It is rooted in Karl Marx's notion of the "annihilation of space by time" originally elaborated in the Grundrisse,[1] and was later articulated by Marxist geographer David Harvey in his book The Condition of Postmodernity.
[2] A similar idea was proposed by Elmar Altvater in an article in PROKLA in 1987,[3] translated into English as "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space" and published in Capitalism Nature Socialism in 1990.
[4] Time–space compression occurs as a result of technological innovations driven by the global expansion of capital that condense or elide spatial and temporal distances, including technologies of communication (telegraph, telephones, fax machines, Internet) and travel (rail, cars, trains, jets), driven by the need to overcome spatial barriers, open up new markets, speed up production cycles, and reduce the turnover time of capital.
For Postone, the postmodern moment is not necessarily just a one-sided effect of the contemporary form of capitalism but can also be seen as having an emancipatory side if it happened to be part of post-capitalism.
This initial perspective misfires however, when forms of society such as modernity and subsequently postmodernism take itself as the true whole of life for being oppositional to capitalism, when in fact they are grounded in the reproduction of the same capitalist relations that created them.