This chapter of Rebel Cities by David Harvey was really challenging for me. I think I got a lot out of it, but there were concepts I struggled with. I wasn’t really confident that I understood what the author meant by “to produce a surplus value capitalists must produce a surplus product” and in general, the concept of surplus product that was so important throughout the text. My understanding of how capitalists make profits, or surplus value, is that they sell products or services for more than the products or services cost to make, which doesn’t exactly fit conceptually.
I tried to figure out what the author was saying, and this is the best I could come up with: there’s a certain quantity of output that firms could produce that would mean they would just exactly break even (they’d cover their costs but not make any profit) and any level of production higher than that is what we’re calling surplus production. If I’m understanding this right, it’s a shift in perspective, because that’s not generally how economists would describe it; this higher level of output is being demanded (in economics, this just means consumed) by consumers, so the output isn’t surplus. But this does seem to make sense with generally how Harvey talks about surplus product. It seemed like his concept of the “capital surplus disposal problem” is similar to what an earlier author called the “growth machine,” the idea that capitalism requires endless expansion and has to be always selling more things to more people for higher prices. To constantly create this growth, taking real estate away from low-income communities and selling it for higher prices to rich people is a popular tactic, as we’ve discussed before.
The idea that the amount of production that makes a profit for producers is ‘surplus’ is interesting, because the break-even point for producers has no significance for consumers–there’s no reason that from their perspective consuming more than this amount is ‘surplus’ or unnecessary. The examples the author uses, like a ski resort in Dubai, seem stereotypically excessive, but there’s no obviously bright line between that and the common practice of making snow to put on mountains at ski resorts when it isn’t snowing, or even having ski resorts in the first place, or all of the endless things we spend money on that aren’t directly related to survival. In our current economic system, we decide how much should be produced based on the supply and demand model that producers use to chose the level of production that will make them the most profit. This system results in ski resorts in Dubai. In another system, how would these decisions be made? What would be defined as ‘excess’, and who would get to define it?
The author thinks that social movements should “converge on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus.” Again, I’m not sure what this means. Would it be some sort of system where producers still decide how much to produce in order to maximize profit, and then these profits are heavily taxed or somehow redistributed? Or would some sort of governmental or non-governmental organization interfere in the process of creating the surplus, so that producers don’t make decisions based on profit maximization, and excesses aren’t created? It seems like if social movements are looking for control of the surplus then the surplus is still being created the same way it is in the current system, but I don’t know.
This article was definitely an intellectual challenge for me. I was really interested in the questions it raised, and would be interested in reading more by this author to get a better idea of what he’s arguing.
Discussion question: Given how different consumption is across cultures and time periods (people in the 1800s would see indoor plumbing as unnecessary; people in all other countries use less gas than we do in the US ) how could we ever decide on a sustainable level that balances the needs of others, ourselves, the environment, and the workers?
