David Harvey (geographer)
English geographer and the Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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.
Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.
But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.
" 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."
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.
Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.
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.
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.
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?
The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.
The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.
Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.
Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.
Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.
All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.
If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world.
Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.