pjackson - class 5

paul jackson | geopolitics | June 2008

First off, his conclusion. I really enjoyed that he says he hopes he is wrong and asks for someone to prove him wrong.

Second, his notes. I LOVE that he only has 12 endnotes and quotes four people, one of which is mostly Harvey (1982). [Imagine if everyone had to do that? Bye-bye citation count…]

Harvey begins by giving us a reading of Marx, then moves on to focus on crisis, but then asks: is there anything new? Specifically:

“Are there ways to absorb the surpluses productively through opening up new conduits and paths for the circulation of capital?” (135)

To work from crisis, the different ways to advert the crisis, and how the contradictions remain, Harvey needs new elaborations—all predicated on geography. First he explains why concepts like credit and fictitious capital are spatial, or have spatial effects. He deals with the state (and Lenin) as explicitly territorial, but not as something that merely exists, but is produced as part of a general theory of space-relations and geographical development under capitalism. To further explain how, Harvey trots out new [to the course] concepts—primarily geographic concepts—such as spatial fix, structured coherence, regional spaces, regional class alliances, spatial competition, and how they are all related. Asking the question:

“Is it possible to construct a theory of concrete and the particular in the context of the universal and abstract determinations of Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation?” (144)

I think this is constructed through uneven development: capital needing to move, producing the structures to move, and yet that movement puts at risks the very structures that allow the movement. Key quote:

“Capitalism perpetually strives, therefore, to create a social and physical landscape in its own image and requisite to its own needs at a particular time point in time, only just as certainly to undermine, disrupt and even destroy that landscape at a later point in time.”

[Tons more here, found it very useful, but I’ve run out of time…]

One savior: with the investment in social infrastructures the lives of the majority in the west under capitalism are made better, even though the contradictions and crisis are displaced

One curse: with these regional alliances and spatial fixes leads to struggles between nation states. War? What is it good for? Absolutely, capitalism.

Further…

+++++++We are getting into the state and social infrastructures, and why the state becomes the key expression of regional class alliances. There is a lot I would like to talk about in this, but maybe that’s only me… Anyway he introduces some of the complications, but he does talks about how all “economic agents” will cut and run if need be and how this fixity and motion is fundamental to his theory (150-151). While, yes, all capitalists can, and many do, cut and run, yet historically this has been a very messy and contingent process? And is anyone, even capitalists, purely economic agents?

+++++++ One of the interesting points for me is: “How the dynamics of accumulation mesh with population growth cannot be predicated in advance and the whole relation of the circulation of capital to the reproduction of labour power remains a thorny, perhaps unresolvable problem.” (134)
→ my first response was: “well the state needs to be involved…”, which he knows and gets into later. I understand the reluctance to predict, but why is the relation unresolvable? Does he mean, it can’t be solved, or cannot be separated?

+++++++And he answered a question from yesterday in that Marx starts with the commodity and Harvey starts with the “historical geography of capitalism” (144)