The survival of capitalism for so long in the face of multiple crises and reorganizations accompanied by dire predictions, from both the left and the right, of its imminent demise, is a mystery that requires illumination. Lefebvre, for one, thought he had found the key in his celebrated comment that capitalism survives through the production of space, but he unfortunately failed to explain exactly how or why this might be the case. Certainly both Lenin and Luxemburg, though for quite different reasons and utilizing quite different forms of argument, considered that imperialism—a certain form of production and utilization of the global space—was the answer to the riddle, though in both cases this solution was finite and therefore replete with its own terminal contradictions. It was in this context that, in a series of publications beginning more than twenty years ago, I proposed a theory of a ‘spatial fix’ (more accurately a spatio-temporal fix) to the crisis-prone inner contradictions of capital accumulation. The central point of this argument concerned a chronic tendency within capitalism, theoretically derived out of a reformulation of Marx’s theory of the tendency for the profit rate to fall, to produce crises of overaccumulation. Such crises are typically registered as surpluses of capital (in commodity, money, or productive capacity forms) and surpluses of labour power side by side, without there apparently being any means to bring them together profitably to accomplish socially useful tasks. The most obvious case of this was the world-wide slump of the 1930s when capacity utilization was at an all-time low, surplus commodities could not be sold, and unemployment was at an all-time high. The effect was to devalue and in some cases even destroy the surpluses of capital and to reduce the surpluses of labour power to a miserable state. Since it is the lack of profitable opportunities that lies at the heart of the difficulty, the key economic (as opposed to social and political) problem lies with capital. If devaluation is to be avoided, then profitable ways must be found to absorb the capital surpluses. Geographical expansion and spatial reorganization provide one such option.