Marc Morell

In his current research project, Marc explores the shift towards ground-rent capitalism and the implications this has for anthropological class analysis. He does so by focusing on the historical specialisation of the Mediterranean region as one «exploited for the purpose of and by means of the consumption of space».

By looking into offshore Malta and its efforts to attract Foreign Direct Investment as an illustration of the wider global periphery of pleasure the Mediterranean has come to be, Marc delves into how local interpretations on the scarcity of property are deployed (79% of Maltese citizens own their homes), within the scope of an economic vision that in the last fifty years has shifted from tourism to finance and digital services, such as e-gaming. Far from decreasing, though, tourism has grown steadily hand in hand with urban development, real estate business and a tendency towards an increasing polarisation between homeowners and tenants.

Furthermore, Marc pays attention at how the Maltese turn towards the attraction of global capital and labour, via the development of thriving industries (e.g., financial services), has been accompanied by the political entrenchment of the Maltese two-party system into what is considered to be a «flawed democracy» (when minimum standards for democracy are not met); one that can get by thanks to the exercise of a ground-rent class hegemony that spreads brick-and-mortar wealth while granting the Maltese people with the promise of a full rentier society. Opposing this scenario there are very few political pressure groups and transformative social movements.

While on the concrete level of analysis, Marc asks how people in Malta manage their existence under the rule of the price of the square metre beneath the sun and what conditions of possibility for social transformation they are left with, on a more abstract level he considers what are the implications for thinking of value formation and class struggle under the aegis of ground-rent capitalism, as well as what «transformation» is about when democracy is flawed.

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Marc Morell is a postdoctoral research fellow employed at the Department of Social Anthropology of Universitetet i Bergen, where he carries out research under the programme lead by Don Kalb «Frontlines of Value: Class and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism», that seeks to foster ethnographic-historical class driven research on global capitalism and inequality. He obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona and before his appointment at Universitetet i Bergen he was employed as researcher and lecturer at the Universitat de les Illes Balears.

His main line of inquiry is that of the class character of the production of space in capitalist society and his current research on Malta follows former fieldwork in Majorca where he explored gentrification and the tourist commoditisation of housing not as a spatial expression of previously precipitated class formations, but as a constitutive moment in their making. In the coming years Marc is planning to close his inquiry on the urbanisation of the west of the Mediterranean by carrying out further fieldwork in Sardinia and leading research in the region (Maghreb included). Further in time, he wishes to study the neoliberalisation of the Baltic countries and the role they play within the EU and NATO.

Marc’s most recent publications include: «Why do middle-class positions matter?» (in Antipode 10.1111/anti.12798, 2022, with Yrigoy and Müller); «Housing financialization in Majorcan holiday rentals» (in Hahn and Kalb, Financialization, Berghahn, 2020); «Not tourism-phobia but urban-philia» (in Boletín de la Asociación de Geográfos Españoles 83, 2019, with Blanco-Romero, Blázquez-Salom and Fletcher); «Urban tourism via dispossession of oeuvres» (in Focaal 82.winter, 2018); and «The class gap in gentrification» (in Albet and Benach, Global Capitalism and Processes of Regeneration, Routledge, 2018).

Marc includes more detailed information in his CV.