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Diagram 1: David Harvey's Visual Representation of Capital
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 imbued with lived experience. There's no better place to observe how human beings make space meaningful than the home.
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 meaningful life together inside the four walls and property lines of their privately-owned dwelling place.
But what about the 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 homelessness and its relation to placelessness? Shouldn't I say something about the abstract economic forces that keep so many homes, homeowners, would-be homeowners and unhoused people on a knife's edge?
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 reproduces itself on an ever-expanding scale by molding place and space into its own image.
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, yet another term I promise to define before too long.
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 on multiple fronts, from globalization to 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 seven 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 sure foundation 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 concept of value as socially necessary labor time which serves as the "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 dynamic mode of production in human history, thanks to its unceasing pursuit of labor-saving technology.
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 discusses how capital produces its own "space-time," as when it seeks a temporary solution to its crisis tendencies by expanding into new spaces and reconfiguring old ones, a displacement mechanism which Harvey calls the "spatial-temporal fix."
The seventh and final part circles back to place in the hope of tying at least some of the many loose threads of this essay together.