THE PRODUCTION OF TIME, SPACE AND PLACE
When Marx and Harvey refer to capital as a mode of production, they mean much more than the making of shoes and shirts, as important as such commodities are for the reproduction of everyday life. What they want to suggest is that in the very act of producing shoes and shirts, capital also produces the enabling conditions of its own reproduction on an ever-expanding scale, or what Nancy Fraser in Cannibal Capitalism calls "the background conditions of possibility." A good case in point is the capitalist production of time, space and place.
Even though Marx recognizes the interwoven nature of this socially constructed tryptic, he does not accord the three parts of the whole equal treatment. Rather, he enthrones time as a central organizing principle of the capitalist mode of production, leaving a consideration of space and place for later a generation of Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, who theorize them in their analyses of imperialism. In more recent times, the French Marxist intellectual Henri Lefebvre and geographer David Harvey had been at the forefront in bringing space and place into a better balance with time.
Time is imprinted on every page Capital and on every one of its foundational concepts, Marx's telltale fingerprint. Start with value. This is the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of a given commodity. Time likewise lies at the core of surplus value, which is the labor time appropriated by capitalists in production above and beyond the labor time necessary to cover the value of their workers' labor power. Relative surplus value continues the pattern, resulting as it does from the adoption of labor-saving technology that drive down the value, or socially necessary labor time, congealed in wage goods.
Finally, we come to the conjoined concepts of wealth and freedom, which in Marx's early writings, and even in Capital and the Grundrisse, are like the sun that occasionally peaks out from a dark and forbidding sky. We learn that wealth is not a big bank account, a vacation home in Tuscany or however many billions of dollars Elon Musk has socked away for the colonization of Mars. For Marx wealth as opposed to capital is measured in terms of use value rather exchange value, of concrete labor rather than abstract labor. The spectacular development of the productive forces under capital makes it possible to imagine a post-capitalist society of freely associated workers who produce and distribute wealth, not capital, on the basis of social needs, a society liberated from the tyranny of the clock, a society in which individuals have the freedom conferred by free time to develop their creative powers and capacities,
I have before me an article that appeared in the August 24, 2024, edition of the New York Times. Written by the bureau chief responsible for the South America beat, it is an interview with the 89-year-old José "Pepe" Mujica, who was a Marxist guerilla in his youth and a political prisoner for fourteen years before his election as president of Uruguay in 2009. "My doctors say it went well, but I'm broken," Mujica tells the reporter, referring to his recent radiation treatment for esophageal cancer. These words are spoken in a simple farm house outside of Montevideo, which he shares with his long-time comrade and wife Lucía Topolansky. This is the place where they insisted on living during the years when Mujica was president, and where they have lived ever since. No official palace for them. In the fields surrounding their house, Mujica and Topolansky raise chrysanthemums for a living.
"You’re free when you escape the law of necessity—when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs," says Mujica from the simple place which he and Topolansky have filled with lived experience and radical meaning.
Where did the "philosopher president," the unofficial title conferred on Mujica by the press, get his ideas about time, law, necessity, desire and freedom? He doesn't say and the reporter doesn't bother to ask. But it's no mystery: these ideas come from Marx, who writes in the third volume of Capital: "In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production."
It's a shame that the interviewer did not see fit to follow up on the Marxist roots of Mujica's philosophy. A shame but no surprise. The Times has always looked askance at Latin American leaders tainted by Marxism. I suspect that Mujica, who now finds himself at death's door, would have jumped at the chance to acknowledge his intellectual debt to the author of Capital.
Almost a year has passed since I wrote the preceding paragraphs about Mujica. In this morning's paper, the Times reports that he died on May 13, 2025, at the age of eighty-nine. The same bureau chief who interviewed him earlier sums up Mujica's life this way: "But as news of his death spread on Tuesday people across the world remembered him not for his policies. It was his humility that was his legacy." There is no mention of Mujica's Marxism or how it might have influenced his decision to privilege creative time over consumers needs, and to live what many regarded as a "humble" life. Drained of any philosophical content, the philosopher president's life and legacy are effectively reduced by the newspaper of record to a lifestyle choice, rather ironic in light of Mujica's indictment of lifestyle consumerism.
Out of respect for both Mujica and his legacy, let's go where the Times did not, and dig deeper into Marx's conception of time in relation to space and place.
Picking up where we left off in the last section, the competitive drive for relative surplus value leads to technological innovations that cut inputs of labor time in the sphere of production. But it would be a mistake to assume that the impulse to economize on time is confined to this sphere alone. The same impulse is at work driving the hunt for time-saving efficiencies in the spheres of realization and circulation, as Harvey seeks to demonstrate by unpacking Marx's concept of "turnover time."
This concept is the cable holding together the three-tower suspension bridge of time, space and place.
Turnover time is how long it takes industrial capitalists to (1) buy labor power and means of production; (2) combine them in a production process from which will emerge a new commodity; (3) get this new commodity to market; (4) sell it at a profit; (5) use part of the profit to settle accounts with the tax collector, banker and landlord; (6) use another part to buy goods for personal consumption; and (7) reinvest what's left of the profit in labor power and means of production so that the accumulation process can start over again on an expanded basis.
Those industrial capitalists who get from (1) to (7) in the least amount of time enjoy a significant advantage over their competition. They are able to throw money into circulation again and again while the rest of the competition waits impatiently for their profits to materialize. In a given period of time, these efficient capitalists will earn a mass of profit greater than the social average, a portion of which will be reinvested in improved technologies that increase labor productivity, reduce the value of labor power and produce more relative surplus value.
Conversely, any interruption or delay in the movement of value through the industrial circuit will put individual capitalists at a competitive disadvantage. Sluggish turnover times will translate into a loss in market share at the very least and economic ruin in the worst-case scenario. At the level of capital in general, a system-wide slowdown in turnover time will trigger a powerful response, ranging from localized, short-lived devaluations to a general crisis of overaccumulation.
In sum, value races against the clock as it travels through the circuit sketched out in Diagram 1. Individual capitalists are like sprint cyclists fighting for position on the final lap of a velodrome track, trying to be the first to cross the finish line.
Do you remember our stereoscope analogy from the "Place" essay? Let's try applying it to Diagram 1. Up to this point we have been viewing it with one eye shut, through the lens of time only. Now let's open both eyes, so that we can see Diagram 1 through not only the lens of time but also that of space. We know that the three red rectangles of production, realization and distribution represent the moments in time when value changes form. But that's not all they represent: these same rectangles also mark the places in space where value changes hands.
From this insight into the convergence of time, space and place Harvey is able to construct a Marxist theoretical framework in which time is more than an arrow that arcs through space, space is more than an empty container through which the arrow flies and place is more than a set of coordinates on a map pinpointing the arrow's path. Time, space and place do not exist as fixed, universal principles independent of their social and historical context; they are produced by capital as it reproduces itself on an ever-larger scale.
"The ability to overcome space," Harvey writes, "is predicated on the production of space." If value is to circulate smoothly, some part of it must be fixed in the double sense of being immobilized over a long period of time and being anchored to a particular place. The see-saw relationship between fixity and motion is what gives the dynamics of capitalist place formation its volatile and uneven character.
At the most basic level, the production of space entails the construction of transportation and communications infrastructures that aim at nothing less than "the annihilation of space by time," to quote Marx. What is more, it involves the accretion of larger built environments that grow up layer upon layer around these infrastructures, like the coral reefs that are perishing before our eyes as a result of global warming and ocean acidification. Capital produces space in the form of interlocking built environments that are necessary not only for the reduction of turnover time but also for commodity production in general and the social reproduction of local populations whose labor keeps value in motion.
For Harvey the city is crowning proof of capital's capacity to overcome spatial barriers by producing geographical configurations favorable to accumulation and circulation. In 2007 it was announced that for the first time in human history a majority of the planet's population lives in urban areas. The city as a spatial form and urbanization as a spatial process have never been so central to capital accumulation as they are today. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that urbanization and accumulation form a unity, albeit one riddled with contradictions.
In short, the production of space and place under contemporary capitalism boils down to the production of urban built environments. The countless physical structures that make up these environments are commodities possessing a use value, exchange value and value. Taken together, they form what Harvey calls "a geographically ordered, complex, composite commodity." This commodity of commodities is created by capital, not out of thin air but from materials at hand. And it is created not to last forever but only until the time comes to destroy it, in whole or in part, and replace it with a new built environment more in line with capital's needs.
The production of time, space and place cannot escape the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. Let's now turn to Diagram 2 above, another of Harvey's schematic represents of value in motion. Here, he disaggregates the circulation process into primary, secondary and tertiary circuits of capital. The primary circuit is where value and surplus value are produced, and where commodities are consumed as either means of production or wage goods. The secondary circuit encompasses the built environment of production and consumption. The tertiary circuit, about which Harvey has relatively little to say, consists of social infrastructures and investment related to state expenditures on research, development and social programs more generally.
As we noted in the last section, pressures of overaccumulation have a tendency to build up in the primary circuit, driving down the rate of profit and threatening the mass of profit. If corrective measures are not undertaken to deal with this situation, nothing short of a system-wide devaluation in the form of a crisis will be able to eliminate the surplus capital and restore conditions of accumulation.
Investment in the secondary circuit of capital of the built environment provides a temporary solution or "fix" to the surplus capital absorption problem. In Diagram 2, Harvey subdivides this circuit into two broad categories, fixed capital and the consumption fund. Those elements of the built environment which enable the production of value are assigned to fixed capital, while those others contributing to the consumption of value belong to the consumption fund. Factories are an example the first, housing of the second. But every element of the built environment is defined by its use, so that boarded-up factories that have been repurposed as hipster condominiums move from fixed capital to the consumption fund, while tenement apartments that have been converted into sweatshops move in the opposite direction. Streets are dual products, defined as fixed capital when they are being used by trucks to move goods in and out of production and storage facilities, and as part of the consumption fund when they are being used by motorists or pedestrians on their way to and from the shopping mall.
The spatial-temporal fix aims to manage overaccumulation pressures by "switching" surplus capital from the primary circuit to the secondary circuit. Capital that has languished for lack of profitable investment outlets in the primary circuit is now channeled into major urban development and infrastructural projects in the secondary circuit, ranging from high-speed rail to suburban housing tracts and downtown festival markets. These large-scale, taxpayer-subsidized undertakings are made possible by long-term loans with amortization periods of 20 or 30 years. The complicated logistical and technical challenges of such development projects are managed by a nexus of state and financial intermediaries which are substantially shielded from public scrutiny and form a hybrid public-private state within a state.
In addition to the anti-democratic governance structures through which they operate, spatial-temporal fixes are fertile soil for all manner of speculative behavior. This is due to the long-term nature of investments that are inherently risky and whose success or failure will not be known until long after the original investors are gone. Moral hazard is hardwired into the day-to-day operations of spatial-temporal fixes overseen by the state-finance nexus.
Unsurprisingly, spatial-temporal fixes have been a breeding ground for the some of the most insane excesses of casino capitalism in recent memory. What is more, they have put urban development priorities on the auction block, so that that mammoth projects productive of neither surplus value nor human well-being receive the green light from state-finance nexuses eager to please the major "community stakeholders" (read finance capital and real estate interests). Harvey characterizes the big-city trophy projects of the neoliberal era as "mindless urbanization," since their sole function is to serve as a sink for surplus capital.
What is the big take-away from this discussion that began with the background conditions of capital's possibility? Just this: capital produces time, space and place in its own image. But there is no magical configuration of these three elements that can solve capital's internal contradictions and crisis tendencies once and for all, only temporary fixes that power uneven spatial development and subject place formation to periodic gales of creative destruction.
To the degree that the production of time, space and place has been hijacked by such displacement mechanisms as the spatial-temporal fix, cities will continue to serve as sponges for overaccumulated capital, playgrounds for gentrifiers and incubators of speculative finance, while the vicious circle of displacement, housing insecurity, homelessness. and social and spatial inequality goes round and round with no end in sight. Welcome to urbanization in the time of neoliberalism.
TOURISM AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF PLACE, SPACE AND CULTURE
I am going to conclude this essay by returning to the place where we began, namely place. And I will do so by way of tourism, appropriately enough for a "Marxist tourist."
Tourism is a major driver of capital accumulation and place formation today. Not only do tourism and travel account for roughly 10 percent of global GDP and global employment, but their rate of growth is projected to continue outpacing that of the world economy for the foreseeable future. The rise of behemoths Airbnb and Uber has ushered in the "platformization" of tourism and consolidated the formation of what Marxist political economist and tourism authority Raoul Bianchi calls the "tourist-real estate regime of accumulation." These transformations are disrupting patterns of everyday life in historic tourist hot spots such as Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam, where anti-tourism movements are gaining traction, not to mention new tourist frontiers opening in the Global South, where cultural tourism, ecotourism and related niche products are rapidly plugging into the spiderwebs of platform capitalism. While the word tourism does not appear in Harvey's diagrams which we have been using to navigate the complicated pathways of capital accumulation and circulation, don't be fooled: the spatial dynamics of value in motion represented there are an indispensable framework for understanding the touristification of capital.
The spectacular rise of tourism in both its mass and niche forms has not escaped the notice of academics. Tourism scholarship has emerged as a booming disciplinary field in its own right, decked out with all the professional accoutrement of peer-refereed journals, annual conferences and research institutes. The institutional roots of this field go back to business schools, where tourism was branded as "hospitality management" and bolted onto existing undergraduate and MBA programs. Steeped in their chamber-of-commerce view of the world, the faculty of business schools are inclined to see tourism as an all-terrain vehicle for delivering economic development, shoring up shaky tax bases and creating career opportunities for newly credentialed graduates of their programs. The structures of class power, mechanisms of distributional inequality and environmental costs built into tourism are rarely glimpsed through the lens of hospitality management. In recent years, less celebratory perspectives have taken hold in the disciplines of geography, sociology and anthropology, mobilizing under the banner of "critical tourism studies." Focused primarily on matters of cultural representation, symbolic value and identity formation, and sprinkled with liberal calls for the reconfiguration of tourism along more ethical lines, critical tourism studies marks a big improvement over the business-school approach. Even so, its preoccupation with meaning-making and signification all too often obscures the political-economic constraints under which tourism operates today.
In short, neither of the two analytical frameworks that have dominated tourism studies to date is altogether comfortable situating tourism squarely in relation to capitalism. Fortunately, there are signs that interest in the political economy of tourism is stirring around the question of the commodification of place, space, nature and culture. Commodification lies at the heart of both Marx's value theory and the Marxist approach to tourism. Geographers Martin Young and Francis Markham provide a clear explication of the linkages between commodification, value theory and tourism. The tourism commodity, they tell us, is identical to the more familiar manufactured commodity, with one important exception: the tourism commodity is not transportable and taken to market for sale, but permanently affixed to the land. It is a landed commodity that must be consumed in its natural environment or not at all. Young and Markham also note that in Marx's value theory, a commodity can be a physical object, an intangible experience, an immaterial service or some combination of the three. Whatever their form, all commodities must have a use value by virtue of their ability to satisfy a want, need or desire; an exchange value as indicated by their price; and a value based on the socially necessary labor time involved in their production. Yet while all values have a price, not all prices have a value. For example, the free gifts of nature and culture can be assigned a price, despite not containing a scintilla of value. This is because they entail the process of expropriation or what Harvey calls "dispossession" rather than the process of exploitation, in which capitalists appropriate surplus labor time in production. These free gifts represent "fictitious capital" or "pseudo-commodities" which claim a share of value produced by living labor elsewhere in the circuit of industrial capital, and usually take the form of rent.
At the heart of the process of commodification lurks this question: what transforms an object, experience or service into a full-fledged capitalist commodity? Marx addresses this at the end of Capital, Volume 1, in his discussion of the violent commodification of land and labor in early modern England. Young and Markham, with the help of geographer Noel Castree, have extracted from this historical account of so-called "primitive accumulation" six bullet points that are applicable to the commodification process wherever and whenever it may occur. To become a capitalist commodity the following must happen:
- the object, experience or service must be privatized, that is, assigned to an individual, party or institution by legal title.
- the object, experience or service must be made alienable, that is, transferable from the title holder to another party through sale, exchange, gift, loan, etc.
- the object, experience or service must be individuated, that is, separated from its enabling context via some process of boundary making or form of enclosure.
- the object, experience or service must be abstracted, that is, inserted into a larger taxonomic category or categories, where its concrete characteristics disappear from view.
- the object, experience or service must be valued, that is, given a price based on the socially necessary labor time involved in its production, which establishes its commensurability with all other commodities.
- the object, experience or service must be displaced, that is, "fetishized" so that it appears as something other than what it is, namely the product of labor.
How do these criteria apply to the commodification of both tourist places and their cultural products? Let's go through the six-point list once more, this time with tourism in mind.
- Privatization: Like all places, tourist places are "composite-complex commodities," to use Harvey's term, that cohere around a built environment of production and consumption. The place as a whole and its constituent parts are woven together through legal titles to private ownership.
- Alienability: These titles are legally transferable to other parties, be they individuals, groups or corporations, locally-based or transnational.
- Individuation: Tourist places are marked off from their larger spatial context by territorial borders defined and policed by state authorities. Within these borders, the maintenance of tourist safety and comfort, and the promotion of tourist place image receive top priority.
- Abstraction: All tourist places are commensurable with all other tourist places by virtue of their being composite-complex commodities. Try asking ChatGPT where you can go for a two-week vacation on a $4,000 budget, including airfare, lodging and food. The answer I received—Lisbon, Bangkok, Marrakesh, Hanoi—illustrates how the process of abstraction works. It would hard to imagine four more different places on planet Earth but their distinctive natural, historical and cultural qualities vanish in the Cuisinart blender of abstraction.
- Valuation: Check out the price tag above, $4,000. This is what each of the four vacation options is worth to an Atlantan tourist (or "guest") planning a two-week vacation abroad as well as to the tourist service providers (or "hosts") who will work hard to supply the appropriate "experiences." Monetary value is not the only way to measure the value of a tourist place, but it's the one that drives the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation.
- Displacement: What comes to mind when tourists imagine their dream destination? Sea, sand, sun, sex? One thing that will probably not come to mind is all the labor that goes into the production and reproduction of the tourist place where they are going to spend their time and money. If the tourist experience is a staged production, it can only work if the stage hands whose labor makes it all possible remain behind the scenes, invisible. Commodity fetishism, which is Marx's shorthand for keeping the stagehands off stage, is on full display in the tourist place.
In the tourism domain, commodification works by investing place and its cultural products with the aura of "authenticity." Authenticity is not an intrinsic property of the place or product, and nor is it a "sign value" that operates independently of Marx's value theory, as sociologists Jean Baudrillard and Dean MacCannell contend. Rather, authenticity is a socially constructed use value that satisfies the tourist's want, need and desire for a meaningful cross-cultural experience.
The commodification of place, space, nature and culture takes a particularly aggressive form in tourist destinations, casting in bold relief the structural transformations that are reshaping places of all sorts, including those whose economies are not tourism-oriented. Tourist places serve as laboratories for neoliberal urban policies and practices that seek to break down barriers to the full-scale commodification of the free gifts of nature and human nature. For a good case in point consider the policies and practices of place branding, which have been enthusiastically embraced by the governing regimes of tourist places since the neoliberal counter-revolution kicked into high gear during the 1980s.
I offer in evidence Bloom Consulting, founded in 2003 by Portuguese entrepreneur José Felipe Torres. With an A-team client list and offices in Lisbon, Madrid, London, Paris, São Paulo and Riyadh, Bloom boasts on its website: "We provide countries, regions and cities with a range of consulting services and proprietary technology to create innovative Place Branding Strategies and measure Nation and Place Brand effectiveness and reputation." To help prospective clients visualize the value of its services and technology Bloom offers a handy graphic, the "Country Brand Wheel." At the hub of the wheel in bold letters is the "CENTRAL IDEA" aka the brand, which functions like the magnetic motor of an ebike, turning the wheel of fortune while the rider relaxes and enjoys the scenery streaming by. Carefully designed and vetted by Bloom's professional staff, the CENTRAL IDEA is the key that will unlock the tangible benefits represented by the wheel's five spokes: exports, investment, prominence, talent and, not least important, tourism. In the Bloom imaginary, a branded place is an efficiently run corporation adhering to best business practices. The people who happen to live in the place being branded are seen not as citizens who participate directly in the decision-making process but as "stakeholders" whose interests are mediated by nonprofits, NGOs and the so-called "third sector." Like the neoliberal institutional apparatus of which it is part, Bloom embraces a top-down, market-driven, technocratic and profoundly anti-democratic view of place governance.
The neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism over the last forty years has enabled tourism and place branding to carve out an increasingly prominent place in accumulation dynamics today. But it has also intensified the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism, as can be seen when we view tourism through the lens of the spatial-temporal fix. As Harvey demonstrates, the restructuring of global capitalism along post-Fordist lines let the genie of overaccumulation out of the bottle, unleashing a desperate search for sponges to soak up surplus capital. Tourism fit the bill. Responding to the global capitalist crisis of 2008, the United Nations World Tourism Organization, in its "Roadmap to Recovery," called for a concerted campaign to stimulate tourism through deregulation, lower taxes and incentives for infrastructural investment. At the same time, the rise of "lean platforms," most importantly Airbnb, accelerated the commodification of private living space in tourist places, effectively orchestrating a massive shift of assets from the consumption fund into the fixed capital of the built environment, with predictable results: overcrowding, gentrification, displacement and the erosion of neighborhood solidarities. "In this way," concludes environmental anthropologist Robert Fletcher and his colleagues, "platforms offer an entirely new arena—cyberspace—in which to pursue time-space fixes for the overaccumulation crisis."
So here we are, back where we started. If place is defined as meaningful space, and if meaning lies at the heart of culture, what we are now witnessing is the commodification of place, meaning and culture on an unprecedented scale. The places where we make our lives, and the meanings we attach to these places, are being rapidly reconfigured around the needs of capitalism not people.
