Those of you who have read the mini-essays under the "Place" tab know that I used my home as a stand-in for place in general. Please don't think there's something special about my home; it's only claim to fame is that it happens to be the one I know best, inside and out. Yours would have served just as well since every home on this green earth is a bounded space imbued with lived experience. This spatial fusion of materiality and meaning is what makes home the quintessential place.
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 place formation is a self-contained process, one that involves little interaction with or intrusion from the larger world in which the home is embedded. The story I told was about two people making a life together inside the four walls and property lines of their privately-owned dwelling place.
But what about mortgage payments, property values, zoning restrictions, interest rates, insurance premiums, home equity and the like? Shouldn't I say something about the source of these abstract economic forces that keep so many homes on a knife's edge?
Yes, I should. To avoid any misunderstanding on this score I now intend to put place in its place. In other words, this essay will examine place in relation to space, and both in relation to capitalism.
The diagram 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 to visualize capital as a totality of value flows. I will say more about each of these three terms—totality, value and flows—below.
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.
Since Harvey's flow chart receives top billing in this essay, it seems only fair for me to acknowledge my intellectual debt to him. For half a century he has championed the theory of capital set out by Marx, insisting that it is more relevant today than it was when Capital was first published, thanks to the globalization of capitalism since Marx's death in 1883 and the triumph of the neoliberal counter-revolution since 1973.
Harvey has advanced Marxist theory in his work on globalization, financialization, neoliberalization, urbanization, uneven geographic development and the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism. His 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 six parts.
The first pours cold water on the mainstream claim that capitalism is a cure-all for social problems of all types owing to its ability to allocate scarce goods and resources efficiently and fairly by fusing small government and individual freedom in a self-equilibrating market economy.
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 concept of value as socially necessary labor time which serves as the central regulatory principle or "law" governing all aspects of the capitalist mode of production.
The fourth explains how and why "value in motion" and the "coercive laws of competition" combine to make capital the most technologically dynamic mode of production in human history.
The fifth 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 crisis tendencies.
The sixth and final part will discuss the production of "space-time" and relate this to Harvey's concept of the spatial-temporal fix that aims to explain the uneven and volatile character of capitalist geographical development today.