Harvey and Postmodernity
In this instalment of our Harvey at 90 series, Ashok Kumar takes us through The Conditions of Postmodernity (1989)
When The Condition of Postmodernity appeared in 1989, the intellectual climate was saturated with discussions of postmodernism. Across philosophy, architecture, literature and cultural theory, postmodernity had come to signify a historical break with the certainties of the modern era: the collapse of universal narratives, the turn to pastiche and parody, the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture. In the same period Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism crystallized much of this debate into a powerful synthesis, linking stylistic shifts in culture to a broader historical moment marked by multinational capital and new technologies. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition declared incredulity toward metanarratives as the defining sensibility of the age. Jean Baudrillard’s meditations on simulacra and hyperreality seemed to dissolve the very possibility of a stable reference point. Yet despite their sharp insights, much of this literature was curiously detached from the concrete transformations of capitalist production, trade and finance that were reshaping the world economy in the late 20th century.
Harvey’s intervention was both of its moment and sharply against its grain. By the late 1980s, he had already established himself as one of the most original Marxist thinkers working in geography. Social Justice and the City (1973) had been a landmark in radical urban studies, challenging the apolitical, technocratic models that dominated geography and insisting on the centrality of class struggle and capitalist urbanization. The Limits to Capital (1982) had extended Marx’s analysis into a richly dialectical account of how capital manages its internal contradictions through geographical expansion and the reorganization of space. In both works, Harvey developed a set of conceptual tools for analyzing capitalism not as a static system, but as a restless, crisis-prone process that continually remakes its own spatial and temporal coordinates in order to sustain accumulation.
The Condition of Postmodernity was the moment when Harvey brought this geographical materialism into direct confrontation with the cultural debates around postmodernism. Where Jameson sought to read cultural forms as allegories of late capitalism, Harvey reversed the procedure: he began with a systematic account of the restructuring of capitalism after the crisis of Fordism, and from there traced how these changes generated the cultural logics identified as postmodern. His key argument was that the stylistic eclecticism, spatial fragmentation, and historical pastiche celebrated (or lamented) by postmodern theorists were the cultural expression of a new regime of accumulation — what he called “flexible accumulation” — that emerged in the wake of the profitability crisis of the 1970s.
The historical moment in which Harvey was writing is crucial to understanding the force of this intervention. The 1970s had been a decade of stagflation, oil shocks and labor unrest across the advanced capitalist world. The long postwar boom, organized around mass production, rising real wages, and Keynesian demand management, had run into its structural limits. Fordist production — standardized goods rolling off assembly lines in vertically integrated firms, coordinated with national-level bargaining between capital and labour — became increasingly unprofitable. By the early 1980s, under the leadership of Reagan and Thatcher, a new regime was taking shape: one built on deregulation, privatization, globalization of production, financialization, and an aggressive assault on organized labor. This was the birth of neoliberalism as both economic policy and class project.
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Harvey’s concept of flexible accumulation captured this transformation in its full spatial and temporal dimensions. At the level of production, firms abandoned the rigidities of Fordist mass production in favor of smaller batch sizes, rapid product cycles, and the outsourcing of components to a global network of suppliers. Just-in-time manufacturing reduced inventory costs but increased vulnerability to disruption. New technologies in transport, logistics, and telecommunications made it possible to coordinate far-flung supply chains in real time. At the level of consumption, fashion cycles shortened, markets fragmented into niches, and brand identities became more fluid. The built environment reflected this shift: urban space was restructured through waves of gentrification, speculative real estate booms, and the creation of spectacle-rich environments designed to attract capital, tourists, and the new middle classes.
Culturally, Harvey argued, this material reorganisation of space and time under flexible accumulation found expression in the eclecticism, fragmentation, and nostalgia of postmodern aesthetics. The revival of historical architectural styles, the embrace of pastiche, the mixing of high and low cultural forms — all were, for Harvey, symptomatic of a world in which capital itself was moving faster, recombining elements from disparate times and places to create novelty, and commodifying culture in ever more intricate ways. Crucially, these cultural forms were not merely reflective of economic change; they were integral to it, shaping desires and legitimising new forms of capitalist urbanism.
This is where Harvey diverged most sharply from Jameson. While Jameson’s reading of postmodern culture as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” remains powerful, it is ultimately a culturalist reading, one in which the economic base is gestured toward but not reconstructed in detail. Harvey, by contrast, proceeds as a historical materialist: the reorganisation of culture is part of the reorganisation of production, distribution, and exchange. In this sense, The Condition of Postmodernity is less a theory of culture per se than a theory of capitalist restructuring with culture embedded within it. Harvey’s method allowed him to sidestep some of the postmodernism debate’s more sterile dichotomies — whether postmodernism was progressive or regressive, liberatory or nihilistic — and instead ask what kind of capitalism produced it, and to what ends.
Compared to other theorists of postmodernity, Harvey’s insistence on the material basis of cultural change gave his work a durability many contemporaries lacked. Baudrillard’s vision of a world of free-floating signs, severed from any reference to material reality, captured the exhilaration and disorientation of the media-saturated 1980s but offered little traction on why global capital was reorganizing itself in particular ways. Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives resonated in an era of ideological exhaustion, but was ill-equipped to explain why neoliberalism emerged as the new orthodoxy. Harvey’s synthesis — linking the “time–space compression” of postmodern experience to the structural imperatives of capital — could account for both the changing feel of everyday life and the hard political economy beneath it.
This grounding in Marxist crisis theory also connected The Condition of Postmodernity to Harvey’s earlier work. In The Limits to Capital, he had elaborated on Marx’s insight that capital confronts periodic crises of overaccumulation — situations where more capital exists than can be profitably invested. One strategy for resolving such crises is geographical expansion: opening up new markets, new resources, new investment outlets in space. Another is the reorganization of time: accelerating turnover, reducing circulation times, compressing the horizon between investment and return. Flexible accumulation, in Harvey’s view, was precisely such a spatio-temporal fix, made possible by technological change and neoliberal political restructuring. Seen in this light, postmodernism was not a cultural rupture with modernity but a cultural corollary of capital’s latest fix to its own contradictions.
By anchoring his analysis in this historical-materialist framework, Harvey could also see further into the future than many of his contemporaries. What in 1989 appeared as the cutting edge of postmodern capitalism — financial innovation, just-in-time production, rapid turnover of styles — also contained the seeds of future instability. The same global integration that allowed capital to scour the planet for cheap labor and raw materials made it vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. The same financial techniques that opened new profit opportunities created layers of speculative risk. The same acceleration of consumption cycles that fueled growth intensified the pressures on labor, communities, and ecosystems.
In retrospect, The Condition of Postmodernity reads as a prehistory of the neoliberal crises of the early 21st century. Harvey’s account of time–space compression anticipates the fragile global just-in-time networks that ground to a halt in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. His emphasis on the speculative turn in urban development prefigures the real estate bubbles whose collapse devastated economies from Las Vegas to Dublin to Dubai. His mapping of cultural production’s integration into the circuits of capital consumption foreshadows the platform capitalism of the 2010s, in which the speed and fluidity of digital culture are inseparable from the imperatives of data extraction and targeted advertising.
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The trajectory of Harvey’s later work makes clear how The Condition of Postmodernity functioned as a hinge in his intellectual career. In The New Imperialism (2003), he would name “accumulation by dispossession” as the ongoing neoliberal strategy of enclosing commons, privatizing public goods, and commodifying life itself — tendencies already visible in the flexible accumulation framework of 1989. A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) would give the political and class content of the economic-cultural system described in Condition of Postmodernity, showing how neoliberalism restored elite class power under the cover of market freedom. The Enigma of Capital (2010) and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) would return to crisis theory, tracing how the very strategies that sustained neoliberal growth also made it increasingly unstable.
Against this backdrop, The Condition of Postmodernity stands out not only for its analytical clarity but for its prescience. Where many postmodernism debates became trapped in cultural description, Harvey linked the “new” cultural forms to a restructuring of capitalism that was itself historically determinate, politically contested, and ultimately crisis prone. His work demonstrated that even in an age supposedly beyond grand narratives, the grand narrative of capital — with its relentless drive to overcome barriers in space and time — remained the deep structure of historical change.
That, perhaps, is why Harvey’s 1989 book has endured. It spoke to the cultural theorists of its time by taking postmodernism seriously, but it refused to accept the notion that culture could be understood apart from political economy. It addressed Marxists by offering a concrete, updated account of capital’s restructuring without retreating into economic determinism. And it addressed geographers by showing that space and time are not neutral backdrops but active dimensions of social struggle. Situated between Limits to Capital’s theoretical rigor and the more popular, accessible Harvey of the 2000s, The Condition of Postmodernity represents the point where his Marxist geography reached its widest theoretical and political resonance. It remains a model for how to think dialectically across culture, economy, and space — not just in the postmodern 1980s, but in the crises of our own time.
