Automation

And an individual doesn't consume more cars, but more individuals can consume cars at a faster rate: if anything it is easier for consumption to increase with food for pleasure.

When you eat food for pleasure you don't eat fast food though?

What you think people go to Maccydees instead of grocery shopping?

Because they need to prepare it? Or are you saying that because they don't need to prepare the food they have more time to go shopping?

*don't need to

To save time, not for pleasure. Besides if fast food production increases at the expense of grocery stores, that would cause more job loss than Kiosks.

At first I had trouble figuring out exactly what Harvey was going for in the passage you quoted, but Harvey's thesis in the pdf made it clear:
[referring to the transition of developed nations toward a service-based economy from ~1972 onward]

You might suspect, given that I'm posting in favor of more automation, that I'd disagree with this thesis. That isn't the case. I don't think this latest wave of automation represents or points to a substantial break in capitalist accumulation. My point is that it is precisely this process of capitalist accumulation, with its internal contradictions, that leads capitalism into crisis, dysfunction, and communism.

The argument I'm advancing has nothing specific to do with the present moment. This same process of contradiction leading to a crisis of overproduction gripped the developed world in 1929. Only massive intervention in the form of government make-work (in Nazi Germany and the USA), value destruction (WWII), and the deliberate wasting of productive capacity (arms production in the post-war period) stopped capitalism from killing itself dead right then and there. Those interventions had run out of steam by the 1970's, threatening crisis once again. Like before, we saw massive interventions, like the departure from the gold standard (to facilitate greater financialization) and the opening up of low-wage production in China et al. Today we're seeing these attempts to stop capitalism from killing itself reach the end of their useful life. The expansion of credit has lead to the 'everything bubble', and offshoring labor has created Xi's China, an industrial juggernaut with rising wages, a rapidly dropping organic composition of capital, and a huge debt burden. In other words, it's a capitalist economy with all of the problems we were hoping to get away from by shipping everything off to low-wage China in the first place. China is now gearing up to paper over its problems by shipping everything off to lower-wage Africa, but I'm surewe can all see where this is heading by now.

My point is that through all of this, the rate of profit has ticked inexorably lower. Its fall is temporarily arrested or reversed by the interventions described above, but they never stick, and profit always hits lower lows.

Again I say that the task of all communists is to bring the rate of profit down, and to arrest any upward movement. Communism is the limit as the rate of profit approaches zero.

cheers