David Harvey - Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography

SPACES OF CAPITAL

DAVID HARVEY is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was previously Professor of Geography at the Johns Hopkins University and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. He received the Outstanding Contributor award from the Association of American Geographers in 1980; the Anders Retzius Gold Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 1989; and in 1995 both the Patrons Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and the French Vautrin Lud Prize.

by the same author

Explanation in Geography

Social Justice and the City

The Limits to Capital

Consciousness and the Urban Experience

The Urbanization of Capital

The Urban Experience

The Condition of Postmodemity

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

Spaces of Hope

Spaces of Capital

Towards a Critical Geography

David Harvey

This edition published 2012 by Routledge

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David Harvey, 2001

Published by arrangement with

Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, in 2001.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harvey, David, 1935

Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography David Harvey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-93240-8 ISBN 0-415-93241-6 (pbk.)

1. Communism and geography. 2. Urban geography. 3. Urban economics. 4. Marxian economics. 5. Space in economics. 6. Capitalism. I. Title.

Contents

Part 1
GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGES/POLITICAL POWER

Part 2
THE CAPITALIST PRODUCTION OF SPACE

Preface

No one who aspires to change the way we think about and understand the world can do so under circumstances of their own choosing. Everyone has to take advantage of the raw materials of the intellect at hand. Each must also try to combat the presumptions, prejudices and political predilections that at any time constrain thinking in ways which may at best be understood as repressive tolerance and at worst as merely repressive. The essays collected here, written over some thirty years, record my attempts to change ways of thought in the discipline of geography (until recently my institutional home within the increasingly dysfunctional disciplinary division of knowledge characteristic of the academy), in cognate areas (such as urban studies) and among the public at large. They also reflect the changing circumstances of knowledge production within the English-speaking world during those years.

The onset of the Cold War and the devastations wrought on freedom of thought by McCarthyism during the 1950s, aided and abetted by disturbing revelations about the excesses of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, made it extremely difficult during the 1950s and early 1960s to treat Marxs writings as serious raw materials for shaping new understandings and modes of political action. Indeed, as the case of Owen Lattimore (see that had proven so vulnerable during the catastrophic events of the 1930s and 1940s. The civil rights struggles and urban uprisings in the United States (the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the frontal attack upon the Black Panthers which culminated in the state assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago) also called for serious re-evaluations in thought and political practice.

It seemed important to engage with Marx for two compelling reasons: first, to understand why it was that a doctrine so denigrated and despised within official circles in the English-speaking world could have such widespread appeal to those actively struggling for emancipation every-where else; secondly, to see if a reading of Marx could help ground a critical theory of society to embrace and interpret the social conflicts that culminated in high political drama (bordering on cultural and political revolution) in the climacteric years of 196773.

My own work on these topics originated as part of a general effort to come to terms with these questions during the early 1970s. It was, of course, helpful to discover that the embers of Marxist scholarship were still glowing strongly in certain quarters (the work of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy shone out in the United States and of Maurice Dobb, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams in Britain) and that various cur- rents of Marxist thought remained strong in Europe. At first attention had to be paid to recuperating these achievements while developing fresh insights from the classical Marxian texts appropriate to the times. Marxs writings subsequently became more widely studied and commonly accepted, but later still were seen increasingly as repressive dogma or as anachronistic and reactionary: it was then important to show that there was life in his ideas when they were adapted and extended to deal with unfamiliar circumstances.

The specific angle of my work was, however, somewhat unusual since it was almost as uncommon for those working in the Marxist tradition to pay any mind to questions of geography (or of urbanization, except as a historical phenomena) as it was for geographers to consider Marxian theory as a possible foundation for their thinking. If anything, the radical tradition of geography (which was never very strong) harked back to the anarchists, particularly those at the end of the nineteenth century when geographer-anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Elise Reclus were prominent thinkers and activists. There is much of value in that tradition. It was, for example, much more sensitive to issues of environment and urban organization (albeit critically) than has generally been the case within Marxism. But the influence of such thinkers was either strictly circumscribed or was transformed, through the influence of town planners like Patrick Geddes, into a communitarianism framed in gentle and acceptable opposition to what Lewis Mumford, for example, considered the dystopian trajectory of technological change under capitalism. Part of the radical geography movement in the late 1960s was dedicated to revitalizing the anarchist tradition, while geographers with strong sympathies with, say, national liberation and anti-imperialist revolutionary movements wrote in a more directly historical-materialist and experiential mode and eschewed Marxian abstractions. Geographers of this sort (Lattimore and Keith Buchanan come to mind) were marginalized, often treated like pariahs, within their discipline. Radical geographers sought nevertheless both to uphold this tradition (in the face of fierce opposition) but also, as in the radical geography journal Antipode (founded in 1968) to underpin it by appeal to the texts of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukacs, and the like.

The initial essays in Part Two of this collection, all published in Antipode, were part of that collective effort. There was very little written on the geography of capital accumulation, the production of space and of uneven geographical development from a Marxist perspective. Marx, though he promised a volume of