David Harvey Quotes
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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.
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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?
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Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.
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The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.
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There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.
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Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.
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Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.
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But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.
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There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?
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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.
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Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.
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If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.
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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.
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Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.
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Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.
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Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.
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What sets imperialism of the capitalist sort apart from other conceptions of empire is that it is the capitalist logic that typically dominates, though ... there are times in which the territorial logic comes to the fore. But this then poses a crucial question: how can the territorial logics of power, which tend to be awkwardly fixed in space, respond to the open spatial dynamics of endless capital accumulation? And what does endless capital accumulation imply for the territorial logics of power?
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Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.
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When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.
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The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
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Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.
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The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.
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We're supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition.
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There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.
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The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than to generate wealth and income.
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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.
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If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, then capitalism is not long for this world.
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What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.
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People must get active; go outside; get moving. This is a crucial time. You know, massive wealth and capital haven't budged one bit, so far. We have to give it a huge push if we want to see something different in our society. We need to create mechanisms and forms of organization which reflect the needs and wants of society as a whole, not just a privileged-oligarchic class of individuals.
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