ABSTRACT
The contradiction of space is an expression of the contradiction between the interests of different factions of capital (financial, productive, landed, and commercial – but also “national” factions of global capital) and the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, or of capital as a “formal unity” of different factions, nationalities, states, and markets (Lefebvre 1991; see also Harvey 1999). This contradiction is explored historically in the following chapter. In this chapter, I draw on Marx’s analyses in the third volume of Capital to explain the contradiction arising from inter-capitalist competition as a contradiction between the production of surplus value, the source of profit, and the distribution of profit among competing capitalists. The argument could be summarized as follows: under the compulsion of competition, capitalists seek ways to squeeze surplus value out of the working class as a whole, to produce the largest profits from capital they invest in production, leading to a progressive concentration in laborsaving means of production. The development of capital is, therefore, expressed as a contradictory tension between the concentration of the means of production and a decline in the general rate of profit of capital as a whole, as a result of growth in the objective means of production in relation to the labor necessary to employ them in the production process – the source of surplus value and profit. The development of labor productivity replaces living labor, the source of surplus value, with dead labor, machines, tools, buildings, etc. Capital counters the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by increasing the exploitation of labor to extract larger masses of surplus value, which leads, however, to further growth in the means of production (including, not in the least, the raw material necessary to put more productive labor to work), resulting in further decline in the general rate of profit and consequent development of labor productivity, and so on and so forth. This contradiction is at the heart of the development of capital – the growth of constant capital being the source both of the tendency for the rate of profit to decline and the means to counter this tendency temporarily, and is expressed as both growth in the value and magnitude of the means of production in relation to living labor: the organic composition of capital.
