Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space

FIVE: Toward a Theory of Uneven Development II: Spatial Scale and the Seesaw of Capital

175 chapter five Toward a Theory of Uneven Development II Spatial Scale and the Seesaw of Capital if the dialectic of geographical differentiation and equalization is ultimately responsible for the pattern of uneven development, it does not on its own completely specify the process. Two questions arise: first, why does this dialectic not simply result in a static disparity in levels of development, rather than a dynamic pattern of uneven development ? Second, at what scales does this dialectic operate and how are these scales themselves derived? We shall look at these questions in turn. Beginning with the question of spatial equilibrium, we return to Harvey’s analysis. 176 Chapter Five I. The Possibility of Spatial Equilibrium Locational advantage should be considered like technological innovation as a source of relative surplus value, according to Harvey. Individual capitalists are perpetually driven to adopt the most advantageous locations. Insofar as producers relocate at will, their “excess profit” is purely ephemeral; where they remain for a long period, it is taxed away as ground rent. Assuming equal access to technology, and “spatial competition ,” therefore, the “rate of profit to capitalist producers will tend to be equalized across locations either through the appropriation of rent or through the geographical mobility of production capital.” From this Harvey concludes: The aggregate long-run effect on a closed plain is that the search for individual excess profits from location forces the average profit rate closer and closer to zero. This is an extraordinary result. It means that competition for relative locational advantage on a closed plain under conditions of accumulation tends to produce a landscape of production that is antithetical to further accumulation. Individual capitalists, acting in their own self-interest and striving to maximize their profits under the coercive pressures of competition , tend to expand production and shift locations up to the point where the capacity to produce further surplus value disappears. There is, it seems, a spatial version of Marx’s falling rate of profit thesis.1 Although this model represents a deliberate simplification, it is not unreasonable to conclude from it that while some form of equilibrium may be possible, there is no equilibrium in the sense of an equalized landscape ; however much the tendency toward an equalization of profit rates presses, through the mobility of circulating capital, to spatialize itself, it fails. Thus Harvey notes of Losch’s spatial equilibrium of hexagonal market networks that it “is a landscape of zero accumulation, totally inconsistent with the capitalist mode of production.” Thus “‘spatial equilibrium’ in the bourgeois sense [equalization] is an impossibility under the social relations of capitalism for deeply structural reasons.” Toward a Theory of Uneven Development II 177 The “closer production equals some spatial equilibrium condition (the equalization of profit rates across locations, for example), the greater the competitive incentive for individual capitalists to disrupt the basis of that equilibrium through technological change.” This disturbs and alters “the conditions under which the preceding spatial equilibrium . . . was achieved.”2 Harvey’s general point is that while there is certainly a tendency toward spatial equilibrium (in the sense of equalization), it is continually frustrated by equally powerful forces at the heart of capital (e.g., technological dynamism) which tend toward a continual geographical disequilibrium . But as we saw in the last chapter, specifically in our glimpse of Lenin and Luxemburg, there is a more profound importance to spatial equilibrium. It is not just that capital tends toward creating spatial equilibrium as a geographical mirror image of itself; rather the production of geographical space becomes itself a major way of protecting social and economic equilibrium and of staving off crisis. Marx treated foreign trade, exports, and primitive accumulation in this fashion, and in a simple version involving absolute space, this was also Luxemburg’s conception ; Lenin’s was a more complex version which implicitly acknowledged the relativity of space. Harvey picks up the idea in connection with over-accumulation and asks whether there is a “spatial fix” to the internal contradictions of capitalism. This is what he has in mind when he emphasizes that “space is an active moment” in the overall circulation and accumulation of capital. “Spatial equilibrium” becomes not simply an interesting side effect of capitalist development but an integral necessity, and a measure of the limits to capital. First, there is no “external” solution. However cathartic they may be in the...