Capital Accumulation Theories_PPT

Md. Tanvir Hossain

A. David Harvey, primarily a geographer, concerned with mathematical modeling techniques.

B. During the late 1960s, he was greatly influenced by the ghetto riots, and by the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Marx and Engels. 

C. In the 1970s, he applied Marxian economic analysis to the condition and development of the cities. He asserted four things – 

1. First, he defined the city as a spatial node that concentrates and circulates capital.
2. Second, he discussed the way the capitalist and the working classes confronted each other in the city. The conflict among capitalists and workers takes many forms as these classes split up within them. The capitalist class be divided as

• Financial investors (finance capital),
• Owners of department stores and other marketing assets (commercial capital), and
• Owners of factories (manufacturing or industrial capital).

D. Workers can also be split among 

1. Factory laborers, 
2. White-collar sales -people, and 
3. Professional financial analysts, working for wages.

E. Third, he discussed how the economic interests brings about government intervention to implement the planning as well as to aid capitalists to maximize their profit making tasks. 

F. Finally, he took a detailed look at the capitalist class and how it made money within the space of the city.

1. Capitalists are principally interested in location within the urban environment to reduce the costs of manufacturing. 
2. Capitalists also set different priorities relating to the flow of investment and the realization of interest on money loaned or rent on property owned.

G. Hence, capitalists tend to locate their factories in places with cheap housing, and also refuse to invest in poorer areas and seek out only the higher-rent districts of the city. 

H. As a result, areas of the city can become rundown and abandoned not because of the actions of industrial capital, but because of actions taken by investors in real estate, as the socio-spatial perspective suggests.

I. Harvey’s work bears out the importance of the real estate industry and of central insight into the production of uneven development under capitalism.

Reference

• Flanagan, W. G. 2010. Urban Sociology: Images and Structure. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Maryland
• Gottdiener, M. and Hutchison, R. 2011. The New Urban Sociology (4th ed.). Westview Press, Colorado