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.”

the urban experience, david harvey (1985)

introduction

(1-2): a more orthodox understanding of the object to be studied? the urban as city?

(3): the importance of a structuring "meta-theory," the Marxist variety of which Harvey turns to in the early 1970s

(3): against positivism, "science can never be neutral... New understandings of the world cannot come from passive contemplation, Marx argues, but arise through active struggle..." this, he adds, is the "dialectical quality" of the Marxist approach: "We think before we act but learn to think through doing."

(4): here delineating his own understanding of the contribution he made in

Limits to Capital, the "empty boxes" of Marxist theory--this helped him shift, he says, from a study of history to a study of historical geography (and of the "urban process as an active part of the historical geography of class struggle and capital accumulation")

(5): social theory has focused on time and history, but not space and spatial relations (this is anthony giddens' critique)

(5): space enters Marxism, it seems, through the underdeveloped theory of "uneven geographic development"--but this is only a stop-gap solution, of course. the work remains to be done.

(6): it's not clear to me that the "space" is as foundational a structuring concept as "time," but nonetheless (i mean, it's either trivially true, or impossible to understand, for me)--i suppose we can follow harvey as he attempts to "upgrade" historical materialism into "historical-geographical" materialism.

(6): definition of the urban: "The urban is, however, one of several spatial scales at which the production of spatial configurations, social organization and political consciousness might be examined--regions, nation-states, and power blocs being others... I do not intend that [the urban] should be considered a theoretically specific object of analysis separate from the historical geography of capitalism as a whole."

(7): what's more, "the urban" must be studied always as a "process," and never as a "reified" thing.

(7): bourdieu's critique of the pure empiricists, who disavow theory--in taking a step back, you constitute a "representation" of practical activity. and this representation makes impossible pure empiricism (the facts and data you present are always framed by a certain theoretical understanding).

(8): KEY: Harvey's representation of the "Marxist approach" (pp 8-11). he makes an important distinction between "concrete representations" (money, work, etc.), and "abstract and non-observable concepts" (surplus value, value, etc.), which are more controversial but conceivably still essential to making sense of the world in which we live. "The proof of this conceptual apparatus lies in the using..."

(12): "I focus in particular on the circulation of capital (and value) through the production and use of built environments... I think it is useful to look upon the geographical landscape of capitalism as the expression of flows of capital."

(13): positivism vs. Marxism: "The imposition of postivist standards of proof upon Marxian theory means accepting positivsm not Marxism as a working base. From the Marxian standpoint, proof is constituted in part out of the confidence that arises from the mode of concept formation and in part through explanatory power. The latter implies the capacity to interpret historical geography in coherent and compelling ways..."

(16): the evolution of more 'flexible' modes of accumulation after the slumps of the 70s cast doubt on the conceptual framework that had tried to come to terms with the post-war long boom (i.e., of "monopoly capitalism" leading to stagnation leading to socialism)

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the urbanization of capital

(16): the "eternal skepticism" of Marxism, even as science

(16): question being asked--"how does capital become urbanized?"

(18): first, commodity exchange--Harvey wants to ask what are the spatial and temporal limits placed on these transactions; in other words, there is a separation of the purchases involved in M-C/C'-M' in space and time--but "how much separation?" "The spatial and temporal horizons of exchange are evidently socially determined."

(19): KEY: "But the general point remains: when looked at from the standpoint of exchange, the circulation of capital is a geographical movement in time. I shall later seek to show that the geographical structures of commodity markets are more than mere reflections of capital circulation and function as real determinants of capitalism's dynamic." [question of labor power as a special comomdity--the limits are more real/"human"]

(20): KEY INTERVENTION, "spatial competition": "The general Marxist approach is to see the evolution of those sociotechnical conditions of production as an outcome of intercapitalist competition and class struggle supplemented by spillover needs... But here I shall have to introduce a fundamental modification of the general Marxian account. I insist that intercapitalist competition and class struggle spark spatial competition..." [so does this mean, then, that cross-class alliances can (and do) form, across space? and if they can, does this represent a de-centering of the category of class? or are they, 'space' and 'class', not to be understood in opposition?]

(20): a tension in the geography of capitalism--geographical concentration (has the advantage of minimizing spatial separation) vs. geographical dispersion (which allows firms to take advantage of particular geographical features)

(21): Harvey hints at the importance, also, of a "spatial" analysis of consumption in understanding the urban form (Marxism has focused on the centrality of production). this obviously recalls Castells.

(22): "Money represents the greatest concentration of social power int he midst of the greatest possible dispersal" -- this can help, it is implied here, understanding the importance and role of financial markets, which concentrate in cities.

(22-23): "Capital accumulation and the production of urbaniztion go hand in hand... Buidling a capacity for increased efficiency of coordination in space and time is one of the hallmarks of capitalist urbanization."

(23): study of "capital surpluses" (i.e., profits) and "relative labor surplus" provide a "powerful link to the history of capitalist urbanization", Harvey's arguing, aside from telling us a lot about capitalist crisis.

(24): urbanization preceded the "standard form of circulation of capital through production"--"A built environment potentially supportive of capitalist production, consumption, and exchange had to be created before capitalism won direct control over immediate production and consumption." [note here the ease with which Harvey is dealing with the 'urban,' accepting its convenitional definition. in a sense, of course, his entire argument is an attempt to clarify the process it denotes--but the traditional definition lurks therein, still...]

(25): distinction between condition in seventeenth-century England and contemporary Third World assessed on the basis of the massive relative labor surpluses in the latter--this informs/structures "Third World urbanization"

(25): possibility of a divergence between the particular and general class interest (no doubt, the State must step in here, to prevent individual capitalists from ruining themselves)

(27): some reflections on the depleted asset base in the Third World, vis-a-vis developing England and France--but this is not very systematic..

(27): helpful clarification: "The breakthrough into a predominantly capitalist mode of production and circulation was not, therefore, a purely urban or a purely rural event. But without the urban accumulation of surpluses of both capital and labor power, one of the crucial necessary conditions for the rise of capitalism would not have been fulfilled."

(27): and it is thus,roughly, this period of breakthrough when we see the logic of accumulation come to 'determine' urbanization, in a new way--this, in turn, leads to the sharpening of the purely internal contradictions of capitalism, and crisis (he dates the first of these to 1848). capitalism then seeks a 'spatial' fix.

(28-): rise of the "industrial city"

(29): to the earlier point about urban-based class alliances, Harvey writes: "The capacity of any urban-based class alliance to wield monopoly control, either internally or on the world stage, diminished." [in other words, the phenomenon of urban-based class alliances, or spatial competition of that sort, is contingent--and pre-industrial (no, Harvey notes Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham in the 1860s)? as the industrial city became part of an increasingly more generalized capitalist system, it's power, qua city, decreased. this doesn't mean the end of competition between cities, again--it simply means that those cities are not in control of that competition]

(31): the bourgeoisie has to respond to class struggle--"above all, the ruling-class alliance had to find ways to invent a new tradition of community [though he goes on to suggest that this formation of community identity was also organic] that could counter or absorb the antagonisms of class. [and here, collective consumption:] This it did in part by accepting responsibility for various facets of social reproduction of the working class (health, education, welfare, and even housing provision)..."

(32): Harvey notes the appearence of politics at the urban scale, but also the new barriers this activism was up against (specifically, "two reserve powers," the "discipline of competition," and of 'abstract labor' on the world market)

(32): ruling-class control over space becomes a critical means of repressing working-class mobilization (as in Paris in 1848 and 1871)

(33): important--the "industrial city" as "an unstable configuration," rather than static object.

(34): the "spatial fix", again

(34): WWII as a "neat but hideously violent resolution to capitalism's internal contradictions."

(34): the beginnings, in the post-war era, of "demand-side" urbanization. questions to ask, though: certainly it's not sufficient to see this as entirely motivated by the logic of the system, in the sense presented here--it took demands and agitation and the threat of something more (though, of course, it's important not to overstate this point, at the same time)

(34-35): monopoly era frees companies to focus on the labor market? what does this mean, exactly? he's referring to the birth of the mass market (via Gramsci and Fordism)

(36): the increasing importance of credit in the economy is reflected, Harvey's arguing, in cities, as the process of urbanization becomes linked to the available supply of capital in an economy

(37): though speaking about demand-side "urbanization," one notes that he hasn't told us anything at all about the city, yet.

(37): this periodization is important--Fordism began the switch to demand-side urbanization, but it was state intervention in the form of Keynesianism that consolidated it.

(38): theorizing the growth of infrastructures as a deployment of "overaccumulated Capital and labor-power," which introduced the illusory prospect of continued growth

(38): it is important to note the centrality of "debt-creation" to this process (the US, Harvey is saying, was confronted with a mountain of private and public debt as early as 1970), given the prevalent impression that its explosion is unique to the current historical epoch, in the US (1973 collapse of real estate markets, and 1974-1975 fiscal crisis in NY, all signaled a sea-change)

(38-39): we see the 'suburban solution' to the underconsumption problem (cf. D. Walker) ("Though suburbanization had a long history, it marked post-war mobilization to an extraordinary degree")

(39): in advanced capitalist countries, the 'urban-rural' distinction is obliterated in its traditional appearance. but, Harvey's noting, it re-appears as a "consumption" option.

(40): "The Keynesian city put much greater emphasis upon the spatial division of consumption relative to the spatial division of labor."

(40): the inner-city as the other side of the suburban, demand-side coin

(41): KEY: in summary, three problems with the "demand-side" urbanization--(1) "increased indebtedness"; (2) the spatial fix was challenged by movements seeking to preserve community; (3) focus was now on circulation of revenues (of consumption), rather than on production, which is the system's lifeblood (in the worst cases, this led to "job loss", "capital flight", and "disinvestment) [we see here, as elsewhere, grounds for supporting the argument that castells' analytic of "collective consumption" is valid as a historically specific argument, i.e. pegged to 'monopoly capitalism/keynesianism]

(43): even with limited knowledge, I don't find this a very coherent enumeration of the social movements produced by the Keynesian city--specifically, that they were motivated by this "consumption" question. and when he argues that they were motivated by a desire to "control social space"--that is fine, but it doesn't seem obvious to me why that desire is at all historically specific. here again i would like some more history and help from harvey.

(44): and so, of course, the post-kenyesian (or neo-liberal) city is born--the operative problem being: "How could urban regions blessed largely with a demand-side heritage adapt to a supply-side world? Four different possibilities... seemed possible... "

(45): I. Competition within the Spatial Division of Labor--two primary tools, of course, the pursuit of relative and absolute surplus-value. in the former, the city has very little autonomy, except by making general interventions in the labor-market and/or infrastructure. in the former, cities can of course help (free trade zones, and the like).

(47): II. Competition within the Spatial Division of Consumption--this is a battle for "cultural hegemony," for the revenues circulating in the system. it encompasses things like Disney World and Tourism, but is not limited to them, of course (think DHA City, maybe)

(48): III. Competition for Command Functions--competition for key control functions in government and finance, which requires heavy investment in "public infrastructures" that link the city to the world market (moreover, this is a sector characterized by monopoly power "that is hard to break")

(48): throughout this essay, there lies latent the question of how systematically we're speaking of the city, as agent--is it via the orthodox concept of social class (i.e., a particular bourgeoisie commands the city?) or is it through this new, contingent concept of class-based alliances? clearly, a la Brenner, there is lots of room to be thinking about the State, here (can formulate this better in RP) (see also 58)

(50): IV. Competition for Redistribution--i.e., for handouts (typically in the form of infrastructure) from the State. [is this a way in to the question of social class?] example, also, of the cities built around the "defense industry" (and we might add prisons) in the US.

(52): "The rich now grow richer and the poor grow poorer... because it is the natural outcome of the coercive laws of competition."

(53): endorsing the "cogency" of Lefebvre's call to prioritize the "urban," but in a very specific way: on the one hand the urban as the site of deployment for economic surpluses has always existed--but this is of course very different under capitalism.

(54): memorable, but meaningful?--"Capitalism has to urbanize in order to reproduce itself. But the urbanization of capital creates contradictions... Capitalist urbanization has its own distinctive logic and its own distinctive forms of contradiction."

(54): this is actually deeply confusing, and needs to be re-examined: on the one hand, he is disputing the notion of unitary identity (that people are not just their class, but also consumers, community residents, etc., etc.), which is fair enough. but he is extending this to critique the very processes he has just been outlining, to say not just that they are "not necessarily true," but even that they are about as accurate as the notion that "consciousness=class." those are not very high standards, mr. harvey...

(55): "our historical geography is always ours to make."

(56): insightful--the spectre of geo-political troubles for the US, as it becomes increasingly a site of "appropriation" rather than "production" (a mercantilist center)

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the urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis

(58): acknowledging, again, the specificity of the 'urban' under capitalism--and within this, "I hang my interpretation of the urban process on the twin themes of (1) accumulation and (2) class struggle.

(60): contradiction one: while each capitalist lives in a world of 'unlimited' freedom and individuality, he is subject--always--to the coercive law of competition (this, then, is the problem of the general class interest: "individual capitalists..acting in his own immediate self-interest, can produce an aggregative result that is wholly antagonistic to the collective class interest."

(61): contradiction two: the classic one, between capitalists and proletariat

(62): in his "ridiculously short" summary of the argument of Capital, Harvey draws attention to Marx's assumption of a 'single time period' of production.

(62-63): the Harvey theory of crisis--overaccumulation manifests itself in (1) overproduciton; (2) falling rates of profit (prices, not values); (3) Surplus Capital; (4) Surplus labor (or rising rate of exploitation) [the question of whether this is a theory of crisis, or a 'description' can be left to more storied scholars--see also pp 70-71, where he discusses three "scales" of crisis (partial, switching, global)]

(64): fixed capital--(1) used as "aids to the production process"; (2) used over a "relatively long time period"; moreover we have fixed capital confined to the production process, and fixed capital "that functions as a physical framework" (or, "the built environment for production")

(64): similarly, we can talk of a "built environment for consumption"

(64-65): secondary circuit of capital--flows of capital into these "fixed asset and consumption fund formation" (naturally, it provides a temporary relief to capital confronted with overaccumulation in the primary circuit of capital, though there are barriers--individual and natural)

(65): capitalism, left to itself, will have trouble ensuring a "balanced flow of capital" between the primary and secondary circuits (another place where the State is important--though we can perhaps talk about if this is simply equivalent to the neoliberal State involved in creating a "good business climate")

(65-66): tertiary circuit of capital: investments in science and technology, and in the labor force (both progressive and disciplinary), which--again--individual capitalists will very rarely make on their own.

(68): distinction between "productivity" of capital, and its "profitability"--Harvey prefers the former, because it can deal with three problems that confront Marx's concept (1. equal rate of profit in diff. sectors / 2. normal pricing of commodities, which does not hold for the 2nd and 3rd circuits / 3. can we really treat total profit as total surplus value, when we look at capitalists as a class?)

(68): perhaps less abstrusely, Harvey is concerned to talk about all investments that "directly or indirectly [expand] the basis for the production of surplus value." this is the definition of productive investment.

(72): status of the "rural" in Harvey's analysis--"there are serious grounds for challenging the adequacy of the urban-rurlal dichotomy even when expressed as a dialectical unity, as a primary form of contradiction within the capitalist mode of production..." [we can flag this for later, but his argument that it can be analysed in terms of other contradictions/concepts is tolerable, but then valid for other things we concentrate on, too? although, having said this, right away he makes a qualification that aligns with my perspective, so...]

(73-74): elaborating further on the concept of the built environment (useful for reference)--it is a "gross simplification... [it] is long lived, difficult to alter, spatially immobile, and often absorbent of large, lumpy investments."

(76-77): 'devaluation' is critical to re-starting capital accumulation

(77): evidence for 'long waves' in investment in the built environment (and, moreover, switching across Atlantic economy between Britain and the US)

(80): two aspects of the theory of crisis are flagged as crucial--"overaccumulation" and "devaluation"

(80): historicizing overaccumulation wrt to the built environment, arguing that we see investment of surplus in the built environment prior to capitalism (i.e., England in the 1700s), but we cannot call that overaccumulation. Harvey, then, is targeting something else--this relationship exists only in the modern mode of production (by 1840s in Britain, at least).

(81): 1848 as "the first really solid and all-pervasive crisis in the capitalist world."

(81): and devaluation--if it is to work, it must leave behind a "use-value" that can then be used to re-start accumulation (WWII, then, doesn't count as devaluation?)

(82-83): problem of devaluation of fixed capital--new technologies make old ones (which were anticipated to be long-lasting) much less valuable. this was Marx's insight--Harvey wants to apply it to the study of the "built-environment": "Capital represents itself in the form of a physical landscape created in its own image, created as use values to enhance the progressive accumulation of capital. The geographical landscape that results is the crowning glory of past capitalist development. But at the same time it expresses the power of dead labor over living labor, and as such it imprisons and inhabits the accumulation process within a set of specific physical constraints."

(84): turning to class struggle, he focuses first on the "industrial reserve army," which is a window into a systematic understanding of the causes and effects of labor migration, obviously.

(85): notion of displaced class struggle, though this doesn't seem particularly useful or novel as a concept (simply denotes class struggle in other spheres of society--i.e., those that aren't directly economic)

(86): the importance of both "suburbanization" and the "ownership society" as attempts to resolve different contradictions in capitalism (the former, overaccumulation and class struggle (problems arising with the spatial concentration and centrality of workers)--the latter, class struggle (but also, by extension, soon overaccumulation as well--i.e., mortgages, etc.))

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the place of urban politics in the geography of uneven capitalist development

(125): the stakes are clear--castells has identified a duality in the marxist framework--the two logics that are said to govern urbanization (capital accumulation and class struggle) seem, to him, incompatible. this, then, is harvey's task in this essay: to prove that they can be dialectially reconciled (with all the failings of a formal model, of course)

(125): much will no doubt hinge on this notion of the "relative autonomy" of social movements.

(126): "autonomous urban politics" seems to arise, Harvey is saying, in that space vacated by the temporary and fleeting "class alliances" that arise in various historical moments.

(127): also, he is arguing, because of the importance of "consumption" in discussions of the urban form, social movements are always around [but this does raise the question of within-system and anti-systemic social movements? in fact, what is a social movement anyway?]

(127): "urban politics"--meant "in the broad sense of political processs at work within a fluidly defined but nevertheless explicit space" [specific enough? certainly this now encompasses both establishment and resistance. not a case of an empty concept, in some sense?]

(127-128): the urban is being re-defined for our purposes--here denotes a "geographically-contiguous labor market"

(128): Harvey notes three unique features, re: labor power--(1) its production is beyond the control of the capitalist; (2) the calculation of its exchange value is embedded in morality and history; (3) it is difficult to specify, for the capitalist, the precise use-value it represents (i.e., how much profit it will give him)

(130): problem of "structured rigidity" in labor market--i.e., things are never as flexible as the capitalist might like (though, if you expand the "time-horizon" of your analysis, you do start to see the flexibility, as well)

(131): marx's "general law of capitalist accumulation" (i.e., idea of reserve army) proves useful, harvey's arguing, as a "first approximation"--but this requires further elaboration.

(131): a critical contradiction-->capital is pulled at in opposite directions wrt to labor markets--on the one hand it likes agglomeration, for various reasons, but also obviously occasionally wants to cut loose to areas where wage rates are lower.

(132): a contradiction immanent in migration, too: individual workers flock to areas with large labor markets, but this obviously has negative effects from the perspective of their collective, class interest (it typically undermines the power of labor in the market to which they flock)

(134): labor, like soil! must be taken care of...

(134): a need to situate "class struggle" in the dynamics that affect labor market insofar as they are geographically-specific. (here, the role of the nation-state is relevant--a tendency, perhaps, for international disparities to overshadow regional ones). BUT, still: "I want to make the argument for the urban labor market as a fundamental unit of analysis..." (the others being international, national, regional, and urban--scales of labor markets...)

(136): travails of the search for "excess profits"--"two streams" (1) competitive path, where new technologies and locations prevail; (2) monopoly path, where exclusive control over technology or location is what matters (this drive is "more important than is generally realized.")

(137): importance of length of turnover time to this process--the longer it takes, the more the technological and locational inertia (this is important, clearly--and it empowers labor, as it makes the fixed capital in these businesses more and more vulnerable)

(139): this can all be understood in terms of this contradiction: "Capitalist behavior is thus ambiguous in relation to spatially defined urban labor markets. On the one hand, the thrust to gain monopoly privileges that put them above their competition... can lead firms to be both covetous and solicitous of tapping into and preserving the special privileges of exclusive access... On the other hand, competition (either spatial or technological) can push them to ride roughshod from one type of labor market... to another... The capitalist landscape of production therefore lurches between the stabilizing stagnation of monopoly controls and the disruptive dynamism of competitive growth."

(139-140): definition of "structured coherence" -- means something like the calcification and stabilization of a particular spatial-social arrangement, within capitalism (harvey here mentions a tendency towards it, though this is less clear to me from what he has argued thus far)

(140): "From a purely technical standpoint this positions labor as an appendage of the circulation of capital within the urban region" -- he's speaking about the calcification of certain production and consumption norms, but the conclusion seems more drastic (the worker is caught in a 'company store' moment. clearly it means more than the fact that we are always living within capitalism--but surely it is, then, more specific than it is being made out to be?)

(142): the interesting question of "local effective demand" ("I use the example to illustrate the idea that high wage costs do not always undermine competitiveness but can sometimes improve it, depending on the sector.")

(143): "But I speak only of the tendency toward structured coherence because it exists in the midst of a maelstrom of forces that tend to undermine and disrupt it."

(144): important--two types of response to the threat of devaluation/overaccumulation being noted here (though this is probably not exhaustive of what we've discussed thus far): (1) monopolization, space and technology--of course this threatens stagnation; (2) temporal and spatial displacement

(145): summary of his own arg. wrt to infrastructures: (1) they demonstrate idea of "structured coherence", insofar as they fix a certain "technological mix"; (2) they represent a potential source of excess profit, insofar as they guarantee unique access; (3) usually involve debt-financing, and State--which has the benefit of ensuring that they are more 'rational' than most; (4) vulnerable to devaluation, because they represent technological and spatial confinement; (5) precisely for this reason, those who have built them have a vested interest in making sure they're put to use.

(147): THE URBAN, in light of all this: "An examination of physical and social infrastructures will help to broaden the conception of what an urban region is all about. It is more than a set of overlapping and interpenetrating commodity and labor markets; more than a set of intersecting labor processes and productive forces; more, even than a simple structured coherence of production and consumption. It is also a living community endowed with certain physical and social assets, themselves the product of a long process of historical development and class struggle."

(148): somewhat cryptic and unwarranted insertion of "human agency" into his argument.

(148): important--in the argument, Harvey wants us to understand "structured coherence" as the 'material' analogue (or 'base') of "class-based alliances" (about which, now, he will ask three questions: who, how, and why unstable?)

(149): a nice example of a (very fleeting) class-based alliance on a base of structured coherence--homeowners and financial institutions in the "ownership" society.

(150): this is CRITICAL to understanding this article, as rejoinder: "Such activities [i.e., 'false' class-alliances], I want to stress, are not aberrations of class struggle but are a necessary and particular manifestation of the way class relations and accumulation unfold in space." (see also pg. 155)

(152): he pinpoints "the art of politics" -- but can't we integrate this better into a more orthodox discussion of 'hegemony'? or is this better understood as an alternative way of getting at the same phenomenon?

(153): uff, Harvey--is this not a classically empty statement? "It is, we conclude, the interpenetration of class, group, and individual relations within and between the state and civil society which provides the matrix of possibilities for building a ruling coalition."

(156): "There are aspects of urban life and culture which seem to remain outside the immediate grasp of the contradictory logic of accumulation [but] there is nothing of significance that lies outside its context... The task of the urban theorist, therefore, is to show where the integrations lie and how the inner relations work." (a formal or historical task? a formal-historical task, of course)

(156): urban politics, here, seems to enter to set the stage for capital accumulation--it coordinates, in a sense, what the individual capitalist cannot (though there is, certainly, always room for more anti-systemic inclinations)

(157): re-applying Jacobs on technology

(159): an additional layer onto the urban--the urban as "geopolitical identity within capitalism"

(160): interesting, though very underdeveloped observation that through the 1800s, there was a trend towards enhancing the political authority of local regions (i.e., cities). Harvey argues that the very success of labor and the working-class scuppered this movement, as the new formation represented too much of a threat to the status quo (hence, dispersal and deliberate fragmentation...)

(162-163): noting himself that the "urban" is merely one of the multiple scales at which the dynamics of capitalism can be apprehended. this is, nonetheless, a very "real context." ("The processes appear as abstract forces, to be sure, but they are not the kind of forces that we can ever afford to abstract from.")

(164): "By that path we might hope to liberate ourselves from the chains of a spaceless Marxist orthodoxy as well as from the futility of bourgeois retreat into partial representations and naive empiricism."

Well, the first thing is that, along with this optimistic scenario from the point of view of uniting the conditions of the working class globally, there was a more pessimistic consideration in the essay, pointing to something that I’ve always considered a very serious flaw in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. There is a logical leap that does not really hold up, intellectually or historically—the idea that, for capital, those things that we would today call gender, ethnicity, nationality, do not matter. That the only thing that matters for capital is the possibility of exploitation; and therefore the most exploitable status group within the working class is the one they will employ, without any discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity. That’s certainly true. However, it doesn’t follow that the various status groups within the working class will just accept this. In fact, it is precisely at the point when proletarianization becomes generalized, and workers are subjected to this disposition of capital, that they will mobilize whatever status difference they can identify or construct to win a privileged treatment from the capitalists. They will mobilize along gender lines, national lines, ethnicity or whatever, to obtain a privileged treatment from capital.
(...) [Adam Smith:] Substantively, the action of the government in Smith is pro-labour, not pro-capital. He is quite explicit that he is not in favour of making workers compete to reduce wages, but of making capitalists compete, to reduce profits to a minimum acceptable reward for their risks. Current conceptions turn him completely
(...) There is evidence that the Chinese authorities are worried about the environment, as well as about social unrest—but then they do things that are plain stupid. Maybe there is a plan in the works, but I don’t see much awareness of the ecological disasters of car civilizations. The idea of copying the United States from this point of view was already crazy in Europe—it’s even crazier in China. And I’ve always told the Chinese that in the 1990s and 2000s, they went to look at the wrong city. If they want to see how to be wealthy without being ecologically destructive, they should go to Amsterdam rather than Los Angeles. In Amsterdam, everybody goes around on bicycles; there are thousands of bikes parked at the station overnight, because people come in by train, pick up their bicycles in the morning and leave them there again in the evening. Whereas in China, while there were no cars at all the first time I was there in 1970—only a few buses in a sea of bicycles—now, more and more, the bicycles have been crowded out. From that point of view it’s a very mixed picture, very worrying and contradictory. The ideology of modernization is discredited elsewhere but so far is living on, rather naively, in China.
(...) If you look at the way in which China has behaved towards its neighbours historically, there has always been a relationship based more on trade and economic exchanges than on military power; this is still the case. People often misunderstand this: they think I am depicting the Chinese as being softer or better than the West; it’s nothing to do with that. It has to do with the problems of governance of a country like China, which we’ve discussed. China has a tradition of rebellions that no other territory of similar size and density of population has faced. Its rulers are also highly conscious of the possibility of new invaders from the sea—in other words, the us.
(...) So I had the luck—from the point of view of analysing the capitalist business enterprise—of going into successively larger firms, which helped me understand that you cannot talk about capitalist enterprises in general, because the differences between my father’s business, my grandfather’s business and Unilever were incredible.
(...)
(...) First of all, we should not exaggerate the extent to which China has broken the pattern. The level of per capita income in China was so low—and still is low, compared to the wealthy countries—that even major advances need to be qualified. China has doubled its position relative to the rich world, but still that only means going from 2 per cent of the average per capita income of the wealthy countries to 4 per cent. It is true that China has been decisive in producing a reduction in world income inequalities between countries. If you take China out, the South’s position has worsened since the 1980s; if you keep it in, then the South has improved somewhat, due almost exclusively to China’s advance. But of course, there has been a big growth in inequality within the prc, so China has also contributed to the world-scale increase in inequalities within countries in recent decades. Taking the two measures together—inequality between and within countries—statistically China has brought about a reduction in total global inequality. We should not exaggerate this—the world pattern is still one of huge gaps, which are being reduced in small ways. However, it’s important because it changes relationships of power between countries. If it continues, it may even change the global distribution of income from one that is still very polarized to a more normal, Pareto-type distribution.
(...) From the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, the more important development has been the bifurcation of a highly dynamic and upwardly mobile East Asia and a stagnant and downwardly mobile Africa, and particularly southern Africa—‘the Africa of the labour reserves’, again. This bifurcation is the thing that interests me most: why southern Africa and East Asia have moved in such opposite directions. It’s a very important phenomenon to try to understand, because to do so would also modify our understanding of the underpinnings of successful capitalist development, and the extent to which it relies or not on dispossession—the complete proletarianization of the peasantry—as happened in southern Africa, or on the very partial proletarianization that has taken place in East Asia. So the divergence of these two regions brings up a big theoretical question, which once again challenges Brenner’s identification of capitalist development with the full proletarianization of the labour force.
(...) The relationship is very close, because, first of all, contrary to what many people think, the Chinese peasants and workers have a millennial tradition of unrest that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. In fact, many of the dynastic transitions were driven by rebellions, strikes and demonstrations—not just of workers and peasants, but also shopkeepers. This is a tradition that continues down to the present. When Hu Jintao told Bush, a few years ago, ‘Don’t worry about China trying to challenge us dominance; we have too many preoccupations at home’, he was pointing to one of the chief characteristics of Chinese history: how to counter the combination of internal rebellions by the subordinate classes, and external invasions by so-called barbarians—from the Steppes, up to the nineteenth century, and then, since the Opium Wars, from the sea. These have always been the overwhelming concerns of Chinese governments, and they set narrow limits on China’s role in international relations.
(...) Well, not of less relevance, because in fact it is the most serious crisis that historical capitalism has experienced; certainly, it was a decisive turning point. But it also educated the powers-that-be in terms of what they should do so as not to repeat that experience. There are a variety of recognized and less recognized instruments for preventing that type of breakdown from happening again. Even now, though the collapse in the stock exchange is being compared to the 1930s, I think—I may be wrong—that both the monetary authorities and the governments of the states that actually matter in this are going to do all they can to avoid the collapse in the financial markets having similar social effects to the 1930s. They just cannot afford it, politically. And so they will muddle through, do anything they have to. Even Bush—and before him Reagan—for all their free-market ideology, relied on an extreme kind of Keynesian deficit spending. Their ideology is one thing, what they actually do is another, because they are responding to political situations which they cannot allow to deteriorate too much. The financial aspects may be similar to the 1930s, but there is a greater awareness and tighter constraints on the political authorities not to let these processes affect the so-called real economy to the same extent that they did in the 1930s. I’m not saying that the Great Depression is less relevant, but I’m not convinced that it is going to be repeated in the near future. The situation of the world economy is radically different. In the 1930s it was highly segmented, and that may have been a factor in producing the conditions for those breakdowns. Now it’s far more integrated.
(...) Yes. I think that over the last thirty years there has been a change in the nature of the crisis. Up to the early 1980s, the crisis was typically one of falling rate of profits due to intensifying competition among capitalist agencies, and due to circumstances in which labour was much better equipped to protect itself than in the previous depressions—both in the late-nineteenth century and in the 1930s. So that was the situation through the 1970s. The Reagan–Thatcher monetary counter-revolution was actually aimed at undermining this power, this capacity of the working classes to protect themselves—it was not the only objective, but it was one of the main objectives. I think that you quote some adviser of Thatcher, saying that what they did was [to create an industrial reserve army]; what Marx says they should do! That changed the nature of the crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s and now, in the 2000s, we are indeed facing an underlying overproduction crisis, with all its typical characteristics. Incomes have been redistributed in favour of groups and classes that have high liquidity and speculative dispositions; so incomes don’t go back into circulation in the form of effective demand, but they go into speculation, creating bubbles that burst regularly. So, yes, the crisis has been transformed from one of falling rate of profit, due to intensified competition among capitals, to one of overproduction due to a systemic shortage of effective demand, created by the tendencies of capitalist development.
(...) ...What the declining power does is very important, because they have the ability to create chaos. The whole ‘Project for a New American Century’ was a refusal to accept decline. That has been a catastrophe. There has been the military debacle in Iraq and the related financial strain on the us position in the world economy, transforming the United States from a creditor nation into the biggest debtor nation in world history. As a defeat, Iraq is worse than Vietnam, because in Indo-China there was a long tradition of guerrilla warfare: they had a leader of the calibre of Ho Chi Minh; they had already defeated the French. The tragedy for the Americans in Iraq is that, even in the best possible circumstances, they have a hard time winning the war, and now they are just trying to get out with some face-saving device. Their resistance to accommodation has led, first, to an acceleration of their decline, and second, to a lot of suffering and chaos. Iraq is a disaster. The size of the displaced population there is far bigger than in Darfur.
(...) One of the major problems on the left, but also on the right, is to think that there is only one kind of capitalism that reproduces itself historically; whereas capitalism has transformed itself substantively—particularly on a global basis—in unexpected ways. For several centuries capitalism relied on slavery, and seemed so embedded in slavery from all points of view that it could not survive without it; whereas slavery was abolished, and capitalism not only survived but prospered more than ever, now developing on the basis of colonialism and imperialism. At this point it seemed that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalism’s operation—but again, after the Second World War, capitalism managed to discard them, and to survive and prosper. World-historically, capitalism has been continually transforming itself, and this is one of its main characteristics; it would be very short-sighted to try to pin down what capitalism is without looking at these crucial transformations. What remains constant through all these adaptations, and defines the essence of capitalism, is best captured by Marx’s formula of capital M–C–M', to which I refer repeatedly in identifying the alternation of material and financial expansions. Looking at present-day China, one can say, maybe it’s capitalism, maybe not—I think it’s still an open question. But assuming that it is capitalism, it’s not the same as that of previous periods; it’s thoroughly transformed. The issue is to identify its specificities, how it differs from previous capitalisms, whether we call it capitalism or something else.
(...) Well, I would have no objections to it being called socialism, except that, unfortunately, socialism has been too much identified with state control of the economy. I never thought that was a good idea. I come from a country where the state is despised and in many ways distrusted. The identification of socialism with the state creates big problems. So, if this world-system was going to be called socialist, it would need to be redefined in terms of a mutual respect between humans and a collective respect for nature. But this may have to be organized through state-regulated market exchanges, so as to empower labour and disempower capital in Smithian fashion, rather than through state ownership and control of the means of production. The problem with the term socialism is that it’s been abused in many different ways, and therefore also discredited. If you ask me what would be a better term, I’ve no idea—I think we should look for one. You are very good at finding new expressions, so you should come up with some suggestions.

For two reasons. One is, it makes you actually very vulnerable if you’re a heavily debt-encumbered homeowner. And actually, the initial legislation was kind of interesting, the debate around it back in the 1930s, when it kind of said debt-encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike, and because it’s—you know, you’ve got to pay your mortgage. And so, this becomes, as it were, a millstone around your neck. And that then makes you very vulnerable to fluctuations in the market like we’re seeing right now, particularly if you have variable rate mortgages, things of that kind, and you can really easily get caught out. So, in effect, what we’ve seen in the housing market is a tremendous plundering of the assets of some of the most vulnerable people in the country. I mean, this has been the biggest loss of asset wealth to the African American population that there’s ever been.
(...) But as soon as the big guns get into trouble, the state bails them out. And this is what we call moral hazard, that actually because you’re bailing out Wall Street all of the time, then Wall Street will take high risks. And they’ve taken immensely high risks over the last thirty years and again and again and again being caught out. And each time they get caught out, the state steps in and saves them. That’s the connection, if you like, between the state and Wall Street. That’s the connection that has to be broken.
(...) I don’t see the neoliberalism as dead, if you say that neoliberalism is about consolidation of class power, because actually we’re seeing the further consolidation of it right now, rather than the lessening of it. And that’s what I—when I talk about the bank bailout, that’s what it was doing. So I’m kind of concerned.

Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.
(...) One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. This would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people, and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger.
(...) One of the major barriers to continuous capital accumulation back in the 1960s and early 70s was the labor question. There were scarcities of labor both in Europe and the US and labor was well organised, with political clout. So one of the big barriers to capital accumulation during that period was; how can capital get access to cheaper and more docile labor supplies? There were a number of answers. One was to encourage more immigration. In the United States there was a major revision of the immigration laws in 1965 that in effect allowed the US access to the global surplus population (before that only Europeans and Caucasians were privileged). In the late 1960s the French government was subsidising the import of Maghrebian labor, the Germans were bringing in the Turks, the Swedes were bringing in the Yugoslavs, the British were drawing upon their empire. So a pro-immigration policy emerged which was one attempt to deal with the labor problem.
(...) The second thing you go for is rapid technological change which throws people out of work and if that failed then there were people like Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet to crush organized labor. And finally capital goes to where the surplus labor is by off-shoring, and this was facilitated by two things. Firstly technical reorganisation of the transport systems: one of the biggest revolutions that happened during this period is containerisation which allowed you to make auto parts in Brazil and ship them for very low cost to Detroit or wherever. Secondly the new communications systems allowed the tight organization of commodity chain production across the global space.
(...) All of these solved the labor problem for capital, so by 1985 capital has no labor problem any more. It may have specific problems in particular areas but globally it has plenty of labor available to it; the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of much of China added something like 2 billion people to the global proletariat in 20 years. So labor availability is no problem now and the result of that is that labor has been disempowered for the last 30 years. But when labor is disempowered it gets low wages, and if you engage in wage repression this limits markets. So capital was beginning to face problems with its market, and there were two things which happened.
(...) The first was the gap between what labor was earning and what it was spending was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness of households. So in the US in 1980 you would find that the average household would owe around $40,000 in debts now it’s about $130,000 for every household, including mortgages. So household debt sky-rockets and that brings you to financialisation, and that was about getting the financial institutions to support the household debts of working class people whose earnings are not increasing. And you start with the respectable working class, but by the time you get to the year 2000 you start to find these sub-prime mortgages circulating. You are looking to create a market. And so finance starts to support the debt-financing of people who have almost no income. But if you hadn’t done that what would have happened to the property developers who are building the houses? So you try and stabilize the market by funding that indebtedness.
(...) Debt is about the assumed future value of goods and services, so it assumes the economy is going to continue to grow over the next 20 or 30 years. It always involves a guess, which is then set by the interest rate, discounting into the future. This growth of the financial area after the 1970s has a lot to do with what I think is another key problem: what I would call the capitalist surplus absorption problem. As surplus theory tells us, capitalists produce a surplus, which they then have to take a part of, recapitalise it, and reinvest it in expansion. Which means they always have to find somewhere else to expand into. In an article I wrote for the New Left Review called ‘Right to the City’ I pointed out that in the last 30 years an immense amount of the capital surplus has been absorbed into urbanisation: urban restructuring, expansion and speculation. Every city I go to is a huge building site for capitalist surplus absorption. Now, of course, many of these projects stand unfinished.
(...) Throughout the history of capitalism, the general rate of growth has been close to 2.5% per annum, compound basis. That would mean that in 2030 you’d need to find profitable outlets for $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s a very tall order. I think there has been a serious problem, particularly since 1970, about how to absorb greater and greater amounts of surplus in real production. Less and less of it is going into real production, and more and more into speculation on asset values, which accounts for the increasing frequency and depth of the financial crises we’ve been having since 1975 or so; they are all crises of asset value.
(...) There is another point we have to consider, which is that labor, and particularly organised labor, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to Marx’s shortcomings in how he set up the problem. If you say to that the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism (which it obviously is), and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting or setting it up these institutional arrangements, labor has never been at the forefront of that struggle. Labor has been at the forefront in the labor market and over the labor process and these are vital moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles which have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles in which labor has only been partially present... We have a completely different kind of class politics going on and some of the conventional Marxist ways of viewing these things get in the way of a real radical politics.
(...) There is also a big problem on the left that many think the capturing of state power has no role to play in political transformations and I think they’re crazy. Incredible power is located there and you can’t walk away from it as though it doesn’t matter. I am profoundly skeptical of the belief that NGOs and civil society organisations are going to change the world, not because NGOs can’t do anything at all, but it takes a different kind of political movement and conception if we are going to do anything about the main crisis which is going on. In the United States the political instinct is very anarchist, and while I am very sympathetic to a lot of anarchist views their perpetual complaints about and refusal to command the state also gets in the way.
(...) So I could imagine a reconfiguration of urbanisation. To do anything on global warming we need to totally reconfigure how American cities work; to think about a completely new pattern of urbanisation, with new patterns of living and working. There are a lot of possibilities the left should be paying attention to - this is a real opportunity. But it is where I have a problem with some Marxists who seem to think, ‘yes! It’s a crisis; the contradictions of capitalism will now be solved somehow!’ This is not a moment for triumphalism, this is a moment for problematising. First of all I think there are problems with the way Marx set up those problems. Marxists are not very good at understanding the state financial complex or urbanisation - they are terrific at understanding some other things. But now we have to rethink our theoretical posture and political possibilities.

notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 6-10

(566): nominibus mollire licet mala -- "it is proper to lighten evils with words" (ovid)

(568-569): in this critique of the bourgeois economists, marx alludes to an understanding of machinery as emancipatory, providing that its implementation is not overseen by capitalism. this does, though, leave open many questions about how a socialist society implements machinery. is it gradual? if it's gradual how does it remain competitive? how is it not alienating? etc., etc.

(571): the advent of cotton-spinning "promote[d], as if in a hot house, the growing of cotton in the United States, and with it the African Slave Trade." an example, if one was needed, of the way in which capitalism intensified slavery, rather than simply succeeding it. (in 1790, 697,000 slaves in US; in 1861, four million).

(571-572): a bit about the demands of the wool industry and the consequent conversion of arable land into pasture for sheep, which is critical precisely because, as sayre argued, it demonstrates that little is 'natural' (as in, outside of history). or, better put, nature has to be understood historically; in this case, the relation of man to land (in this case, the de-population of rural areas) cannot be understood outside of technological advance and new systems of production. in other words, man, in england and ireland, did not meet natural limits, but limits imposed upon nature by specific histories of 'progress'.

(574): in essence, section 6 responds to those apologists who see in machinery the means by which more and more employment will be made available to laboreres (as, in short, machinery stimulates general economic growth). marx's response is unequivocal: by and large, this stimulation is negligible. there will be further growth, he admits, but this will be insignificant in relation to the general impact of machinery on labor, as well as itself being prey to the later impact of machinery (as in, if machine implementation in one branch of industry stimulates another, we can still expect it to be a matter of time before machinery pervades the latter). he ends, then, with an interesting summary of recent, contemporary growth of the servant class in industrial britain, which has relevance for third world nations today, of course. for if it truly is the case that machinery requires a "larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively," (can we think of the service sector in these terms?) then it is impossible to understand the plight of the current servant classes of the third world without recourse to 'labor-saving' technology. in other words, marx's attentiveness to this question of the relationship between technology and labor absorption should make us critically aware in the present: is it possible to imagine a way to limit technological advance so as to deal with the far more relatively numerous masses in the homes and kitchens of the indigenous bourgeoisie in the third world? how will this be accomplished, while still being competitive to the extent of being sustainable? are these the right questions?

(577): "finally, we have considered this question entirely apart from the fact that everywhere, except in the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel"--this is the critical 'other side' of the story of the industrial revolution, and neglected, i think, in accounts of women's liberation that give explanatory power to WWII. what did this mean for women's liberation? specifically, why was it the case that this large-scale employment of women did not result, in england, in a consciousness of liberation in the way that it did in america during WW2? of course there's a lot of history that i have yet to learn about both... (namely, what is the story of the english women's movement and its relation to industrial capitalism? what was the role of women in the US industrial revolution (the mills in massachusetts, for example)?)

(578): once more, a martial metaphor to explain industrial competition.

(579): marx, again, was fully aware of the gutting of india's handicraft cotton production, and its conversion into a site for producing raw material (cotton, wool, hemp, jute, indigo).

(579-580): quite standard development of underdevelopment narrative; in other words, quite clearly a dialectical (not linear) narrative of how capitalism advances.

(582): here, marx draws a link between the global extension of capitalism and the frequency of crisis. in other words, there seems to be a link between the scope of the capitalist market--the space over which it has expanded--and the frequency (and clarity) of the crises that afflict it. this, no doubt, is properly theorized in harvey and others. but we can add that it is probably not so much the fact that space is a source of new contradictions (indeed, harvey suggests that expansion into as-yet virgin areas is often the 'fix'), but rather that it is a vehicle for the consolidation of market relations (which clarifies, in a real sense, the dynamics producing crisis).

(588, fn 67): something made clear throughout this chapter is that the fact that the decreasing rate of surplus value must be compensated by absolute increases in capitalist production (by increases in the mass of surplus value) gives capitalism its relentlessly expansive character. innovation must happen, but alongside expansion. both are, simultaneously, survival strategies for individual and system.

(588-589): marx comments here on the way in which specific technical innovations undo certain divisions of labor pioneered in the manufacturing/handicraft era. he uses the example of adam smith, and his example of ten men making sewing-needles. the general importance of this passage, i suggest, is that it raises again the question of how machinery imposes objective requirements on the organization of production, which are of a quite different nature from the divisions of labor that preceded them. in other words, it is wrong to see, as feldstein via smith implied, that the progressively more extensive division of labor is the driver of increased productivity--rather, machinery intervenes in a quite decisive way, disrupting what is a very alluring linear story to reveal contradictions (advances with retreats). (see also 590, where marx writes about how the 'new division of labor' requires exclusively 'cheap labor' (i.e., women and children), quite in contrast to the 'old division of labor' in the handicrafts and even manufacture).

(593): "they become rough, foulmouthed boys, before Nature has taught them that they are women"--i suppose this is excusable, given context and intent.

(596): again, an explicit critique of the linear liberal.

(597): here, in the employment of child labor, we remember the contingency of the definition of childhood. in other words, appraising the dialectical relationship of environment (i.e., the factory) to the underlying biology is crucial to understanding the mendacity of 'capitalist anthropology'. (see also 599, where sociobiology can make little sense of parents pushing their children into brutal forms of employment).

(601): marx's argument, derived from the calculus he establishes for deciding on the efficacy of machinery, is that, in any given industry, there comes a point when increasing productivity through cheating labor, employing women/children, etc., is no longer viable (largely because demand has become so extensive). instead, capitalists turn to the machine. one question, in response, is how does this match on to the argument that the machine itself facilitates the entrance of women/children (he later clarifies some complexity, in that young children are removed but "the new machine-minders are exclusively girls and young women"? but i think that is a historical question, which requires one only to look more carefully at the chronology of their entry, rather than a theoretical conundrum. secondly, there seems to be an underlying dynamic of capital accumulation involved; in other words, you need a certain amount of capital to be able to invest in whole-scale transformation of production; a amount of disposable capital that may not be available in immature industries.

(601): again, looking to the past to better understand the present: "the fearful increase in death from starvation during the last ten years in london runs parallel with the extension of machine sewing"

(604): an important passage on the unsteadiness governing the transition from pre-factory forms to the factory system. specifically, marx here is arguing that the uneven implementation of the factory system in various branches of industry, affects dramatically (in a way that makes more inhumane) the non-factory forms of production that are linked to this technical advance. in other words, much like capitalism seizes on pre-capitalist forms and transforms them, here the factory form of production exacerbates the madness of pre-factory forms. in this way, the ascent of the factory system is accompanied by "a totally changed and disorganized" series of non-factory forms of production, which themselves "overdo all the horrors of the factory system." there is a lingering question about how to judge this transition, as marx seems to be arguing that the transitional forms are "worst" (not unlike slavery under capitalism, i suppose).

(604-605): argument here is fairly straightforward, yet important for legislation to check the excesses of contemporary capitalisms in the third world. in essence, marx is suggesting that the factory acts hastened the mechanization of production, insofar as they prohibited manufacture/domestic industry from the quick fixes of "unlimited exploitation of cheap labor-power." to compete, they had to raise productivity by the books. this has interesting consequences, when extrapolated to the case of child labor in the third world; insofar as it is true that more smaller factories/workplaces sustain these practices than larger ones (how true?), one can imagine proper legislation facilitating the concentration of capital in the hands of larger-scale industry (made explicit by marx in a passage on page 607). this dynamic, of course, has its own consequences. (anyway i think all this requires more empirical investigation, before it can be applied to explain today).

(607): a need to discipline the worker--to wean him from his "irregular habits"

(608): this is important, precisely because it prefigures what is done far too infrequently when studying "booms & busts"--namely, looking at crises from the eyes of labor, and assessing their consequences thusly.

(612): the earlier point about bourgeois legality being unable to regulate the internal order of a factory here resurfaces (and this quite aside from questions of autocracy at work). here marx offers an example of the impossibility of regulating the architecture of production: the factory acts could not re-organize the spatial structures of production, lest they "strike at the very roots of the capitalist mode of production," which is really it's freedom to purchase and consume labor-power in whatever way it pleases. put differently, the spatiality of this freedom here becomes important, insofar as it seems "impossible to impose [any] rule on capital" in this regard. in a sense, the contradiction immanent in the dual freedom of labor (the freedom to dispose of him/herself, but also the freeing of him/her from the means of production) here reappears as a contradiction in the legality of productive activity: the bourgeoisie claim the latter in the form of their property rights, yet thereby expose the fallacy of the former, insofar labor is revealed to be thoroughly subordinate to capital's will. "between equal rights, force decides."

(617): there's a dynamism to modern industry, marx is arguing, that is not present in all previous modes of production. whereas those were "essentially conservative," modern industry cannot survive without constantly "transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process." this is of course important to the chronological questions of early industrial britain (progressive de-skilling, for example), aside from being wholly true with respect to the madness of contemporary capitalism. again, dialectics, not linearity. BUT, critically, marx here, in one of those rare moments, hints at what socialist harnessing of large-scale industry would achieve. at the bottom, he writes of how capitalism channels the dynamism required by industry (the "fluidity of functions, the mobility of the worker") into a form that does away with "all fixity and security" for the worker. the challenge for socialism, then, is this: how to organize production in large-scale industry such that the mobility is emancipating, rather than exploitative (there is, of course, the ecological challenge, but that's quite separate). all this is made explicit on page 618, where marx writes directly (well, almost) of the "partially developed individual" being replaced by "the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions [required by large-scale industry] are different modes of activity he takes up in turn."

(619): more of the same attempt to prefigure socialist organization of production--and indeed, a making explicit of the dialectical approach: no necessary connection, in other words, between industry and alienation. in fact, it proves, on this account, a necessary condition for emancipation.

(620): quoting children's employment comission of 1866 (for the sociobiologists): "against no persons do the children of both sexes so much require protection as against their parents."

(621): toward a "higher form of the family:" again, an excellent explication of a concrete issue in which we can both lament the loss of all that is "fixed and frozen" (as is critical) without fearing the future (as is necessary).

(621): "since here the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker."

(621): clarifying chronology: factory acts enable general transition to machine-system, simultaneously heightening (in a real sense) the misery of those branches of industry left unregulated (domestic industry, manufacture, handicrafts).

(625-626): of course, in noting the disjuncture between what's enshrined in the letter of the law and what applies, marx (or engels, in this case) registers the classic contradiction of battles over the integrity of laws. indeed, we need to look no further than the UN declaration of human rights.

(635): a key passage, especially as regards the question of the revolutionary potential of the informal working-class. because here marx is tracing the increasing revolutionary capacities of the industrial working-class to the obliteration of spatially isolated small-scale workshops (those "ancient and transitional forms"). as this concentration of workers replaces the prevailing "partially hidden dominion of capital" with an awareness of what exactly workers ought to hold against this world, it "generalizes the direct struggle." it should be clear, though, that none of these conditions exist in the contemporary third world in any significant capacity. in that sense, fanon's command to concentrate on the peasantry needs to be re-issued, today, in the form of a demand to understand and organize the informal sector (the lumpen sectors). what remains to be studied, of course, are the imperfections of this general narrative; are there any ways in which the modern conjuncture opens up as-yet-unforseen possibilities of revolt? or is it really true that davis' pessimism prevails? why not study this, for god's sake?

(637-638): marx's first systematic presentation of the industrialization of agricultural production is lacking, of course, but is interesting in ways that orthodox reproductions don't account for. for example, there is the emphasis on the spatial distribution of laborers as an explanation for the possibility of resistance--indeed, the way he traces the chronology of agglomeration, it might be argued that even the peasantry, if crowded appropriately, could be revolutionary. (yet, on second thought, there's much more to this issue than simply space--it is, of course, to marxism's credit that it has a more robust explanation for what makes the urban working-class revolutionary (i.e,. the utterly inhuman (and painfully clear) hierarchies of the factory floor, and the invariably collective character of the demands that follow)). yet, even still, there remains room for playing with this aspect of the passage. secondly, even more interestingly, marx here introduces the concept of the 'metabolic rift,' emphasized by bellamy-foster. he hints at its future resolution, but all that he writes otherwise clarifies his interest in ecology, and capitalism's unavoidable irrationality in this respect. all this, it scarcely needs to be said, is a critical rejoinder to soviet developmentalism.