Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Harvey's thought followed Marx's view that endemic overaccumulation
resulted in periodic economic crises manifested in declining rates of pro
t.
His spatialization of Marxism began by observing capitalism's numerous
economic depressions—most notably, those of 1873, the 1930s, and the
1970s—and the endlessly varying forms it assumed after the recovery from
each by undergoing wide-reaching rounds of restructuring, each of which
witnessed new technologies, new markets, new forms of labor control, new
state interventions, and new spatial con
fi
gurations. Harvey observed how
capitalism, despite the surface variations in its multiple historical and spatial
forms, nonetheless rests upon the deep structure of commodity production
and the conversion of commodities into money, and of
fi
ered a model of
commodity production that abstracted its essential qualities and shed light on
its transformation of time and space. He began with Marx's distinction
between use and exchange values. Use values are essentially con
ff
ned to abso-
lute spaces and times, including, for examples, the activities of workers,
commodities, factories, and houses. Exchange values, in contrast, exist only
because of the circulation of capital, its constant state of motion through
relative space (Harvey 2006:141); as every capitalist knows, money that is not
in motion declines in value.
Central to the production of value and its realization through exchange is
the built environment, the infrastructure of transportation and communica-
tions that allows capital and labor to move through time and space. Typically,
capitalists rely on the state for this purpose, for publicly constructed infra-
structures socialize the costs while allowing the bene
fi
ts to remain privately
held. The built environment, therefore, is the spatial manifestation of the
logic of commodity production at any given historical moment. To overcome
the friction of distance and accelerate the turnover rate of capital, capitalists
must invest in new, more rapid transport systems, which are expensive and
take a long period to amortize due to their extended depreciation times. In
order for capitalists as a class to expand and survive, capital must be suf-
fi
fi
ficiently mobile to participate in the process of production and exchange;
however,
fixed capital, irretrievably sunk in the form of the built environment
in the form of transport systems, does not realize surplus value, and does not
directly generate pro
fi
t.
Under the force of competition, capitalists must maximize the rate at
which the use value of labor is converted into exchange values on the market:
“There is an omnipresent incentive for individual capitalists to accelerate
their turnover time
vis-à-vis
the social average, and in so doing to promote
a social trend towards faster average turnover times” (Harvey 1989a:229).
Capitalists as a whole
must
of necessity (not choice) speed up the turnover
time of capital, which is “the time of production together with the time of
circulation of exchange” (Harvey 1989a:229). Reducing the friction of dis-
tance expands capital's spatial scale of operation, which also makes it more
rather than less sensitive to local variations in production costs and e
fi
ciency.
Harvey (2001b:244) asserts “The opening-up of more distant markets, new
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