel toward financiers, merchants, landowners and the state apparatus. These economic questions have political implications to which we return later in this paper.

To formulate an answer to this larger question, we need to first understand the conditions under which leisure spaces may or may not become commodities, that is, the bearers of value and surplus value. Yet few geographers to date have analysed tourism in terms of its position within capitalist social relations (Gibson, 2008). The most significant contribution remains Britton’s (1991) posthumously-published analysis of the ‘tourism production system’ as a set of interconnected branches of capital that specialise in the production of tourism spaces for profit. Britton called for a programme of research into the commodification processes associated with pleasure travel, including transport, accommodation and attractions, to better understand how leisure space is capitalistically produced. But as Gibson (2009: 532) has pointed out, ‘Despite repeated echoes of his [Britton’s] argument…nearly two decades on, it seems that the wider discipline, and particularly economic geography, has failed to fully acknowledge tourism’. Indeed, tourism has only tended to receive passing mentions in the critical geographical scholarship on the commodification of nature (e.g. Carrier, 2010; Liverman, 2004; Sayer, 2003). This literature has covered the commodification practices that produce food (Cook and Crang, 1996; Hollander, 2003), water (Bakker, 2005; Page, 2005), urban infrastructure (Ekers and Prudham, 2017; Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000), and ecosystem services (Robertson, 2006, 2012), yet has not to date convincingly examined one of the most prevalent forms of the production of nature – that of tourist spaces.

That said, more geographic work on the political economy of tourism has started to emerge since Gibson’s most recent review (e.g. Barua, 2016; Bianchi, 2017; Duffy, 2013; Duffy and Moore, 2010; Eisenschitz, 2016; Griffin, 2016; Mosedale, 2011, 2016). In addition, critical studies have been taking place within the sub-discipline of tourism geography that have extended Britton’s critical agenda in useful directions. These include connecting tourism political economy to: the appropriation of nature (Lopez-Alonso, 2017; Mosedale, 2015); the state and governance (Bramwell, 2011; Bramwell and Lane, 2011; Mosedale, 2016); and commodity chains (Clancy, 2011). At the macro-economic level, literature is emerging which interprets tourism as a spatial fix for the contradictions associated with capital overaccumulation (Fletcher, 2011; Fletcher and Neves, 2012; Yrigoy, 2014). However, none of this work directly takes up the pressing issue of the conditions under which tourist places may or may not produce value or, put differently, whether tourism commodifies place. In part, this is because these questions are complex and geographically contingent. Tourist places, as commodities, appear to incorporate the free gifts of nature and culture with some sort of labour process, while simultaneously being implicated in the production of monopoly rents. Harvey (2017: 102) diagnoses the general situation, writing that:

The mix of free gifts and of commodity values within a tourist package is intriguing. Such labour can also be capitalistically organised and hence contribute to value and surplus value production. This does not obviate the fact that many of the basic use value inputs into the production process of the tourist industry are free goods (e.g. sunny beaches or cultural heritage) which may acquire a money price even if they are of no value (unless they have been recently produced in the course of the invention of history, tradition and culture in the Disney mode).

In this paper we attempt to set the commodification of tourist spaces upon a firm basis in political economy. Specifically, we seek to distinguish the key processes involved in the touristic commodification of place, scaffolding our explanatory framework with Marxian value theory. To do this we first critique the orthodox position that the value of tourist places is best considered in terms of the experiences they produce rather than the socially necessary labour time involved in their production (MacCannell, 1976). We argue that the usual rejection of value theory by studies of tourist commodification is based on a misunderstanding of the intangible and socially-constructed nature of use values, both of which are readily accommodated by value theory. We make this case analytically, adapting previous geographic work on the production of nature to develop a new typology of tourist spaces. We draw distinctions between commodities (i.e. those goods and services that are ‘crystals’ of social labour; Marx, 1976 [1867]: 128) and ‘pseudo-commodities’ (i.e. those goods and services that bear a price but have no value) in terms of their respective economic relations to the production and distribution of value. We conclude our argument with an outline of the class processes that emerge from these spatial economic relations, suggesting that a contingent urban politics over the ‘right to the city’ is equally, if not more, important than the contestation over the processes of commodity production proper.

II Commodification in tourism – a critique

The notion of commodification, both of cultures (Cohen, 1988; Devine, 2017; Gotham, 2002; Greenwood, 1976; Shepherd, 2002) and spaces (Cloke and Perkins, 2002; Gotham, 2007; Meethan, 2001; Mosedale, 2006; Shaw and Williams, 2004), is not new in analyses of tourism. Unfortunately, this work has been confounded by inconsistent theorisation. There has been much confusion about what precisely constitutes a tourist commodity, which processes convert spaces into commodities, and what characteristics spaces take on when they assume commodity form. While there is general agreement that exchange value is implicated in the commodity form of tourist spaces, to date no author has presented a convincing explanation of what exactly is produced and sold, aside from generalised and uncritically-accepted notions of the ‘tourist experience’ (MacCannell, 1976; Shaw and Williams, 2004; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994).

At the root of these difficulties lies a fundamental and ongoing misconception that Marx’s analysis of the commodity fails to adequately deal with the experiences and symbolic values that appear central to the consumption of tourist spaces. Two particularly problematic corollaries flow from this misunderstanding. First, because tourist use values are in large part experiential (e.g. sightseeing), explanatory emphasis has been placed on the ‘tourist gaze’ as a form of symbolic consumption (Urry, 2002). This understandable emphasis is unfortunate as it risks obscuring the material processes that produce tourist spaces as commodities. The symbolic use values of tourist places become the focus of analysis, rather than the spatial and economic processes by which these use values are brought into being as the products of capital (Lefebvre, 1976: 21). Second, the ‘value’ of tourist spaces as commodities has been erroneously equated with their ability to produce tourist experiences (MacCannell, 1976). This has led the project of critical tourism studies to neglect a political economy agenda concerned with commodification and the production of value, instead analysing the meanings and experiences that might be realised through the consumption of particular use values (e.g. Prebensen et al., 2014).

We may trace these missteps to Dean MacCannell’s (1976) book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, which has cast a long shadow over subsequent studies of tourist consumption. The thesis of this field-defining monograph is that tourism, rather than representing a frivolous and empty form of pleasure-seeking (e.g. Boorstin, 1961), is the fundamentally transcendental quest for authenticity and meaning in a world characterised by increasing ideological and symbolic fragmentation. MacCannell’s ‘ethnography of modernity’ is founded on the axiom that tourism is a new form of consumption that is qualitatively different from the consumption of manufactured goods. Indeed, the growth in the 1970s of the touristic consumption of intangible or experiential use values which ‘leave no material trace’ (p. 21) indicated to MacCannell the existence of a sui generis commodity form, one that needed to be re-theorised from first principles. He wrote:

It is necessary to recall that Marx derived his model of social class relations from his analysis of the value of commodities. As new species of commodities appear in the modern world, and as the fundamental nature of the commodity changes (for example, from a pair of pants to a packaged vacation; from a piece of work to a piece of no-work), Marx’s deduction must be repeated. (MacCannell, 1976: 11; emphasis added)

MacCannell asserted that Marxian political economy was obsolete because the value of tourist experiences is categorically different from the value of manufactured goods. For MacCannell, the value of a tourist commodity is derived from the unique relationship between the consumer and the use value, in this case the tourist experience, rather than from the labour time involved in the production of that experience:

The value of such things as programs, trips, courses, reports, articles, shows, conferences, parades, opinions, events, sights, spectacles, scenes and situations of modernity is not determined by the amount of labour required for their production. Their value is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they produce. (MacCannell, 1976: 23; emphasis in original)

A passing familiarity with Marx's value theory would have eased MacCannell’s concerns. There is no incompatibility between the production of intangible goods and value theory. As Marx noted in the famous opening to Capital, the use value of a commodity may derive from the needs of the imagination as readily as from those of the stomach (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 125). Indeed, Marx elsewhere discusses at length the conditions under which intangible use values such as concerts, theatrical productions, and other creative labour services are directly productive of surplus value (Marx, 1963 [1861–3]). Subsequent scholars such as Walker (1985) have set out in detail how the more recent growth of the ‘service sector’ may be comfortably accommodated within an orthodox interpretation of value theory. Not realising that labour could produce intangible goods and services as commodities, MacCannell was left searching for the source of value within use values. He conflated use value (i.e. experiences or other intangible aspects of space) and value (i.e. the socially necessary labour time required to produce them). And it was on these shaky grounds that MacCannell built his ‘new theory of the leisure class’.

It would be easy to consign MacCannell’s thesis to the annals of disciplinary history as an early but flawed analysis of tourist consumption. The problem is that The Tourist remains canonical in tourism studies. Its shortcomings seldom have been recognised and remain unremedied. The text has been cited well over 9,000 times and continues to exert a profound influence on the field, setting a trajectory for tourism commodification research that has been accepted with a remarkable absence of critique. A number of subsequent authors have reproduced MacCannell’s argument, defining the commodity as the ‘tourist experience’ and value as the ‘quality and quantity’ of this experience to the consumer (Meethan, 2001; Mosedale, 2006; Shaw and Williams, 2004; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994; Williams, 2004). An ongoing concern with use values at the expense of production of exchange value and value remains characteristic of the tourism literature. When production has been investigated, analyses have been hampered by inadequate conceptualisation of both the commodity being produced and the source of value (Judd, 2006). If we are to theorise the relation between tourist places and the production of value, we need to understand the circumstances under which these places take on commodity form. We begin this project by rehabilitating the analysis of the tourist commodity, starting with MacCannell.

III Tourist experiences and value

MacCannell’s fundamental error in The Tourist was his failure to realise that the useful effects of commodities in fulfilling human needs are not limited to physical goods. The fact that use values may be immaterial or intangible (i.e. tourist experiences) makes no difference to their ability to satisfy human needs. A commodity need only have a social use value – a use value for others – to make it exchangeable. It matters not what this particular use value is, nor whether it is material or intangible. Experiential use values such as the consumption of cultural performances, concerts, and tourist spectacles are entirely consistent with the commodity form. Despite MacCannell’s elementary misunderstanding of Marxian political economy, he is nonetheless correct in realising that intangible use values, those that do not necessarily take the interceding form of a physical good, have become increasingly important in the reproduction of capital (Haug, 1986). For example, the emergence of ‘information-based’ use values, including mass media and internet communications, are just as useful, and are just as constitutive of human wealth, as manufactured objects (Fuchs, 2016).

The important analytical question is how to deal with the observation that use values may be socially-constructed in ways that can be additional to (and even at odds with) the use value as produced (Fine, 2002). By this we refer to the ways in which commodities are afforded meanings as they become drawn into the cultural life of consumers – becoming ‘thoroughly socialized’ in ways that appear to transcend production alone (Appadurai, 1986: 6). Tourist destinations, for example, find particularly rich expression in the cultural life of capitalist societies far beyond a concern with their particular characteristics (Meethan, 2001). The fact that the consumption of use values may diverge from their production is of course an important one. Baudrillard (1998 [1970]) argued that the social construction of use value (what he termed sign-value) is more important as a driver of consumption, and hence of capitalism, than the useful effects of particular goods and labour services. From this perspective, consumption is determined not by what a commodity does but by the symbolic significance that consumption of a commodity bestows on its owner (Veblen, 2012 [1899]). MacCannell’s seminal contribution was to argue that tourist consumption can similarly be understood to revolve around the collection and decoding of signs (Culler, 1981). The sign-value of place has retained a centrality in more recent and highly influential analyses of tourism, with tourist places conceptualised as cultural representations that are produced, circulated and consumed in a visual system of signification (Lash and Urry, 1994). The analytical implication of this approach is that tourist consumption may be understood as an auto-referential system of sign-values – the symbolic or sign-value of commodities become more important to the analysis than their existence either as material use values or as embodiments of human labour (Gotham, 2002: 1737–8).

We make no objection to the indisputable observation that signification is crucial to tourism consumption. However, this argument has been taken too far for two reasons. First, sign-value is commensurable with the Marxian commodity form, as we have outlined above. Second, any adequate analysis of the commodity needs to relate the consumption of socially-constructed use values to their production. The production of commodities always involves complex and multiple addition of social meaning throughout the commodity chain. As Hartwick (1998: 428) puts it, ‘advertising cannot conjure commodity signs from the thin air of imagination alone. The sign has to have some relation to the object body of the commodity’. If BMW automobiles were slow, unreliable and rust-prone, then their sign-value as a prestige automobile would be unsustainable (Sayer, 2003: 345). As Fine (2002: 78) sets out:

Objects do not arrive through the market as blank sheets after which culture can do its work upon them to create (symbolic) use values. The material processes by which commodities are provided are themselves cultural, reflecting the cultures of work, design, retailing, etc. In short, capital and capitalism are simultaneously economic and cultural categories.

A number of geographers have interpreted socially-constructed use values using the Marxian analogy of the fetish (for overviews see Castree, 2001; Prudham, 2009). We identify two strands to this work. One looks at the way even the most material of assemblages, such as urban infrastructures, become fetishised when they take on cultural meanings disconnected from their geographical basis in production (e.g. Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000). Another strand is concerned with unmasking the fetish character of commodities to reveal the location and conditions of exploited labour – through the use of commodity chains for example (Hartwick, 1998, 2000). Such studies have revealed the increasingly complex and global socio-spatial division of labour that produces use values as well as the exploitation of labour in the Global South that is obscured by complex global relations and interdependencies within production networks.

As useful as these analyses have been in revealing the material and social bases of production, they have tended to adopt somewhat imprecise notions of the commodity fetish, such as equating it with cultural representations of objects or with the labour conditions that produce them. For Marx, the commodity fetish is an inherent process within the production of commodities for exchange, whereby the value of commodities – the socially-necessary labour time that enters their production – is necessarily concealed by the appearance of commodities as exchange values, with the result that the value of the commodity appears as a property of the commodity itself. As Shumway (2000: 5) puts it: ‘Commodity fetishism is not lust after laces or purses, but a mistake about the locus of value and the origins of the capital that the exchange of commodities seems magically to yield.’ This is precisely the mistake MacCannell makes in The Tourist. Indeed, associating the value realised by a visit to Disneyland with the fantastic form of Mickey Mouse, rather than the labour of the 37,000 employees of ‘the happiest place on earth’, is perhaps a textbook example of the commodity fetish. To avoid this misstep, value theory needs to be carefully deployed to better understand the production of these socially-constructed use values.

One way forward is to appreciate that intangible or immaterial commodities (for example a cultural product or performance) are produced by what Hardt and Negri (2000: 290) term ‘immaterial labour’ – ‘labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’. The value of such commodities is a function of the quantity of the abstract labour they contain in the same way as for manufactured goods. Of course, many commodities incorporate both material means of production and immaterial labour, what Walker (1985) describes as ‘joint products’ (such as restaurant meals). The tourist industries commonly combine goods with labour services in this way – through, for example, attractions, hotels, cruise ships, events and tours. In these cases, even use values that are ‘experiential’ (e.g. sightseeing, spectacles) still require what is often a vast materiality that is transformative of the built environment (Gotham, 2005; Nelson, 2010). All three types of commodity (i.e. goods, labour services and joint products) embody labour – hence all can be productive of value and surplus value. They are not sui generis commodities, as MacCannell would have it; they are symptomatic of the creation of new use values to satisfy the expanded reproduction of capital (Lebowitz, 1977). Therefore, an understanding of tourist commodification requires the unravelling of the ways in which the means of production and labour power (be that material or immaterial) are combined to produce tourist commodities. Rather than try to explain the emergence of each new use value either in a material or socially-constructed sense, we need to explain the characteristics they take on when assigned commodity form (Castree, 2003, 2004). To this end, we apply Marx’s value theory to untangle the processes by which places become tourist commodities.

IV A systematic typology of landed tourist commodities

2 Tourist places and exchange value

In the case of landed tourist use values, the processes that afford exchange value to places are complex. This is largely because land is inherently resistant to commodification: it is not generally produced by labour or transportable to market. But landed tourist use values can and do assume commodity form in particular circumstances. Places may be sold as private property, rented for a time through entry tickets and the like, or indirectly traded upon in a myriad of ways. As Smet (2016) has pointed out, for example, ‘spaces of consumption’ tend to rely on revenues from local and distant consumers, very often in the form of ground and monopoly rents. While we will return later to these processes by which landed tourist use values may appear as commodities, we first need to describe the circumstances in which commodification can take place. To do so, we adapt Castree’s (2003) systematisation of the interrelated processes that commodify nature more generally to help us uncover the properties that landed tourist use values take on when they are assigned commodity form. To this end we develop Marx’s (1981 [1894]: ch. 38) well-known example of the waterfall to demonstrate these processes of commodification. We supplement this staple example with other, common concrete instances of landed tourist use values that exemplify features of the category we describe (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Commodification processes and tourist places.

	Landed tourist use values (LTUVs)	Enclosed landed tourist use values (ELTUVs)	Landed tourist commodities (LTCs)
Definitional characteristic	Use value Inseparable from specific locations of the earth’s surface Used by tourists	As for LTUV plus: Privatised Alienable Individuated Abstracted Valuated Displaced	As for ELTUV plus: Abstract labour
Place commodification	None	Pseudo-commodification	Commodity production
Tourism context	Any free public places visited by tourists	Owned by private or collective entity Visited on a temporary basis Physically enclosed Exist as a class of tourist attractions Bear an entry price	Joint products combining wage labour with built means of production (i.e. fixed capital) or free gifts of nature
Tourism examples	A beach, park, monument, building, urban area, cultural event or festival, the countryside, etc.	Attractions (e.g. Grand Canyon, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc.)	Hotels (e.g. Paris Hilton) Theme parks (e.g. Disneyland) Tours (e.g. Thomas Cook Holidays) Events (e.g. Superbowl)
Economic relation	State revenues; may be indirectly traded upon	Ground and monopoly rents	Value and surplus value

Privatisation

Privatisation describes the assignment of a title to exclusive legal possession of land to an individual or group (Castree, 2003: 279). This affords the owner a monopoly power to dispose ‘of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others’ (Marx, 1981 [1894]: 752). In the case of landed tourist use values, rather than providing the legal basis for the exchange of commodities, privatisation refers to the legal ability to grant or deny access rights to a given piece of land. In the case of a waterfall, an entity, by right of ownership or lease, can dictate who is allowed to enter the area to visit it. Where land transitions from collective to private forms of ownership, access to landed tourist use values can become more generally controlled by a class of landed property owners seeking to extract an economic return (Andreucci et al., 2017; Mansfield, 2007). As means of consumption, landed tourist use values thus internalise a class relation between their owners and workers-as-consumers (Mulcahy, 2016) that is more analogous to the relationship between landlord and residential tenant than that between landowner and capitalist producer. As a class process, privatisation thus internalises an inevitable struggle between owners and consumers of landed use values.

Alienability

Alienability ‘refers to the capacity of a given commodity, and specific classes of commodities, to be physically and morally separated from their sellers’ (Castree, 2003: 279). Alienability is necessary to the commodity form because ‘all commodities are non-use values for their owners and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 179). Landed tourist use values face a twofold alienability problem. First, they are physically immobile. ³ The resolution to this problem is that people visit the landed tourist use value rather than the other way around. In the case of the waterfall, people who usually live in a different area visit the waterfall for a limited time. Rather than multiple use values being produced in one place (e.g. a factory) and sent to many individual consumers, many individual consumers travel to a single landed tourist use value. This is a form of temporary or incomplete exchange – where owners of a use value allow consumers to use it for an agreed period of time, a solution already common to real estate and consumer services (e.g. movie tickets) (Walker, 1985: 66). The temporality of the landed tourist use value becomes significant and the ‘politics of time’ starts to discipline the consumption of leisure (Clarke and Critcher, 1985). Second, landed tourist use values are often owned collectively (e.g. national park, museum, famous buildings) and sometimes hold incredible cultural value that can resist alienability. As Harvey (2002: 95) puts it, ‘it is unlikely (though not impossible), for example, that Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace will be traded directly (even the most ardent privatizers might balk at that)’. Of course, even this limit to alienability is constantly challenged, making landed tourist use values the ongoing site of contestation between capital and what we may loosely term ‘public’ interests.

Individuation

Individuation refers to the separation of a use value from its context, the process of ‘putting legal and material boundaries around phenomena so that they can be bought, sold and used’ (Castree, 2003: 280). In landed tourist use values we may draw a distinction between those that remain materially contiguous with their surrounding landscape and those that are formally separated via an act of ‘enclosure’ (Jeffrey et al., 2012). The former we refer to as unenclosed landed tourist use values, including public parks, beaches, wilderness areas, public streetscapes – all the unenclosed features of the earth’s surface (Table 1). The latter we refer to as enclosed landed tourist use values, including various built and natural attractions. We emphasise that by enclosure we refer to an explicitly economic act of separation where access is granted only to possessors of the money commodity. Of course, we appreciate enclosure may be considered in other terms, such as the discriminatory biopolitical practices of the ‘moving-on’ of indigenous and homeless people from otherwise unenclosed landed tourist use values (Lea et al., 2012), or the various bordering practices that establish the spatial differentiation of some ‘tourist enclaves’ (Saarinen, 2016). However, for current heuristic purposes, we restrict our discussion to formal economic enclosure as this is a necessary condition for the ‘real’ commodification of space (Castree, 2003: 285). On this basis, enclosed landed tourist use values demand no, or very limited, free public access. The waterfall becomes an enclosed landed tourist use value when the owner builds a fence around it and restricts who can go in and out. Discursively, enclosed landed tourist use values are concerned with the identification, even creation, of ‘spatial difference’, the process of separating a use value from its supporting context in a way that emphasises its uniqueness or significance. Enclosure not only requires that the owner has the legal right to control access and movement through privatisation, but that these rights are enforceable through physical separation, surveillance and policing.

Abstraction

Abstraction is the ‘process whereby the qualitative specificity of any individualized thing (a person, a seed, a gene or what-have-you) is assimilated to the qualitative homogeneity of a broader type or process’ (Castree, 2003: 281). When abstracted, landed tourist use values become comparable and interchangeable: one holiday destination can be replaced by any other. The waterfall gets compared not just with other waterfalls, but also other landed tourist use values in promotional materials. This means a tourist can visit any set of different landed tourist use values and still have a ‘holiday’. Abstraction is necessary for the commodification of landed tourist use values because, as several authors have observed (e.g. Clancy, 2011), consumers are unable to experience landed tourist use values in advance due to the spatial separation between use value and consumers that defines tourism. For landed tourist use values to be commodified, therefore, the comparison of abstracted use values must be enabled by, for example, guidebooks and promotional literature. The bizarre situation emerges where an African safari is compared on equal footing with a European river cruise or an Australian outback adventure within the same brochure. Abstraction thus poses a contradiction between the necessary interchangeability of landed tourist use values (i.e. qualitative homogeneity) and the emphasis on the uniqueness of landed tourist use values that constitutes part of their use value (i.e. individual difference).

Valuation

In order to be commodified, use values must bear an exchange value, expressed in money terms. They must bear ‘a price and can, to all intents and purposes, consequently be rendered commensurable with things not only in the same taxonomic class of goods but in different ones too’ (Castree, 2003: 281). Landed tourist use values can become monetised in various ways, but most simply involve a price for entry or temporary use. In the case of the waterfall, the owner charges a price for entry for a limited time. Valuation generally implies enclosure to regulate access and police payment. A money-price allows comparison of enclosed landed tourist use values not only with other landed tourist use values (i.e. abstraction) but with all other commodities. It is through the universal equivalent of a monetary price that a holiday can be made commensurate with a new car or a home renovation, or that various enclosed landed tourist use values within a city may be directly compared. Price also allows comparison within enclosed landed tourist use values by, for example, differential pricing, whereby the waterfall owner charges more for those who want to climb to the top. As a project of capital, tourism is animated by the drive to convert as many landed tourist use values as possible into bearers of exchange value as revealed by a money-price.

Displacement

Displacement is the process by which the appearance of a commodity occludes the labour required to produce it, ‘appearing, phenomenally, as something other than itself’ (Castree, 2003: 282). We identify three interrelated forms of displacement in enclosed landed tourist use values. First, there is the structural displacement of source of value performed by all commodities via the fetish – the erroneous idea that value is derived from the quantity and quality of experiences that a landed tourist use value facilitates rather than from the social relations that produce it. Second, landed tourist use values are socially-constructed or abstracted to align their meanings with the dictates of the tourist gaze, displacing other possible meanings (Urry, 2002). The waterfall may be presented as a scenic picnic area in the romantic western aesthetic tradition (Campbell, 1987), rather than a potential source of motive power, the manifestation of a set of geophysical processes, or a site of local cultural significance. The place meanings (socially-constructed use values) that are most competitive as exchange values gain precedence in symbolic circulation (Gold and Ward, 1994). Third, the discursive reproduction of place is often preceded by a material act of dispossession, through which earlier relations between people and place are expunged to make way for the new symbolic representations.

V The landed tourist commodity form

The landedness of landed tourist use values means that landed tourist commodities take on a peculiar form. Most obviously, landed tourist commodities cannot be distributed to consumers because they are necessarily fixed to the earth. This distribution problem is resolved through a spatiotemporal reconfiguration, by bringing consumers to the commodity, and by providing ownership only via temporary exchange. Consequently, multiple consumers are frequently co-present at the landed tourist commodity, consuming multiple potential use values, both material and socially-constructed. The same is true for enclosed landed tourist use values. Second, landed tourist commodities are produced partly or wholly by labour in situ. They are always joint products that, by definition, combine landed use values, as free gifts of nature or culture, with labour services (Walker, 1985). Here we may draw a parallel with the production of transport where ‘The useful effect can only be consumed during the production process; it does not exist as a thing of use distinct from this process, a thing which functions as an article of commerce and circulates as a commodity only after its production’ (Marx, 1978 [1884]: 135). This means that workers-as-consumers are necessarily brought together with workers-as-labourers, ‘thickening’ relations between production and consumption (Leslie and Reimer, 1999: 410). Indeed, in some cases, the act of production is simultaneously an act of consumption, as in the form of a spectacle (Urry and Larsen, 2011).

As exchange values, landed tourist commodities produce value to the extent that they exploit socially necessary labour time – that labour organised as a capitalist social relation. The co-presence of workers-as-labourers and workers-as-consumers (Mulcahy, 2016) (or, as we could put it, of workers-as-tourists) presents a challenge for the maintenance of the commodity fetish. The risk is that the worker-as-tourist will recognise labour as the source of value, no longer concealed within a ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 279), and in so doing may realise their own implication in this exploitation (Fleetwood, 2008). Clearly a potential for contradiction emerges here, one that may be addressed by disguising the source of value in a number of ways. These include deploying an ideology of class-reversal through consumers-as-capitalists (e.g. five and six star service), by disguising labour through staged authenticity (Cohen, 1988; MacCannell, 1973), through emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), and through the rationalisation of mass consumption (Ritzer, 2015).

A further consequence of the landed tourist commodity form is the threat of ‘moral depreciation’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 528). Because value is produced through the combination of labour with nature or the built environment, landed tourist commodities necessitate the investment of varying amounts of fixed capital (see Harvey, 2002: 102). The capital invested in the land (e.g. hotels, attractions, stadiums, and visitor facilities) is one form of fixed capital, what Marx termed ‘la terrecapital’ (Marx, 1981 [1894]: 756). In a competitive market, landed tourist commodity industrialists face the pressing prospect that a newer, grander, attraction (e.g. hotel, resort, theme park, or casino) may appropriate market share and thus devalorise the capital already fixed in the structure of the original attraction. The implications are that ever more attractive landed tourist commodities must be produced though fixed capital investment, existing fixed capital must be continuously renovated, upgraded and redeveloped, and space is increasingly rationalised to process as many consumers as possible in a given time (Young and Markham, 2017).

Consequently, landed tourist commodities must be simultaneously produced both materially and via social construction (Fine, 2002: 89). As a duality, the material production of socially-constructed use values is done through design of the spectacle (Baudrillard, 2001; Gotham, 2005; Ritzer and Stillman, 2001), specific concrete labour including performances and various forms of affective labour (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 293), and fixed capital branding and theming (Gottdiener, 2001). For example, Disneyland has both buildings and rides (fixed capital) and symbolic theming. The same combination appears in the resorts of Las Vegas (Venturi et al., 1977). In this way the built environment encodes the socially constructed use values so necessary to attracting consumers. Its perhaps not surprising that truly commodified tourist places have been considered contrivances for the past century, from Boorstin’s (1961) ‘pseudo-events’ to Eco’s (1986) ‘hyperreality’.

The combination of threatened moral depreciation and the necessity for co-presence of consumers also gives rise to many of the familiar characteristics of landed tourist commodities. Moral depreciation dictates the intensification of production which, when combined with enclosure, requires an ever-greater volume of visitors. Thus crowding, for example, becomes a barrier to further capital accumulation. One resolution is the transformation of consumers themselves into the use value via spectacle co-production (Gotham, 2005). The more consumers, the more meaningful the use value and, therefore, the greater the possible exchange value. Even so, there is a vast materiality at work here on the side of production, especially with the labour that produces the value of spectacles that take landed tourist commodity form. Communications technologies are employed to sell the landed tourist commodity to a mass audience outside of the immediate spectacle that allows for a global yet individually differentiated enclosure – what Debord (1977, 1988) described as ‘the society of the spectacle’.

V Tourism commodities, pseudo-commodities and the ‘right to the city’

To extract surplus value, tourism capital produces its own use values, building massive buildings such as integrated hotel resorts, global spectacles, and hyperreal theme parks on a truly grand scale. These landed tourist commodities have a clear base in the production of value, even though their use values may be intangible or symbolic. They are indisputably commodities in a technical sense. Their analysis, however, requires a more careful deployment of the notion of fetish than has hitherto been conducted, one that keeps the question of value firmly in sight. Although new forms of consumption, such as tourism, have complex relationships to the commodity form, this does not require the wholesale abandonment of value theory. Rather, it necessitates a more careful analysis of novel commodities than the one offered by MacCannell and subsequent scholars of tourism.

Contrary to orthodox accounts of the ‘commodification’ of tourist places, the great attractions of the world tend to be pseudo-commodities – they possess a number of features of the commodity form that allow them to bear a price – but they are not productive of value defined as socially-necessary labour time. These are enclosures of the free gifts of nature and culture – the wealth of landed use values on which tourism consumption is predicated. Their price, in the form of entry fees and the like, reflects the ability of their private or collective owners to charge rent by virtue of their monopoly control of space (Harvey, 2002). The search for rents provides a powerful drive towards capture and creation of monopolisable landed use values as an explicitly geographical project of enclosure. These attractions have a role in the distribution and extraction of surplus value produced elsewhere in the economy. This is a fundamental distinction, as it means landed tourist commodities and enclosed landed tourist use values (as pseudo-commodities) are functionally different in terms of the class relations they express. Those economies which rely on enclosed landed tourist use values may be considered in large part rentier economies, developed towards the extraction of value from production processes located elsewhere, a portion of which are distributed as revenues via a multi-scalar spatial differentiation of consumption. In this way, tourism produces social relations that are expropriative rather than exploitative, linking tourism-dependent rentiers in destinations with workers and other fractions of capital in origins. Of course, landed commodities and pseudo-commodities are mutually constitutive elements of the tourist system. Landed tourist commodities are to some degree reliant on the presence of landed tourist use values, while enclosed landed tourist use values need landed tourist commodities by way of accommodation and the like. Thus, the production of value is contingent on a politics of enclosure and dispossession, while the extraction of rents necessitates associated commodity production in accommodation and transport infrastructures.

As a necessarily expansive system of landed commodities and pseudo-commodities, tourism development generates its own set of distinctive obstacles to further reproduction. Notwithstanding struggles over labour conditions in landed tourist commodities, the political struggles specific to tourism relate to the destruction of landed use values. This dispossession appears in the literature as a concern with cultural displacement, the deterioration of places from over-visitation, and the production of globally homogenous spatial forms. Indeed, the degradation of landed use values makes clear that tourism has the potential to undermine its own basis of production. What this suggests is that the tourism industries have material limits – and that the development of new, increasingly massive landed tourist commodities is one way to overcome these limits.

Given this understanding, some specific social and political limits may be derived from landed tourist commodities and enclosed landed tourist use values as distinct movements of capital. Landed tourist commodities internalise an antagonism between capital and labour. Because of the necessity for the concentration of labour within large structures of fixed capital, workers can organise in these contingent circumstances, although in general the status of labour is highly precarious. We may anticipate workers supporting tourism development – battling over pay, conditions and the supply of jobs – rather than actively contesting the processes of tourism commodification. Considered as a global spatial project, tourism co-opts workers from the Global North with the promise of libertine use values of other places (Britton, 1982; D’Hauteserre, 2004). It co-opts workers of the Global South into heavily exploited labour processes (Lee et al., 2015). Landed tourist commodities thus pit workers from different places – who are usually separated by spatial, cultural, racial, economic, or ideological divides – against each other in the antagonistic social roles of worker-as-labourer and worker-as-tourist (Fleetwood, 2008). The scope for traditional class politics is fractured here, resulting in perverse outcomes such as guilt-laden consumption (Young et al., 2015) and a demand for ‘ethical’ tourism experiences (MacCannell, 2011).

The spatial concentration of tourism development tends to produce new class antagonisms that are sharply revealed in particular places. The adoption of the new digital technologies of platform capitalism (Snricek, 2017), such as Airbnb for example, co-opts landed property owners in destination regions through the conversion of the ‘consumption fund’ (the instruments of future consumption, such as housing, household goods, and motor vehicles (Harvey, 2006: 229)) into the fixed capital of a new petty bourgeoisie class. Local residents experience urban effects such as increased rents which simultaneously transform the sociospatial organisation of cities (Gutierrez et al., 2017). The capitalist social relations producing these new antagonisms are, of course, recognised by those affected. As Ada Colau – whose anti-tourism activism won her the mayorship of Barcelona – put it, mass tourism pits ‘the rights of residents’ against those of ‘big business’’ (Colau, 2014).

Thus, rather than turning to traditional class politics between worker and capitalist in production, we ought to consider the potential for a spatial politics of the local characterised by more complex class alliances organised around residency and the production of space. It is here the enclosed landed tourist use values and the processes of pseudo-commodification may offer possibilities. Landed use values, those ‘free gifts’ of nature and culture on which enclosed landed tourist use values rely, are not fully alienable. They constitute ‘social space’, the geographic expression of ongoing individual and collective social relations (Lefebvre, 1991). The flow of tourists to these pseudo-commodities of course has enormous effect on the character and liveability of tourist destinations. It is at the fringes of tourist commodification where a key political struggle emerges between local residents, tourists and the tourist industries. Even the loyalties of workers in the tourism industries are likely to be divided between their roles as employees and residents. We therefore have theoretical reasons to anticipate that resistance to tourism will take the form of struggles for control over public space, where the more marginalised resist the processes that create enclosed, landed tourist use values – an explicitly spatial struggle over what Lefebvre called the ‘right to the city’.

Indeed, tourist cities are increasingly sites of such protest and resistance, a struggle currently being expressed through anti-tourism movements in cities such as Barcelona, Berlin, Florence, Lisbon, Hong Kong, and New Orleans, among many others (Colomb and Novy, 2016). This is a political struggle over the degree to which lived spaces as use values are appropriated and transformed by capital into conduits for the extraction of exchange value. On one hand, local organised resistance attempts to reclaim the use values of place. On the other, various fractions of the capitalist classes attempt to realise exchange values in the form of monopoly and ground rents. The discursive and material control of space are both implicated in this struggle because exchange values are predicted on the spatial and socially-constructed properties of landed tourist use values. The contestation of landed use values by discursive (e.g. anti-tourism protests and campaigns) and/or material means (e.g. tourist blockades) directly affects the ability of the capitalist classes to extract value through both pseudo- and real tourist commodities. Thus, the spatial struggle over the ‘right to the city’ is a struggle of de-commodification, one that can negate the realisation of both values and rents by the capitalist classes.