The Spatial Fix: Geography as Capitalism’s Escape Hatch

 Capitalism has a dirty little habit. It makes too much, too fast. Goods pile up, money stagnates, and suddenly the whole machine threatens to seize. That’s the crisis. And the escape hatch? Geography.

When Manchester’s mills glutted local markets in the 19th century, they didn’t slow down production—they exported their surplus to India and, while they were at it, dismantled India’s own textile industries. The contradiction at home was “fixed”… by making life worse somewhere else.

The same logic drove European voyages across the Atlantic. Merchants drowning in debt conjured a solution out of stolen land, enslaved labor, and rivers of silver ripped from the Americas. One society’s “growth” was another’s catastrophe.

Harvey calls this the spatial fix: capitalism avoids imploding by dumping its crises on someone else’s doorstep. Infrastructure serves the same function—railroads in colonies, highways across America, server farms in deserts—all built as sponges for surplus capital, opening new spaces for accumulation. But every fix is temporary. Railroads enable competitors, new markets saturate, wages rise, and suddenly the escape hatch slams shut. Until the next one.

And here’s the irony. Each fix is sold as progress, but really it’s a shell game. The system never solves its own contradictions, it just shifts them—across oceans, into future generations, onto the planet itself. The smoke from 19th-century English mills still warms the atmosphere today.

So the real punch line? The “genius” of capitalism isn’t efficiency or innovation. It’s survival through evasion—forever running from the disasters it creates, forever finding a new corner of the map to plunder, until one day… there’s nowhere left to run.

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