Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sources of raw materials and of new opportunities for the employment of
labor under the social relations of capitalism, has the e
ect of increasing the
turnover time of capital unless there are compensating improvements in the
speed of circulation.” The need to “annihilate space by time” is thus funda-
mental to the operation and survival of capitalism on an on-going basis, i.e.,
its ability to reproduce itself at ever-expanded spatial scales and to accelerate
temporal rhythms of capital accumulation. Every delay in this process is an
opportunity cost, and conversely, every reduction in turnover times releases
resources to increase capital accumulation.
The result of capitalists' search for solutions to the tendency toward
anarchical crisis is the infamous “spatial
ff
ers a
temporary window of stability, maximizing the rate of turnover, and thus
pro
fi
fix,” i.e., the landscape that o
ff
fixes, including primitive accu-
mulation or forcible dispossession through war and slavery, the creation of
new labor markets through the commodi
fi
t. Harvey posits several forms of spatial
fi
cation of noncapitalist social for-
mations, the creation of new commodity markets to absorb excess investment
capital, the use of land markets to generate di
fi
erential land values, the
deployment of communications systems to reduce uncertainty and thus speed
up production, and the use of the state for particular governance structures
to facilitate more pro
ff
table forms of capital accumulation (Jessop 2006;
Sheppard 2006). All of these, in one way or another, externalize the essential
contradiction between the extraction of surplus value, overproduction, and
the tendency for the rate of pro
fi
fi
t to fall.
fix, however, is always a tenuous, contingent, and temporary
ameliorative. Because the production system changes more rapidly under the
impetus of competition than does the landscape (or more technically, sunk
costs must be replaced before their full economic value has been amortized),
the very same landscape that o
The spatial
fi
ers a temporary escape from overproduction
eventually comes to inhibit future capital accumulation. Spatial distributions,
infrastructures, and built environments that are optimal at one phase of
development metastasize into weights slowing down future capital accumula-
tion. The spatial
ff
fix thus mutates from a resource to a barrier, and forms
simultaneously a “crowning glory and a prison” of capital. As Harvey
(2001a:25) puts it, “capital has to build a
fi
fixed space (or 'landscape') neces-
sary for its own functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to
destroy that space (and devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later
point in order to make way for a new 'spatial
fi
fix' (openings for fresh accumu-
lation in new spaces and territories).” In this way, capitalism exhibits a fun-
damental contradiction between
fi
fixity—the need to stabilize production
temporarily in order to realize surplus value—and motion, the need to
annihilate old geographies in an act of creative destruction and replace them
with new, more e
fi
cient landscapes amenable to more recent systems of pro-
duction. Capitalists must negotiate (often unsuccessfully) the knife-edge
between using up old spaces and creating new ones.
The expansion of capital, its relentless search for new markets and new
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