Introduction

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

CAPITALISM: INTRODUCTION

In the the previous tab, I presented my home as a microcosm of place. There's nothing special about my home; it just happens to be the place I know better than any other. Your home would have served just as well since every home is a bounded space permeated with lived experience. There's no place like home when it comes to observing how human beings make space meaningful.

Yet in detailing how Allyson and I "dwell" in our domestic space, to borrow one of Heidegger's favorite words, I may have left the impression that the home specifically and place in general are self-contained, self-regulating islands which have little interaction with the larger world. The story I told was about how two people (five if you add our son, daughter-in-law and Alice Alma; seven if you include Sugar and Clay) make a meaningful life inside the four walls and property lines of a privately-owned residence.

But what about the everyday economic realities of home life? What about rent and mortgage payments, property values, zoning restrictions, interest rates, insurance premiums, utility bills, home equity, evictions, foreclosures and the like? What about unhoused people and their relation to home and place? Shouldn't I say something about the abstract economic forces that keep spatial configurations in a constant churn and from which no home or place is spared?

Yes, I should. I will now turn from place to space. And I will take up the subject of capitalism, a mode of production that molds place and space in its own image while reproducing itself on an ever-expanding scale.

Diagram 1 above will be our road map as we set out to explore the internal dynamics and spatial configurations of capital. It was developed by Marxist geographer David Harvey in order to represent capital as a totality of value flows. In what follows, I'll do my best to explain the terms totality and value.

For the time being I will simply draw your attention to the three red rectangles in the diagram which represent critical moments in capital's life cycle, when value is produced, realized and distributed. You should also take note of the black border that encloses the flow chart. Here, we find two enabling conditions without which capital is inconceivable: nature and space (at the bottom) and human nature and culture (at the top). While these are treated by capital as "free gifts" originating outside the totality of value flows, capital transforms both non-human and human nature through a process of creative destruction (remember the kaleidoscope).

Since Harvey and his flow chart receive red-carpet treatment in this essay, it seems proper to acknowledge my intellectual debt to him. For half a century he has championed the theory of capital as set out by Marx, insisting that it is more relevant today than it was when Capital was first published in 1867, thanks to the globalization of capitalism since Marx's death and the triumph of what Harvey calls the neoliberal "counter-revolution" since 1973.

Harvey has advanced Marxist theory on multiple fronts. The processes of globalization, financialization, neoliberalization, urbanization, uneven geographic development and the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism more generally have all come under his sharp analytical eye. Harvey's pathbreaking The Limits to Capital, published in 1982, together with a steady flow of monographs and essays in the years since, to say nothing of his wildly popular online reading courses on Capital and the Grundrisse, have helped persuade a growing number of people on the left and beyond that Marx's ideas remain a force to be reckoned with.

Count me among the persuaded.

The rest of this essay is divided into eight parts.

The first pours cold water on the claim made by mainstream economists that capitalism allocates scarce goods and resources efficiently and fairly by building a self-equilibrating market economy on the solid pillars of small government and individual freedom.

The second takes up Marx's concept of capital as a historically-specific mode of production which operates according to its own "laws of motion" and whose defining feature is the class relation between capitalists who own the means of production and wage earners who don't.

The third unpacks Marx's claim that value, defined as socially necessary labor time, serves as the "law" governing all aspects of the capitalist mode of production.

The fourth casts a vote in favor of Marx's proposal that we use value theory to explain the social relations of capitalist production instead of the price-setting mechanisms of the market.

The fifth explains how and why "value in motion" and the "coercive laws of competition" combine to make capital the most dynamic mode of production in human history, thanks to its unceasing pursuit of labor-saving technology.

The sixth shifts the focus from the production of value to its realization and circulation, where the dynamics of overaccumulation play out in such a way as to intensify capital's internal contradictions and raise the possibility of full-blown economic crisis, the nightmare that haunts all of us.

The seventh discusses how capital produces its own "space-time," as when it seeks a temporary solution to overaccumulation by expanding into new spaces and reconfiguring old ones, a displacement mechanism which Harvey calls the "spatial-temporal fix."

The eighth and final part brings our two tabs together in order to show how and why both place and space are incorporated into capital's laws of motion through travel, tourism and place branding.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

CAPITALISM: INTRODUCTION

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist