David Harvey: Capitalism

“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

“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

Time

“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

Way

“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

Change

“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

History , Change

“Capital creates space-time.”

David Harvey

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

Time

“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

“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

Money

“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

Confidence , Failure

“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

“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)

“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

“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

Money

“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

Way , Idea , Time

“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

Life , Time

“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 , Way