Spaces of Global Capitalism by David Harvey

Author:David Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

In transforming our environment we necessarily transform ourselves. This is Marx’s most fundamental theoretical point concerning the dialectics of our metabolic relation to nature. “The antithesis between nature and history is created,” Marx and Engels observed, only when “the relation of man to nature is excluded from history.”13 And if that relation is seen as dialectical, as a matter of internal relations, then the particularity-universality problem is directly confronted. On the ecological side, therefore, we have to understand how the accumulation of capital works through ecosystemic processes, re-shaping them and disturbing them as it goes. Energy flows, shifts in material balances, environmental transformations (some of them irreversible) have to be brought thoroughly within the picture. But the social side cannot be evaded as somehow radically different from its ecological integument. There is, as I argued in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, nothing unnatural about New York City.14 The circulation of money and of capital have to be construed as ecological variables every bit as important as the circulation of air and water. The concept of embed-deddness in “the web of life” understood both in ecological and social terms therefore becomes crucial to the theorization of uneven geographical development. This is the kind of work that political ecology has embarked upon with significant results.

This dialectic has unfolded, however, without us being particularly cognizant of the ways we re-make ourselves. Even when there was some collective sense of how “the mastery of nature” (just to take one example) might contribute to human enlightenment and emancipation, the unintended consequences of human actions have been so vast and unexpected as to disrupt and in some instances even reverse some of our most cherished hopes. The unexpected outcomes feed our Frankenstein fears instead. All the problematics posed by environment-alism here loom large. The question of how capital accumulation works through the physical, chemical and biological processes that surround us becomes a compelling issue for critical work.

This becomes even more evident when we insert the word “built” in front of the word “environment.” For the city as the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once remarked, is:

man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.15

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