Marx said that spatial expansion and attempts at the displacement of crisis merely reproduced these contradictions on a widening and intensifying geographical scale.Ĭolonialism for Hegel was an outcome of the resolution of the internal dialectic (the contradictions) of civil society that can have no internal resolution. Against these thinkers, Harvey says that one reason Marx ended Capital with the chapter on colonialism was to simply show that colonialism was no remedy for capitalism’s contradictions, as Hegel posed. Harvey traces the thread of spatial fixes through these three thinkers, showing how Marx settled upon certain ideas from them for his own thinking. 30) or as a process: in this case a process of exercising power via certain institutional arrangements” (280). “The state should in fact be viewed, like capital, as a relation (Oilman 1971: ch. He cites Gramsci to describe the complicated ways that this plays out, highlighting how subordinate classes are enrolled via hegemony and ideology into the state project. He sums up Marx’s position on the state in terms of an outline of some of its bare-minimum functions: “We have so far shown that Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production can be paralleled at each step by a theoretical derivation of certain minimal state functions: the equality and freedom of exchange must be preserved, property rights must be protected and contracts enforced, mobility preserved, the ‘anarchistic’ and destructive aspects of capitalist competition must be regulated, and the conflicts of interest between fractions of capital must be arbitrated for the ‘common good’ of capital as a whole” (275). Harvey begins by setting out the state as the dialectical medium and product of antagonisms between classes, but the trick to this form of power is the way it is made to appear above or outside of society and social relations, in Marx and Engels’ words an “alien power.” One means for accomplishing this abstraction is through the ever-more universalizing discourses of equality and rights, which in practice are not realized or, at least, in terms of money and the supposed equality it provides (the great leveler) is theoretically and equalizer but actually a modality through which inequality is produced and maintained. “In Marx’s own thought it appears that the crucial intermediate steps encompass a theory of location and an analysis of fixed and immobile investment the necessary creation of a geographical landscape to facilitate accumulation through production and circulation” (266).Īs a side note, I think this statement by Marx is interesting in relation to my own interests: “Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands everywhere for a system of robbery, so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping, slavery and colonial conquest” (1967, Vol.
Harvey says that the geographic expansion and intensification of capital accumulation in fact constitutes Marx’s theory of imperialism. Marx’s ideas are thus really different from bourgeois economists since it presupposes not an equalization of various spaces, but rather their uneven (differentiated) development. Improving modes (that is, faster) modes of transportation help overcome spatial distance, with credit providing the temporal stepping-stone for this “annihilation of space by time.” This leaves a very physical trace in the landscape with infrastructures, but these same forms of fixed capital are also superseded and destroyed in the process of capital’s need for endless expansion: “Capitalist development has to negotiate a knife-edge path between preserving the values of past capital investments m the built environment and destroying these investments in order to open up fresh room for accumulation” (247). a surplus of labor and capital without any conceivable means for bringing them profitably together-constitutes the paramount crisis dynamic that forces capitalism to make new room for itself (in either temporal or spatial terms). The unavoidable tendency for the overaccumulation of capital-i.e. He faults theorists of imperialism for providing one-sided analyses that fail to grasp the necessary links between accumulation and imperialism. He writes that locational theory provides a bridge between Marx’s theories about the accumulation of capital and imperialism. uneven development, the role of credit, overaccumulation and imperialism, spatial fixes, and space-time compression. In this first chapter, we can see Harvey beginning to develop much of what later becomes central aspects of later works, e.g. Geography of Capitalist Accumulation (1975)
Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography.
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