David Harvey - The limits to capital (1982)

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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.

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
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
The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.

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

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

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

David Harvey
Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

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

David Harvey
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.

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
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
Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.

David Harvey
The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

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

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

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

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

David Harvey
The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.

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
The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium.

David Harvey
Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

David Harvey
The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.'

David Harvey