David Harvey Quotes

David W. Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

In 2007, Harvey was listed as the 18th most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences in that year, as established by counting cites from academic journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI database. Some of the artists influenced by Harvey's work are Elisheva Levy in Israel and Theaster Gates in Chicago.

✵ 31. October 1935
David Harvey photo
David Harvey: 37   quotes 3   likes

Famous David Harvey Quotes

“Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 295

“We have, Marx asserts, built a vast social enterprise which dominates us, delimits our freedoms and ultimately visits upon us the worst forms of degradation.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 7, Overaccumulation And 'First Cut' Theory, p. 203
Context: The inner logic that governs the laws of motion of capitalism is cold, ruthless and inexorable, responsive only to the law of value. Yet value is a social relation, a product of a particular historical process. Human beings were organizers, creators and participants in that history. We have, Marx asserts, built a vast social enterprise which dominates us, delimits our freedoms and ultimately visits upon us the worst forms of degradation.

“A work of this sort admits no conclusion.”

Afterword, p.446
The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition)

“Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 11, Theory Of Rent, p. 347

“The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 11, Theory Of Rent, p. 338

“Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 13, Crisis In The Space Economy Of Capitalism, p. 424

David Harvey Quotes about money

“Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 3, Production, Consumption and Surplus Value, p. 95

“When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 293

“If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 269

“Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 253

David Harvey Quotes

“Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 8, Fixed capital, p. 221

“But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 8, Fixed capital, p. 221

“The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.”

Afterword, p. 449
The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition)

“Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism.”

Variant: Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.
Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 6, Dynamics Of Accumulation, p. 188

“The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 327

“workers then have a strong stake in the preservation of the very system that exploits them because the destruction of that system entails the destruction of their savings.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 263

“The dominant notion of rationality is a capitalist notion of rationality, that is, whatever is profitable, whatever can be organised in terms of social control of labour-power and control of natural resources.”

(January 1984) " The history and present condition of Geography: an historical materialist manifesto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDoIMT-Dbyo," YouTube video, 1:10:15, posted by "IGU Channel," May 7, 2014.

“Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 4, Technology, Labour Process And Value, p. 122

“Capital creates space-time.”

Introduction to the 2006 Verso Edition, p. xix-xx
The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition)

“The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 1, Commodities, Values And Class Relations, p. 15

“Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 2, Production and Distribution, p. 59

“The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 13, Crisis In The Space Economy Of Capitalism, p. 418

“The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 304

“All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 11, Theory Of Rent, p. 349

“The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 12, Production Of Spatial Configurations, p. 385

“The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 3, Production, Consumption and Surplus Value, p. 82

“There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 13, Crisis In The Space Economy Of Capitalism, p. 442

“Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 11, Theory Of Rent, p. 369

“The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 6, Dynamics Of Accumulation, p. 165

“Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.”

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 12, Production Of Spatial Configurations, p. 373

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