David Harvey Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.

David Harvey
There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.

David Harvey
All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.

David Harvey
The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.

David Harvey
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
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
Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

David Harvey
Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.

David Harvey
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?

David Harvey
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
Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.

David Harvey
If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world.

David Harvey
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
Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.

David Harvey
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.

David Harvey
The dominant notion of rationality is a capitalist notion of rationality, that is, whatever is profitable, whatever can be organised in terms of social control of labour-power and control of natural resources.

David Harvey
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.

David Harvey
Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.

David Harvey
Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.

David Harvey
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.

David Harvey
When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.

David Harvey
But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.

David Harvey
Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.

David Harvey
Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.

David Harvey
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