>The translation of Grossmann's book in English in 1992 was a
>reminder of an earlier set of debates, but there was a distinct
>failure in earlier marxian political economic theories to attribute
>uneven geotemporal development to the displacement of the
>overaccumulation problem.
Since Patrick is referring to David Harvey's definition of the spatial dimension of capital, I might add a word or two introducing Harvey to people not familiar with his work.
David Harvey, best known as the author of "The Condition of Postmodernity", is in the Urban Studies Department at Johns Hopkins University. His interest in urban studies is very closely related to the rather neglected aspect of Marxism that examines such topics as neighborhoods, public spaces, etc. from a class perspective.
Around two years ago I heard Harvey at the Brecht Forum in NYC speaking about the current situation facing the black community in Baltimore. He described the transformation of working-class life, the decay of neighborhoods that were based on a once-thriving industrial substructure. I have vivid recollections of remarks he made on the temporary work agencies that sent men out to do heavy, unskilled labor at minimum wage. Many of these men had once been employed as steel-workers or longshoremen. Harvey, just as Engels, excels at placing working-people in their total environment.
The theoretical background to Harvey's "environmental" (not in the ecological sense) approach to the working-class can be found in his "The Limits to Capital". This book is a more or less orthodox reading of Karl Marx's Capital with two concluding chapters that indicate where he veers from the well-trodden path. Their titles should indicate his area of concern. Chapter 12 is titled "The Production of Spatial Configurations: The Geographical Mobilities of Capital and Labor" and chapter 13 is titled "Crisis in the Space Economy of Capitalism: the Dialectics of Imperialism." Within Chapter 12 is a section called "The Territoriality of Social Infrastructures". Within Chapter 13 is a section called "Crisis Formation within Regions". I intend to show how these sorts of questions dealt with in these sections link up with Engels' investigation of the Great Towns of England in the 1840s.
This is what David Harvey has to say about the "uneven geographical development of social structures" in Chapter 12:
"This brings us more directly to the geographical aspects of the problem. The uneven geographical development of social infrastructures is, in the final analysis, reproduced through the circulation of capital. Capital produces and reproduces, albeit through all manner of subtle mediations and transformations, its social as well as its physical environment. Even the pre-capitalist elements that persist must be reproduced, in the end, out of surplus value production. The social geography which evolves is not, however, a mere mirror reflection of capital's needs, but the locus of powerful and potentially disruptive contradictions. The social geography shaped to capital's needs at one moment in history *is not necessarily consistent* with later requirements."
It is clear that this applies to the Great Towns of England in the 1840s. What Engels saw was a "social geography" that reflected capital's needs at that particular time when capital accumulation took priority over every other need. The textile bourgeoisie needed to get workers into those mills at any cost. The fact that cities like Manchester turned into sprawling slums and that hundreds of thousands of people worked like slaves was immaterial. What happened of course is that the Great Towns of England became transformed as capital's needs evolved. It was the combination of the satisfaction of capital accumulation and the growing power of trade unions that transformed both the geography and working-conditions of places like Manchester.
Bourgeois critics of Marxism who argue that Marx was wrong because modern-day Manchester looks a lot different than the Manchester of 1840 have it all wrong. What has changed is the conditions of capital creation, not its elimination. The welfare state for a whole period of time served to meliorate class tensions as well as provide for a better- educated and more mobile working class. The working-class of 1940 had to be much more transportable as capital itself became less static. Put in its essence, this meant that to create the new cities of the Southwest United States, it took a working-class with a high-school education and relatively good health to pick up and move from Alabama to California. The conditions of exploitation have changed but not disappeared.
Geographical displacement doesn't just take place on a national level as workers follow capital's trajectory from South to North, and subsequently from Northeast to Southwest. It also takes place on a global scale. In the concluding chapter of Harvey's book, he describes the conditions under which capital migrates:
"To simplify, we initially assume that all production and realization of interdependent capitals occurs within a closed region. Accumulation proceeds within that region at rates dependent upon the local expansion of the proletariat, the state of the class struggle, the pace of innovation, the growth in aggregate effective demand, etc. But since capitalists will be capitalists, overaccumulation is bound to arise. The threat of massive devaluation looms large and civil society appears destined to experience the social distress, disruption and unrest that accompany the forcible restoration of conditions favorable to accumulation.
This is, of course, exactly the kind of 'inner dialectic' that forces society to seek relief through some sort of 'spatial fix'. The frontiers of the region can be rolled back or relief gained by exports of money capital, commodities or productive capacities or imports of fresh labor powers from other regions. The tendency toward overaccumulation within the region remains unchecked, but devaluation is avoided by successive and ever grander 'outer transformations'. This process can presumably continue until all external possibilities are exhausted or because other regions resist being treated as mere convenient appendages."
What Harvey is describing here, of course, is the tendency for national capital to expand internationally in order to resolve a crisis within its borders. 'Outer transformations' is simply another word for imperialism.
Engels and Marx did not live long enough to observe imperialism's full ability to use 'outer transformations' to resolve crisis. It took WWI and Lenin's analysis of the causes of this war to round out Marxism's understanding of this dialectic.
Engels could not have possibly understood that the hell being created in Manchester in the 1840s was only temporary. The full motion of capital is beyond the comprehension of any individual, no matter how omniscient they may appear.
Had Engels lived long enough to study the problem, he might have developed a theory of imperialism not unlike Lenin's. Who can resist taking one more look at the observation made by Cecil Rhodes, as cited in Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism".
"I was in the East End of London [a working-class quarter] and listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread! Bread!' and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the need of imperialism....My cherished ideas is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to proved new markets for the good produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."
In this scheme of things, the wage-slavery of the Great Towns of England that so horrified Engels was never abolished, it was simply exported overseas.
One of the big problems of Marxism is the tendency to understand the socialist objective within a national framework. This can lead to some really grotesque exhibits. I recall back in the early 1970s when Trotskyism was growing everywhere, there used to be regular reports coming into the United States about the national conventions of various new Trotskyist groups. Every single one of them followed the same scenario. Very little was spoken about the rest of the world. The big question was how to take power in one's "own" country. I can recall reports from Switzerland, for example, that dealt believe it or not with the "growing contradictions" of Swiss capitalism and the beginnings of a new working-class radicalization. I can't remember what these projections were based on, but it must have been related to tensions between the chocolate and wrist-watch bourgeoisies.
(The other aspect of Engels' "Conditions of the Working Class in England" that seems terribly contemporary has to do with the question of infrastructure and environment (this time *in* the ecological sense). Engels is acutely aware of the violence done to nature as well as society in the course of primitive capital accumulation. These contradictions are as important to him as the contradiction between factory-owner and worker over hours and wages.)
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)