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Value concept in Marx is, of course, a prolegomenon to his analysis of capital, the
circuit of capital as the circuit of self-valorisation (production and realisation of
surplus-value) as well as, as Harvey and many others imbibe, a theory of crisis.
Although Harvey, not unlike Postone, lingers on the value concept, abstract labour
and other ‘concrete concepts’ of the capitalist commodity production with ardent
acuteness, real abstraction is at best subtextual throughout his analysis. He, at one
time, notes that ‘labour in the abstract is a distillation’(1982:15). However, from here
onwards, an understanding of money as real abstraction is more seminal to Harvey’s
materialism than the abstract temporality of labour. Money, succinctly, is the
phenomenal form socially necessary for the abstraction abstract labour processually
is; that is, thorough some money commodity or money form alone, commodity values
are materially abstractable.
For Harvey, it is because accumulation of capital is about the ongoingness of
valorisation that there can already be some vestige of a stillness of capital and the
putative strife that would stem from the systematic stymieing of an otherwise
continuious phenomenon. In other words, capital is productive, commodity and
money capital as long as it can be briefly still. To that effect, accumulation is not
realistically continuious but foremost technically continuious; turnover of capital must
anticipate caesurae in valorisation. Into those brief segments of time at which capital
is at a standstill that one must first reconnoiter for some devalorising concequences
that are technically part of the overall system of valorisation whose whole imperative
nevertheless is that it be ever recurrently continuious. Thereby, when capital is
dormant, it is ‘devalued capital’. This said, for Harvey, concept of devaluation in
itself is a foundation solely for the possibility of crisis(1982:195).
Possibility of crisis is not a conceptual equivocation. In fact, Marx’s thoughts on the
possibility of crisis are single-handedly the fuse behind much of the crisis-centrism in
Marxist political economy. Here Marx abjures the Ricardian thought –each sale is
immediately a purchase; that there cannot be an overproduction of commodities. This
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