I'm going to briefly run through a summary of one aspect of the geographer David Harvey's work - who works off of Marx in turn - which will make for a useful framework to structure a companion piece on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
In any sort of political economy - but especially in industrial political economy as we'll see - time and space are important dimensions to consider in the function and operation of the world economic system. Through the history of the capitalist system, it has been the relentless annihilation of time and space that has been among the most important (and predictive) motivating factors in support of capital's historic drive to accumulate and grow.
However short-termist capital's appetites for extraction and profit may be, there are periods of its development when it is willing to engage in energy and resource-intensive long-term infrastructural and technological investments and conquest to effect the toppling of spatial and temporal barriers to accumulation.
So we see historical improvements in transportation and communication for example that are linked to decades of research and development, and then years or even decades more embodying these improvements in massive and durable infrastructure projects, such as in the form of rail, ports, energy and electrical infrastructure, lines of communication, and then the ongoing development of various iterations of Internet technologies, and so on, so as to speed up the movement of materials and the coordination of production. There are complex historical reasons for this that I've explored elsewhere and don't have time for now, but a smattering of them include capitalist competition, warfare, various environmental and political pressures, and so on.
The dimensions of time and space are inextricably linked together, and function together. The rapid movement of materials to and fro implies places that those materials are rapidly moved from and rapidly moved to, which adds an entirely new dimension of consideration to the historical processes of acceleration and movement.
Historical to capitalist development, you not only see a continuous development of means and technologies to reduce the significance of distance in the passage of time, but also the complete spatial overhaul of relationships in the spaces between those distances. This began as a revolutionary overhaul of the means of production, which included gathering labor forces more tightly and densely together, and breaking their tasks down into increasingly simplified and specialized tasks which worked together in an organized and mechanistic manner, speeding up the actual processes of production locally.
This process was multidimensional in its effects. One good example Harvey gives is in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution when there was a transition from wood-burning to coal-burning for energy applications. There was a temporal element in this transition, as the energy dense and portable coal packed a bigger punch in a smaller package for the generalized acceleration of transportation and production.
But there was also an additional spatial dimension as well: you get wood from trees, and you need a lot of it for a reliable energy source, and this takes a lot of land space, which competes for livestock, agriculture, production, and habitation spaces. With coal, you can go underground, and with parallel advances in the steam engine, it became possible to pump out a mine, allowing mining to go even deeper, freeing up the horizontal realm for ever more production.
As this process gathered steam, the capitalist system went on to reconquer and reconfigure those distant lands where certain complexes of desired resources were to be found, which were either unique to their geography, or which posed as additional reserves when the local resources were burned up. These additional production centers had to be re-organized and invested in, which took time, but which then vastly accelerated production as they came online. This process was carried out by generations of hegemonic imperial powers and by their allies and rivals looking to modernize and rationalize their own societies to better compete.
The more technological progress you make, the faster you are crossing larger distances, the more you are speeding up production, and the better you are besting rivals, the more pronounced is a tendency to require more and more quantities of different types of materials of greater specificity, which are sourced all over the world for either their uniqueness or for their redundancy and abundance, while at the same time denying rivals those very materials so that they can't compete.
It is this historical process that defines the structural bounds of the present crisis. The world system, as it has been set up, now needs to run at a continuously rapid pace, as the perpetual circulation of the lowest fundamental necessities such as food, water, energy, and etc. is more dependent than ever on the perpetual smooth function of higher technological tiers of operation in transport, communication, security, energy, and so on, as such a system tends to destroy the slower, more localized processes of production that exist as impediments to the acceleration of its processes of production and accumulation.
One example I really like is the pouring of vast amounts of concrete. Concrete is a really important resource for modern infrastructure, and a highly flexible and workable material. Anything really big with a heavy footprint at the very least needs a deep foundation which requires a lot of concrete. Any sort of heavy industry or transport requires strong, stable, lasting surfaces realized with a material like concrete or some similar material form like asphalt.
In general, it is an indispensable base material for building upon or building with; it is what you want if you want a flat plane that will stay put with a stability and a predictability and to get you up out of the dirt, and which can be thrust upon, or hold things in place to build further upon. It is inseparable from civilization at this point. There is a reason concrete is the second-used substance in the world next to water.
But as you lay down concrete to travel on or build upon, you must lay it upon the earth, covering up the earth and anything within or underneath. As the concrete radiates ever further outward as the built environment expands, you must traverse across its growing distances at ever more rapid rates, and the provision of natural resources has to occur ever further outside its bounds, with resources trucked in and finished products and wastes trucked out. This tendency could be managed differently under another political economy, but a more expansionary laissez faire version is what we have.
Besides pouring more concrete for development, existing concrete must be maintained as it passes through its lifecycle by getting busted out, with new concrete poured in. You also have to bust concrete out any time you make changes to anything underneath, such as conducting maintenance on plumbing and sewage systems, and then you re-pour over the finished job. So concrete is getting poured all the time, which means you have to constantly be making it. You can recycle old concrete as aggregate, but that aggregate becomes less firm and stable with each generation of its use.
Concrete is composed of cement - typically made up of cooked limestone and clay and other materials - and various aggregates to bulk up the volume and add stability, such as coarse gravel and sand, the latter of which adds additional stability and fills in smaller voids. Here's where things get even more interesting. The type of sand you need for strong, stable concrete tends to be sand in which the individual grains are water-sculpted, making them more varied and angular, which you are more likely to find on river banks, lakes, and coastal zones.
Sand that is acted on by the wind on the other hand tends to be more rounded and uniform, which is less effective as an aggregate in concrete. Research is ongoing to process less suitable sands for concrete, but that means adding expensive intermediate processes, as opposed to simply scooping it up. The interest in this alternative implies a shortage. And sand mining competes with coastline ecologies, water sources, landscape stability, and other natural resources.
So you can only find good concrete sand in certain places, and sand is quite heavy, so you have to figure in the economics of its extraction and then its transport. You'll often find concrete plants at good central places near where the gravels are quarried and the sands are gathered, and then that mixed concrete is transported somewhere else in turn. In larger construction projects, you may even find a central mix plant close by, which mixes the concrete with water to get it ready for direct pouring, a time sensitive service.
The spatial and temporal dimensions of the process of competitive production, toward the end of competitive accumulation, places hard limits on the actual physical places of production. Concrete manufacturing complexes must be developed in consideration of the economics of mining sensitive resources where they occur, and then getting large amounts of those resources, which are very heavy, where they need to go, where they are subsequently mixed and then enter into distribution as a product. These productive processes occur in a territory then, a delimited space which must be organized in accordance with the production of value and surplus value.
In the West, it is easy to lose sight of this aspect of territorialization, what with the hitherto rapid and smooth movement of goods and services, though in recent years in the course of the pandemic and given the current crisis in the Middle East, the inner workings of these vast supply chains have become much more visible as they have begun to break down. In the companion piece to this one, we'll marshal this framework to explore the contemporary dimensions of this historical process, as well as the crisis that emerges within the confines of its structure.
