Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
elastic space, however, required a whole new paradigm, one that took social
relations seriously.
Marxist interventions
The introduction of social theory and political economy into geography was
a monumental and instrumental step in popularizing the notion of space as a
social construction, something implicated in and produced by social practices
under varying historical conditions. This move put the discipline at odds with
neoclassical economists, who typically are concerned with how capitalism
utilizes existing structures of space and time, in contrast to political economy
perspectives that focus on how capitalism repeatedly creates and destroys
these dimensions (Fields 2004). Marx put the issue wonderfully: “Economists
explain to us the process of production under given conditions. What they do
not explain is how these conditions are themselves produced” (1847:199).
From the standpoint of political economy, neoclassical notions such as equi-
librium are little more than mathematicized fantasies. Because economics
su
ocating conceptual myopia that fails to take seriously issues
of history, power, or ideology, the analysis of time-space compression has
bene
ff
ers from a su
ff
ted marginally, at best, from neoclassical analyses.
Geography's engagement with political economy, initiated by David Harvey
(1982, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), led to a rediscovery of Marx, an important early
theorist in the history of time-space compression and
fi
first to examine society
(if not space) explicitly in terms of class relations. Marxism, of course, privi-
leged the labor process as its point of departure in the analysis of social
relations: through labor, people reproduce society, change nature, and mate-
rialize ideas. Drawing on the labor theory of value, Marx maintained that the
capitalist labor process involved the extraction of surplus value in order to
generate pro
fi
ts. The use value of the worker for the capitalist was thus
greater than his/her exchange value as measured by wages. Therefore, the
labor contract was and remains, by de
fi
nition, unfair and exploitative, for if
capitalists paid workers for the full value of their output, there would be no
pro
fi
t. The result was a fundamental contradiction between production and
consumption: every attempt to minimize labor costs also minimized workers'
ability to consume; ironically, people must live on too little because they
produce too much. As a result—an inescapable, inevitable outcome structur-
ally built into the deep logic of commodity production—capitalism su
fi
ered
from a chronic tendency to produce more than could be consumed, generat-
ing an overaccumulation of surplus value that led to a falling rate of pro
ff
fi
t,
declining wages, class con
ict, and periodic crises. Because capitalists face
this endemic problem of overproduction, they must
fl
find markets in which to
unload the excess social product. In short, capitalism must expand in order to
survive, accumulation is inherently expansionary, which lay at the root of
what Marx called its “wolf hunger.”
The result was a historical process by which capitalism reached out and
fi
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