Capital & Space (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Uneven Development 25 Years On: Space, Nature and the Geographies of Capitalism
New Political Economy, 2011
This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smith's intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geography's, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.
Elements for an Immanent Critique of the Political Economy of Modern Space
Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 29, 2022, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 2022
Abstract: Our purpose is to present a logical sequence that accounts for the way in which the critique of political economy (Marx) is categorically articulated and configured with the production of space (Lefebvre). Methodologically, we carry out a comparative categorical approach to the concepts of criticism, immanence, production, modern space-time, and the urban from various epistemological trajectories as primary and secondary sources. Our results indicate that an immanent critique of the political economy of space makes it possible to delimit the critique of capital and the production of modern space-time as a social totality. We conclude that the critique of modernity from the critique of the political economy of space is a critique of the abstract logic of value and its expression in the social production of abstract space-time, where urban space is the geographic space produced for the reproduction of capital and the place of exchange where the totality of mercantile production takes place.
Driven by the central dynamic of accumulation, capitalism is becoming the universal mode of production that Marx had envisaged. Capitalism is increasingly based upon ‘universalised competition’, overcoming the opposition of national states so as to create the ‘modern world market .. and the centralisation of capital’. This ‘has made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations’ (Marx 1999:77/8). The capitalist class holds the power of allocation and the power of management by means of its ownership and control of the means of production and uses this power for reasons of private profit. This power of decision and allocation over productive resources has now become international with the globalisation of the forces of production. The private power of capital is now global in its scope. This paper shows how the relocation of production and investment according to labour cost differentials and the relative power of labour allied to improved communications and transportations, the information revolution and more flexible production technology has created a powerful mechanism for deindustrialisation in the industrialised world. The concentration and centralisation of capital within a ‘transnational monopoly capitalism’ evades attempts at government regulation with the result that the stagnationary tendencies threatening the existence of the capital economy are unleashed. The greater the wages and power of labour in the developed world, the more likely that employment will be lost to the unindustrialised or industrialising parts of the world where labour is cheaper and more quiescent; or, conversely, the more labour from the underdeveloped world is imported into the developed world. This imposes social and environmental costs upon the urban environment in both the deindustrialising and the industrialising parts of the world.
Geography and Capitalism: Rethinking Contradictions
2019
A workshop was held in Rome in May 2015 based on David Harvey's last book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Considering different research perspectives on the topic, this essay proposes a change of perspective in the analysis of the capitalist relation moving from the concept of contradiction to the concept of crisis. Embracing this novel perspective will only be possible understanding the process of territorialization in its broad articulation. Above all, this will imply to move beyond constitutive territoriality while bringing other articulations of the territoriality into the foreground, especially configurative and ontological territorialities. This allows reflecting on the globalitarian capitalistic relation in a specifically geographical perspective.
Space Production in Times of Neoliberalism
Springer, 2021
The right to the city is a concept that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre's book 'Le Droit à la Ville' in 1968 and that has been reclaimed more recently by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space-a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. Today, the right to the city theory has inspired many social movements in the world, especially in the Middle East (e.g. Arab Spring movements and conquering the public squares of the cities by citizens, the Istanbul movement in Taksim square, the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York). Urban public space is the place where all the collective social movements and collective memory of citizens occur. However, the main question around the neoliberal city of today is how and who will create the public space and for whom will this space be created? The aim of this chapter is to discuss the triple notions of space production, collective use of space and the right to the city in the context of the neoliberal cities of the Middle East. We will use a desktop review and case study approach to explain how, in the neoliberal city of today, the occupation of collective space in favour of private profit upsets and impinges upon the general right to the city. All the while discussing the participation of citizens in the process of space production and the increase in the collective use of public space, hence extending and enlarging the citizenry's right to the city.
2020
Problem statement: Lefebvre’s space enters the social realm by departing from the infinite space of mathematicians and the mental space of philosophers. According to Lefebvre, this space is both produced and consumed and is in a sense, a kind of manufactured commodity as well as a consumable product. The overlapping of material production, the production of ideology and the production of meaning in one place and at a time are recognized as key elements of the production of social space that is reproduced in a trialectical rather than a dialectical process. The overlapping of Lefebvre’s theory with the secondary circuit of capital accumulation claimed by Harvey has a profound effect on the concretization of capitalist function. The process of space production and reproduction in the second cycle of capital accumulation carries the products that most leftwing thinkers attribute to the reactionary ways of civilization. What is more important than the productions of capitalist space is ...