the geopolitics of capitalism, david harvey

(313): the logic of the circulation of capital does not explain everything that happens under a capitalist mode of production. but it is the indispensable condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, itself.

(313): IMPORTANT--distinction between "infrastructures" being "functional" for the logic of capital, and being "broadly in support of".

(314): class as a loaded term, but one which can be deployed in the simplest sense--the "class relation" that opens up between buyers and sellers of labor power.

(314-315): similarly, "there are… innumerable other sources of tension, conflict, and struggle, not all of which can be directly reduced directly or indirectly to a manifestation of the capital-labor antagonism. But class struggle between capital and labor is so fundamental that it does infect all other aspects of bourgeois life.”

(315): “a central contradiction”—“The system has to expand through the application of living labor whereas the main path of technological change is to supplant living labor…” We can flag, again, the question of what exactly is explaining crisis, in Harvey; because this sounds like the orthodoxy (falling rate of profit), but it leads him directly to enumerate his (derided?) analytic of overaccumulation (twin surpluses of capital and labor as“manifestations” of this crisis). In short, it is not as simply incorrect as I understand it to be.

(316): KEY: “The historical geography of capitalism can best be viewed from the standpoint of the triple imperatives of production, mobilization, and absorption of surpluses of capital and labor power.” (identical to thinking about it through twin imperatives of ‘logic of capital accumulation’ and ‘logic of class struggle’?)

(317): this point is important for his later “accumulation through dispossession argument”—surpluses are, of course, generated from within the production process, but they also require the parasitism of the mode of the production as a whole (obviously recalls Rosa Luxemburg, this).

(318): given conditions of twin surplus (i.e., a crisis), Harvey wants to draw our attention to the effects on accumulation of those “spatial and temporal displacements” which postpone, but fail to permanently resolve crises.

(319): the possibility of “dynamic equilibrium” across time—i.e., investment in areas that take a long time to mature, precisely because they serve to facilitate the speeding up of other parts of the economy. A nice enumeration of the importance of time to his argument (but can pursuit of ‘turnover time’ be subsumed into the ‘pursuit of relative surplus-value’?)

(320): IMPORTANT—very concrete enumeration of the role of “fictitious capital”: “bonds, mortgages, stocks and shares, government debt and the like... What fictitious capital does is to convert a long-drawn-out circulation process… into an annualized rate of return. It does this by facilitating the daily buying and selling of rights and claims to a share in the product of future labor.” In other words, it enables capitalists to make a regular profit off of investments that would otherwise be unattractive (but which are still, from a systemic point of view, critical—both because it helps the absorption problem, but presumably also because it aids in the annihilation of time).

(321): he is saying that, because fictituous capital and credit make it possible for these “long-term” and “short-term” investment options to co-exist, the possibility of a dynamic equilibrium prevails. But does this not neglect the fundamental insight of Marx, in his reflections on Dept. I and Dept. II (which Harvey mentioned, earlier): you could conceive of equilibrium as a ‘theoretical’ possibility, but the fact that it is all being co-ordinated by the pull of profit makes that fanciful.

(322): regardless, he proceeds to focus on the fact that their displacement ultimately fails, simply because it postpones “obligations” into the future: “what happens, in effect, is that present problems are absorbed through contracting future obligations.”

(322-323): there are two forms this crisis can take: (1) the infrastructures help capitalist production, but the excess surpluses produced in the new cycle of reproduction meet with further absorption problems (since all you have done is displace them through time?) (2) the infrastructures proved useless—the relevant investments devalue.

(323): useful contrast between railroad building in the 1800s, and the post-WWII infrastructure boom: in the former, there were periodic bouts of devaluation, which ‘helped’ capitalism restart. In the latter, though, the State postponed the crisis by simply printing more money—this, of course, raised the spectre of inflation (which can, ultimately, only be combated by austerity measures, unless you’re the US of A! he is, of course, writing after the 70s, so when he mentions the difficulty of capitalism finding a way out, which it partly did (though he’s right to anticipate stagnation and devaluation, the latter has not happened at the scale one would have expected—and that’s Bob Brenner’s argument, of course). In sum: we do need to look more carefully at what is (and what was) transpiring). [see also 339]

(324): having considered the temporal fix (debt/fictitious capital formation), we turn to “space,” about which he will conclude: “The end-result… is that crises become more global in scope at the same time that geopolitical conflicts become part and parcel of the processes of crisis formation and resolution.”

(326-327): Lenin's answer to the 'space'-related lacuna in marxism is to add the "State"--but Harvey doesn't believe, rightly, that the questions about space in capitalism can be resolved into the national scale.

(327): important passage, trying to enumerate the specificity of space—“Is it possible to construct a theory of the concrete and the particular in the context of the universal and abstract determinations of Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation?”

(327-328): critical—we have to be specific about how “space” matters; i.e., we can prioritize “time,” whatever that means, but the real contradiction arises when we see that “spatial organization is necessary” to conquer “space.” It is to see how this unfolds, and its consequences, that we need the methods of a historical-geographical materialism.

(328-329): here, the concept of “structured coherence” enters, includes: forms and technologies of production; technologies, quantities and qualities of consumption, patterns of labor demand; and supply, and physical/social infrastructures—a certain, specific, coherent material-geographical arrangement of the prevailing relations and forces of production, in a given area (an alternative definition is, simply, a labor market/commuter range, it seems). A “regional space.”

(329): FOUR processes that undermine coherence: (1) accumulation/expansion builds pressures on capital to leave, labor to arrive; (2) revolutions in technology; (3) class struggle; (4) revolutions in capitalist forms of organization.

(332-333): “The result can only be a chronic instability to regional and spatial configurations... The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes. ”

(333-334): more, then, on the “class alliance” that emerges to protect this “structured coherence.”

(334-335): is there a problem here?—he is trying to problematize the “national question” via his analytic of the “class alliance,” which seems derived from a very specific understanding of developed capitalism. Can we speak of feudal-hari alliance in Sindh in the same way? Maybe.

(337): his analysis of dependency, tested through India-Britain-US. Britain had an interest in tailoring India’s development to the needs of its own industry (but then, it encountered problems precisely because India didn’t work well as a site of surplus absorption). Certainly, there’s a lot missing from the analysis (consciously so, I suspect), but it’s not uninteresting.

(338): Marx’s “theory of overaccumulation-devaluation,” which reveals the “intense destructive power that lurks behind capitalism’s façade…”

(342): from depression to the Marshall Plan: “It was in fact the Second World War that brought full employment and reinvestment, but did so under conditions where vast amounts of capital stood to be physically destroyed, and many idle workers consumed as cannon fodder. And it was precisely the geographical unnevenness of that destruction that opened up new spaces in the postwar period for the absorption of surplus US capital.“

(343): “The bourgeois era has witnessed a growth in destructive force that more than matches the growth of productive force so essential to the survival of capitalism.”