David Harvey Quotes

#1. The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.

David Harvey

#2. The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.

David Harvey

#3. Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.

David Harvey

#4. All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.

David Harvey

#5. 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.

David Harvey

#6. The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism .

David Harvey

#7. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

David Harvey

#8. Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.

David Harvey

#9. It is always dangerous to treat simultaneity as causation

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#11. The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#13. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

David Harvey

#14. 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.

David Harvey

#15. Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

David Harvey

#16. Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital , can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.

David Harvey

#17. 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.

David Harvey

#18. Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

David Harvey

#19. The shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society) has therefore been marked under neoliberalism.11 In this respect the practices of the neoliberal and developmental state broadly converge.

David Harvey

#20. The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.

David Harvey

#21. 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.

David Harvey

#22. The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.

David Harvey

#23. Neoliberalization has meant ,in short,the financialization of everything.There was unquestionably a power shift away from production to the world of finance.

David Harvey

#24. The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#26. There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?

David Harvey

#27. Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.

David Harvey

#28. The process of neoliberalization has, however, entailed much 'creative destruction',

David Harvey

#29. It is therefore only at the money moment - the moment of capitalist universality - that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#31. Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.

David Harvey

#32. We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

David Harvey

#33. Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

David Harvey

#34. The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.

David Harvey

#35. If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#39. There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#41. 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

David Harvey

#42. Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

David Harvey

#43. 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.

David Harvey

#44. Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital .

David Harvey

#45. The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time.

David Harvey

#46. 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.

David Harvey

#47. Capital is process, and that is that.

David Harvey

#48. 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.

David Harvey

#49. If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#51. The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.

David Harvey

#52. 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!

David Harvey

#53. 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.

David Harvey

#54. The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.

David Harvey

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

David Harvey

#56. Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.

David Harvey