The permutation fails—contradiction is part of capitalism’s internal logic. Only full rejection and transcendence of capitalism solves.

Both the establishment and the ongoing maintenance of capitalism, whether as a mode of production or as a wider social formation, are crisis-ridden. They depend on moments and places in which limits to accumulation are encountered and then transformed into thresholds. This informs the leading trope in David Harvey’s now-classic interpretation of Marx’s principal works on capital, Limits to Capital (1982). In it, the contradictions encountered at every moment of the unfolding of capital’s inner logic constitute ‘limits to capital’. At each stage in Harvey’s exposition, these limits are partly and temporarily overcome, notably through mechanisms of temporal deferral and spatial displacement. And each stage, the circuit of capital is temporarily restored. But at each subsequent stage, Harvey also finds that capital’s contradictions are ultimately intensified and multiplied rather than resolved. Harvey therefore re-affirms Marx’s classical overall conclusion that capitalism’s contradictions cannot be resolved: capitalism itself must be transcended.