Capital Switching and the Role of Ground Rent: 3 Switching between Circuits, Switching between Submarkets, and Social Change

Abstract

In the first paper of this three-part series, Harvey's ‘circuits of capital’ argument was reviewed, and was linked first to ground rent theory, and second to forms of crisis and social change in advanced, Western-style economies. In the second paper these ideas were used to reflect on the progress of the urban housing market in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1980s. Specifically, an attempt was made first to identify significant switchings of investment between economic sectors, and forms of crisis that might have accompanied them; and second to understand significant switchings of investment between submarkets within the housing sector, their relationship to intersectoral switching, and the changing social relationships involved. In the present paper this question of changing social conditions is pursued further. It is concluded (1) that the increasingly differentiated structure of housing submarkets, apparently ‘necessary’ for continuous seesawing investment between submarkets, is dependent on shifts in incomes and behaviour of different social groupings; and (2) that the present direction of such shifts is, however, destabilising, transforming an economic crisis into a potential ‘motivation crisis’. The paper ends with some overall conclusions to this series of three papers.