Spatial fix
공간적 조정
A concept put forward by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. Capitalism repeatedly runs into crises of "overaccumulation", in which surplus capital and surplus labour cannot be brought together profitably, and resolves them temporarily by moving the surplus to new regions and markets (spatial displacement) or burying it in long-lived investments such as roads, ports and housing that defer it into the future (temporal displacement). "Fix" carries a double meaning: capital becomes literally fixed in the land, and it is a fix, a solution, for the crisis. The solution is only temporary and leads to creative destruction, in which landscapes once built must later be destroyed, and to imperialist expansion.
In depth
Harvey's starting point is a pervasive tendency of capitalism, understood theoretically by way of Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit, to produce crises of "overaccumulation". Overaccumulation is a condition in which surplus labour (rising unemployment) and surplus capital (a glut of commodities that cannot be sold without loss, idle productive capacity, money capital lacking outlets for productive and profitable investment) exist side by side with no apparent means of bringing them profitably together. As an illustrative assumption, suppose the capitalists of a country seek to reinvest 100 of profit each year but existing industries offer profitable outlets for only 60: 40 of capital has nowhere to go. If that 40 and the workers who have lost their jobs simply remain, system-wide devaluation, even destruction, of capital and labour power follows. To avoid crisis, ways must be found to absorb the surplus.
Harvey names three ways of absorbing it. The first is temporal displacement: investment in long-term capital projects or social expenditures such as education and research, which defers the re-entry of current excess capital values into circulation well into the future. The second is spatial displacement: opening up new markets, new production capacities and new resource, social and labour possibilities elsewhere. The third combines the two. The combination matters most for fixed capital embedded in the "built environment": industrial parks, ports and airports, transport and communications systems, sewage and water provision, housing, hospitals and schools. This is no minor sector of the economy, and it can absorb massive amounts of capital and labour under conditions of rapid geographical expansion.
Such investment requires the mediation of financial and state institutions, which can generate credit: a quantity of "fictitious capital" is created and allocated away from current consumption to future-oriented projects such as highway construction or education. If the expenditures prove productive, facilitating more efficient accumulation later on, the fictitious values are redeemed through retirement of debt or higher tax returns. If not, the values of assets such as housing, offices, industrial parks and airports are devalued, or the state has difficulty paying off its debts on physical and social infrastructure, a fiscal crisis of the state.
Harvey stresses that such investments have both stabilised and destabilised capitalism. The starting point of the crisis of 1973 was a world-wide collapse of property markets, beginning with the Herstatt Bank in Germany, which brought down the Franklin National in the United States, followed by the virtual bankruptcy of New York City in 1975, a classic case of social expenditures outrunning tax revenues. Japan's decade-long stagnation began in 1990 with the collapse of a speculative bubble in land and property, and the Asian collapse of 1997 began with the bursting of property bubbles in Thailand and Indonesia. After mid-2001, when all other sectors were in recession, speculative vigour in property markets was the main prop of the US and British economies. From 1998 China absorbed its labour surpluses through debt-financed mega-projects dwarfing even the Three Gorges Dam.
The word "fix" has a double meaning. A portion of total capital becomes literally fixed in some physical form for its economic and physical lifetime: machinery can be unbolted and moved, but airports cannot. The spatio-temporal "fix", on the other hand, is a metaphor for solutions to capitalist crises through temporal deferment and geographical expansion. The production of space, the organisation of wholly new territorial divisions of labour, the opening of new and cheaper resource complexes, and the penetration of pre-existing social formations by capitalist social relations and institutions such as contract and private property all provide ways to absorb surpluses.
The solution breeds new contradictions. Vast quantities of capital fixed in place act as a drag upon the search for a spatial fix elsewhere. If capital moves out it leaves a trail of devastation, like the deindustrialisation of Pittsburgh, Sheffield and Bombay in the 1970s and 1980s; if it cannot move, it is devalued where it stands. Harvey's summary: "capital necessarily creates a physical landscape in its own image at one point in time only to have to destroy it at some later point in time as it pursues geographical expansions and temporal displacements as solutions to the crises of overaccumulation to which it is regularly prone." And since the spaces to which surpluses are sent must have means of payment, credit, debt, inter-state rivalry and imperialism come into play.
Harvey worked on the problem from the 1970s, theorised the "spatial moment" of crisis formation in The Limits to Capital (1982), and moved through the "spatial fix" of the 1980s and "Globalization and the 'Spatial Fix'" (2001) to the "spatio-temporal fix" of The New Imperialism (2003). He connects the work to Lefebvre's insight that capitalism survives through the production of space, and to Lenin and Luxemburg, who for different reasons saw imperialism as the answer to the riddle of capitalism's survival. Harvey accepted Robert Brenner's evidence of chronic overaccumulation in global capitalism since the 1970s, but criticised most accounts of accumulation, Brenner's included, for ignoring the built environment or treating it as epiphenomenal. Bob Jessop extended the theory by distinguishing spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal fixes, and Giovanni Arrighi discussed the "spatial and other fixes" of historical capitalism. The other outlet for overaccumulation, opening up non-capitalist spheres as new markets, leads on to Harvey's concept of "accumulation by dispossession".