David Harvey Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism.

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.

But the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers.

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

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

Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.