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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 quotes3 likes

Famous David Harvey Quotes

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

“The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.”

David Harvey

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 12, Production Of Spatial Configurations, p. 376

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

(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.”

David Harvey

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

“If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?”

David Harvey

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 316

“Capital creates space-time.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

“But the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers.”

David Harvey

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 5, Organization of Capitalist Production, p. 146

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

“Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.”

David Harvey

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 2, Production and Distribution, p. 39

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

“Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.”

David Harvey

Introduction, p. xxxii
The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition)

“The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.”

David Harvey

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

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

David Harvey

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

“Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?”

David Harvey

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 13, Crisis In The Space Economy Of Capitalism, p. 445

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

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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.”

David Harvey

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

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