1 Rent or price of the land? 
2 Space and location 
3 The payment for location: a means of spatial organization of production 
4 Spatial organization in specific stages 
5 Use value and value of space and location 
6 The payment for location and accumulation
7 The urban process 

The debate over rent theory, the price of urban land --or for that matter, the price of commodities--, the housing question, the specificity of capitalist as against socialist planning or the current crisis of capitalism have this in common: the issues so raised are all related to spatial organization of production. For this reason all can usefully, not to say necessarily, be approached from a theoretical framework in which spatial organization of capitalist (re-)production is at the core from the outset -- as opposed to being a belated insertion like 'rent theory' in Political Economy or 'location theory' in vulgar economics. A further fundamental feature of such a framework is that it locates the innermost antagonism and the very moving force of capitalism in what can be termed the dialectic of the commodity form.

To avoid an excessively arid reading, no attempt will be made here to detail such a framework in itself which could not be fully substantiated within the limits of a paper.(1) Instead we will take on some of the issues referred to above briefly as examples, as it were, trying to show the framework in use. It is hoped none the less that through the succession of examples there is a progression, if not an unbroken movement, from the concrete to abstract levels of approach resulting in an outline of a coherent theory in use.
 

1   Rent or price of the land?

It is a most intuitive notion as a result of everyday experience that the price of urban land is somehow linked to the 'spatial distribution' of human activity. But for Political Economy and for Marx, the price of land is the 'capitalized form' of land rent and accordingly, urban analysis has been obstructed to this day by adherence to rent theory. During the 1970s interest in the former was at its highest in recent times. However, the many attempts at an application of rent theory to urban analysis failed and a potentially more promising critical line and corresponding debate died out inconclusively.(2)

The case for the rejection of rent theory may be summed up as follows. In the early stage of capitalism, the category of feudal rent was carried over into the analysis of capitalism by Political Economy (Smith, Steuart) along with a ghost of the feudal class of landlords, the class of 'landowners'. Members of this class retain a supposed monopoly of some gifts of Nature --notably of land-- rent being the payment they can extract from capitalists for the use of the 'productive powers' of the land. Having been promoted to the status of category on the basis of such a conception, land rent was then analysed under the assumption of equilibrium (see Ricardo's theory of differential rent, which Marx himself was not able to get rid of). Because this in turn implies perfect fluidity of capitals (allowing the movement from one equilibrium to another without cost), rent theory can not even approach the question of transformation of land use where the crucial fact is the rigidity of capitals materialized in concrete (individual) processes of production.(3)

To get an idea of the full weight of its limitations, let us recall that marginalism is precisely the generalization of rent theory to the economy as a whole.(4) In Ricardo's time such a development was of course only a possibility, but it did not go unnoticed to many and accordingly, "Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain" (Keynes,1936,p.32). To the bourgeoisie which had just made an important step towards political power through the extension of the franchise with the passage of the Reform Bill (1832) and was in a position to enforce whatever economic policy was in its interest --the repeal of the Corn Laws and the victory of 'Free Trade' would follow soon-- it was of the utmost importance that capitalism be seen as a natural order and be 'analysed' under the assumption of equilibrium (and harmony, commonwealth etc, the very foundations of liberal ideology), a framework in which rent theory would be the centre-piece. For the rest of us the same recognition leads to the need for the elimination of rent theory from the analysis of the processes that regulate capitalist production, spatially or otherwise.

The abandonment of rent theory leaves a vacuum which both begs and is able to be filled with new categories. As far as 'land' is concerned, let us note at the outset that in capitalism it is not paid for as such, still less as a 'natural resource', but as a property which gives rights of use over a portion of the Earth.[ When we say payment for land we actually mean a payment for the rights of use of a piece of land constituted as a private property ] Since land is a private property,[--that is to say, the rights over the use of a particular portion of the Earth which in capitalism are constituted as a property--] it can be bought and sold and therefore it commands a price. Such a price can not be seen as the 'capitalized' form of rent in view of the supersession of the latter category in capitalism. Instead, it must be accounted for directly as price. However, there is no specific social relation behind the price of the land other than private property -- a precondition of the capital relation itself. The specificity of the price of the land, as opposed to the price of commodities, lies in its relation to both the production and the use of space and, in fact, it is governed by the requirement of organization of production over space.
 

2   Space and location

Space is not a 'new dimension' of reproduction in society -- even though spatial organization became a concern only in the stage of predominantly intensive accumulation in capitalism. Engels wrote that matter without movement is as inconceivable as movement without matter; it is only a corollary to this to say that material production without space is as inconceivable as matter without movement. Every society needs a territory to live in; with social division of labour this territory is structured into space.(5) The concepts of location and space derive from the social practice of production and reproduction within a social division of labour, characteristic of a mode of production.

We designate by 'space' in capitalism the territory of a unified market over which the commodity form had been generalized. This space contains locations, a location being the locus of an individual process of production (or reproduction). The specificity of as concrete space is defined by the relations between its locations.(6) The relations themselves materialize in physical structures: paths, roads, wires, cables, pipes, satellites and so on. Equally, locations materialize in finite, delimited extensions of territory, the elemental expression of which is the juridical form of property -- a plot of land or a built floorspace.(7) All such elements of infrastructure must be built with the expenditure of human labour. Urban space and the locations contained in it are historical products. Land as a location, far from being a gift of nature, is a product of labour which continually re-produces space according to the changing requirements of accumulation.

The category land rent thus gives place to the category of payment for location. The latter may take, as it historically did, the form of rent or the form of price according to the length of the period and more to the point, to the level of control exercised over the location as a condition of production. I have shown elsewhere,(8) that price is the form consistent with fully developed commodity form, rent being a subsidiary form in cases (as in both the early and late stages of development of particular industries) where the commodity form is not yet fully developed or where it has already passed its maturity. Here let us note only that any lasting condition of production can be leased, with the result of 'transforming' the corresponding fixed capital into circulating capital -- the leasing of land being only a particular case of this.
 

Mir space station

Further, location itself may take on various forms, of which 'land' is no doubt the most common, but is by no means unique. One distinctive feature of contemporary space is precisely a growing variety of forms in which locations may materialize: apart from land, one may have locations (loci of individual processes of production) in the air, at sea, in the seabed or on artificial satellites. Being conditions of production (or reproduction) and being posited, although not produced, as commodities, they will be paid for either in the rent or the price form. In all cases, we confront one of the many forms of materialization of a same category: namely, the category of payment for location.

 
 

3   The payment for location: a means of spatial organization of production

We arrive therefore at a conceptualization of the price of the land as being a means of (spatial) organization of production, just as is the price of commodities proper. The latter idea is ably expressed in Rowthorn's definition: "The natural price [i.e, the price of production --CD] of a commodity is simply the price that must be paid, under competitive conditions, to guarantee the production of this commodity at a given scale".(9) We only need to add that 'to guarantee the production' must surely include a location which in turn must be paid for, so that the payment for location is included in the price of production of a commodity along with the means of production, materials and labour. Hence a price of production determines, along with the technique (scale) of production, the level of payment for location and therefore, the localization of this individual process of production in urban space. Note that this latter determination neither leads nor follows the determination of a supposed process of production 'as such', that is in everything except localization. Indeed, both determinations are simultaneous and, in fact, a concrete process of production is not conceivable without a location.(10)

Insofar as production is regulated by the market, the price of location therefore performs its role in the spatial distribution of individual processes of production and reproduction. But regulation is not performed by the market alone. If the notion of the "anarchic nature" of capitalist production never meant total lack of intervention by the State in the working of the 'invisible hand',(11) in the stage of predominantly intensive accumulation it must be abandoned altogether. As early as in 1891, Engels had already realized that capitalism could no longer be regarded as being planless. "This idea has become obsolete; once there are trusts, planlessness disappears".(12) As capitalism developed further, State intervention has been playing an expanding role in production, to say nothing of its role in the reproduction of 'non-economic' conditions of production,(13) many of which belong precisely in the realm of both the production and the control of the use of space.

What is true for the organization of production in general holds also for its spatial organization in particular. As the flow of capitals between firms and industries is regulated to a lesser or greater extent (according to the stage of accumulation) through taxes, subsidies, direct intervention, regulation affecting concentration and centralization of capital, cross-(national) boundary controls and so on, so is spatial localization framed by zoning by-laws, property taxes, public entreprise etc, in a way that the price of location carries out organization merely within the confines of the remaining 'freedom' of the market. The price of the land --the dominant form of payment for location-- thus becomes one of the means of spatial organization of production along with such others as legal, incentive and coercive actions of the State. Just as economic regulation is achieved through a balance of market forces and planning, so is spatial regulation achieved through a balance between the same processes which materialize, respectively, in the price of location and state intervention. The actual combination in the use of the diverse means of regulation is historically determined by the stage of development of the productive forces or more precisely, of the antagonism between the production of use-values as exchange-values (that is, of commodities) and the direct production of use-values. It will be argued further below that one of the features of the current crisis is the increase of the role of the State in the regulation of capitalism to a point at which it jeopardizes the very primacy of the commodity form and that this provides a perspective in which the payment for location (or the price of land in the urban agglomeration in particular) can be approached.
 

4   Spatial organization in specific stages of development

It is of course the case that for a given diversification of space (that is, for the same intensity of regulation needed), the more the organization of space is achieved through state intervention, the less is left to prices to organize --and they may be lower-- and conversely, the less direct intervention there is in spatial regulation, the more responsibility falls on location prices --which must then show greater differentials and thus cover a greater range. In other words, they will be higher. A most striking example of this is provided by the introduction of the 'New Economic Mechanism' in Hungary.(14) In Budapest land prices had been stationary and low, almost nominal, for about two decades after World War II. The location of activities (state-owned entreprises, but residential settlements as well) was regulated by strongly centralized planning, virtually by decree. Then, in a few years after NEM had been introduced in 1968, land prices in the capital increased tenfold, the cause whereof in the case of Budapest cannot be attributed to rapid growth, either demographic or of production (which does impose increased need for spatial regulation). A clear-cut explanation of the increase is provided, however, by a simple description of the nature of the change brought about by NEM:

The essence of the Hungarian economic reform of 1968 can be briefly summed up as the introduction of indirect guidance through economic regulators (price, credit, fiscal and wage policy) in place of direct guidance of economic units by instructions. 

Kemenes (1981), p.583.

5   Use value and value of space and location

The approach in which the price of the land is not a rent paid for the use of a 'gift of nature', but a payment for a location in a man-made environment, allows for a re-examination of the questions of the use value and value of locations, of the production of space, and ultimately, of the role of the latter in the accumulation process. Let us start with the implications of the 'labour content' of space for both the value of, and the payment for, the location.

The meaning of the fact that space is a product of labour is not so much that urban space loses its 'natural' content -- it is certainly made up of matter found in nature. It is rather that whatever transformations nature had gone through up to any particular epoch, it --nature and the product of past labour-- can be transformed again so that no permanent elements are to be found in it. This is why it is fruitless to try to discover the natural element in space --as with rent theory-- or to try to determine the amount of nature and the amount of labour 'contained' in space at any specific historical epoch in order to measure its value -- as with value theory.

Both rent theory and value theory are in fact approaches that seek to determine what is rather than what is becoming and are thus concerned with situations rather than processes, and ultimately both imply the concept of equilibrium, as if an equilibrium (of productive processes, of spatial distribution of activities etc.) could instantly arise on the basis of an existing structure -- only to be offset in the next instant. Our own focus is rather on the transformations wrought upon space by labour in answer to changing requirements of the development of productive forces which necessarily accompanies the accumulation process. Indeed, 'production of space' is transformation of space in the strong sense that the end-product of interventions into space is not any particular ('new') structure but the transformation of particular structure itself. Physical structures that come into existence in the process may remain --and parts of them do remain-- unchanged for some time, if only waiting to be transformed in turn as soon as the need for it will be felt. Even while they remain unaltered in their physical form however, such parts of the structure do change as use values while the production process develops.

By the same token, even though a location is not consumed in production at the individual level, locations do become obsolete through time both because of physical decay and because the flow of technological innovations that accompanies the development of production brings about changes in the requirements of production and reproduction to which space --if not the individual location-- must constantly be adapted through additional labour. Therefore no particular location is (as the price-form of payment for it might suggest) a 'permanent' condition of production, or in possession of an intrinsic use value: the use value of a location is transformed incessantly and individual economic activities must, in their turn, adapt to the changes in the urban space (which is the very process of transformation of land use). They must appear again and again on the market as 'consumers' bidding for suitable locations. Indeed, intervention into space --production of space-- is about transformation, rather than either conservation of existing structures, or the attainment of any particular structure which could only be conceived as an 'ideal'. It is the incessant transformation of space which is required by the development of the production process.

The value of the labour power spent in the production of space dispels objections --such as those raised in classical political economy in connection with rent theory-- that the payment for land can enter the price of production of commodities. Labour time spent in the production of space is socially validated indirectly and at the aggregate level through the consumption of the commodities which have been produced over the whole of space. The resulting transformation of space gives rise to new payments for locations contained in the former and occupied by new individual processes (commodity,quantity and technique) of production. These payments are incorporated into the price of production of commodities so that labour spent in the transformation of space is finally validated in this mediated form in the consumption of commodities. 'Value of a location' however, has no meaning since no portion of space has any specific content of abstract labour: any labour performed on any portion of space re-defines (transforms) urban space as a whole.(16) Accordingly --and just as in the case of commodities-- the price of a location does not arise from (still less is it regulated by) a supposed value of the latter but simply as a requirement of the organization of production under the prevailing conditions of competition among capitals.
 

6   The payment for location and accumulation

Following classical rent theory, price of location (in the form of the price of land) has been seen as a barrier to capital accumulation leading to widespread theses a about nationalization of the land as a remedy. Even though it has also been amply pointed out that private property in land is essential to the dispossession of the worker from his means of subsistence, that is to say to the existence of wage labour and therefore to capitalism itself, propositions for abolition of private property in land have reached the level of political debate from Great Britain (Massey & Catalano,1978,p.16ff) to Brazil (Singer,1978) to Japan (Uno,1964, pp.102,108). An archetypal form of the argument reads:

... the purchase price of the land (capitalized ground rent subsumed under the legal fiction [sic] of the value of the land) has the effect of withdrawing capital from investment in agricultural production. Private landownership (large or small) serves as an obstacle to the development of productive forces in agriculture.(17)

 VE = V + VS

We have seen that production of space can not be 'governed by the law of value imposed in a market' (or more simply, governed by the market) and therefore must be carried at the social level. A quantum of the productive power of society (abstract labour) is devoted annually to the production of the sum total of changes in physical infra- and superstructures (20) needed to adapt urban space to the requirements of production and reproduction. The labour time spent in the production of space over a certain period represents the value of the latter. This value is by no means a deduction of a surplus value which 'otherwise' would be higher: on the contrary, it is one of the very conditions of the production of surplus value. Without transformation of space there can be no sustained production, so that labour spent in the production of space is as necessary as labour spent in the reproduction of the means of production, and the same is also true for all other labour necessary to upkeep the state apparatus, that is to say, to reproduce the legal, political and administrative infrastructures of production.

In order to make explicit these portions of social labour, we may then break up total necessary labour V into its constituent parts and write

V = W + VL + VT

VE = (W + VL + VT) + VS ,

Now we can go back to the question of the payment for location being a hindrance to accumulation and to an eventual nationalization of the land. It is clear from the above that neither does the payment for location hinder, nor would its 'abolition' help the expansion of capital: from the point of view of accumulation, all that matters is the amount of abstract (social) labour spent in the production of space as a proportion of necessary labour.(21) That is to say, the only thing which would accelerate accumulation in this connection is a reduction of the labour time necessary to produce space VL, thus reducing total necessary labour time V --and we have seen earlier that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the price of the land.

If land had no price (and spatial regulation were carried out by central planning, an event as unlikely as complete anarchy of production), all that would happen is that the corresponding amount of money would be withdrawn from circulation --and the monetary expression of abstract labour (that is, the 'value' of money) would change accordingly.(22) But the amounts of labour spent, the techniques of production and ultimately the rate of accumulation VS/V would remain unchanged. All that would be altered is the denominations under which capital flows would be effected (excluding, in the latter case, the denomination 'price of land') or in the case of mere variations in the level (such as those arising from legal regulations like land use zoning which do not do away with land price but interfere with its magnitude) of the price of the land, the proportions of the flows under the same denominations which make up capital advanced for production, but without affecting VS/V or even the (money-)rate of profit, VS/W.

Let us note that, incidentally, the argument behind the idea of 'rational' planning is the same as that which holds that 'rent' hinders accumulation: planning --through land use zoning, public entreprise etc.-- would make production 'more efficient'. We are allowed to conclude from the foregoing, however, that planning --one form of State intervention-- does not arise in order to increase efficiency (say, the rate of accumulation) that 'otherwise' would be lower but rather, out of sheer necessity imposed by the limits to the commoditization of the economy. In other words, State intervention does not make commodity production more efficient -- it makes it possible, by ensuring the conditions of its very existence.
 

7   The urban process

...(B)ut now the market had triumphed over the community.
                       Christopher Hill Reformation to industrial revolution

The primacy of the commodity form and the process of reification of social relations require that the regulation of capitalist production is achieved in the first instance by the market and in the second instance by State intervention, the specific combination being determined by the conditions of commoditization of production according to the stage of development of the forces and relations of production. Political Economy was able to isolate, and to restrict itself to the analysis of, the commodity sector of the 'economy'(25) at the price of gradually excluding the account of both the State and of spatial organization pari passu with the very development of both. The study of production at its locations and within urban space however (and to say the study of contemporary capitalism would be to say the same) makes it manifestly impossible even to attempt such a separation. There can be no 'commodity sector' in the production of space and conversely, 'purely economic' categories such as production, consumption and exchange derived from commodity production alone dissolve into urban activities or land uses. While location can still be posited as a commodity to be traded in a (however restricted) market, production of space escapes commoditization and falls wholly into the realm of the social, to be performed at the collective level.(26)

The totality of the material conditions of life re-emerges in the urban process. Provided we do not exclude from the urban process, this time, its core in commodity production and restrict it to 'social movements'(27) (that is, to social forces of production unanchored in the relations of production) it acquires a specificity as the crisis ensuing from the overt challenge to reified social relations and the primacy of the commodity form. The limits to commoditization of production do not arise from (the need for) spatial organization alone, but the study of spatial organization does put those limits into sharper relief by highlighting the necessarily increasing role of collective production and regulation in social production. This should not be obscured by attempts made at preserving the (capitalist) relations of production, asserting and reasserting the commodity form and market regulation, nor by the disguising of the State behind 'general interest', or yet by the hiding of the flagrant violation of reified social relations by State intervention under the cloths of 'rationality'. Incidentally, such attempts explain the (liberal) planning rhetoric that accompanies State intervention which ostensibly submits itself to the principle of market regulation while --in order to preserve it-- it is forced to circumscribe it to an ever increasing extent.(28)

However, as liberal as it may be, rhetoric is unlikely to reverse the (counter-)tendency for the confines of commodity production to shrink. 'Accumulation crises' can be overcome by a general devalorization of capital and reorganization of production and of reproduction (in a process which, itself, is not free from State intervention (29). But the dialectic of the commodity form is not simply a pendular movement in which periods of retraction of the commodity form can be followed by its re-establishment merely by repositing it as the dominant form both in production and social relations. The analysis of spatial organization suggests that the increase of State intervention, or of direct production of use values, is only strengthened with the development of production, for the more space is differentiated under the drive of the production of values (including surplus value posited as 'profit'), the more homogenization of space through production of use values is required. The implication or the ultimate consequence of the shrinking of the commodity form is not a limitation to the expansion of the productivity of labour, but rather, the demise of the primacy of the commodity form in production and the supersession of reification of social relations as the ruling principle of social organization. Meanwhile, the antagonism between the commodity form and State intervention remains the moving force behind intensive accumulation, or in other words, the urban process.
 
 
 

References
 

AGLIETTA,Michel(1976) A theory of capitalist regulation New Left Books, London, 1979

ALQUIER,Fran‡ois(1971) "Contribution à l'étude de la rente foncière sur les terrains urbains" Espaces et Sociétés 1(2):73-87

BALL, Michael(1977) "Differential rent and the role of landed property" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 1(3):380-403

BALL, Michael(1979) "A critique of urban economics" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 3(3):309-332

BALL, Michael(1980) "On Marx's theory of agricultural rent: a reply to Ben Fine" Economy & Society 9(3):304-326

BALL, Michael et alii(Ed,1985) Land rent, housing and urban planning Croom Helm, London

BROADBENT,T A(1975) "An attempt to apply Marx's theory of ground rent to the modern urban economy" Research Paper 17 Centre for Environmental Studies, London

CASTELLS,Manuel(1972) La question urbaine Maspero, Paris

CROZIER,Michel,HUNTINGTON S & WATANUKI J(1975) The crisis of democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission UP, New York

DEAK,Csaba(1985) Rent theory and the price of urban land/ Spatial organization in a capitalist economy PhD Thesis, Cambridge

DEANE,Phyllis & COLE,W A(1967) British economic growth 1688-1959 CUP, Cambridge

DRIVER, Ciaran(1981) "A theory of capitalist regulation: the US experience/ A review" Capital & Class 15:150-68

EDEL,Matthew(1975) "Marx's theory of rent: urban applications" Housing and class in Britain Conference of Socialist Economists, London

EDWARDS,Michael(1980) "Notes for analysis of land use planning" The production of built environment, Vol.I Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, London

EDWARDS,Michael(1985) "Planning and the land market: problems, prospects and strategy" in Ball et alii(1985)

FAINSTEIN,Norman & FAINSTEIN,Suzanne S(Ed,1982) Urban policy under capitalism (Urban affairs annual review, Vol.20) Sage, Beverly Hills,Ca

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FINE,Ben(1980a) Economic theory and ideology Arnold, London

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LENIN,Vladimir I(1969ed) British labour and British imperialism Lawrence & Wishart, London

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LOJKINE,Jean(1971) "Y a-t-il une rente foncière urbaine?" Espaces et Sociétés 1(2):89-94

MARX,Karl(1858) Grundrisse Penguin, Harmondsworth,1973

MARX,Karl(1864-7) Capital Vols.I-III, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1954; 1956; 1959

MASSEY,Doreen & CATALANO,Alejandra(1978) Capital and land Arnold, London

MAUTNER,Yvonne(1986) "The building industry which works at the fringes of capitalist production: the case of São Paulo" BISS 8, Dessau, in The production of built environment, Vol.8 Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, London

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ROWTHORN,Bob(1980) Capitalism, conflict and inflation Lawrence & Wishart, London

SEKINE,Thomas T(1977) "Translator's foreword" "An essay on Uno's dialectic of capital"; "A glossary of technical terms" in Uno(1964)

SINGER,Paul(1978) "O uso do solo na economia capitalista" Mimeo Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da USP, São Paulo

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Notes

* Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo
Departamento de Projeto
Rua do Lago, Cidade Universitária
São Paulo, Brazil
** This paper was prepared for BISS 8 in 1986 but the author was unable to attend. It was circulated informally at BISS 10 in 1988. The author wishes to thank Mike Edwards and Jörn Janssen for valuable comments on the earlier version.

1 A fuller account may be found in Deák(1985).

2 In the former group, see for example Lojkine (1971), Alquier (1971), Lipietz (1974), Edel (1975) and Broadbent (1975). For critique and debate, see Ball (1977), Murray (1977,8), Fine (1979), Ball (1980) and Fine (1980b). --On revising this paper in 1988, a short further comment seems to me in order. The foregoing (original) part of this note refers to the situation by mid-1982 when I was finishing my own critique and historical interpretation of rent theory, which became Part I of my PhD Dissertation which I concluded three years later (Deák,1985), the remaining parts of which are concerned with analysis of the transformation of the individual process of production (including a treatment of fixed capital and technical change) in general and the transformation of land use (including the former plus payment for the use of location) in particular. Since then the picture has not changed much, however, as far as I can see it. My attention was drawn to Ball et alii (Ed,1985), for instance. But whatever else it may contain by way of valuable analysis of some 'urban questions', and it does a great deal, this book is anything but a clear-cut break with rent theory. This is not the place to substantiate such a view, therefore I can merely illustrate it recalling only the title of the book, being: Land rent(!), Housing and Urban Planning. May I say in conclusion that what I am at pains to argue here is not for a critical 'view' towards rent theory but for its rejection once and for all, along (of course) with the category of rent itself.

3 Equally, Political Economy cannot account for the transformation of the individual process of production. Even in Marx, and notwithstanding the correct hint contained in the concept of devalorization, the treatment of fixed/circulating capital is absent throughout. Engels did insert into Vol.III of Capital: "The only essential distinction within his capital that impresses itself upon the capitalist is that of fixed and circulating capital"(Marx, 1959ed, p.75) but, along with a numerical example which follows, it remains an isolated remark.

4 Fine (1980a), pp.145ss.

5 In primitive communism where there is no social division of labour and production is not individualized, the territory need not be structured into space. Of course members and objects of the community do move from place to place within the territory, but the latter is used in its natural form and is not transformed through labour: locations do not become individualized. This is what allows such communities to move from one territory to another with ease, under the effect of an external impulse, such as aggression from another community or society or the mere seasonal variations of nature. Small numbers of such forms of society have survived up to our day, as for example some Indian groups living in the Amazonian region and which are still allowed a territory large enough to keep their 'native' form of life.

6 The Cartesian plane is the mathematical representation of the space of a unified market, where the points are defined with respect to a single reference system. The specificity of such a space is then defined by a metric, that is to say, the way in which distances between points are measured.
 

7 Note that the simplest form of location: a plot of land, is already a social product materialized in, if in nothing else, a written legal title -- the concreteness of which was heavily felt by many a small freeholder throughout two centuries of enclosures in England, with the abolition of feudal, and the institution of bourgeois (private property) rights to land (see Hill,1967, p.147). 8 Deák (1985), especially Chap. 6. 9 Rowthorn (1980),pp.183-4.

10  Incidentally, such recognition cuts short the age-old dispute regarding wether 'rents' (that is, the payment for location) are price-determined or price-determining. It also implies that there can not be a 'location theory' --or for that matter, a theory of spatial organization-- as such, just as there cannot be an analysis of the process of production as such, that is, excluding location.

11  At a first glance it is surprising how generally this early capitalism has been termed 'Free Trade' or 'competitive' capitalism. These terms, apart from being relatively irrelevant from the point of view of accumulation, are at best misleading if one considers that out of about two centuries in this stage England had pursued a protectionist policy --in order to be able to develop her own industries free from competition by the more developed manufacturing of Northern Europe-- for one and a half century (Hill,1967,p.181) and 'Free Trade' for only about 20 years (allowing for two or three decades of transition after the Napoleonic Wars). This stage, which could also be called 'capitalism in one country' since it was restricted largely to England, closes with the spread of capitalism over the globe in the nineteenth century and gives rise to imperialism, a stage equally commonly misnamed 'monopoly' with a later variant for 'State monopoly' capitalism. (Monopoly is not only not specific to any particular stage of capitalism; it is not specific even to capitalism itself.) For this reason, apart from the fairly obvious 'early' and 'imperialist', we use here also (stages of) 'predominantly extensive' and 'predominantly intensive' accumulation (as in Aglietta,1976, where these come coupled to a further concept of 'regimes of accumulation'). Aglietta's concept of regime of accumulation is not unproblematic and we do not need to subscribe to it, but the expressions 'predominantly extensive' and 'predominantly intensive' suitably point to a crucial feature of each stage respectively: in the former, expansion of commodity production was based chiefly on the extension of capitalist relations of production (viz, wage labour) at the expense of pre-capitalist ones, whereas in the latter, the possibilities of the former being exhausted, expansion can only proceed through intensification of production via technical progress (increase in the productivity of labour).

12  As quoted in Lenin (1969ed), p.138.

13  These were relegated by Marx to the limbo of 'general conditions of production', secured with the expense of 'unproductive' labour (the best passage is probably in Grundrisse, pp.521ff, esp.533). Such a view is a result of the reduction of capitalist production to commodity production, the ultimate consequences of which have been explored by Uno(1964) and that will be discussed further later. For the same reason as well there is no place for the State in Marx's Capital...

14  This example comes from a socialist country, but the means of regulation in socialism are very much the same as in capitalism, the (otherwise fundamental) difference being only that the primacy in the dialectic of the commodity form, viz, of the production of use-values as commodities over the production of use-values as such, is inverted. I have no notice of any similarly dramatic example in capitalism. In São Paulo in Brazil, there was a significant increase in planning activity and State intervention in the early seventies and indeed, there was a fall in relative prices for central and pericentral areas within the metropolitan area. However, such a movement was not nearly as intense as in the case of Budapest and its impact was further dampened by an overall tendency of rising payments for locations as a result of rapid growth (at 7% p.a.) and the ensuing differentiation of space.

15  There is a misleading idea in Marx's legacy regarding this point, namely, the notion that England is the 'model country' in the development of capitalism in the sense that as capitalism spread worldwide, other countries would follow the English pattern. Although this view has since been successfully challenged as regards 'peripheral' as opposed to those at the 'core' of worldwide accumulation, the same is by and large adhered to as regards the countries today at the core. In contradistinction to this view, a periodization of capitalism according to early and mature stages, accompanied respectively by predominantly extensive, and predominantly intensive accumulation, allows for regarding England as unique rather than a model, a country to which the early stage was restricted and whose development would be followed nowhere else. When capitalism spread over the world through a number of centres of accumulation, it was already in its mature stage. Germany, France, Japan and the United States followed specific development paths, distinct notably from the one opened by England. In what concerns us especially here, the rent form never developed in those countries as a (dominant) historical form of payment for location.

16 This is in fact the same with commodities as well --which 'embody' specific amounts of concrete labour only-- where even the amount of abstract labour necessary to produce a particular commodity is devoid of meaning, since necessary labour can only be defined at the social level under any prevailing stage of development of production. Failure to recognize this gave rise to the so-called transformation problem -- the transformation of values into prices (see for example, Kay 1979, Aglietta 1976 and an interpretation of the latter, Driver 1981). In this connection, let us note that Driver says Aglietta has solved the transformation problem: better would be to say that in Aglietta's view it is not a 'problem', for values and prices do not belong to a same realm. Anyhow, if it is more difficult to see that there is no meaning in 'value of a commodity' because it appears as if commodities can be individually produced, the same becomes self-evident in the case of locations in space, themselves unconceivable in isolation.

17  Hindess(1972),p.16 quoted in Massey & Catalano(1978),p.52.

18  For a definition of infrastructure, in contradistinction to superstructures, see note (20) below.

19  We follow Aglietta's view that, as with necessary, or abstract labour, so values can be defined at the social level only (Aglietta,1976, especially pp.38-47). Despite this view, however, Aglietta himself ends up by restricting value to the commodity form in which socially necessary labour is directly validated, and direct production of use-values (non-commodities) enters his analysis as a division of profits, which can then be read back into the field of value as "simply an ex-post result without major significance"(op.cit, p.62).

20  Infrastructures: that support juridical units of location, or (when defined on the Earth's surface and within an urban agglomeration) plots. Superstructures: buildings inside the plot, which may (but not always do) give rise to further individual locations such as flats or offices. The relevant distinction between infrastructure and superstructure is that the former falls into the realm of the "public" --so that both its production and use are necessarily performed collectively-- whereas the latter may be produced, serviced and used in possession by individuals, that is to say, within the realm of private property and commodity production. Here we are concerned mainly with infrastructure, but it is useful to note that the distinction between infra- and superstructure, and the precise delimitation of a 'location' both depend on the way --which may adapt to social practice through time-- in which private property is defined in the territory.

21  It is also clear by now that history did not vindicate Ricardo's fear that capitalism faced a long-term tendency to stagnation because of the tendency of rents to rise. The decrease of the payment for location relative to total capital advanced is especially pronounced in machinofacture (industrial production proper) which furthermore was becoming the dominant sector of production. The share of rents in capital advanced for all industries (national income less profits and interest) fell from over 40% around 1688 to 31% in 1801; 22% in 1865; 18% around 1900 and to 5% by 1950 (source of raw data: Deane & Cole,1967, p.301). But even in agriculture the 'secular rise' of rents had been accompanied by a fall of the share of rents in the value of agricultural produce (Murray,1978, pp.23, 30-1).

22  The position in favour of an 'abolition' of rents implies in fact confusing capital with a sum of money. By the same token it could be said then that wages are a "deduction" from profits (as in the neo-Ricardian formulation where the wage is a 'distributional variable'), as though the latter pre-dated labour and the corresponding wage, and these were not its very conditions of existence.

23  In this connection it might come to the mind that in ('existing') socialism a similar antagonism is at work, between the production of use values and the production of exchange values, with the obvious difference that whereas capitalism is the primacy of the commodity form over direct production of use values, in socialism the polarity is inverted, with the positing of the primacy of the latter over the former, of planning over the market and above all, of social relations over their own reification.-- Such an analogy should not be pushed too far without further exploration, for the dialectic of (let us say) planning may not be, and most likely is not, simply the 'opposite' of the dialectic of the commodity form. Even the point reached this far should make clear however, that the dialectic of capitalism (or of socialism) is not a question of balance, or mix, between market and State regulations, and thus a widening of the welfare State, for example, is not a tendency towards socialism, nor, for another example, is China 'becoming capitalist' because of its 'opening to the market' after 1984.

24 The supersession of the town/country dichotomy --in which the country was the place where surplus (in the form of rent) was produced, whereas the town, the place where the same was exchanged-- in capitalism should by now be reasonably well established. This feudal legacy of a concept re-emerges sometimes none the less in the form of a 'rural/urban' dichotomy, which in turn should be easily taken care of by, for example, Ball(1979). Urban space and capitalist space, urban process and capitalism, are strictly speaking, equivalent expressions. The specificity of the word 'urban' can at most be a connotation designed to draw attention on some especially intensified, but otherwise not specific, conflicts in the great urban agglomeration produced by differentiation of space in the stage of intensive accumulation. To study them, in one more move in the fragmentation of social science, urbanism; to deal with them, a special discipline: urban planning.

25 The ultimate consequences of a reduction of capitalism to a 'commodity economy' as is implied in Marx's assumptions are illustrated by Uno (1964, and also Sekine,1977), who reaches the conclusion that "a purely capitalist society" will never develop for it "can only be approximated by reality" (because of the limits to the commoditization of the economy). That is to say, to identify capitalism with commodity production is to define it in such a way that actual societies escape of it. It is only a further logical step then to hold that "the bourgeois state is an institution alien to capital" (Sekine,1977,p.154).

26  Even housing, a simple 'superstructure', has stubbornly resisted commoditization against all attempts at extending commodity production to this component of the wage --which in 'peripheral' countries (or ex-colonies) can reach over 40% of the wage (see, for example, Mautner, 1986, where the concrete conditions of, and the attempts at, commoditization of housing are also outlined).

27  As a reaction to the 'economicist' approach, many students of urbanism have attempted to re-capture 'totality of life' in their analysis. However, what would usually be termed something like 'the overwhelming weight of the many aspects of the urban process' but is in fact no more than lack of either capacity or will to rise to a level of criticism and above dominant ideology, has frequently led to the election of some particular aspect or aspects as autonomous subjects in their own right --one archetypal form of which is the influential (from the mid-70s to the mid-80s) 'urban social movements' approach (Castells,1972 etc.). The difficulty lies in introducing the remainder of the 'totality of life' without losing the connection with its original fundaments which in capitalism remain commodity production. Little has been produced in this respect: the last something being perhaps Mike Edwards' "Notes ..."(Edwards,1980).

28  The policies pursued in the late 1970s and the early 1980s by national governments of the imperialist countries amount precisely to an (increasingly desperate attempt at the "re-commodification" of their economies. (The capitalist state has to try this, since to ensure the conditions of commodity production is its very raison d'ˆtre, even while it wholly misses the point that the negation of the negation of the commodity form can not restore the latter: privatization is not the same as commoditization.) Such policies have been epitomized as 'Reaganism' and 'Thatcherism', a good account of them (that is, of the cases of the US and the UK) being Tomaskovic-Devey & Miller (1982) and Gough (1982), respectively. -- The latter accounts provide an opportunity for two remarks. Firstly, Tomaskovic-Devey & Miller use the term "recapitalization", not recommoditization. Since they clearly mean recommoditization ("recapitalization of capitalism" et seq, p.24), this shows how strong is the idea of identifying capitalism with the commodity form, rather than with the predominance of the commodity form. The distinction however, is important for otherwise crises of accumulation can not be distinguished from a crisis of commoditization (see also earlier remark on 'Uno-type hyperabstraction'). Secondly, both accounts follow the very widely held view according to which both the US and the UK governments were actually doing what they were saying they were doing --namely, 'reducing the government'-- mainly because of their policies of reduction of social wages and of 'privatization'. In the couple of years that have elapsed between their writing and this writing (this note, in Deák,1985,p.227fn), it has probably become more readily apparent, however, that to see "a further [sic] step forward in state centralization and state intervention, obscured by a rhetoric of decentralization" as an alternative to Thatcherism (Gough,op.cit,p.62) is to have fallen foul, precisely, to the 'rhetoric of decentralization'. The former is indeed a most apt description of what 'Reaganism/Thatcherism' is, rather than of an alternative to it. For if those governments did reduce social wages and privatized a number of state entreprises (some of them, under very un-market conditions), they also increased their own intervention in quite a range of fields, from sending police against striking workers to increasing State expenditure to rescuing broken (big) banks, to attempting even (though they failed in this) to intervene in the money market, the ultimate regulator of world finance, and setting up ever more instruments of State control at supra-national levels. --If the extent of such interventions is new, what is also new is the difficulty met by the State in achieving legitimation, to the point of raising the question of the "governability of democracies" ... la Crozier et alii(1975), owing precisely to the cleavage between what it is doing and what it is supposed to do or rather, what we are supposed to think it does. 

29  The essence of which being, as in Edwards' (1985, p.208) words, "that old public and private assets ... are being devalorized at collective expense ... to the point at which they can be bought so cheaply that private investors can run them" [CD,1988].