Marx, The Communist Manifesto Written in 1847, published in 1848

1. Marx, The Communist Manifesto Written in 1847, published in 1848 “It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”

2. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

3. Jameson: Marx is pursuing “a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.” (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 55).

4. Marx, in the Grundrisse: “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.”

5. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. [. . .] All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries [. . .] that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

7. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology: On sugar and coffee: “these commodities have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of Liberation of 1813”.

8. Harvey, quoting Frank Norris: “the wheat farmers of California had to recognize that they were ‘merely a part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the world around, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant’. How was it possible, using the narrative structures of realism, to write anything other than a parochialist and hence to some degree ‘unrealistic’ novel in the face of all this spatial simultaneity? Realist narrative structures assumed, after all, that a story could be told as if its was unfolding coherently, event after event, in time.”

9. capitalism is tendentially a world-system from the outset • capital is value in motion; it displays a self-expansionary logic • tendency towards overproduction/ overaccumulation • Contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations of production

10. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. [. . .]The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. 

11. Harvey: capital’s “spatial fix” • Neil Smith: “Capital is continually invested in the built environment in order to produce surplus value and expand the basis of capital itself. But equally, capital is continually withdrawn from the built environment so that it can move elsewhere and take advantage of higher profit rates”(Uneven Development 6).