The Historical Geography Of Capital

Under the guidance and domination of the mode of production with capital as the core,our anatomy of modern society can only be found in political economics.This makes Das Kapital,a brilliant work with a critical attitude of political economy,that go deep into the essential dimension of modern society and history,still opens a broad interpretation space at present after more than 100 years of theoretical roaming.Before "Interpreting" Capital in order to make this classic work present,we first need to "understand" the core sequence method contained in capital,that is,the dialectics of capital.If the dialectics in Capital is suspended,it is impossible to recognize Marx’s revelation of the internal tension of capital derived from the capital relationship itself.On the contrary,it is easy to regard the narrative clues in Capital as contradictory or even negative to each other.This is particularly evident in the linear and empirical interpretation of Capital.In the course of decades of research,interpretation and teaching of Capital,David Harvey faced the challenges of these two interpretation paths,regarded Capital as an internally related text whole(non-linear interpretation),and followed the argumentation method in the narration of Capital(non-empirical interpretation).On this basis,it realizes the effective connection between the construction of meta theory and responding to practical problems,so that its interpretation of Capital expands the original and systematic theoretical achievements on the premise of restoring the original meaning of the text.Harvey further defined the capital as a kind of "social relationship" as "process flow",condensed Marx’s dialectics of historical materialism into "flow process" dialectics of internal interactive dynamic evolution,upgraded historical materialism to historical geographical materialism,and constructed the triple space-time framework of historical geographical materialism.Capital develops the "going far" in time and the expansion direction in space at the same time.It is based on the possession and adjustment of time and space,and constitutes the production and reproduction of time and space,making capital an existence in the sense of "historical geography".Based on the theoretical platform of the historical geography of capital,Harvey analyzes the internal relations in the programs of "money-capital","land-capital" and "local-capital",and accordingly reveals the contradiction between the off threshold instinct and realistic regulations of financial capital,the local nature and virtual form of land rent and the independent construction and homogeneous tendency of place.First of all,finance is a virtual derivative of credit.Its essence is a form of creditor’s rights and virtual capital,which presents a floating virtual state rather than the real value itself.Harvey’s investigation of financial capital does not stop at the abstract intuition of financial monopoly hegemony,but traces the social and historical mechanism of financial capital based on the dialectics of "process",forms a logical chain from "monetary base" to "credit system" and then to "financial capital",and returns the analysis of financial capital to the clarification of monetary base.Secondly,Harvey’s historical geographical investigation of land rent is not only because land is the physical carrier of capitalist production and shaping the spatial relationship of capital,but also because land is the key element closely related to the historical origin and internal contradiction of capitalism.It is in the process of capitalization of land rent that capital fully shows the spatial dimension of its power and the power shaping function of space.Harvey regards land rent as a quantifiable and transferable certificate of ownership,and then extends the analysis of the form of land rent to the "class-monopoly" land rent formed by the structural confrontation of class monopoly power in the urban revolution and the super real land rent produced by the symbolic production of territorial culture.Thirdly,the discussion of place and endemicity is related to Harvey’s conception of justice practice in space and the political strategy of liberation.Facing the survival dilemma of "no place" and "no root" caused by capital globalization,Harvey did not simply adopt the "universalist(essentialism)view of spatial justice" or "special(exclusionism)view of spatial justice",but demarcate the specific sequence of the place in the relational space-time,and regarded the place as an entity internalizing the "otherness".The premise of realizing the political science of liberation is to "draw" the space of place with both similarities and differences.Generally speaking,Harvey’s interpretation of Capital takes historical geographical materialism and its dialectics as the epistemological premise,takes the operation logic and practical constraints of capital as the main content,and takes the historical geography of capital as the theoretical summary,which provides an effective interpretation framework for identifying the temporal and spatial attributes and internal limits of capital persistence and expansion under the current conditions.