Marxism 2 Flashcards
Harvey (1982)
During the quantitative turn in geography, Harvey became interested in using Marxist philosophy to understand urban processes (embedded in racial inequalities) in US cities like Baltimore. He adopted a political economist approach to understand these problems. Throughout this time, Harvey identifies general and specific contradictions of capitalism.
General Contradiction 1: Freedom and the Accumulation Imperative (the treadmill of production).
Capitalism is represented as a system of economic freedom, but expansion and accumulation are necessary for the continuation of this. This introduces a lack of choice and a system that is coercive. Capitalism produces value for its own expansion, not for the good of society.
General Contradiction 2: Coercing and Disciplining Labour.
Faster rates of production and lower wages lead to greater profits. But this is at the expense of the most important element of capitalist production (the labour force). Labourers are disciplined through violence to prevent their uprising (e.g. debt).
Specific Contradiction 1: Over-accumulation Crises.
Attempts to increase profits by increasing productivity results in reducing demand for commodities (since labourers cannot afford them). This is what created the economic stagnation of the 1970s. This leads to under-consumption and over-accumulation.
Specific Contradiction 2: Under-production Crises.
Over-accumulation results in the degradation of the means of production- leading to a crisis of the underproduction of the thing (nature) that is transformed in the labour process. This results in the inability to continue production.
Harvey argues that capitalism overcomes these contradictions through the spatial fix. Capitalism is continuously searching for new markets (accumulation by dispossession and financial innovation). This expansion creates a certain kind of space- the conditions for the continual compression of space and time.
Harvey (2001)
The production, reproduction and reconfiguration of space is central to understanding the political economy of capitalism.
“Globalization is nothing more than another round in the capitalist production and reconstruction of space”
The spatial fix describes capitalism’s insatiable drive to resolve its inner crisis tendencies by geographical expansion and restructuring; capitalism cannot survive without expansion.
Capitalism has to fix space in order to overcome space, this becomes a fixed space necessary for its own functioning, BUT at a certain point capitalism will destroy this place via devaluation to make new space for accumulation.
Marx (1868) ‘Primitive Accumulation’
In Marx’s account of the historical processes of change in rural life during the 15th-18th century of Britain and Ireland, he details how peasants were forced off their land as the commons were enclosed.
Marx argues that is it this separation of the peasants from the land was a necessary condition for the development of the capitalist mode of production- this was “the revolution that laid the foundation for the capitalist mode of production”
The process of primitive accumulation created the changes in social relations that permitted the creation of the capital-labour relation and factory-based capitalism. A crucial component in this was the enclosure acts of the 17th century in which common lands were expropriated from the poor. The poor no longer have access to the means of reproduction of life (food) and therefore they have to sell their labour in able to do so.
Marx (1868) ‘Commodities and Money’
Labour is an eternal necessity that mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself. The need to labour to create use-values is part of the human condition independent of whatever form of society is in place.
BUT, labour isn’t the only source of material wealth (wealth is the grand total of use-values). Nature is the other source since it provides the raw materials for production. “Material wealth is not the spontaneous produce of nature”.
“Without [nature] there can be no material exchanges between man and nature, and therefore no life”.
O’Connor (1991)
Argues that capitalism has two contradictions:
a) crises of over-production
b) crises of under-production
The second contradiction is an issue of progressive environmental crises which result from the processes of under production. Capitalism treats nature as though it were a free good; as a result, there is a tendency within capitalism to under-value and therefore under produce the conditions of production.
Horkheimer and Adorno (1944)
The authors focus on what capitalism has done to our relationship with nature; our estrangement from nature is intrinsically tied to the intellectual project of the Enlightenment. “The Enlightenment has always been aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing sovereignty”.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles; mythology is the inverse of Enlightenment (it is the domination of nature over man). What this gives us is simply another form of myth making- science and truth are simply myths formulated through mathematics (through these we render the world quantifiable). “That which does not reduce to numbers […] becomes illusion”
Nature is no longer a power of its own- it is disenchanted; immanently manageable; nature becomes the chaotic matter of mere classification.
“What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men. That is the only aim”.
Smith and O’Keefe (1980)
Nature separate from society has no meaning for Marx; nature is always related to society activity. Nature is at the centre of human activity- people rely on nature for the fulfilment of fundamental needs. Therefore, to conceive of nature as separate from society is a false abstraction; we cannot know nature as an external thing as we only know it by entering into a relationship with it
Production is a process by which the form of nature is altered; this is done via labour. However, labour produces more than a simple change in the form of matter- it also produces a change in the labourer.
Nature becomes the material which has its form altered by labour, becoming the material embodiment of exchange value. The relationship with nature is therefore a use-value relation.
However, since we no longer live in an exchange economy (the introduction of money) our understanding of the relation with nature needs to be refined. Nature is no longer seen as a purely use-value relation since direct need no longer determines what is produced. We only see nature in terms of exchange value (money).
McCarthy (2005)
Neoliberalism has meant enclosure and destruction of the commons and public goods. Many of the instrumental arrangements for the protection of nature that won in earlier struggles have been challenged or diluted.
The call for the commons can be seen on a global, national and local scale. Defence of the commons, or calls for new ones, are truly counter-hegemonic projects; a reminder that property relations are social, not natural.
Katz (1998)
Our conventions and practical engagements with the external world (nature) under capitalism have operated as if this is a free good or source of unlimited wealth; simply waiting for man to turn it into resources.
BUT, after the crises of the 1960/70s, man could no longer be sure that natural resources would be eternally available; nature, under capitalism, hit its limits. Consequently, nature was re-made for capitalism.
Corporate capitalism has embraces environmentalism as its own- in this shift, nature has essentially become an accumulation strategy. Nature is no longer an open frontier for capitalism in the sense of an absolute arena of economic expansion; nature has undergone involution. The time-space of nature has changed- corporate capitalism has morphed into a green version of itself by the 1980s
With the loss of extensive nature, capital re-grouped to plumb an everyday, more intense nature; nature became converted into an accumulation strategy. This is a new enclosure movement example given is resource reserves.
Smith (1984)
Under the growth-orientated, competitive and labour-value orientated conditions that are specific to capital, nature itself becomes internal to the economic system. Nature becomes embroiled in the logic of exchange value on the world market.
The production of nature is a continuous process in which nature and capital co-constitute one another in temporally and geographically varied and contingent ways. Nature becomes internal to capitalism in such a way that the very distinction implied by using these terms is eroded and undermined.
Massey (1991)
What Marx referred to as the annihilation of space by time has gained new momentum- becoming known as space-time compression. This refers to the movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching out of social relations and to our experience of all of this
It is capitalism and its developments which are argued to determine our understanding and our experience of space. But surely this in insufficient? Gender and race surely matter too. There is a lot more determining how we experience space than what capital gets up to
As a consequence, space time compression needs differentiating socially: different social groups have distinct relationships to differentiated mobility (some are in charge, some initiate flows and others are imprisoned by it).
One of the results of this process is the increasing uncertainty about what we mean by places and how we relate to them; can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity? Is it not possible for a sense of place to be outward looking?
This is in part a responsible to the desire for fixity and security of identity in the middle of movement and change. Whilst time is equated with movement and progress, space is rendered to stasis and reaction. This problem with this view is that is seems to require the drawing of boundaries (mapping onto a distinction between us/them)
Massey shows us how this ‘fixed identity’ it not necessarily true in reality through the example of Kilburn high street. This place is not a seamless or coherent identity with one sense of place. It embodies a global sense of place, with connections all over the world. We need to consider spaces in terms of their outwardness.
Lefebvre (1974)
Gives us three ways to understand the production of space…
1) Perceived space
The material and concrete spaces and the means through which we encounter them
The relationship between materials and routines of daily life
2) Conceived space
This involves representations of spaces, abstract plans and mental processes
This is the spaces of scientists, planners and social engineers
3) Lived space
These are spaces of representation- spaces of inhabitants and users
The relationship between space, place, bodies and affective space
Murray (2006)
One of the abounding myths which accompanies certain discourses of globalisation is the idea that it homogenises the world. This is clearly not true. One of geography’s major contributions has been to continue to provide both empirical data and theoretical constructs which both illustrate and explain this.
The world is now more unequal than ever. Under colonial globalisation, unevenness was created as part of the necessary process of fuelling of the imperial economies. Following the Second World War, the rise of the development project (McMichael, 2004) furthered the expansion of the capitalist nucleus, perpetuating marginalisation and exclusion. The more recent phase is also predicated on inequality. The nature of that inequality has changed however; what we have now is networks of privilege, with interstices (gaps in the net) of poverty and deprivation.
Harvey (1995) argues that globalisation may be better described as ‘uneven spatio-temporal development of capitalism’
