Rebel Cities-David Harvey

36 REBEL CITIESrealization of surplus value while abstracting from and excluding whathe called the "particularities" of distribution (interest, rents, taxes, andeven actual wage and profit rates), since these are accidental, conjuncturaland of-the-moment in space and time. He also abstracted from thespecificities of exchange relations, such as supply and demand and thestate of competition. When demand and supply are in equilibrium, heargued, they cease to explain anything, while the coercive laws of competitionfunction as the enforcer rather than the determinant of the generallaws of motion of capital. This immediately provokes the thought of whathappens when the enforcement mechanism is lacking, as happens underconditions of monopolization, and what happens when we include spatialcompetition in our thinking, which is, as has long been known, alwaysa form of monopolistic competition (as in the case of inter-urban competition).Finally, Marx depicts consumption as a "singularity"-thoseunique instances that together make up a common mode of life-whichin being chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable, is therefore, in Marx'sview, generally outside of the field of political economy (the study of usevalues, he declares on the first page of Capital, is the business of historyand not of political economy), and therefore potentially dangerous forcapital. Hardt and Negri have therefore recently been at pains to revivethis concept, for they see singularities, which both arise from the proliferationof the common and always point back to the common, as a keypart of resistance.Marx also identified another level-that of the metabolic relation tonature, which is a universal condition of all forms of human society andtherefore broadly irrelevant to an understanding of the general laws ofmotion of capital understood as a specific social and historical construct.Environmental issues have a shadowy presence throughout Capital fo rthis reason (which does not imply that Marx thought them unimportantor insignificant, any more than he dismissed consumption as irrelevantin the grander scheme of things).10Throughout most of Capital, Marx sticks broadly to the frameworkoutlined in the Grundrisse. He fo cuses sharply on the generalityof production of surplus value and excludes everything else. He recognizesfrom time to time that there are problems in so doing. Thereis, he notes, some "double positing" going on-land, labor, money,