When Marx and Harvey refer to capital as a mode of production, they are thinking about more than the production of everyday commodities like shoes and shirts. They are also thinking about how capital produces the enabling conditions of its own existence in the very process of producing shoes and shirts. A case in point is the production of space and time. This final section of the essay will track how space and time are braided together around the requirements of capital accumulation and circulation, like two Kentucky Blue vines climbing up a beanpole in my late father-in-law's vegetable garden. To underscore the tightly woven relationship between space and time, I will often use the hybrid term "space-time" in what follows.
We can begin with some basic questions: How and why does capital produce space-time? Where does this contradictory unity fit into the crisis theory put forward by Marx and Harvey? And what does capitalist space-time have to do with the photographs in this website which are eagerly awaiting your attention and just a click or two away?
Marx was fully aware of the interwoven nature of space and time, or to put it a bit more grandly, the dialectics of spatio-temporality. But rather than giving space and time equal billing, he chose from the beginning of his studies on political economy to enthrone only one of them as the reigning regulatory principle of the capitalist mode of production.
For Marx Time is King.
Consider how many of Marx's foundational concepts revolve around time. Start with value. Isn't this actually a concept of time, specifically the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of a given commodity? And then there's the concept of surplus value, which Marx defines as the labor time appropriated by capitalists above and beyond the value of the labor power expended in the production of a given commodity. Next in line is the concept of relative surplus value. This is the bump in surplus value made possible by technologically-driven gains in labor productivity which reduce the socially necessary labor time congealed in wage goods, thereby bringing down the value of labor power.
Finally, we come to the concept of wealth, which in Capital and the Grundrisse is like the sun that occasionally peaks out of a dark and gloomy sky. For Marx wealth is not a pot of gold or a heap of commodities or however many billions of dollars Elon Musk has socked away for the colonization of Mars. Wealth is the free time which capital allows us to imagine but which can only be realized through socialist transformation. In a truly wealthy society of the sort that Marx envisioned, individuals will be able to develop their powers and capacities under conditions of real freedom, which is to say released from the shackles of economic necessity.
I have before me an article in the August 24, 2024, edition of the New York Times, in which 89-year-old José "Pepe" Mujica, the one-time Marxist guerilla and former Uruguayan president, sits down for an interview. He is recovering from radiation treatment for esophageal cancer. "My doctors say it went well, but I'm broken," Mujica tells the reporter. 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 where they insisted on living during the years 2010-2015, when Mujica was president. No official palace for them. In the fields surrounding the house, Mujica and Topolansky raise chrysanthemums.
"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.
The "philosopher president" doesn't say and the reporter doesn't ask where he got his ideas about time, law, necessity, desire and freedom. Or if not the ideas, which are rooted in the ups and downs of Mujica's extraordinary life, then the words to express them. The discursive and philosophical thread that connects the young revolutionary who spent fourteen years in prison with the sick old man who finds himself at death's door is a simple idea he learned from Marx: freedom means nothing without free time.
That Mujica would base his long-standing critique of consumerism on the commodification of time and the erosion of freedom invites us to take a closer look at how the clock operates to regulate and discipline all spheres of capitalist activity.
We have already seen how the competition-fueled drive for relative surplus value leads to technological innovations that cut labor time in the sphere of production. But it would be a mistake to think that this competitive impulse is confined to the sphere of production. It likewise incentivizes the hunt for time-saving efficiencies in the spheres of realization and circulation, as Marx seeks to demonstrate with the concept of "turnover time." This critical piece of his argument serves as the specific link between space and time, the beanpole around which they intertwine to form space-time.
Let's consult Diagram 1 once again in order to view the circulation of value through the lens of time. Turnover time is how long it takes for industrial capitalists to (1) produce their commodities; (2) get them to market; (3) sell them at a profit and thereby realize the value contained therein; (4) settle up with the tax collector, banker and landlord; (5) buy commodities for their personal consumption; and (6) reinvest whatever remains of the profits so that the accumulation process can start over again on an expanded basis.
Those individuals who are able to turn over their capital the fastest can throw their 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 fortunate few will earn a greater mass of profit as compared to the social average, a portion of which will be invested in improved technologies aimed at increasing labor productivity, reducing the value of labor, decreasing turnover time, securing more surplus value and consolidating their competitive edge in the market.
Any interruption or delay in the movement of value through this circuit, which, as we have seen, is most likely to occur at those moments when capital changes material form from money to commodity to productive activity and back to money, will put individual capitalists at a competitive disadvantage. This will bring 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 both the clock and the competition as it travels through the circuit sketched out in Diagram 1. Sort of like a sprint cyclist circling the velodrome track.
To help you visualize the circulatory dynamics at play here permit me to offer the analogy of another high-speed vehicle—a sky-blue, four-on-the-floor, '69 Pontiac LeMans which, as chance would have it, I used to drive around Atlanta until the warning lights went off in my head and I sold it. Let's pretend that my old gas-guzzler is capital, the gas in its tank is value, and that I am behind the wheel, eager to get home after a long day at the office.
Sadly, I'm stuck in stop-and-go traffic, with a long drive ahead and no filling station in sight. Every minute on the road is a little less gas in the tank. The worst of it is when I'm forced to take an unexpected detour or idle in place, burning up precious fuel without getting any closer to my destination. Will I have enough gas to make it home and give my poor feet a rest, or will the LeMans sputter and die, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere?
What is the moral of this story? Just this: capital needs to complete the circuit and get home ASAP and with plenty of value in the tank. Home, of course, is the hidden abode of production.
This need to economize on time pits capital against space. Capital's colonization of time is just one part of the contradictory unity we are interested in here; the other is the parallel campaign to subdue space and produce geographical configurations that will shrink turnover time to the bare minimum. If we accept Harvey's definition of capital as value in motion, as I believe we should, then "motion" has to be understood as unfolding in two registers, through time and across space.
Harvey makes a compelling case that Marx's theory of capital must strike a better balance between time and space if it is to realize its full potential as an explanatory tool for understanding the world in which we live, a world characterized by uneven geographical development and recurrent crises that are strongly correlated with the spatial dynamics of urbanization. These processes do not take place on the head of a pin, as Harvey is fond of saying; they are spatial to their very core.
We should take note of the specific lens or lenses through which Harvey views space. He is at his best when treating space as a socially constructed material product, an agglomeration of fixed capital embedded in the land, a physical landscape in and through which value flows, a built environment that internalizes capital's contradictions and crisis tendencies.
By comparison, meaning, everyday life and the lived experience of place receive less attention, which Harvey openly acknowledges and is at pains to justify. Space production, he maintains, is directly subject to the laws of motion of capital as set out by Marx. Place formation, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of autonomy relative to these laws, reflecting historical and geographical particularities which are best treated as aspects of the social formation of capitalism.
As I stated in "Capital: Naming the System," this distinction between space and place, capital and capitalism, is very helpful even if it gives Harvey's theoretical work a structuralist tone that has rubbed some critics the wrong way. In particular, those of a multicultural, postmodern and neoliberal persuasion are inclined to view Marx and Harvey's conceptual framework as "totalizing" owing to its alleged neglect of issues related to identity and agency. On the whole, I find this criticism unpersuasive since, as Harvey makes clear, such issues can and should be investigated under the rubric of capitalism.
What is totalizing is not Marx and Harvey or their theory of capital but capital itself, the mode of production they are investigating.
Let's go back to the first of our original questions: how and why does capital produce space-time? The answer becomes clear when we recognize that Harvey's Diagram 1 not only plots nodes of economic activity but also maps their spatial location. Production, realization and distribution appear as red rectangles representing moments in the process of accumulation and circulation. But these rectangles also represent built environments attached to the land and separated from each other by spatial distances ranging from just around the corner to the other side of the planet.
If value is to circulate and capital accumulate, the barriers of space must be overcome.
"The ability to overcome space," Harvey writes, "is predicated on the production of space." By this he means that for capital to circulate freely some part of it must be fixed in the double sense of being immobilized over a long period of time and being permanently anchored in a particular place. The see-saw relationship between fixity and motion gives the dynamics of capitalist space production their volatile and uneven character.
At its most basic level, the production of space entails the construction of transportation and communications infrastructures whose raison d'etre is, in Marx's words, "the annihilation of space by time." It also involves the accretion of larger built environments that grow layer upon layer like a coral reef around these infrastructures. The built environment is necessary both for commodity production and for the social reproduction of local populations whose labor keeps value in motion.
In Harvey's estimation, the city is crowning proof of capital's capacity to overcome spatial barriers and produce geographical configurations favorable to accumulation and circulation. Never has the city as a spatial form and urbanization as a spatial process cast a longer shadow over capital than they do today, when for the first time in human history a majority of the planet's population lives in urban areas.
An urban built environment might at first glance appear to be a random collection of roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, bus terminals, port facilities, train stations, factories, call centers, warehouses, sweatshops, strip malls, shopping centers, big-box stores, suburban housing tracts, apartment buildings, homeless shelters, cell towers, telephone polls, water treatment facilities, power stations, schools, hospitals, parks, police stations, prisons, city halls, county courthouses, state capitols, and on and on.
But there is unity in diversity. The countless physical things which comprise the urban built environment 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 with materials handed down from the past. And it is created not 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.
We have now circled back to Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction by way of the forces impinging on the production of urban space. In Diagram 2 above, Harvey provides a framework for analyzing how these forces align with the contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. This is what Harvey calls the "spatial-temporal fix," one of his most influential concepts that encompasses both capital's geographical expansion into new areas and its geographical reconfiguration of old areas.
To represent the urban dynamics of the spatial-temporal fix Harvey has constructed Diagram 2, which foregrounds the built environments of production and consumption. As we noted in the last section, pressures of overaccumulation tend to build up in what the diagram refers to as the "primary circuit" of capital, where value and surplus value are produced, and where commodities are consumed either in production or social reproduction. In other words, surpluses of capital and labor gather side by side in the primary circuit with no profitable investment opportunities for absorbing them. The danger is that, left to themselves, the mass of surplus will continue to grow, driving down the rate of profit and slowing down turnover time, until nothing short of a system-wide devaluation in the form of a crisis will be able to eliminate them and restore conditions of accumulation.
This is where the spatial-temporal fix comes in. Overaccumulation pressures can be managed and crisis averted, or at least postponed for a time, by "switching" the troublesome surpluses from the primary circuit to the secondary circuit of the built environment of production and consumption. The switch is enabled by a nexus of state and financial intermediaries who coordinate large-scale investment in urban infrastructures and other forms of fixed capital and the consumption fund. Such investment is usually facilitated with publicly subsidized, long-term loans. The effect of capital switching is not to solve the surplus capital absorption problem permanently but to displace it in space and defer them in time.
This fix works on many levels, as is suggested by the multiple meanings of the word itself. Fix can refer to the fixed capital of physical infrastructures and the built environment, to capital that is fixed to the land, to fixing the problem of overaccumulation, and even to the fix an addict needs "to anaesthetize the pain of living," if I may borrow a phrase from Russell Brand.