Quotes from David Harvey

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.

We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.

Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers

Separating land, labour and capital as independent and seemingly autonomous factors of production had a double advantage for the ruling classes since it permitted them to proclaim 'the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue' at the same time as it suppressed any notion of exploitation since the act of production could in principle be portrayed as the harmonious assembly of separate and independent factors of production.

For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process—a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

There is a big difference between the circulation of money as a mediator of commodity exchange and money used as capital. Not all money is capital. A monetized society is not necessarily a capitalist society. If everything revolved around the C-M-C circulation process, then money would be merely a mediator, nothing more. Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.

This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx's supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.

the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises.

As Marx amusingly put it elsewhere, in boom economies everybody acts like a Protestant—they act on pure faith. When the crash comes, though, everyone dives for cover in the "Catholicism" of the monetary base, real gold.

The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders' returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged.

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

The sale of indulgences is sometimes regarded as one of the first major waves of capitalist commodification. It certainly laid the basis for all that hoarded wealth in the Vatican. Talk about the commodification of conscience and honor!

the wealth of a society is going to be measured by how much disposable free time we all have to do what the hell we like without any constraints because our basic needs are met.

The difficulty," he says, "lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money" (186): What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities universally express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (187, emphasis added)

This translates into a hypothesis about actually existing capitalism: that the more it is structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class inequalities. And there is, it goes without saying, plenty of evidence to support the view that the rhetoric of free markets and free trade and their supposed universal benefits to which we have been subjected these past thirty years have produced exactly the result that Marx would expect:

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

Marx's critique of free markets and free trade can shed as much devastating light on our own actually existing capitalism as it did for the capitalism of Marx's own time and place.

With the whole world in economic recession, a new approach was called for.

The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.

Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.

A lição é clara: enquanto nós arquitetos rebeldes não conhecermos a coragem de nossa mente e estivermos preparados para dar um mergulho igualmente especulativo em algum desconhecido, também nós continuaremos a ser objetos da geografia histórica (como abelhas operárias) em vez de sujeitos ativos que levem conscientemente ao limite as possibilidades humanas.

The British imperialist logic that led to the Opium Wars reflected this: there was a lot of silver in China, so the idea was to sell Indian opium to the Chinese, get all that silver out in that lucrative sale, and thereby pay for all the goods that were being produced in Manchester and sent to India. When the Chinese resisted opening their doors to the opium trade, the British response was to knock them down with military force.