Producing Space-Time

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PRODUCING SPACE-TIME

When Marx and Harvey refer to capital as a mode of production, they have in mind much more than the production of shoes and shirts, as important as such commodities are for everyday life. What they want to suggest is that in the very act of producing shoes and shirts, capital also produces the enabling conditions of its own reproduction on an ever-expanding scale. A good case in point is the capitalist production of space and time, or what might more accurately be called "space-time."

While Marx stressed the interwoven nature of space and time, he did not accord them equal treatment. Rather, he enthroned time as the reigning regulatory principle of the capitalist mode of production.

All of Marx's foundational concepts carry the stamp of time. Start with value. This is the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of a given commodity. Time likewise lies at the heart of surplus value, which is the labor time appropriated by capitalists above and beyond the labor time necessary to cover the value of labor power. Relative surplus value continues the pattern, resulting as it does from the adoption of labor-saving technology that drives down the socially necessary labor time congealed in wage goods.

Finally, we come to the interrelated concepts of wealth and freedom, which in Capital and the Grundrisse are like the sun that occasionally peaks out from behind a dark and cloudy sky. Wealth is not a big bank account or a second home in Tuscany or however many billions of dollars Elon Musk has socked away for the colonization of Mars. For Marx wealth is free time. The spectacular development of the productive forces under capital makes it possible to imagine a society unburdened by economic necessity, a society in which individuals will have the time and therefore the freedom to develop their creative powers and capacities. A future society governed by the "associated producers," Marx proclaimed, will be a society liberated from the tyranny of the clock.

I have before me an article that appeared in the August 24, 2024, edition of the New York Times. It is an interview with the 89-year-old José "Pepe" Mujica, who was a Marxist guerilla in his youth and a political prisoner for fourteen years before his election as president of Uruguay. "My doctors say it went well, but I'm broken," Mujica tells the reporter, referring to his recent radiation treatment for esophageal cancer. These words are spoken in a simple farm house outside of Montevideo, which he shares with his long-time comrade and wife Lucía Topolansky. This is where they insisted on living during the years 2010-2015, when Mujica was president. No official palace for them. In the fields surrounding their house, Mujica and Topolansky raise chrysanthemums.

"You’re free when you escape the law of necessity—when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs," says Mujica.

Where did the "philosopher president" get his ideas about time, law, necessity, desire and freedom? He doesn't say, presumably because the reporter doesn't ask. But it's no mystery: the ideas come from Marx.

It's a shame that the interviewer did not follow up on the Marxist roots of Mujica's philosophy. A shame but not a surprise. The Times has always looked askance at Latin American leaders tainted by Marxism. I suspect that Mujica, who now finds himself at death's door, would have jumped at the chance to acknowledge his intellectual debt to the author of Capital.

So, out of respect for both Mujica and Marx, let's go where the Times did not.

In "Against the Clock," I set out Marx's argument that the competitive drive for relative surplus value leads to technological innovations that cut inputs of labor time in the sphere of production. But it would be a mistake to assume that the impulse to economize on time is confined to this sphere alone. The same impulse drives the hunt for time-saving efficiencies in the spheres of realization and circulation, as Marx seeks to demonstrate with his concept of "turnover time."

This concept is the bridge between space and time, the hyphen in space-time.

To understand why let's revisit Diagram 1. Turnover time is how long it takes industrial capitalists to (1) buy labor power and means of production; (2) combine them in a production process from which will emerge a new commodity; (3) get this new commodity to market; (4) sell it at a profit; (5) use part of the profit to settle accounts with the tax collector, banker and landlord; (6) use another part to buy goods for personal consumption; and (7) reinvest what's left of the profit in labor power and means of production so that the accumulation process can start over again on an expanded basis.

Those capitalists who turn over their capital the fastest are able to throw money into circulation again and again while the rest of the competition waits impatiently for their profits to materialize. In a given period of time, these efficient capitalists will earn a mass of profit greater than the social average, a portion of which will be reinvested in improved technologies that increase labor productivity, reduce the value of labor power and produce more relative surplus value.

Any interruption or delay in the movement of value through the circuit will put individual capitalists at a competitive disadvantage. Sluggish turnover times will translate into a loss in market share at the very least and economic ruin in the worst-case scenario. At the level of capital in general, a system-wide slowdown in turnover time will trigger a powerful response, ranging from localized, short-lived devaluations to a general crisis of overaccumulation.

In sum, value races against the clock as it travels through the circuit sketched out in Diagram 1. More like sprint cyclists fighting for position on the final lap of a velodrome track than German cars cruising down the Autobahn at the same speed.

This is our segue from time to space, and from Marx to Harvey.

Capital's colonization of time is paralleled by its campaign to produce geographical configurations that will shrink turnover time to the bare minimum. Value in motion has to be understood as unfolding not only through time but also across space.

Harvey's principal contribution has been to put Marxist theory on a solid spatial foundation. To put it differently, he wants to bring space and time into an equal partnership. While Harvey identifies three distinct conceptions of space—absolute, relative and relational—he argues that they all have a basis in the material practices of capitalist production. In Harvey's view, space is a social construct that takes the form of fixed capital embedded in the land, physical landscapes in and through which value flows and built environments that displace and defer capital's crisis tendencies.

With all this in mind, take another look at Diagram 1, where you will see that the key moments of the circulation process occur in space as well as time. The red rectangles of production, realization and distribution represent built environments attached to the land and separated from each other by distances ranging from just around the corner to the other side of the planet.

These spatial distances are barriers that must be overcome if value is to circulate freely and capital is to accumulate in an endless spiral.

"The ability to overcome space," Harvey writes, "is predicated on the production of space." By this he means that for capital to circulate smoothly, some part of it must be fixed in the two-fold sense of being immobilized over a long period of time and being permanently anchored to a particular place. The see-saw relationship between fixity and motion gives the dynamics of capitalist space production their volatile and uneven character.

At the most basic level, the production of space entails the construction of transportation and communications infrastructures that aim at nothing less than "the annihilation of space by time," to quote Marx. It also involves the accretion of larger built environments that grow layer upon layer around these infrastructures, like the coral reefs that are perishing before our eyes as a result of global warming and ocean acidification. Capital produces space in the form of interlocking built environments that are necessary for commodity production and for the social reproduction of local populations whose labor keeps value in motion.

For Harvey the city is the crowning proof of capital's capacity to overcome spatial barriers and produce geographical configurations favorable to accumulation and circulation. In 2007 it was announced that for the first time in human history a majority of the planet's population lives in urban areas. The city as a spatial form and urbanization as a spatial process have never been so central to capital accumulation as they are today. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that urbanization and accumulation are one and the same.

This is why Harvey argues that the production of space under capital boils down to the production of urban built environments. The countless physical things which comprise these environments are commodities possessing a use value, exchange value and value. Taken together, they form what Harvey calls "a geographically ordered, complex, composite commodity." This commodity of commodities is created by capital, not out of thin air but from materials at hand. And it is created not to last forever but only until the time comes to destroy it, in whole or in part, and replace it with a new built environment more in line with capital's needs.

The creative destruction of the urban built environment plays a central role in Harvey's crisis theory.

Harvey provides a framework for analyzing how the production of space and time is aligned with the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. He disaggregates the circulation process into the primary, secondary and tertiary circuits of capital. The primary circuit is where value and surplus value are produced, and where commodities are consumed as either means of production or wage goods. As we noted in the last section, pressures of overaccumulation have a tendency to build up in the primary circuit, driving down the rate of profit and threatening the mass of profit. If corrective measures are not undertaken to deal with this situation, nothing short of a system-wide devaluation in the form of a crisis will be able to eliminate the surplus capital and restore conditions of accumulation.

At this critical point when crisis tendencies seem to be coming to a head, the secondary circuit of capital comes to the rescue, providing a temporary solution or 'fix' to the surplus capital absorption problem. Let's see how this spatial-temporal fix works.

The secondary circuit is subdivided into two broad categories, fixed capital and the consumption fund. Those elements of the built environment which enable the production of value are assigned to fixed capital, while those others that contribute to the consumption of value fall into the consumption fund. Factories are an example the first, and apartments of the second. But every element of the built environment is defined by its use, so that boarded-up factories that have been repurposed as hipster condominiums move from fixed capital to the consumption fund, while tenement apartments that have been converted into sweatshops move in the opposite direction. Streets are dual products, defined as fixed capital when they are being used by trucks to move goods in and out of production and storage facilities, and as part of the consumption fund when they are being used by motorists or pedestrians on their way to and from the shopping mall.

The spatial-temporal fix aims to manage overaccumulation pressures by "switching" surplus capital from the primary to the secondary circuit. Capital that has languished for lack of profitable investment outlets in the primary circuit is now channeled into major urban development and infrastructural projects in the secondary circuit, ranging from high-speed rail to suburban housing tracts and downtown festival markets. These large-scale, taxpayer-subsidized undertakings are made possible by long-term loans with amortization periods of 20 or 30 years. The complicated logistical and technical challenges of such development projects are managed by a nexus of state and financial intermediaries which are substantially shielded from public scrutiny and form a hybrid public-private state within a state.

In addition to the anti-democratic governance structures through which they operate, spatial-temporal fixes are fertile soil for all manner of speculative behavior. This is due to the long-term nature of the investments whose success or failure will not be known until long after the original investors are gone. Moral hazard is hardwired into the day-to-day operations of spatial-temporal fixes overseen by the state-finance nexus.

Unsurprisingly, spatial-temporal fixes have been a breeding ground for the some of the most insane excesses of casino capitalism in recent memory. What is more, they have put urban development priorities on the auction block with the result that mammoth projects that are productive of neither surplus value nor human well-being receive the go-ahead from state-finance nexuses eager to please major "stakeholders" (read financial and real estate interests). Harvey characterizes the big-city trophy projects of the neoliberal era as "mindless urbanization," since their sole function is to serve as a sink for surplus capital.

The photo above shows the spatial-temporal fix in mid-production. The Fourth Ward complex is Atlanta's largest private development project, which itself is nested in the even larger public-private project of the Beltline. Inspired by New York's High Line and Hudson Yards, and like these other much-ballyhooed undertakings, the Beltline has been praised to high heaven as a game-changing catalyst of green-friendly development. Critics are more inclined to offer it as Exhibit Number 1 in the case against the mindless urbanization that passes for sustainability in my home town.

What is the big take-away from this discussion of capitalist space-time? Capital bends space and time to its own reproduction requirements. But the production of space-time can never "fix" capital's internal contradictions and crisis tendencies once and for all. The best it can do is move them around.

To the degree that the production of space and time has been hijacked by such displacement mechanisms as the spatial-temporal fix, cities will continue to serve as sponges for overaccumulated capital and gentrified playgrounds for the one-percent, while the urban crises of affordable housing, homelessness and decimated social services will continue to fester.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PRODUCING SPACE-TIME

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist