I drunkenly accosted David Harvey at a wine and cheese reception after a talk he gave last night and was asking him about whether or not he thought that some portion of urban building site rent could be attributed to the low organic composition of capital of the building industry. Politically the man's a social democrat, and just wants things like "free education" (that is state-funded as opposed to privately funded), but I am still trying to figure out if he has anything interesting to say about more abstract political-economy issues. As we talked, he basically said that he doesn't really believe that the building industry necessarily has a low organic composition, or that the whole idea of absolute rent is useful at all. Or even that the tendency of the rise of organic composition exists, as machines tend to just get cheaper. Unfortunately I have not read enough of Harvey's stuff, and I was pretty drunk, so I didn't exactly follow his entire argument... or remember it all.
Anyway, I'm wondering if people have read Harvey's crisis theory and what you think of it. To what extent is it a rejection of Marx's theory. Does it make sense? What about the rise in organic composition of capital? And also what's the difference between "organic composition" and "value composition"... which I vaguely remember being important.
At the moment I am very unconvinced by the concept of "accumulation by dispossession", but would like to hear what people have to say.
